Maybe you can. I prefer to stick to the what's actually written in the document. You should also take a close look at the 9th and 10th Amendments. Do you know why they're the 9th and 10th Amendments, the last ones that were written? They're at the end because they're the endcap amendments. They're the Amendments which say "This is it, and no more, unless you write new Amendments." This whole business of expanding the role of government past the core document by reinterpreting individual clauses is specifically forbidden by the 9th and 10th Amendments.
What's actually written in the document is and always has been open to interpretation, which is why we have a Supreme Court. You seem to be asserting that there is only one correct read of the Constitution and the 9th and 10th Amendments, but even a cursory glance at the Wikipedia entry for the 9th Amendment reveals that reasonable minds differ on intepreting it.
Nobody listens, nobody cares. Politicians made an active decision to ignore the 9th and 10th Amendments in the very first meeting of Congress. It's all a sham anyway.
Just because the Constitution hasn't been interpreted to your liking doesn't make the last two hundred years of legislation and legal interpretation a sham. Would you prefer that along with judgements on copyright, we should also throw out judgements on civil rights?
The one thing I think that would be a step in the right direction is if corporations were no longer legally recognized as a separate entity but the product of actions by the CEO, Board of directors, etc and they are held liable for the criminal and civil misdeeds of the corporation.
I agree 100%. Your point about not really caring about music gets to the bottom of my argument, which is that much of the furor over P2P filesharing is really about a much larger issue. People want to change the role of and power of corporations in America, but most of the time they won't admit that's what they're after.
Downloading zillions of songs for free is an easy way to stick it to The Man, but it's not exactly a principled approach, and it's not necessarily going to lead to the desired outcome.
Personally my biggest problem with copyright law as it stands is the duration of copyright. The Disney copyright extensions have led to an absurd situation, particularly given the pace of American society, wherein by the time a copyright expires, the value of the copyrighted material has been radically diminished. The vast majority of copyrighted material doesn't even create real revenue for the copyright holders. But they get the copyright for free, with no action required on their part. The material just sits there languishing for decades.
I'm also very purturbed at the chilling effect problem with sampling. As Kimbrew McCleod explains in Freedom of Expression it is now far easier and less expensive to record a full cover of a song than it is to sample two seconds from a song and use it in your recording. There's something really warped going on there. As an aside, McCleod also points out that Big Media has succeeded far less frequently in the courts than in the collective unconscious. They sue quite a bit, but don't win nearly as often as people think. Thus the chilling effect even when the law isn't on their side.
As for the legal status of corporations, many people, including businesspeople, agree with your assertion that we'd all be better off if corporate management were actually held accountable for their individual actions. Individuals are being held to the fire more these days, primarily because Elliot Spitzer is on the warpath, but nailing individuals involved in a collective endeavor is inherently difficult, especially when current law pretty much compels corporations to fight off every lawsuit that comes their way. Even if an individual at the company is a bad seed, the company has to act as if the entire company is being attacked. I don't believe that corporations are inherently evil, but the law certainly prods them to act in an amoral fashion.
Last I recalled, you couldn't exactly sue someone for somebody else.
The ACLU sues on behalf of people all the time. Class actions are filed by a party on behalf of a class of people (usually customers) frequently as well.
If the music industry wants to deal in rentals then they should make that clear at the point of sale.
Are you proposing that the downloading and keeping of a practically perfect copy of a music file constitutes a rental, in the same way that rental of a DVD from Netflix does?
As for fair use and copyright law: The federal government, the primary author of copyright law, is empowered by a single document: The Constitution. In this document, the rights are reserved to the individual authors and inventors. Rights are inalienable. You cannot sell or transfer your Constitutional rights. Admittedly, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of court cases where incompetent attorneys and incompetent judges have breached this natural law. But let's hold true to natural law and how the Constitution implements it.
So are you arguing that contracts between artists and distribution companies are inherently unconstitutional? Are you also arguing that artists only have the option of going through big labels? Perhaps if they want to roll the dice and take a shot at being fabulously wealthy, but there are other options, such as selling music and merchandise direct, as David Lindley knows.
I'm also wary of the assertion that copyright is a "natural law." Are you saying that copyright is primarily a law derived from morality, rather than a law derived from a more utilitarian analysis of commerce? My understanding of American copyright law is that it is based on the idea that by granting individual creators the right to exploit their works for a limited time, then turning those works over to the society at large, the individual is given the incentive to create, and society is also allowed to benefit from that creativity. Whether copyright is a natural right is, at the least, open to debate.
