There is a useful distinction between *legal* (meaning authorized by statute) and *lawful* (meaning actually in accord with all applicable laws.) So some of what they are doing appears to be legal (you can point to a statute authorizing it) but to the extent it violates the 4th amendment it's still not lawful.
Of course, a large part of the dispute concerns activities that the administration purports to consider legal under e.g. section 216 which clearly does not actually authorize it, and those activities would be both unlawful AND illegal.
But of course 'whistleblowing' to the same corrupt authority that stamped the unlawful and/or illegal activity in the first place is an obvious trap either way.
In Snowdens case, he has said that he feared if he tried to do it secretly his own coworkers would come under suspicion for it, an outcome that was not acceptable to him.
"Marketing people would much rather use the word "more" than the word "less", and bigger numbers rather than fractions. So in trying to say "uses one-eighth as much", it comes out as "saves 87% MORE than"."
I think you hit the nail on the head, but you are being too kind. We can use fewer words and simply say "marketing lies.'
"What the hell does "saves 87% more" mean? Uses 87% less, fine - but saves 87% more??? WTF???"
The only way that could make any sense would be if they were measuring the water that does NOT cycle through in a flush, i.e. the amount that is 'saved' between flushes. Since the idea is actually to 'flush' the system saving more in that context would be a bad thing.
They appear to be trying to say that it uses less water, as you say, but the wording is so horribly confused I dont think I would accept it as an English utterance. Those are English words strung together but the sentence as a whole has no meaning.
"Unlike for example the German language, where you can practically always tell how to spell a word by how it is written."
I assume you mean by how it is pronounced, not by how it is written (if you see how it is written you also see how it is spelled.)
That said, we should remember that languages that manage to stay close to phonemic (like German, Spanish, etc.) have done that, not by magically being immune to language change, but by enforcing and regularly updating a centralized definition and excluding a lot of their own diversity, whether geographic, socioeconomic, or temporal. Even German has quite a bit of variation as you go from the alps to the Danish border - English is spoken from England to New Zealand by way of India, and by way of New England on the return trip!
And I think a very real part of what makes English attractive IS the fact that it was already too big for any 'national academy' to control and dictate.
Also think about how much you would actually lose by any attempt to make the spelling phonemic. For example homophones are currently only confusing in speech, they would become ambiguous even in writing. To, too, two? Nope, just one word, tu. What about other words where one dialect may preserve a distinction but another does not? Which one will we reflect in writing? And which one is going to get stuck with significantly depressed scores in school as a result?
Peepel tat lrn tu rajt foneemik Eenglish wil av trubel reeding ol buks tu. Tink bowt tat.
"Rest of us "techies" that use this website it should have since windows xp and now Windows Key + Type what you want, or click on the task bar."
No. Windows XP does not have the search, it started in Vista but was super buggy. Win+$search is only reliable on 7 or 8. Win+r works all the way back to XP though, and is better than search unless you are unsure of the filename.
When I get on a windows machine I typically do Win+r;cmd<enter> and then work from there, and on linux I prefer WM, so obviously I dont care about the start menu qua start menu, I always thought it was a bit ugly. But it was functional and well understood by lots of windows users that are barely able to navigate their computer at all. Removing their most basic landmark left a lot of people severely confused, and angry.
Plus, yeah, essentially no one wants their computer to pretend it's a phone with a tiny little touch-screen. Not the techies, and not the navigation-challenged either - those are the people the interface is supposedly aimed at but they seem to uniformly hate it and just want the old system they have already learned to navigate a little on back instead of being forced to start over and wrestle with tiles.
MS saw that the PC market was on a plateau and phones were selling. They wanted a piece of that market, but no one wants windows phone. So they decided to force the windows phone ui and api onto the desktop market, reasoning that this would result in people learning the phone interface on their desktop, and then becoming less resistant to having it on their phone where it will at least make a little more sense.
Of course people resist and hate it. Microsoft knew they would - they trialled a similar system for Chicago and panned it for good cause. But this time they have more motivation - a huge mobile phone market they would love to corner.
