Sure, that falls into "pick your poison." The point is that he was sentenced for a mundane and valid reason, and not for "interfering with religion" or for anything to do with religion at all. It just so happens that the entity with a grievance was a "religious" organization. Kids who are arrested for tagging a church aren't put in jail for "desecrating sacred sites," but merely for defacing property.
States have their own legislatures, and the public elects representatives to them. Citizens are far more likely to know their US Senator than their state senator, just as they are far more likely to know the president's name than their governor's. I think you would be remarkably hard-pressed to find a large group of people who could name any Secretary of Transportation unless it affected them personally.
It does matter because it reflects accountability standards--states have few to none, and the people in the offices are not intensely scrutinized, even by "local" media, which is forced to compete with national news sources and in turn dedicates increasingly less space to local issues, and almost never to the day-to-day operations of the state government. It's not a sexy topic, and nobody cares. As someone who has worked in a state legislature, I can personally vouch for the zero media presence when session convened at 1pm. Committee meetings are closed-door events in most places, with no public record of the proceedings--the only public record is the committee report submitted on the floor, but again, unless there is a sexy topic at hand, local news is nowhere to be found. There are no restrictions on earmarks, no professional oversight, and almost no "beltway crowd" as in DC.
States have a free pass when it comes to accountability, so long as they don't step on the wrong toes, causing them to exact revenge by exposing scandal. Most of these go unreported until the party doing the leaking pulls strings with executives. You would be shocked at how a typical state government is actually run (much as the machinations in DC are far more complex than most people realize).
I don't have time to reply in depth at the moment, but a state representative is not a federal anything. State legislatures are just that: state legislators. The federal official is a US Senator or US Representative.
Just another faulty summary designed to promote/. comment storms. Consider it two separate components--being found guilty of harassment or slander or libel or choose your poison, but with the victim being a religious organization. The summary might as well say "sent to jail for interfering with science" when the person released the rabbits from a study, for example (when the crime wasn't "interfering with science" but rather trespassing/theft/etc.).
You have a puzzling perspective. You believe that "the feds" can crack down on abuses of the Constitution, and yet in the next sentence you worry about federal abuse. The solution in either case is not to flee, but to correct the problems that arise.
I'm not sure what measure you use to gauge attention, but media coverage of state/local issues is lesser, voter turnout is substantially depressed, and a pathetic percentage (~9%, IIRC) can even name their state representative. Regardless, the hypothetical described could not be pushed on the public unwillingly overnight. There would be ample opportunities to act; insidious sneak-ins are quite difficult to pull off at the federal level than at the state level because of the far greater oversight and accountability mandated in DC (you only hear about scandals once they've been discovered). Even beyond that, changing culture and social expectations may well make that scenario completely acceptable within a generation, making the whole debate irrelevant.
That's the Constitution as written. Again, I'll mention the Commerce Clause, and throw in the Elastic clause as well. You'd do well to read them. "Powers delegated to the United States" do not end at the enumerated powers.
The scenario you paint can be accomplished just as easily by a state government, while simultaneously getting away with even more egregious violations because people don't pay that much attention to their state governments. Unless you live in a state like California where the state has lots of money to throw around, you hear about the states about once a year. All the attention and distrust is aimed squarely at the federal government while states get away with murder. If you want to see wasteful spending, look at the University of California. It's worse than any DoD contract.
Actually, the "whole republic concept" has nothing to do with federalism. There are dozens of unitary republics in the world. But more to the point, "usurping power from the states" is not a violation of privacy. People are calling this a privacy issue, and I want to know why. I get that there is a states rights argument, but that has nothing to do with privacy.
Where in the Constitution do states get the right to issue drivers licenses? They don't--it only happened that way because there were only local motor roads when the automobile was introduced. In fact, given that licenses are required on interstate highways, the commerce clause would undoubtedly be an easy point of entry for requiring a federal drivers license (as required in most of the world's 191 countries).
Explain to me why a national ID surrenders more privacy than a state ID. It is not as though the federal government doesn't already have access to all 50 states' ID systems. What is the inherent harm in replacing 50 different databases with one database?