If you believe that "there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of court cases where incompetent attorneys and incompetent judges have breached this natural law" I would assume that you also believe in the "Constitution in Exile" theory of legal interpretation. Are we to view the Constitution purely through our interpretation of how the Founders intended it? If that is the case, the Supreme Court should feel no compunction about turning back the clock on any number of issues including federal government taxes, separation of church and state, civil rights interpretations, and so on.
I can just see people telling this to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement.
I wholeheartedlly agree that civil disobedience is required in certain circumstances. But do you equate not being able to share music over a P2P network with race discrimination?
I'm not sure what the threshold should be for illegal action, but I'm not convinced that fighting the RIAA over copyright merits it.
If we were ruled by dictators who held mock elections every four years, how would you recommend fighting them? By participating in the polls? By voting with our dollars?
I'm not sure how this analogy applies to the RIAA and MPAA. They are not all-powerful, even among huge corporate interests, and certainly not in our government. Just because things are going their way right now doesn't mean that the slow mechanisms of representative government won't eventually force them to acquiesce.
Once the media company sells something to me then it is mine and I will do with it whatever I darn well please.
I doubt that even the most staunch advocate of fair use rights would say that the intent of copyright is to allow you to do whatever you please with copyrighted material.
I can't make photocopies of books then sell those photocopies, for example.
Based on the Grokster decision, when file sharing services are making money off of other people's copyrighted materials, and are obviously inducing people to use their service expressly to make money off of copyrighted materials, you're on the wrong side of the law.
Situations that fall short of obvious copyright violation and inducement to violate copyright are still open to legal interpretation. Right now the RIAA is suing the crap out of people not because they feel they can win the cases, but because they are trying to frighten people into submission.
The Congress has thus far been acting at the behest of the entertainment industry, but the courts aren't beholden to the legislature or the entertainment industry. They make their decisions in a rather different fashion. As Lessig wrote in his post-mortem of the Eldred case,
Kennedy in good faith wanted to be shown. I, idiotically, corrected his question. Souter in good faith wanted to be shown the First Amendment harms. I, like a math teacher, reframed the question to make the logical point. I had shown them how they could strike down this law of Congress if they wanted to. There were a hundred places where I could have helped them want to, yet my stubbornness, my refusal to give in, stopped me. I have stood before hundreds of audiences trying to persuade; I have used passion in that effort to persuade; but I refused to stand before this audience and try to persuade with the passion I had used elsewhere. It was not the basis on which a court should decide the issue.
The entertainment industry is obviously run by people who are trying to hold on to an outmoded business model, as you pointed out. But I'd argue that having or not having pity for them isn't really the point. The point is that taking music isn't necessarily the most effective way to fight the entertainment industry. Impatience with the slowness of the legislative and judicial systems is a tenuous argument for breaking the law, particularly when we're not exactly talking about stealing a loaf of bread for your starving family.
This is more about keeping options open in case the Intel transition doesn't come off.
I'm not sure how Apple making a decision to keep their options open constitutes reason for anyone to twist and turn. To me it sounds like smart business, which is something the old Apple didn't even know existed.
For the last several years Apple has been running off a new playbook. I think it is fair to say that talking about its dumb moves from six years ago or more amounts to archaeology.
Did you consider the USA wants those systems hacked by the Chinese.
You could be right. I know it's not fashionable on Slashdot to give credit to anyone in government for having any brains whatsoever, but from time to time the government gets things right. The closer you get to national security, the longer-term the planning becomes, and the more secretive as well.
I'm not sure that forcing the Soviets to try and outspend us was an example of misinformation, but there are examples of America actually using misinformation well: the buildup to Operation Overlord comes to mind, and the Pentagon used misinformation very well in making Saddam Hussein think the American attack would be a head-on affair, rather than the "left hook" it actually used.
They unsuccessfully went after Visa and other credit card companies for handling the credit card services for websites that allegedly infringed on Perfect 10's copyrights. Perfect 10's argument was that Visa knew there was copyright infringement going on and they didn't cease doing business with the alleged offenders. Interestingly, Visa had earlier put Perfect 10 on a blacklist because of the high number of chargebacks run by Perfect 10.
