Let's start this out simply - I am an ideological libertarian. I think the government should legalize marijuana, even though I have never tried it. I don't think that the government should legalize gay marriage - I think that the government should stay out of all marriages. I don't think that the government should ban abortion - I think that the courts should discern between abortion that is murder and abortion that is not murder and punish, or opt not to punish, accordingly, and that whether or not a given abortion is murder is a question of fact for a jury to answer with the help of expert witnesses who know when life begins - those being doctors, not lawyers, politicians, or religious zealots. I am personally a Christian and follow my God to the best of my ability, but I will no more force my God on you than I believe the government should. (If God wants to force you to believe, he will do so. If I am one of his tools in doing so, I will be such willingly, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go around forcefully converting people, which use of force is by principle ineffective in its very purpose, anyhow.)
Now, within that framework, the basic tenet stands: if what I am doing is of no harm to any other person, then the government has no right to step in and tell me that what I am doing is wrong. If you disagree with that, please state your version of this basic rule, no matter how contrary it is to my own.
My ownership of guns has never injured another person. I am a careful and safe gun owner, outdoorsman, and hunter. But the second amendment is not, as many politicians want you to believe, at all about hunting. Hunting was an assumption of life in 1791. The second amendment is about "the security of a free state," from enemies both foreign and domestic. If Germans, Japanese, Russians, or even terrorists came and attacked me, I would be able to shoot back. That's why none of those groups ever invaded the United States by land. Likewise, if the American government comes by one day to tell me I no longer have a right to free speech, or to due process of law, or "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," I would shoot back. Would I win? No, of course not, and not only because of already-existing infringements to my right to keep and bear arms. Simply put, the US Government is better at making war than I am. But I would not be alone, and in the end the US would be faced with a dilemma: do they shoot or imprison every gun owner in America and end up with no people to rule over, or do they back down and preserve the nation? To paraphrase a founding father whose words are as true today as they were then, you cannot destroy America. The only way America will be destroyed is by its own hand. The right to keep and bear arms is a protection against external attacks and a deterrent against internal attacks.
Now, what about those people who are hurt not by malicious gun owners but by negligent gun owners? I am not one of them, but they do exist. However, negligent owners of buckets of water are responsible for more deaths of children than are all gun owners combined. Statistically, an American child is more likely to drown in a bucket of water than to be shot, and it's not a small margin. Those negligent gun owners should definitely be punished, but I am not one of them.
There is no case for taking away my guns other than the mantra "guns are bad," which is itself a statement with no factual support.
I'm more than dyed in the wool, as I have actually put a lot of my time into understanding and backing up my beliefs, and I hope that you can understand my position as well as my core belief in America the concept. Just as I have no wish to take away your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I would ask you not to try to take mine away. I am a law student, and one of my goals in life is to protect the rights of the little guy, even if his rights have no bearing on me and I don't even want the same rights as he has or I don't understand hi
You give me "oo"? What the hell is that? Does it relate to whatever "toating" means, or is it more of a call to your misunderstanding of capitalization rules in the English language?
My country is free because men braver than any Anonymous Coward stood up for what they believe and took up arms when they did so. That someone who can't spell, capitalize, admit even a pseudonym of his identity, or make a cogent argument against my rights wants to take them away has no bearing on my stature as a man; only on your own.
I know many people who have, and it's hardly indicative of stupidity. In your 40 years of life, free e-mail accounts have existed for about 1/4 of the time, so your 40 years of life have absolutely no relevance to this discussion. The only evidence that supports your claim arises solely out of your own ignorance.
I agree that it's almost a given that the person in question did not give his real name and address when he applied for that Yahoo account, but that does not mean that everyone who has ever applied for one lied in their application.
I think people would see this differently if the GPS were the size of a UHaul trailer and the police attached it to the car, or if it recorded your conversations inside your car and you didn't know about it, but for some reason they're unwilling to make the jump from audio recording to positional tracking or from big thing attached to car to small thing attached to car. I don't get it.
There's a reason for that, at least in the case of federal judges - they are appointed for life, and thus have no political motivation to weigh in their decisions. State judges, at least in my state, are elected, so they suffer from political pull, but you are still more likely to see the little guy win in court than in front of the legislature. And the little guy winning is why we can't afford any kind of tort reform or killing of all the lawyers - the system just plain works the majority of the time.