Zune was finished before 14 November; Vista was still in development at that time--both products were in the support phase. Meanwhile, iPod worked fine through RC2 and didn't break on my machine until RTM/GM.
Zune didn't support Vista until about six weeks ago, and Microsoft makes BOTH of those products...expecting a third party to meet or beat an internal accomplishment is unrealistic.
And yet Apple is expected to have used the Beta period to make iTunes Vista compatible when Microsoft had "good reason" to wait for Zune? Assuming that's a valid reason, then it's a good thing Apple didn't waste time making it compatible with the beta, either.
What does that have to do with anything? If you once owned a VHS tape or DVD, it does not follow that you can copy it and then sell the original--once you sell the original you no longer have the right to copy, and copy becomes illegal.
One-time purchase does not constitute lifetime usage. If you lose/have stolen/damage/have burned by ex/whatever the CD, it's gone and you're SOL. If you sell it to someone else (which you are entitled to do), you no longer have any rights. Used music shops are protected by the law, so while they may indeed get pissy about it, there's nothing they can do to stop them except eliminating the physical component of a CD and issuing its replacement as non-transferable...this is exactly what they're moving toward.
That depends on the cause of the class action. A free replacement CD and an additional free CD is considered fair compensation for having been bothered by a rootkit which may or may not have made your computer more vulnerable. A class action resulting in a recall for a vehicle allows all owners to have the defect remedied.
A class action is a means for the consumer to correct a wrong, not a profit mechanism for angry customers, nor is it intended, ultimately, as a deterrent. Class actions arise from design problems, manufacturing problems, and all sorts of mundane causes. Relatively few are leveled against corporations for doing "evil" deeds...and when they are, the class action is still principally designed to fix problems, not shame companies for stupid decisions. If your goal is to punish a company for doing something, you should avail yourself of other means of litigation.
Effectively, consumers get little because in most cases, the problem is little. Class actions rarely result in more than a product replacement at best.
Exactly. It's not as though the consumers did any work. At best, they found a form to fill out so that they could be contacted by a lawyer when a settlement is reached, and then they went right back to watching TV. And who's paying the bills before the settlement is reached? The lawyers carry the case out of pocket...because it's not like the affected consumers are willing to put down a deposit.
A substantial amount of legal fees goes to actual costs--do you know how much it costs to ship overnight 4 boxes of documents in binders? Weekly, for several months? Simple photocopying and document services alone can cost $10,000 in a case, not to mention shipping, postage, and office supplies. Lawyers also have a paralegal/clerk staff to pay for their time and have to cover all the pro bono cases most of us take, which are also expensive and time consuming.
Good points. Perhaps the solution is a new floppy--a USB flash drive containing a storage chip inside plastic (but not containing the USB connector). You could have a USB connector and then swap out the cheap memory cards. This is almost exactly like using flash storage like a digital camera, but for whatever reason, those formats are still expensive.
As far as slot-load CDs are concerned, though, I've had them for four years in 3 Mac notebooks and only once have I ever gotten a disc stuck (and all it took to fix was a drivers license and a bit of wiggling).
When did I ever mention a state? Or even a municipality for that matter? I said you are required to have an ID in most places. If you read "legally required by the government simply for the sake of having one" out of that, that's your doing. You can't vote or pay taxes or work without ID, making it a requirement to have one to get anything done.
Burning a CD doesn't take longer than writing to disk. Formatting and finalizing take a long time. Floppies came preformatted, so you had that advantage; most modern OSes no longer require finalized CDs, so that requirement is also out the window. Tools like DirectCD which let you use CD-Rs as floppies were really rather useful (but AFAIK DCD is incompatible with Vista).
Optical media is certainly cheaper. If you could buy some preformatted variety for "floppy replacement" and OSes could simply treat it as a standard drive, that would be ideal.
Ah. I think I see what you're saying--you're looking for something like a "now playing" playlist which you can manipulate on the fly? I solved this by keeping a playlist at the top of the window where I drag songs/albums. I can add or remove tracks from this playlist in the manner you seek.
I agree that this functionality should be more common in media players, and I'll readily admit that the downside to my method is that I have to clear the "now playing" playlist manually when I want to start over (though usually I just keep adding to it and start it at, say, #67 in case I want to listen to something I played recently later).