They seem to be extremely serious about protecting their copyrights (as they interpret them). Google is just the latest target.
Proof that first to market doesn't equal success
on
Rio Brand Closes Doors
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
One of the mantras I heard ad nauseum during the Dot Com era was that if you can get there first, you'll get mindshare, which will lead to marketshare, which will lead to market dominance. First-movers have been shot down enough times now that everyone should recognize that being first in a market is not enough, and it can actually be a hindrance.
Your competitors get to watch what you're doing, learn from your mistakes, then jump in at the right time. I'm not saying that being first in a market is never a good strategy, but it's long past the time for the business development people out there to wake up and recognize that if you have a first to market strategy, you'd better have an excellent plan for capitalizing on the initial advantage.
The professor has caused outrage in the past with claims that white people are more intelligent than blacks and that criminal traits are genetically inherited.
Magdalena and Thomas have run some preliminary tests on three large sites that indicate the number of unique visitors is really around half what existing metrics tell us. Both they and I are anxious to run more detailed tests to validate this methodology.
So how do you determine if your methodology is accurate? The fact that preliminary tests give you different answers than traditional methods doesn't really tell us anything. It just informs us that two different methods present two different results.
It seems to even try to function as a business professional without Windows you're asking for HUGE headaches.
I functioned as a business professional for several years using a Mac, without any serious problems. I found that Office was the determining factor. Because there was a Mac version of Office, the OS was of secondary importance.
As more and more office functions are filled by web apps, the determining factor will become the development tools used in the creation of said web apps. IT departments that go with Windows-centric web apps will box out users of MacOS, Linux, BSD, et. al., and IT departments that refuse to tie themselves to Microsoft will make it easier for users of alternative OSes.
Does anyone else find it interesting that any time you talk to a soldier, they will volunteer a story that has the words "his nuts were completely exposed" somewhere in it?
I think that means my friend Jim has been on a lot of deployments. I feel sorry for all those people who have seen his nuts.
When was the above-the-morass golden age of political discourse you imply existed at some point?
This comment comes up just about every time I decry the current state of political discourse. I'm not saying that politics hasn't always been a grubby affair. In a representative system it's bound to be that way. But I'm not keen on just shucking it off with a relativistic wave of the hand, either.
I've been paying attention to politics since the early 1980s, and in my opinion American politics now is more poisonous than during the Reagan years, the Bush 1 years, even the Clinton years.
Part of this stems from the rapid decline in journalistic standards over that period. Infotainment has truly become the norm for TV news, and unfortunately most Americans still get most of their news through TV. The atmosphere of partisanship in Congress is extremely high in historical terms, and the President has become a tremendously divisive figure, perhaps moreso than even Nixon.
I understand that American politics has been dirty from the beginning. Hamilton and Burr spring to mind. Yellow Journalism and McCarthyism follow. But I don't buy the notion that because politics has never been pristine that somehow the political climate in the United States is always just as good or as bad as it was before.
1. our government is representative of money, not of me or of most ordinary slobs in the country.
The government is representative of its citizenry as a whole. It is certainly does not represent me specifically, given that I'm opposed to much of what it does on my behalf. But just because I don't agree with its current policies or leadership doesn't mean that it is not a lawful or representative government. Soldiers don't have the luxury of deciding not to obey the government when they feel it doesn't represent their interests.
2. lots of police are federal employees. ever heard of park rangers? the FBI? border patrol?
Sure. They get medals and awards and other special recognition, as soliders do. Generally they get it when they put their lives on the line.
3. police have to kill sometimes too. its part of their training. but they do it in a legal system, where they have to pay if they kill innocent people.
Agreed. Aside from those in federal employ, they are not being called to do so on behalf of the entire nation. Soldiers operate in a legal framework, but the parameters of that framework are determined by their civilian leadership, as we've seen in Iraq. As I mentioned earlier, soldiers are called upon to kill, in many cases in morally ambiguous circumstances. That makes their sacrifice exceptional, because they have to live with the consequences of that killing long after they are out of the combat zone.
4. if u are a proper right wing nutjob, then doctors who do abortions are also 'trained to kill' on behalf of 'society' and representative government. im still trying to figure out why soldiers are 'different'.
Doctors who perform abortions are acting on behalf of individuals, not society as a whole. When a doctor performs an abortion, they're doing it for one woman.