Truth is an absolute defense to libel and slander and so forth. My only question is how they served process on a Yahoo ID. You can't sue someone that you can't bring into court, and it's difficult to remain anonymous when you do get brought into court. This case is interesting to me purely for its procedural side. Substantively, it's boring and I have no idea how it made the front page over more interesting cases such as the lawsuit against Sony's legal affairs director for illegally enslaving his housekeeper.
Compare this story to this recent gem about the NY court ruling that the police attaching a GPS tracking device to your car without a warrant is just fine and dandy. It's no coincidence that NY is (for America) extremely liberal and TX is fairly conservative.
Here's the thing that I find funny. The American left has us believing you have a right to privacy when it comes to abortions but not when it comes to the government sneaking electronics into your car when you aren't looking. You have a right to privacy when it comes to embarrassing truth about your past, but not when it comes to having a gun for self-defense in your own home. Heck, to many liberals, somewhere in the Constitution can be found a right to privacy, but nowhere in the Constitution can they discover a "right to keep and bear arms [which] shall not be infringed."
That there is considerable debate on this story here at Slashdot, where the Democratic Party appears by comparison to be extremely conservative, is not surprising - do you have a right to privacy or not? Since the line is so poorly defined by American liberals, they fight amongst themselves ad nauseam when what, to them, appears to be a borderline case is presented. That this case comes from New York is hardly surprising, either. New York liberals may be more intelligent than their Californian counterparts, but they are just as hypocritical.
To me, this is a pretty clear violation of due process. The government does not give you the privilege of car ownership. (Although, in some places in America, the government prohibits ownership of certain cars by subterfuge - you can't have an unregistered car on your own property (there's that right to privacy, again), and you can't register a car that doesn't meet emissions requirements, which change each year to keep the road full of brand new cars).
Anyhow, the government properly regulates where you can operate your vehicle, but that does not mean that it owns your vehicle. It can tell you not to drive on its roads, but it can't go to your parked car and sneak tracking devices into it, for that's a violation of due process.
Hopefully, the victim of this appeals his case; or someone who eventually appeals a similar case in New York wins. Your car is your chattel, your "effect" under the 4th amendment. But look also to the 14th amendment, which says that no State may "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." There is a very strong argument in favor of putting a tracking device on your car without your knowledge constituting a deprivation of your liberty.
But this is what happens when you put anti-liberty morons on the bench. I'm only surprised that California hasn't beat New York to the punch.
If the e-mail is property and thus capable of devisement, bequeathment, or other giving in a will, then leaving it out of the will does not mean it won't go to someone. All your property must be disposed of somehow when you die, and you cannot will things to people if those things aren't yours to begin with.
There are three possible outcomes here: (1) the court sets a precedent that e-mail is property and may be willed away or otherwise inherited, (2) the court sets a precedent that e-mail is not property and may not be, or (3) whatever the court does doesn't matter because a new law will be created in legislature to address the issue.
I look at languages as tools. I also look at language features as tools. For example, OO, almost-OO (lacking multiple inheritance or other useful bits), built-in toolkits like the STL in C++, exception-handling as in C++ or Java, etc. are all just tools. Languages are like multitools or Swiss Army knives - they combine a few useful tools that are not necessarily all themselves the best at their job but all do the job okay with a maximum of convenience.
But just like any other field, you have to select the right tool for the job. You can pound a nail in with a Phillips screwdriver, but it won't be fun. The hammer is a better choice.
Computer work - be it network engineering, database design, or software development - is all about problem-solving. The most important skills are rapidly generating a strategy by which to solve the problem and then rapidly selecting the right tool or set of tools to solve the problem.
A good computer programmer can pop his hood and fix minor engine troubles with a Leatherman, can put together furniture with or without the poorly-written instructions, can fix a jammed gun and understand how the action works even if he's never held a gun before, and so on. Given enough time, he can understand how women think and help them solve their seemingly-insane problems. He's an expert problem solver, and that's that. Languages are just the tools he uses to solve problems.
I think this is a generalization of what you look for in candidates. Problem-solving is a true skill. Writing code in Language X is like turning a screwdriver - anyone can do it and if they can't they can RTFM with Google's help and figure it out inside of eleven seconds.
When was that? I know I checked their application requirements a few years ago and a Math PhD was what they were looking for at the time. Regardless, Wolfram definitely has stricter mathematical requirements than Google.
Wolfram Research (the Mathematica people) is the really tough one. You need a Math degree to get any job there at all, and I believe that a PhD is the actual requirement. I'm not sure if this spills over to lawyers and sysops, but I suspect that it might.
Yes, you. s/that/who/, s/No not me,/No, not me./, and s/BS\)/B.S.\)/ would have been evidence otherwise.