"It is unfortunate that most people -- even modern Africans -- are unaware of the ancient achievements that came out of Africa. "
People tend to calcify the situation of very recent history and project it earlier - it's as natural and understandable a tendency as it is regrettable. A longer term view would resolve these little bugbears easily.
The Europeans have been ascendant for a few hundred years, but before that it was a backwater. East and North Africa on the other hand are ancient population centres that have seen civilizations rise and fall repeatedly from the beginning, which have been ascendant not once but multiple times over the course of history.
If memory serves the suggestion was made in the article that the same sequence is responsible for both blondes and redheads, by lightening the underlying color, which without lightening comes out brunette either way.
"They failed to mention the much more interesting and strange genetic feature. Every human being on the planet is more attracted to light colored hair than dark"
They failed to mention that because it's bullshit.
"One assumes that if the man was convicted of a "crime" in Sweden, than what he did was against Swedish Law..."
Except it was already pretty well established that what they were doing was perfectly legal under Swedish law and they had been operating quite openly for some time until Hollywood got real annoyed and DC phoned in threatened sanctions.
Then suddenly they had US-style SWAT raids on a bunch of geeks (this kind of treatment the Swedish Police do not typically resort to even when dealing with Russian Mafia) and a judge who ruled that it did not matter that what they actually *did* was legal, because their *intent* was not. Think about that for a second.
"No, not unless you would like your Internet access technologies refreshed and upgraded about as often as your water pipes or electric lines are. Which is to say approximately never."
Which is what all the big 'telecommunication services' plan to do anyway. FIOS and its kin will be maintained where they exist already, a pathetic fraction of the country, but not expanded. The cable companies plan to continue making their money on cable tv, hobble their internet access to prevent the internet from competing (excepting possibly those like Netflix that pay them specifically, but watch! Netflix may still get screwed despite paying) and the telephone companies plan to continue building out new *wireless* services where they can charge premium per mb rates, but no one besides google is expanding conventional unlimited hardwired internet service in the US either way. Google may only be lukewarm on network neutrality but they are _not_ one that would flee the field rather than comply. So in this case the damage of regulation could approximate zero.
Land lines are a natural monopoly and it's not like these lines were laid out in the first place without subsidy and privilege from the government, at all levels. In fact the taxpayer has already paid for an awful lot of capacity that he never received and never will.
Getting the government involved is almost never a good choice economically, but the 'almost' is still important, and natural monopolies are the biggest exception.
"Some deaths from chickenpox continue to occur in healthy, unvaccinated children and adults. Many of the healthy adults who died from chickenpox contracted the disease from their unvaccinated children."
Yes, if you contract it as an adult it can be life-threatening. And how does that happen without immunizing for it first? It does not. What happens is that you get a vaccination and immunity early, which prevents you from taking and passing the infection at the proper time. But it does eventually wear off, leaving you a vulnerable adult. I'm not aware of that ever happening to someone that had developed natural immunity as a result of the childhood disease.
"If I present to you two pills. Both have been exposed to ebola but one has been put into a chamber which is linked to a computer. 97% of the time when I hit the enter key on the computer the chamber is flooded with gamma radiation killing every living thing in there. I hit the enter key, remove the pill and give both to you. I now through some form of compulsion require you to take one of the pills. Which one are you going to take?"
In a free country you do not take action against an individual because they *might* do something bad, you have to wait until there is reason to believe they actually have or will do something bad.
For many people it's not inertia but some level of agreement with their parents choice as well. The religious objections are real, but they are rooted deeply in human psychology so religion is not a necessary component. The importance of bodily integrity is a fundamental quality of human psychology shared by all populations and cultures, and there is nothing abnormal about wanting to be left un-penetrated.
I'm very nearly your age and the best I know the pox vaccine was already very old when I refused it, perhaps you were living in a third world nation at the time?
At any rate, I got it at 12 years old and as a result of getting it so late I had a rather severe case that lasted over a week and left me with numerous scars. But my life was certainly never in danger from it, and if I had simply caught it a few years earlier it would have been much easier. Most unvaccinated kids I knew caught it younger and just felt bad for a day.