Have you tried using Smart playlists? Once I figured those out, I never went back. You can set to match all songs from an artist, sort by album, and even include covers by other bands. The only downside is that it's not automatically created for each artist, but there are tons of scripting tools to automate the process of creating a smart playlist for all your artists, if that's what you want.
I suppose it's just a matter of preference. I'd rather not have standing playlists when all I have to do is type a few words to filter the content in my library. To play an album, it's as simple as scrolling to its cover and double-clicking. You can even filter the album covers by typing in part of the artist's name, which gives you less to scroll through. I'd never want to fight my way through a nested list of hundreds of artists and nearly 2000 albums, as my library currently stands. But then again, if you don't have artwork for your library, cover flow view is kind of boring.
Ubuntu itself recommends not using Automatix because it breaks things so easily, and as for updates, one need look no further than the Dapper -> Edgy disaster, which left many users with days of cleanup. That's not to say that Windows doesn't have its share of update problems, but a Linux distro will have to be better than that to motivate someone to switch. Automatix furthermore does not replace a device manager in the least but is instead an installer helper which happens to help launch some nVidia installers (but still doesn't properly close X and doesn't write valid X configs).
Even still, every attempt at updating an Ubuntu graphics driver inevitably ends with me having to restore a backup image, because it breaks the delicate configuration for the "eye candy" that makes it a viable desktop. There are quite simply too many drivers, too many points of failure in the process, and too much compatibility checking to be done out there. Linux needs to pick a universal standard (and stick with it), or it needs to provide a mechanism to ensure that drivers are compatible with the system (which entails some wing-clipping for the free developers out there).
You inevitably have the problem of too many distros, too many variations on those, and no concise method of choosing what's best without significant research. Even once you've settled on a distribution, it takes entirely too much work to determine which driver is the appropriate one for the platform, how to install it, where to install it, and whether the old one needs to be removed first. There is not yet a distribution which actually makes everything easy. Not only must it meet Windows, but it has to exceed it by enough to make a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoosh! If you look up now, you might see the trailing end of the point whizzing past.
Sure, that falls into "pick your poison." The point is that he was sentenced for a mundane and valid reason, and not for "interfering with religion" or for anything to do with religion at all. It just so happens that the entity with a grievance was a "religious" organization. Kids who are arrested for tagging a church aren't put in jail for "desecrating sacred sites," but merely for defacing property.
States have their own legislatures, and the public elects representatives to them. Citizens are far more likely to know their US Senator than their state senator, just as they are far more likely to know the president's name than their governor's. I think you would be remarkably hard-pressed to find a large group of people who could name any Secretary of Transportation unless it affected them personally.
It does matter because it reflects accountability standards--states have few to none, and the people in the offices are not intensely scrutinized, even by "local" media, which is forced to compete with national news sources and in turn dedicates increasingly less space to local issues, and almost never to the day-to-day operations of the state government. It's not a sexy topic, and nobody cares. As someone who has worked in a state legislature, I can personally vouch for the zero media presence when session convened at 1pm. Committee meetings are closed-door events in most places, with no public record of the proceedings--the only public record is the committee report submitted on the floor, but again, unless there is a sexy topic at hand, local news is nowhere to be found. There are no restrictions on earmarks, no professional oversight, and almost no "beltway crowd" as in DC.
States have a free pass when it comes to accountability, so long as they don't step on the wrong toes, causing them to exact revenge by exposing scandal. Most of these go unreported until the party doing the leaking pulls strings with executives. You would be shocked at how a typical state government is actually run (much as the machinations in DC are far more complex than most people realize).
I don't have time to reply in depth at the moment, but a state representative is not a federal anything. State legislatures are just that: state legislators. The federal official is a US Senator or US Representative.
Just another faulty summary designed to promote /. comment storms. Consider it two separate components--being found guilty of harassment or slander or libel or choose your poison, but with the victim being a religious organization. The summary might as well say "sent to jail for interfering with science" when the person released the rabbits from a study, for example (when the crime wasn't "interfering with science" but rather trespassing/theft/etc.).
You have a puzzling perspective. You believe that "the feds" can crack down on abuses of the Constitution, and yet in the next sentence you worry about federal abuse. The solution in either case is not to flee, but to correct the problems that arise.