Re:I had two interviews at Google
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I'm actually of the opinion that Anonymous Crowhead had better check his keyboard first. It seems he also mistyped "Coward" and created an entire Slashdot account as a result of that mistake.
My experience has been that those companies that require you to have an education to even apply to work for them do so to ensure that you have balance in your life. A real Bachelor of Science degree includes enough liberal arts, writing, and, in general, thinking in its attainment that companies know you'll be balanced enough to do things like bathe before work, read a good book after work to stay sane, and spell the name of the degree you have correctly. These are just examples - their expectations may be much higher, but the key thing they are looking for is balance.
Re:A lot of stuff in Gtk is replacing Gnome widget
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I don't see where I was being inconsistent or intentionally obfuscating anything. The short version, in case there was any lack of clarity or consistency that did sneak in, is I would prefer to have one very good widget toolkit and then separate libraries for the Gnome features that are not widgets (things like bonobo, the panel, and preferably a separate library for system-tray-type functionality so that non-Gnome applications can take advantage of compatible system tray implementations outside of Gnome, such as XFCE4 has).
To my knowledge, this is the exact story I've presented from the beginning. If I've failed, I apologize.
Re:A lot of stuff in Gtk is replacing Gnome widget
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If crack is what it takes to understand what I'm saying, then that's what it takes. At least I'm not 100% alone out here!;)
Re:A lot of stuff in Gtk is replacing Gnome widget
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You certainly are dedicated to being an idiot. Somehow you've managed to agree with most of what I said without even realizing it, because your reading comprehension level is so low that you couldn't be bothered to figure out what I was saying. For example, you claim that I said 40 modularized dependencies of 1MB each is bad, which is not the case at all. Re-read what I said, but this time read each word and look it up in a dictionary if you have difficulty understanding it.
Why do you post anonymously? Did you have trouble understanding the account sign-up procedure, or are you just that certain that nobody likes you and the only way you can post at a non-negative initial score is by not having an account?
Re:A lot of stuff in Gtk is replacing Gnome widget
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Hey, the version of Netrek I run was released in 1997.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Let's start this out simply - I am an ideological libertarian. I think the government should legalize marijuana, even though I have never tried it. I don't think that the government should legalize gay marriage - I think that the government should stay out of all marriages. I don't think that the government should ban abortion - I think that the courts should discern between abortion that is murder and abortion that is not murder and punish, or opt not to punish, accordingly, and that whether or not a given abortion is murder is a question of fact for a jury to answer with the help of expert witnesses who know when life begins - those being doctors, not lawyers, politicians, or religious zealots. I am personally a Christian and follow my God to the best of my ability, but I will no more force my God on you than I believe the government should. (If God wants to force you to believe, he will do so. If I am one of his tools in doing so, I will be such willingly, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go around forcefully converting people, which use of force is by principle ineffective in its very purpose, anyhow.)
Now, within that framework, the basic tenet stands: if what I am doing is of no harm to any other person, then the government has no right to step in and tell me that what I am doing is wrong. If you disagree with that, please state your version of this basic rule, no matter how contrary it is to my own.
My ownership of guns has never injured another person. I am a careful and safe gun owner, outdoorsman, and hunter. But the second amendment is not, as many politicians want you to believe, at all about hunting. Hunting was an assumption of life in 1791. The second amendment is about "the security of a free state," from enemies both foreign and domestic. If Germans, Japanese, Russians, or even terrorists came and attacked me, I would be able to shoot back. That's why none of those groups ever invaded the United States by land. Likewise, if the American government comes by one day to tell me I no longer have a right to free speech, or to due process of law, or "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," I would shoot back. Would I win? No, of course not, and not only because of already-existing infringements to my right to keep and bear arms. Simply put, the US Government is better at making war than I am. But I would not be alone, and in the end the US would be faced with a dilemma: do they shoot or imprison every gun owner in America and end up with no people to rule over, or do they back down and preserve the nation? To paraphrase a founding father whose words are as true today as they were then, you cannot destroy America. The only way America will be destroyed is by its own hand. The right to keep and bear arms is a protection against external attacks and a deterrent against internal attacks.
Now, what about those people who are hurt not by malicious gun owners but by negligent gun owners? I am not one of them, but they do exist. However, negligent owners of buckets of water are responsible for more deaths of children than are all gun owners combined. Statistically, an American child is more likely to drown in a bucket of water than to be shot, and it's not a small margin. Those negligent gun owners should definitely be punished, but I am not one of them.