I'm not suggesting that you should value soldiers any more than you value a UPS driver, the bum on the street corner, your physics professor, or you dentist. But there are reasons why society as a whole treats soldiers differently.
the main difference is that most of them dont get medals or parades for it.
Actually the difference is that soldiers (unlike even police officers and firefighters) work for the federal government as instruments of American political will. A police officer works for the city of Phoenix, and a firefighter works for Westchester County, but a soldier puts his life on the line on behalf of every American.
When a police officer saves a life or kills a criminal and gets a medal, he is recognized for the effort he has made on behalf of his community. When a soldier receives such recognition, it is for acts on behalf of the entire nation.
Also, there is a critical difference in that soldiers are called up on to kill people. That's not something that might come up in their jobs, it is at the core of their jobs. They are asked to do the very thing that society teaches us all not to do. The recognition that veterans receive is largely because soldiers not only take risks, but they are made to kill.
They are the proxies for you and me and John Kerry and George Bush. Whether you support the war or not, the soldiers are still killing and dying because our representative government sent them to do that job on behalf of all of us.
When is spam just a difference of opinion?
on
Google Reacts to Splogs
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
People are going to start reporting blogs with which they disagree as spam in an attempt to have it shut down.
That's not a far cry from some of the moderation I've seen here on Slashdot. Disagree with someone's opinion? Mod them down! In general human beings do not like to face things that make them uncomfortable, and coming face to face with opinions that are diametrically opposed to your own really freaks people out.
When I have mod points, I try to take care to only mod people down when I feel that they are engaging in personal attacks or other socially disagreeable behavior. I admit that it is difficult for me to mod up comments that are in opposition to my opinions, but if someone has argued a point well and isn't resorting to ad hominem attacks or perversions of fact, I can sometimes get past my biases and up-mod a post. The less important the issue being discussed, of course, the easier it is for me to up-mod an opinion with which I disagree.
I strongly believe that maintenance of a community that values diversity of opinion is important, both here on Slashdot and in the "real world." Unfortunately it requires effort to maintain community, and much of the communications technology we use today is making it easier and easier for us all to filter out that which we do not want to hear. Perhaps it's not an accident that political discourse in the United States has sunk to such a morass, devoid of any real substance.
Actually, the only time I ever wore undergarments was when we were out in the cold, and I had to go with polypropelene leggings and undershirt. The rest of the time we did all go commando. The trick to staying comfortable is to not develop moisture and the resulting chafing. When you're running around constantly getting sweaty, going commando is the only way to go.
Anecdote: Our battallion was in the middle of a training rotation at the National Training Center in the desert that is Ft. Irwin, CA. At the conclusion of each mission, we would have a rather scathing after action review led by our evaluators. These AARs were filmed. We had just completed a pre-dawn assault on an enemy position that was protected by a *lot* of concertina wire. As a result, more than a few of us had torn our BDUs. We were tired and sort of spaced out.
We all sat on the side of a wadi, upslope from the Army camera crew that was setting up to film the AAR. My buddy Jim was sitting next to me, and I happened to glance over at him. His nuts were completely exposed from a six inch rent in his trousers, and he was sitting on his butt with his legs spread wide and his elbows on his knees, so he was giving the camera crew a view they didn't necessarily appreciate.
Jim, being Jim, just shrugged and put some 50 mph tape (basically green duct tape) over it. He was the same guy who forgot to button his trousers after taking a leak one January afternoon on a training exercise at Ft. Drum, but that's another story.
People sign things like NDAs, record deals, and professional sports contracts, and then expect us to be sympathetic when they decide not to honor their agreements?
In business the breaking of contracts happens all the time. Those who break their bargains know that they're breaking contract, but the value of breaking the contract is higher than the value of keeping one that is too restrictive or favors the other party.
The consequences are usually spelled out in the contract, so contract-breakers are essentially making a cost-benefit assessment and acting accordingly. You can call it a moral issue, but in American law no moral judgement or determination of guilt is made.
Contracts and the breaking of them has been going on for a long time. I think we just hear more about it these days. As for being sympathetic to those who break their contracts, that's another story. When some rich athlete whines about a bad contract, he's certainly not getting my sympathy.
Business is not about being fair and open market'ish. It's about making lots of money doing $ANYTHING.
Of course business is about making money. Without the profit motive, the computer and telecommunications industries wouldn't exist, and none of us would be involved in this discussion.