I'm not sure what measure you use to gauge attention, but media coverage of state/local issues is lesser, voter turnout is substantially depressed, and a pathetic percentage (~9%, IIRC) can even name their state representative. Regardless, the hypothetical described could not be pushed on the public unwillingly overnight. There would be ample opportunities to act; insidious sneak-ins are quite difficult to pull off at the federal level than at the state level because of the far greater oversight and accountability mandated in DC (you only hear about scandals once they've been discovered). Even beyond that, changing culture and social expectations may well make that scenario completely acceptable within a generation, making the whole debate irrelevant.
Art. I 8.3; Art I 8.18.
That's the Constitution as written. Again, I'll mention the Commerce Clause, and throw in the Elastic clause as well. You'd do well to read them. "Powers delegated to the United States" do not end at the enumerated powers.
The scenario you paint can be accomplished just as easily by a state government, while simultaneously getting away with even more egregious violations because people don't pay that much attention to their state governments. Unless you live in a state like California where the state has lots of money to throw around, you hear about the states about once a year. All the attention and distrust is aimed squarely at the federal government while states get away with murder. If you want to see wasteful spending, look at the University of California. It's worse than any DoD contract.
Actually, the "whole republic concept" has nothing to do with federalism. There are dozens of unitary republics in the world. But more to the point, "usurping power from the states" is not a violation of privacy. People are calling this a privacy issue, and I want to know why. I get that there is a states rights argument, but that has nothing to do with privacy.
Where in the Constitution do states get the right to issue drivers licenses? They don't--it only happened that way because there were only local motor roads when the automobile was introduced. In fact, given that licenses are required on interstate highways, the commerce clause would undoubtedly be an easy point of entry for requiring a federal drivers license (as required in most of the world's 191 countries).
Explain to me why a national ID surrenders more privacy than a state ID. It is not as though the federal government doesn't already have access to all 50 states' ID systems. What is the inherent harm in replacing 50 different databases with one database?
Zune was finished before 14 November; Vista was still in development at that time--both products were in the support phase. Meanwhile, iPod worked fine through RC2 and didn't break on my machine until RTM/GM.
Zune didn't support Vista until about six weeks ago, and Microsoft makes BOTH of those products...expecting a third party to meet or beat an internal accomplishment is unrealistic.
Oh, you mean like Vista's Sync Center? Never thought I'd see the day when I actually miss ActiveSync.
And yet Apple is expected to have used the Beta period to make iTunes Vista compatible when Microsoft had "good reason" to wait for Zune? Assuming that's a valid reason, then it's a good thing Apple didn't waste time making it compatible with the beta, either.
What does that have to do with anything? If you once owned a VHS tape or DVD, it does not follow that you can copy it and then sell the original--once you sell the original you no longer have the right to copy, and copy becomes illegal.
One-time purchase does not constitute lifetime usage. If you lose/have stolen/damage/have burned by ex/whatever the CD, it's gone and you're SOL. If you sell it to someone else (which you are entitled to do), you no longer have any rights. Used music shops are protected by the law, so while they may indeed get pissy about it, there's nothing they can do to stop them except eliminating the physical component of a CD and issuing its replacement as non-transferable...this is exactly what they're moving toward.
That depends on the cause of the class action. A free replacement CD and an additional free CD is considered fair compensation for having been bothered by a rootkit which may or may not have made your computer more vulnerable. A class action resulting in a recall for a vehicle allows all owners to have the defect remedied.
A class action is a means for the consumer to correct a wrong, not a profit mechanism for angry customers, nor is it intended, ultimately, as a deterrent. Class actions arise from design problems, manufacturing problems, and all sorts of mundane causes. Relatively few are leveled against corporations for doing "evil" deeds...and when they are, the class action is still principally designed to fix problems, not shame companies for stupid decisions. If your goal is to punish a company for doing something, you should avail yourself of other means of litigation.
Effectively, consumers get little because in most cases, the problem is little. Class actions rarely result in more than a product replacement at best.