There is no case for taking away my guns other than the mantra "guns are bad," which is itself a statement with no factual support.
I'm more than dyed in the wool, as I have actually put a lot of my time into understanding and backing up my beliefs, and I hope that you can understand my position as well as my core belief in America the concept. Just as I have no wish to take away your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I would ask you not to try to take mine away. I am a law student, and one of my goals in life is to protect the rights of the little guy, even if his rights have no bearing on me and I don't even want the same rights as he has or I don't understand hi
People who aren't creative enough to come up with false names. That's who. :)
You give me "oo"? What the hell is that? Does it relate to whatever "toating" means, or is it more of a call to your misunderstanding of capitalization rules in the English language?
My country is free because men braver than any Anonymous Coward stood up for what they believe and took up arms when they did so. That someone who can't spell, capitalize, admit even a pseudonym of his identity, or make a cogent argument against my rights wants to take them away has no bearing on my stature as a man; only on your own.
I know many people who have, and it's hardly indicative of stupidity. In your 40 years of life, free e-mail accounts have existed for about 1/4 of the time, so your 40 years of life have absolutely no relevance to this discussion. The only evidence that supports your claim arises solely out of your own ignorance.
I agree that it's almost a given that the person in question did not give his real name and address when he applied for that Yahoo account, but that does not mean that everyone who has ever applied for one lied in their application.
I can't mod you up, because you're already at a score of 5. If I could, I'd give you 5 more points for "+1: Understands the Constitution."
the vast majority of people who sign up for free accounts use fake IDs.
Do you have any evidence to back this claim up?
I think people would see this differently if the GPS were the size of a UHaul trailer and the police attached it to the car, or if it recorded your conversations inside your car and you didn't know about it, but for some reason they're unwilling to make the jump from audio recording to positional tracking or from big thing attached to car to small thing attached to car. I don't get it.
There's a reason for that, at least in the case of federal judges - they are appointed for life, and thus have no political motivation to weigh in their decisions. State judges, at least in my state, are elected, so they suffer from political pull, but you are still more likely to see the little guy win in court than in front of the legislature. And the little guy winning is why we can't afford any kind of tort reform or killing of all the lawyers - the system just plain works the majority of the time.
Truth is an absolute defense to libel and slander and so forth. My only question is how they served process on a Yahoo ID. You can't sue someone that you can't bring into court, and it's difficult to remain anonymous when you do get brought into court. This case is interesting to me purely for its procedural side. Substantively, it's boring and I have no idea how it made the front page over more interesting cases such as the lawsuit against Sony's legal affairs director for illegally enslaving his housekeeper.
Compare this story to this recent gem about the NY court ruling that the police attaching a GPS tracking device to your car without a warrant is just fine and dandy. It's no coincidence that NY is (for America) extremely liberal and TX is fairly conservative.
Here's the thing that I find funny. The American left has us believing you have a right to privacy when it comes to abortions but not when it comes to the government sneaking electronics into your car when you aren't looking. You have a right to privacy when it comes to embarrassing truth about your past, but not when it comes to having a gun for self-defense in your own home. Heck, to many liberals, somewhere in the Constitution can be found a right to privacy, but nowhere in the Constitution can they discover a "right to keep and bear arms [which] shall not be infringed."
That there is considerable debate on this story here at Slashdot, where the Democratic Party appears by comparison to be extremely conservative, is not surprising - do you have a right to privacy or not? Since the line is so poorly defined by American liberals, they fight amongst themselves ad nauseam when what, to them, appears to be a borderline case is presented. That this case comes from New York is hardly surprising, either. New York liberals may be more intelligent than their Californian counterparts, but they are just as hypocritical.
To me, this is a pretty clear violation of due process. The government does not give you the privilege of car ownership. (Although, in some places in America, the government prohibits ownership of certain cars by subterfuge - you can't have an unregistered car on your own property (there's that right to privacy, again), and you can't register a car that doesn't meet emissions requirements, which change each year to keep the road full of brand new cars).
Anyhow, the government properly regulates where you can operate your vehicle, but that does not mean that it owns your vehicle. It can tell you not to drive on its roads, but it can't go to your parked car and sneak tracking devices into it, for that's a violation of due process.
Hopefully, the victim of this appeals his case; or someone who eventually appeals a similar case in New York wins. Your car is your chattel, your "effect" under the 4th amendment. But look also to the 14th amendment, which says that no State may "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." There is a very strong argument in favor of putting a tracking device on your car without your knowledge constituting a deprivation of your liberty.