Some companies seek to maximize profits by creating their own standards. Others do not. It's a business decision, not a moral one. It's also been going on since the dawning of the Industrial Age, but it is merely more apparent in the Information Age.
Exclusive deals have nothing to do with innovation. They've been around since before there were such things as "standards". Businesses engage in exclusive deals to lock out their competitors. You give me the best pricing if I guarantee that I will only use you as a supplier. If your product starts to suck, I'll terminate the deal and go with another supplier. So even in exclusive arrangements, suppliers face pressure to keep quality high.
The fact that some technically superior standards are defeated by inferior standards (Betamax vs. VHS springs to mind) usually means that the technological superiority of one standard are incapable of overwhelming the other standard's advantages. In the case of Betamax vs. VHS, the licensing costs of Betamax were prohibitive, so companies that adopted VHS could make more money and continue to improve the VHS standard along the way. VHS technology was "good enough" at its inception, and consumers gravitated to it accordingly. Ironically, the more "open" standard won, even though it was less capable technology.
You can't just do what you want in business. You might be able to get away with boxing out competitors and pushing inferior technology on consumers for a while, but once you start doing that, competitors who can build better mousetraps begin to enter your market. Eventually you either adapt and become more capable, or you go the way of the dodo.
Slashdot Mirror
You're probably (hopefully) right.
It depends on the state you're in, and in some cases you are liable while in others you're not liable. Don't you just love the clarity of the law?
Check out what the Ohio Bar Association says about parental liability in Ohio.
What's actually written in the document is and always has been open to interpretation, which is why we have a Supreme Court. You seem to be asserting that there is only one correct read of the Constitution and the 9th and 10th Amendments, but even a cursory glance at the Wikipedia entry for the 9th Amendment reveals that reasonable minds differ on intepreting it.
Nobody listens, nobody cares. Politicians made an active decision to ignore the 9th and 10th Amendments in the very first meeting of Congress. It's all a sham anyway.
Just because the Constitution hasn't been interpreted to your liking doesn't make the last two hundred years of legislation and legal interpretation a sham. Would you prefer that along with judgements on copyright, we should also throw out judgements on civil rights?
I agree 100%. Your point about not really caring about music gets to the bottom of my argument, which is that much of the furor over P2P filesharing is really about a much larger issue. People want to change the role of and power of corporations in America, but most of the time they won't admit that's what they're after.
Downloading zillions of songs for free is an easy way to stick it to The Man, but it's not exactly a principled approach, and it's not necessarily going to lead to the desired outcome.
Personally my biggest problem with copyright law as it stands is the duration of copyright. The Disney copyright extensions have led to an absurd situation, particularly given the pace of American society, wherein by the time a copyright expires, the value of the copyrighted material has been radically diminished. The vast majority of copyrighted material doesn't even create real revenue for the copyright holders. But they get the copyright for free, with no action required on their part. The material just sits there languishing for decades.
I'm also very purturbed at the chilling effect problem with sampling. As Kimbrew McCleod explains in Freedom of Expression it is now far easier and less expensive to record a full cover of a song than it is to sample two seconds from a song and use it in your recording. There's something really warped going on there. As an aside, McCleod also points out that Big Media has succeeded far less frequently in the courts than in the collective unconscious. They sue quite a bit, but don't win nearly as often as people think. Thus the chilling effect even when the law isn't on their side.
As for the legal status of corporations, many people, including businesspeople, agree with your assertion that we'd all be better off if corporate management were actually held accountable for their individual actions. Individuals are being held to the fire more these days, primarily because Elliot Spitzer is on the warpath, but nailing individuals involved in a collective endeavor is inherently difficult, especially when current law pretty much compels corporations to fight off every lawsuit that comes their way. Even if an individual at the company is a bad seed, the company has to act as if the entire company is being attacked. I don't believe that corporations are inherently evil, but the law certainly prods them to act in an amoral fashion.
The ACLU sues on behalf of people all the time. Class actions are filed by a party on behalf of a class of people (usually customers) frequently as well.
Are you proposing that the downloading and keeping of a practically perfect copy of a music file constitutes a rental, in the same way that rental of a DVD from Netflix does?
As for fair use and copyright law: The federal government, the primary author of copyright law, is empowered by a single document: The Constitution. In this document, the rights are reserved to the individual authors and inventors. Rights are inalienable. You cannot sell or transfer your Constitutional rights. Admittedly, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of court cases where incompetent attorneys and incompetent judges have breached this natural law. But let's hold true to natural law and how the Constitution implements it.