Exactly. It's not as though the consumers did any work. At best, they found a form to fill out so that they could be contacted by a lawyer when a settlement is reached, and then they went right back to watching TV. And who's paying the bills before the settlement is reached? The lawyers carry the case out of pocket...because it's not like the affected consumers are willing to put down a deposit.
A substantial amount of legal fees goes to actual costs--do you know how much it costs to ship overnight 4 boxes of documents in binders? Weekly, for several months? Simple photocopying and document services alone can cost $10,000 in a case, not to mention shipping, postage, and office supplies. Lawyers also have a paralegal/clerk staff to pay for their time and have to cover all the pro bono cases most of us take, which are also expensive and time consuming.
Good points. Perhaps the solution is a new floppy--a USB flash drive containing a storage chip inside plastic (but not containing the USB connector). You could have a USB connector and then swap out the cheap memory cards. This is almost exactly like using flash storage like a digital camera, but for whatever reason, those formats are still expensive.
As far as slot-load CDs are concerned, though, I've had them for four years in 3 Mac notebooks and only once have I ever gotten a disc stuck (and all it took to fix was a drivers license and a bit of wiggling).
When did I ever mention a state? Or even a municipality for that matter? I said you are required to have an ID in most places. If you read "legally required by the government simply for the sake of having one" out of that, that's your doing. You can't vote or pay taxes or work without ID, making it a requirement to have one to get anything done.
Burning a CD doesn't take longer than writing to disk. Formatting and finalizing take a long time. Floppies came preformatted, so you had that advantage; most modern OSes no longer require finalized CDs, so that requirement is also out the window. Tools like DirectCD which let you use CD-Rs as floppies were really rather useful (but AFAIK DCD is incompatible with Vista). Optical media is certainly cheaper. If you could buy some preformatted variety for "floppy replacement" and OSes could simply treat it as a standard drive, that would be ideal.
Ah. I think I see what you're saying--you're looking for something like a "now playing" playlist which you can manipulate on the fly? I solved this by keeping a playlist at the top of the window where I drag songs/albums. I can add or remove tracks from this playlist in the manner you seek.
I agree that this functionality should be more common in media players, and I'll readily admit that the downside to my method is that I have to clear the "now playing" playlist manually when I want to start over (though usually I just keep adding to it and start it at, say, #67 in case I want to listen to something I played recently later).
Have you tried using Smart playlists? Once I figured those out, I never went back. You can set to match all songs from an artist, sort by album, and even include covers by other bands. The only downside is that it's not automatically created for each artist, but there are tons of scripting tools to automate the process of creating a smart playlist for all your artists, if that's what you want.
I suppose it's just a matter of preference. I'd rather not have standing playlists when all I have to do is type a few words to filter the content in my library. To play an album, it's as simple as scrolling to its cover and double-clicking. You can even filter the album covers by typing in part of the artist's name, which gives you less to scroll through. I'd never want to fight my way through a nested list of hundreds of artists and nearly 2000 albums, as my library currently stands. But then again, if you don't have artwork for your library, cover flow view is kind of boring.
Ubuntu itself recommends not using Automatix because it breaks things so easily, and as for updates, one need look no further than the Dapper -> Edgy disaster, which left many users with days of cleanup. That's not to say that Windows doesn't have its share of update problems, but a Linux distro will have to be better than that to motivate someone to switch. Automatix furthermore does not replace a device manager in the least but is instead an installer helper which happens to help launch some nVidia installers (but still doesn't properly close X and doesn't write valid X configs). Even still, every attempt at updating an Ubuntu graphics driver inevitably ends with me having to restore a backup image, because it breaks the delicate configuration for the "eye candy" that makes it a viable desktop. There are quite simply too many drivers, too many points of failure in the process, and too much compatibility checking to be done out there. Linux needs to pick a universal standard (and stick with it), or it needs to provide a mechanism to ensure that drivers are compatible with the system (which entails some wing-clipping for the free developers out there). You inevitably have the problem of too many distros, too many variations on those, and no concise method of choosing what's best without significant research. Even once you've settled on a distribution, it takes entirely too much work to determine which driver is the appropriate one for the platform, how to install it, where to install it, and whether the old one needs to be removed first. There is not yet a distribution which actually makes everything easy. Not only must it meet Windows, but it has to exceed it by enough to make a difference.