But this is what happens when you put anti-liberty morons on the bench. I'm only surprised that California hasn't beat New York to the punch.
If the e-mail is property and thus capable of devisement, bequeathment, or other giving in a will, then leaving it out of the will does not mean it won't go to someone. All your property must be disposed of somehow when you die, and you cannot will things to people if those things aren't yours to begin with.
There are three possible outcomes here: (1) the court sets a precedent that e-mail is property and may be willed away or otherwise inherited, (2) the court sets a precedent that e-mail is not property and may not be, or (3) whatever the court does doesn't matter because a new law will be created in legislature to address the issue.
I ... am really just making most of this up.
By "most", do you mean everything but the parenthetical explaining that you made the rest of it up?
When I lived in Phoenix and was feeling uncreative, I named my wireless network "eldefaulto".
I never was all that good with regular expressions. I prefer writing new B.S. over changing others'. ;)
I look at languages as tools. I also look at language features as tools. For example, OO, almost-OO (lacking multiple inheritance or other useful bits), built-in toolkits like the STL in C++, exception-handling as in C++ or Java, etc. are all just tools. Languages are like multitools or Swiss Army knives - they combine a few useful tools that are not necessarily all themselves the best at their job but all do the job okay with a maximum of convenience.
But just like any other field, you have to select the right tool for the job. You can pound a nail in with a Phillips screwdriver, but it won't be fun. The hammer is a better choice.
Computer work - be it network engineering, database design, or software development - is all about problem-solving. The most important skills are rapidly generating a strategy by which to solve the problem and then rapidly selecting the right tool or set of tools to solve the problem.
A good computer programmer can pop his hood and fix minor engine troubles with a Leatherman, can put together furniture with or without the poorly-written instructions, can fix a jammed gun and understand how the action works even if he's never held a gun before, and so on. Given enough time, he can understand how women think and help them solve their seemingly-insane problems. He's an expert problem solver, and that's that. Languages are just the tools he uses to solve problems.
I think this is a generalization of what you look for in candidates. Problem-solving is a true skill. Writing code in Language X is like turning a screwdriver - anyone can do it and if they can't they can RTFM with Google's help and figure it out inside of eleven seconds.
When was that? I know I checked their application requirements a few years ago and a Math PhD was what they were looking for at the time. Regardless, Wolfram definitely has stricter mathematical requirements than Google.
Wolfram Research (the Mathematica people) is the really tough one. You need a Math degree to get any job there at all, and I believe that a PhD is the actual requirement. I'm not sure if this spills over to lawyers and sysops, but I suspect that it might.
Yes, you. s/that/who/, s/No not me,/No, not me./, and s/BS\)/B.S.\)/ would have been evidence otherwise.
I'm actually of the opinion that Anonymous Crowhead had better check his keyboard first. It seems he also mistyped "Coward" and created an entire Slashdot account as a result of that mistake.
... require a batchelors degree ...
My experience has been that those companies that require you to have an education to even apply to work for them do so to ensure that you have balance in your life. A real Bachelor of Science degree includes enough liberal arts, writing, and, in general, thinking in its attainment that companies know you'll be balanced enough to do things like bathe before work, read a good book after work to stay sane, and spell the name of the degree you have correctly. These are just examples - their expectations may be much higher, but the key thing they are looking for is balance.
I don't see where I was being inconsistent or intentionally obfuscating anything. The short version, in case there was any lack of clarity or consistency that did sneak in, is I would prefer to have one very good widget toolkit and then separate libraries for the Gnome features that are not widgets (things like bonobo, the panel, and preferably a separate library for system-tray-type functionality so that non-Gnome applications can take advantage of compatible system tray implementations outside of Gnome, such as XFCE4 has).
To my knowledge, this is the exact story I've presented from the beginning. If I've failed, I apologize.
If crack is what it takes to understand what I'm saying, then that's what it takes. At least I'm not 100% alone out here! ;)
You certainly are dedicated to being an idiot. Somehow you've managed to agree with most of what I said without even realizing it, because your reading comprehension level is so low that you couldn't be bothered to figure out what I was saying. For example, you claim that I said 40 modularized dependencies of 1MB each is bad, which is not the case at all. Re-read what I said, but this time read each word and look it up in a dictionary if you have difficulty understanding it.
Why do you post anonymously? Did you have trouble understanding the account sign-up procedure, or are you just that certain that nobody likes you and the only way you can post at a non-negative initial score is by not having an account?
Hey, the version of Netrek I run was released in 1997. ;)