The fascist and anti-humanist impulse that leads people to openly advocate forcible penetration of nonconsenting citizens is a far greater danger than any biological disease past or present.
"Both parties admit they're in contract renegotiations. So the current public spat appears to be about whether a retailer should be obliged to continue to stock the goods under negotiation for resale without a contract, because... authors?"
How about customers?
Amazon customers, specifically, may be inconvenienced for this. Which seems a little strange in the context that they appear to have been the ones who decided to take this particular action as a way of slapping around Hachette.
So, Amazon screams 'customers' while appearing to disregard them specifically here, Hachette is screaming 'authors' but all they actually care about are their own profits, of course. (Easily rationalized - how could they pay the authors if they dont make a profit?!? They could not, of course, but someone else would.)
End of the day it's still two big corrupt corporations arguing amongst themselves and probably the best readers and authors can hope for is they fatally damage each other before making up.
Except the only free market in books tolerated is in reprints of books originally published in prior millenia. This is not a free market on either end or in any way.
What you, and a shocking number of other posters are expressing here is an incredibly impoverished view of the options. IF one does not 'believe in Evolution' then one must believe 'a wizard did it' and you allow no other options.
In fact someone that is truly scientific is likely to deny believing *anything* - or else to key the word 'believe' to trigger religious, not scientific, frames of reference. It's only those who practice 'scientism' that are going to be fully comfortable with claiming to 'believe in evolution.'
Making a religion out of science is a great way to miss the point.
I doubt they can sue for damages. The 'requests' this group sends out, at least the ones I have seen previously, do seem to carefully avoid claiming real authority to compel.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a useful distinction between *legal* (meaning authorized by statute) and *lawful* (meaning actually in accord with all applicable laws.) So some of what they are doing appears to be legal (you can point to a statute authorizing it) but to the extent it violates the 4th amendment it's still not lawful.
Of course, a large part of the dispute concerns activities that the administration purports to consider legal under e.g. section 216 which clearly does not actually authorize it, and those activities would be both unlawful AND illegal.
But of course 'whistleblowing' to the same corrupt authority that stamped the unlawful and/or illegal activity in the first place is an obvious trap either way.
In Snowdens case, he has said that he feared if he tried to do it secretly his own coworkers would come under suspicion for it, an outcome that was not acceptable to him.
"Marketing people would much rather use the word "more" than the word "less", and bigger numbers rather than fractions. So in trying to say "uses one-eighth as much", it comes out as "saves 87% MORE than"."
I think you hit the nail on the head, but you are being too kind. We can use fewer words and simply say "marketing lies.'
"What the hell does "saves 87% more" mean? Uses 87% less, fine - but saves 87% more??? WTF???"
The only way that could make any sense would be if they were measuring the water that does NOT cycle through in a flush, i.e. the amount that is 'saved' between flushes. Since the idea is actually to 'flush' the system saving more in that context would be a bad thing.
They appear to be trying to say that it uses less water, as you say, but the wording is so horribly confused I dont think I would accept it as an English utterance. Those are English words strung together but the sentence as a whole has no meaning.
"Unlike for example the German language, where you can practically always tell how to spell a word by how it is written."
I assume you mean by how it is pronounced, not by how it is written (if you see how it is written you also see how it is spelled.)
That said, we should remember that languages that manage to stay close to phonemic (like German, Spanish, etc.) have done that, not by magically being immune to language change, but by enforcing and regularly updating a centralized definition and excluding a lot of their own diversity, whether geographic, socioeconomic, or temporal. Even German has quite a bit of variation as you go from the alps to the Danish border - English is spoken from England to New Zealand by way of India, and by way of New England on the return trip!
And I think a very real part of what makes English attractive IS the fact that it was already too big for any 'national academy' to control and dictate.
Also think about how much you would actually lose by any attempt to make the spelling phonemic. For example homophones are currently only confusing in speech, they would become ambiguous even in writing. To, too, two? Nope, just one word, tu. What about other words where one dialect may preserve a distinction but another does not? Which one will we reflect in writing? And which one is going to get stuck with significantly depressed scores in school as a result?