So are you arguing that contracts between artists and distribution companies are inherently unconstitutional? Are you also arguing that artists only have the option of going through big labels? Perhaps if they want to roll the dice and take a shot at being fabulously wealthy, but there are other options, such as selling music and merchandise direct, as David Lindley knows.
I'm also wary of the assertion that copyright is a "natural law." Are you saying that copyright is primarily a law derived from morality, rather than a law derived from a more utilitarian analysis of commerce? My understanding of American copyright law is that it is based on the idea that by granting individual creators the right to exploit their works for a limited time, then turning those works over to the society at large, the individual is given the incentive to create, and society is also allowed to benefit from that creativity. Whether copyright is a natural right is, at the least, open to debate.
If you believe that "there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of court cases where incompetent attorneys and incompetent judges have breached this natural law" I would assume that you also believe in the "Constitution in Exile" theory of legal interpretation. Are we to view the Constitution purely through our interpretation of how the Founders intended it? If that is the case, the Supreme Court should feel no compunction about turning back the clock on any number of issues including federal government taxes, separation of church and state, civil rights interpretations, and so on.
I wholeheartedlly agree that civil disobedience is required in certain circumstances. But do you equate not being able to share music over a P2P network with race discrimination?
I'm not sure what the threshold should be for illegal action, but I'm not convinced that fighting the RIAA over copyright merits it.
I'm not sure how this analogy applies to the RIAA and MPAA. They are not all-powerful, even among huge corporate interests, and certainly not in our government. Just because things are going their way right now doesn't mean that the slow mechanisms of representative government won't eventually force them to acquiesce.
Once the media company sells something to me then it is mine and I will do with it whatever I darn well please.
I doubt that even the most staunch advocate of fair use rights would say that the intent of copyright is to allow you to do whatever you please with copyrighted material.
I can't make photocopies of books then sell those photocopies, for example.
Based on the Grokster decision, when file sharing services are making money off of other people's copyrighted materials, and are obviously inducing people to use their service expressly to make money off of copyrighted materials, you're on the wrong side of the law.
Situations that fall short of obvious copyright violation and inducement to violate copyright are still open to legal interpretation. Right now the RIAA is suing the crap out of people not because they feel they can win the cases, but because they are trying to frighten people into submission.
The Congress has thus far been acting at the behest of the entertainment industry, but the courts aren't beholden to the legislature or the entertainment industry. They make their decisions in a rather different fashion. As Lessig wrote in his post-mortem of the Eldred case,
Kennedy in good faith wanted to be shown. I, idiotically, corrected his question. Souter in good faith wanted to be shown the First Amendment harms. I, like a math teacher, reframed the question to make the logical point. I had shown them how they could strike down this law of Congress if they wanted to. There were a hundred places where I could have helped them want to, yet my stubbornness, my refusal to give in, stopped me. I have stood before hundreds of audiences trying to persuade; I have used passion in that effort to persuade; but I refused to stand before this audience and try to persuade with the passion I had used elsewhere. It was not the basis on which a court should decide the issue.
The entertainment industry is obviously run by people who are trying to hold on to an outmoded business model, as you pointed out. But I'd argue that having or not having pity for them isn't really the point. The point is that taking music isn't necessarily the most effective way to fight the entertainment industry. Impatience with the slowness of the legislative and judicial systems is a tenuous argument for breaking the law, particularly when we're not exactly talking about stealing a loaf of bread for your starving family.
I'm not sure how Apple making a decision to keep their options open constitutes reason for anyone to twist and turn. To me it sounds like smart business, which is something the old Apple didn't even know existed.
For the last several years Apple has been running off a new playbook. I think it is fair to say that talking about its dumb moves from six years ago or more amounts to archaeology.
Absolutely. Urban crowd control is the optimum environment for nonlethal weapons. The US military is serious about using nonlethal systems where practical, but they do recognize their limitations.
You could be right. I know it's not fashionable on Slashdot to give credit to anyone in government for having any brains whatsoever, but from time to time the government gets things right. The closer you get to national security, the longer-term the planning becomes, and the more secretive as well.