Peepel tat lrn tu rajt foneemik Eenglish wil av trubel reeding ol buks tu. Tink bowt tat.
"The second one is not at all ambiguous. "2.3 times larger" means "multiply how large the first thing is by 2.3" to absolutely anyone."
No, that would 2.3 times the size. 2.3 times *larger* strongly implies the correct answer (for x=1) is 3.3, not 2.3.
"Rest of us "techies" that use this website it should have since windows xp and now Windows Key + Type what you want, or click on the task bar."
No. Windows XP does not have the search, it started in Vista but was super buggy. Win+$search is only reliable on 7 or 8. Win+r works all the way back to XP though, and is better than search unless you are unsure of the filename.
When I get on a windows machine I typically do Win+r;cmd<enter> and then work from there, and on linux I prefer WM, so obviously I dont care about the start menu qua start menu, I always thought it was a bit ugly. But it was functional and well understood by lots of windows users that are barely able to navigate their computer at all. Removing their most basic landmark left a lot of people severely confused, and angry.
Plus, yeah, essentially no one wants their computer to pretend it's a phone with a tiny little touch-screen. Not the techies, and not the navigation-challenged either - those are the people the interface is supposedly aimed at but they seem to uniformly hate it and just want the old system they have already learned to navigate a little on back instead of being forced to start over and wrestle with tiles.
The reasons really are not all that mysterious.
MS saw that the PC market was on a plateau and phones were selling. They wanted a piece of that market, but no one wants windows phone. So they decided to force the windows phone ui and api onto the desktop market, reasoning that this would result in people learning the phone interface on their desktop, and then becoming less resistant to having it on their phone where it will at least make a little more sense.
Of course people resist and hate it. Microsoft knew they would - they trialled a similar system for Chicago and panned it for good cause. But this time they have more motivation - a huge mobile phone market they would love to corner.
"It is unfortunate that most people -- even modern Africans -- are unaware of the ancient achievements that came out of Africa. "
People tend to calcify the situation of very recent history and project it earlier - it's as natural and understandable a tendency as it is regrettable. A longer term view would resolve these little bugbears easily.
The Europeans have been ascendant for a few hundred years, but before that it was a backwater. East and North Africa on the other hand are ancient population centres that have seen civilizations rise and fall repeatedly from the beginning, which have been ascendant not once but multiple times over the course of history.
If memory serves the suggestion was made in the article that the same sequence is responsible for both blondes and redheads, by lightening the underlying color, which without lightening comes out brunette either way.
"They failed to mention the much more interesting and strange genetic feature. Every human being on the planet is more attracted to light colored hair than dark"
They failed to mention that because it's bullshit.
"You cheapen the term "political prisoner" when you apply it to someone who goes to jail for something as mundane as piracy. "
There was no piracy involved or even alleged. He never raised a cutlass, boarded a skiff, or ravished a prisoner.
You unjustly honor the term 'pirate' when you apply it to someone whose crime was facilitating communication.
"One assumes that if the man was convicted of a "crime" in Sweden, than what he did was against Swedish Law..."
Except it was already pretty well established that what they were doing was perfectly legal under Swedish law and they had been operating quite openly for some time until Hollywood got real annoyed and DC phoned in threatened sanctions.
Then suddenly they had US-style SWAT raids on a bunch of geeks (this kind of treatment the Swedish Police do not typically resort to even when dealing with Russian Mafia) and a judge who ruled that it did not matter that what they actually *did* was legal, because their *intent* was not. Think about that for a second.
"No, not unless you would like your Internet access technologies refreshed and upgraded about as often as your water pipes or electric lines are. Which is to say approximately never."
Which is what all the big 'telecommunication services' plan to do anyway. FIOS and its kin will be maintained where they exist already, a pathetic fraction of the country, but not expanded. The cable companies plan to continue making their money on cable tv, hobble their internet access to prevent the internet from competing (excepting possibly those like Netflix that pay them specifically, but watch! Netflix may still get screwed despite paying) and the telephone companies plan to continue building out new *wireless* services where they can charge premium per mb rates, but no one besides google is expanding conventional unlimited hardwired internet service in the US either way. Google may only be lukewarm on network neutrality but they are _not_ one that would flee the field rather than comply. So in this case the damage of regulation could approximate zero.
Land lines are a natural monopoly and it's not like these lines were laid out in the first place without subsidy and privilege from the government, at all levels. In fact the taxpayer has already paid for an awful lot of capacity that he never received and never will.
Getting the government involved is almost never a good choice economically, but the 'almost' is still important, and natural monopolies are the biggest exception.
A trojan. Just say no.
"Some deaths from chickenpox continue to occur in healthy, unvaccinated children and adults. Many of the healthy adults who died from chickenpox contracted the disease from their unvaccinated children."
Yes, if you contract it as an adult it can be life-threatening. And how does that happen without immunizing for it first? It does not. What happens is that you get a vaccination and immunity early, which prevents you from taking and passing the infection at the proper time. But it does eventually wear off, leaving you a vulnerable adult. I'm not aware of that ever happening to someone that had developed natural immunity as a result of the childhood disease.
"If I present to you two pills. Both have been exposed to ebola but one has been put into a chamber which is linked to a computer. 97% of the time when I hit the enter key on the computer the chamber is flooded with gamma radiation killing every living thing in there. I hit the enter key, remove the pill and give both to you. I now through some form of compulsion require you to take one of the pills. Which one are you going to take?"
I would make you eat both of them or die trying.
In a free country you do not take action against an individual because they *might* do something bad, you have to wait until there is reason to believe they actually have or will do something bad.
For many people it's not inertia but some level of agreement with their parents choice as well. The religious objections are real, but they are rooted deeply in human psychology so religion is not a necessary component. The importance of bodily integrity is a fundamental quality of human psychology shared by all populations and cultures, and there is nothing abnormal about wanting to be left un-penetrated.
I'm very nearly your age and the best I know the pox vaccine was already very old when I refused it, perhaps you were living in a third world nation at the time?
At any rate, I got it at 12 years old and as a result of getting it so late I had a rather severe case that lasted over a week and left me with numerous scars. But my life was certainly never in danger from it, and if I had simply caught it a few years earlier it would have been much easier. Most unvaccinated kids I knew caught it younger and just felt bad for a day.
The fascist and anti-humanist impulse that leads people to openly advocate forcible penetration of nonconsenting citizens is a far greater danger than any biological disease past or present.
"Both parties admit they're in contract renegotiations. So the current public spat appears to be about whether a retailer should be obliged to continue to stock the goods under negotiation for resale without a contract, because... authors?"
How about customers?
Amazon customers, specifically, may be inconvenienced for this. Which seems a little strange in the context that they appear to have been the ones who decided to take this particular action as a way of slapping around Hachette.
So, Amazon screams 'customers' while appearing to disregard them specifically here, Hachette is screaming 'authors' but all they actually care about are their own profits, of course. (Easily rationalized - how could they pay the authors if they dont make a profit?!? They could not, of course, but someone else would.)
End of the day it's still two big corrupt corporations arguing amongst themselves and probably the best readers and authors can hope for is they fatally damage each other before making up.
"it is the free market in operation"
Except the only free market in books tolerated is in reprints of books originally published in prior millenia. This is not a free market on either end or in any way.
No it does not.
What you, and a shocking number of other posters are expressing here is an incredibly impoverished view of the options. IF one does not 'believe in Evolution' then one must believe 'a wizard did it' and you allow no other options.
In fact someone that is truly scientific is likely to deny believing *anything* - or else to key the word 'believe' to trigger religious, not scientific, frames of reference. It's only those who practice 'scientism' that are going to be fully comfortable with claiming to 'believe in evolution.'
Making a religion out of science is a great way to miss the point.
I doubt they can sue for damages. The 'requests' this group sends out, at least the ones I have seen previously, do seem to carefully avoid claiming real authority to compel.
This is NOT the London Metropolitan Police. This is the Police of the City of London. Two very different animals.