I'm not sure that forcing the Soviets to try and outspend us was an example of misinformation, but there are examples of America actually using misinformation well: the buildup to Operation Overlord comes to mind, and the Pentagon used misinformation very well in making Saddam Hussein think the American attack would be a head-on affair, rather than the "left hook" it actually used.
Earlier they went after CyberNet Ventures, the people behind the Adult Check age-verification service.
They seem to be extremely serious about protecting their copyrights (as they interpret them). Google is just the latest target.
Your competitors get to watch what you're doing, learn from your mistakes, then jump in at the right time. I'm not saying that being first in a market is never a good strategy, but it's long past the time for the business development people out there to wake up and recognize that if you have a first to market strategy, you'd better have an excellent plan for capitalizing on the initial advantage.
Your post was right on the money, but why the flame-bait title?
The professor has caused outrage in the past with claims that white people are more intelligent than blacks and that criminal traits are genetically inherited.
So how do you determine if your methodology is accurate? The fact that preliminary tests give you different answers than traditional methods doesn't really tell us anything. It just informs us that two different methods present two different results.
I functioned as a business professional for several years using a Mac, without any serious problems. I found that Office was the determining factor. Because there was a Mac version of Office, the OS was of secondary importance.
As more and more office functions are filled by web apps, the determining factor will become the development tools used in the creation of said web apps. IT departments that go with Windows-centric web apps will box out users of MacOS, Linux, BSD, et. al., and IT departments that refuse to tie themselves to Microsoft will make it easier for users of alternative OSes.
I think that means my friend Jim has been on a lot of deployments. I feel sorry for all those people who have seen his nuts.
This comment comes up just about every time I decry the current state of political discourse. I'm not saying that politics hasn't always been a grubby affair. In a representative system it's bound to be that way. But I'm not keen on just shucking it off with a relativistic wave of the hand, either.
I've been paying attention to politics since the early 1980s, and in my opinion American politics now is more poisonous than during the Reagan years, the Bush 1 years, even the Clinton years.
Part of this stems from the rapid decline in journalistic standards over that period. Infotainment has truly become the norm for TV news, and unfortunately most Americans still get most of their news through TV. The atmosphere of partisanship in Congress is extremely high in historical terms, and the President has become a tremendously divisive figure, perhaps moreso than even Nixon.
I understand that American politics has been dirty from the beginning. Hamilton and Burr spring to mind. Yellow Journalism and McCarthyism follow. But I don't buy the notion that because politics has never been pristine that somehow the political climate in the United States is always just as good or as bad as it was before.
The government is representative of its citizenry as a whole. It is certainly does not represent me specifically, given that I'm opposed to much of what it does on my behalf. But just because I don't agree with its current policies or leadership doesn't mean that it is not a lawful or representative government. Soldiers don't have the luxury of deciding not to obey the government when they feel it doesn't represent their interests.
2. lots of police are federal employees. ever heard of park rangers? the FBI? border patrol?
Sure. They get medals and awards and other special recognition, as soliders do. Generally they get it when they put their lives on the line.
3. police have to kill sometimes too. its part of their training. but they do it in a legal system, where they have to pay if they kill innocent people.
Agreed. Aside from those in federal employ, they are not being called to do so on behalf of the entire nation. Soldiers operate in a legal framework, but the parameters of that framework are determined by their civilian leadership, as we've seen in Iraq. As I mentioned earlier, soldiers are called upon to kill, in many cases in morally ambiguous circumstances. That makes their sacrifice exceptional, because they have to live with the consequences of that killing long after they are out of the combat zone.
4. if u are a proper right wing nutjob, then doctors who do abortions are also 'trained to kill' on behalf of 'society' and representative government. im still trying to figure out why soldiers are 'different'.
Doctors who perform abortions are acting on behalf of individuals, not society as a whole. When a doctor performs an abortion, they're doing it for one woman.
I'm not suggesting that you should value soldiers any more than you value a UPS driver, the bum on the street corner, your physics professor, or you dentist. But there are reasons why society as a whole treats soldiers differently.
Actually the difference is that soldiers (unlike even police officers and firefighters) work for the federal government as instruments of American political will. A police officer works for the city of Phoenix, and a firefighter works for Westchester County, but a soldier puts his life on the line on behalf of every American.
When a police officer saves a life or kills a criminal and gets a medal, he is recognized for the effort he has made on behalf of his community. When a soldier receives such recognition, it is for acts on behalf of the entire nation.
Also, there is a critical difference in that soldiers are called up on to kill people. That's not something that might come up in their jobs, it is at the core of their jobs. They are asked to do the very thing that society teaches us all not to do. The recognition that veterans receive is largely because soldiers not only take risks, but they are made to kill.
They are the proxies for you and me and John Kerry and George Bush. Whether you support the war or not, the soldiers are still killing and dying because our representative government sent them to do that job on behalf of all of us.
That's not a far cry from some of the moderation I've seen here on Slashdot. Disagree with someone's opinion? Mod them down! In general human beings do not like to face things that make them uncomfortable, and coming face to face with opinions that are diametrically opposed to your own really freaks people out.
When I have mod points, I try to take care to only mod people down when I feel that they are engaging in personal attacks or other socially disagreeable behavior. I admit that it is difficult for me to mod up comments that are in opposition to my opinions, but if someone has argued a point well and isn't resorting to ad hominem attacks or perversions of fact, I can sometimes get past my biases and up-mod a post. The less important the issue being discussed, of course, the easier it is for me to up-mod an opinion with which I disagree.
I strongly believe that maintenance of a community that values diversity of opinion is important, both here on Slashdot and in the "real world." Unfortunately it requires effort to maintain community, and much of the communications technology we use today is making it easier and easier for us all to filter out that which we do not want to hear. Perhaps it's not an accident that political discourse in the United States has sunk to such a morass, devoid of any real substance.
Anecdote: Our battallion was in the middle of a training rotation at the National Training Center in the desert that is Ft. Irwin, CA. At the conclusion of each mission, we would have a rather scathing after action review led by our evaluators. These AARs were filmed. We had just completed a pre-dawn assault on an enemy position that was protected by a *lot* of concertina wire. As a result, more than a few of us had torn our BDUs. We were tired and sort of spaced out.
We all sat on the side of a wadi, upslope from the Army camera crew that was setting up to film the AAR. My buddy Jim was sitting next to me, and I happened to glance over at him. His nuts were completely exposed from a six inch rent in his trousers, and he was sitting on his butt with his legs spread wide and his elbows on his knees, so he was giving the camera crew a view they didn't necessarily appreciate.
Jim, being Jim, just shrugged and put some 50 mph tape (basically green duct tape) over it. He was the same guy who forgot to button his trousers after taking a leak one January afternoon on a training exercise at Ft. Drum, but that's another story.
In business the breaking of contracts happens all the time. Those who break their bargains know that they're breaking contract, but the value of breaking the contract is higher than the value of keeping one that is too restrictive or favors the other party.
The consequences are usually spelled out in the contract, so contract-breakers are essentially making a cost-benefit assessment and acting accordingly. You can call it a moral issue, but in American law no moral judgement or determination of guilt is made.
Contracts and the breaking of them has been going on for a long time. I think we just hear more about it these days. As for being sympathetic to those who break their contracts, that's another story. When some rich athlete whines about a bad contract, he's certainly not getting my sympathy.
Of course business is about making money. Without the profit motive, the computer and telecommunications industries wouldn't exist, and none of us would be involved in this discussion.
Some companies seek to maximize profits by creating their own standards. Others do not. It's a business decision, not a moral one. It's also been going on since the dawning of the Industrial Age, but it is merely more apparent in the Information Age.
Exclusive deals have nothing to do with innovation. They've been around since before there were such things as "standards". Businesses engage in exclusive deals to lock out their competitors. You give me the best pricing if I guarantee that I will only use you as a supplier. If your product starts to suck, I'll terminate the deal and go with another supplier. So even in exclusive arrangements, suppliers face pressure to keep quality high.
The fact that some technically superior standards are defeated by inferior standards (Betamax vs. VHS springs to mind) usually means that the technological superiority of one standard are incapable of overwhelming the other standard's advantages. In the case of Betamax vs. VHS, the licensing costs of Betamax were prohibitive, so companies that adopted VHS could make more money and continue to improve the VHS standard along the way. VHS technology was "good enough" at its inception, and consumers gravitated to it accordingly. Ironically, the more "open" standard won, even though it was less capable technology.
You can't just do what you want in business. You might be able to get away with boxing out competitors and pushing inferior technology on consumers for a while, but once you start doing that, competitors who can build better mousetraps begin to enter your market. Eventually you either adapt and become more capable, or you go the way of the dodo.