Somehow I have little confidence that this school "deserves" its loan forgiven. How can they be so irresponsible as to not keep track of this hardware or any paperwork associated with it?
Possibly incompetence, which may be why the school district declared bankruptcy and its intent to shut down all operations in 1991, after all or most of the orders at issue had occurred, and is only operating today because of a state bailout that came along with a partial administrative takeover.
Unless I misunderstood the story, it seems that the same state authorities that ensured the school made all it's state loan payments, "2008 was the year the district was scheduled to finish making state loan repayments under its previous loan plan"
You misunderstood the story.
The restructuring of the loan occurred in 1993, and was negotiated between the district and IBM. The state was involved because, during the life of the "emergency loan"--essentially a state bailout--a state trustee has been involved in running the WCCUSD, but any state officials around at the time the earlier state loan occurred and its repayment was set weren't the same state officials that are around now. What is not mentioned in the article is that the repayment term on the state emergency loan have since been extended to 2018, and additional special grants have been made to the district. So, no, the "same state officials" have not "ensured the school made all it's state loan payments". By both extending the repayment of the state loan and providing additional special grants specifically to give the district money it missed out on as a direct result of the terms of the original state takeover, the state has eased up on what it demanded from the district.
Research suggests the county population is quite well off as compared to other counties.
Further research would show that the area served by the West Contra Costa County School District is very different from the Contra Costa County as a whole. Particularly, the residents there are generally less well off, and poverty is something like twice as high. Richmond isn't Walnut Creek.
It is the former, not the latter, that is relevant, if anything at all.
Of course, its not Contra Costa County that owes the money, but the West Contra Costa County School District, which does not include the wealthier areas of the county that are responsible for much of the overall statistics the comment quoted by the parent refers to. The area in the WCCUSD has substantially higher poverty and lower average incomes than Contra Costa County as a whole.
Seriously instead of saying "let us off" they should be saying "here's your money, _please_ don't charge us interest or take us to court".
Since they already entered into an agreement in which the payments were deferred and there is no interest, there is no reason to beg for what has already been given. OTOH, asking to be let off completely can't hurt.
More likely the delivery was received by the staff, and then immediately returned.
Whether or not anyone can find the equipment or the documentation of the original order and delivery now, presumably the time to raise any question of the validity of the underlying debt was at the time of the discussions which led to the 1993 "long-term settlement", not 15 years later.
Even TFA seems badly confused, referring to the school district first as "the Contra Costa school district" and, in the next sentence, as "the West Contra Cost School District". TFA also is similary inconsistent in referring to the story in the Contra Costa Times from which TFA is apparently derived sometimes as a "Contra Cost Times story" and sometimes as a "Contra Costa story".
coondoggie seems to be just following TFA's "randomly dropping words out of proper names doesn't matter" philosophy when he alters the school district's name to "the Costa school district" in the summary.
I mean, sure... it gives you leverage to make sure your privacy isn't infringed upon by government agencies, but don't you think it could create the expectation that internet communications services are _required_ at all times to encrypt communications, even when the sender might have wanted to use more open and readable formats (and possibly not necessarily agreed to be so open by one of the recipients)?
Did similar past decisions regarding public phones and postal mail compel telecoms and the USPS to encrpyt all telephone transmissions and letters?
Yea so you can go to jail for just having an Ethernet sniffer!
Nothing in the current decision suggests that, since it is about the meaning of the Fourth Amendment and therefore the limits of government power.
It is clear text.
So are much of the the hardcopy material in which you have a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. Encryption has never been a Constitutional prerequisite to a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Cos if we can get webmail onto the list, maybe there is a chance we can get slashdot comments done as well.
Unlikely. Slashdot comments are public by design. Webmail is simply an interface to otherwise regular email message, which this covers under the logic they are intended for an identified recipient and provided to other intermediaries on the way for delivery, much like traditional mail.
If either format wins, the catalogs each had at launch will be mostly irrelevant; every movie for which a market exists, including older titles, will be available in whichever format wins.
The longer the two compete, the longer there will be distinct catalogs and exclusives which inhibit the utility of both formats.
The problem isn't the people who are competent to understand the data. The problem is everybody ELSE... which also, btw, includes most scientists... and the people who have to decide what to DO with the data.... the politians of the world, including the author of the article. There really aren't a lot of climatologists in the world.
So? Those people need to either get competent to review the data or find (and, in the case of policy-makers, who can afford to do this and have a positive obligation on the public behalf to do so, hire) people they can trust who are qualified to review the data. These people's potential sources of bias, of course, must be reviewed as well as their other qualifications, but that's just part of the recruitment and hiring process.
Demanding that scientists doing research list their own biases and describe how they influenced their research is not useful at all.
You miss one very important point. There is a big difference between a scientist's ability to abide by the scientific method, take the proper measurements & statistic, write & publish a paper..... and his ability to not let his personal views interfere when he's trying to explain the results to a non-technical audience, when he has to almost by definition simplify some issues and ignore others if he wants his audience to understand.
There is certainly a difference between those two things, but the second, inasmuch as it is a valid problem at all, is not even remotely addressed—for the reasons I stated in my earlier response—by the proposal made.
He's not trying to "sell" anything.
Yes, he is. Whether you happen to believe that the idea he is trying to sell is true or not is irrelevant to whether he is trying to sell it to others.
The closest thing I've seen to an ad hominem argument here is your dismissal of him simple because a) he's a polititian, and b) your reading of his article leads you to believe he doesn't think global warming is real.
I didn't dismiss "him" because he's a politician or because I believe he thinks global warming isn't real. I dismissed his proposal, and gave specific, concrete reasons why, even assuming the problem he addressed was real and significant, the proposal he made could not address it. However, you've ignored that in your response, and made a bunch of completely irrelevant comments that miss the point.
Stop arguing against your own fantasies, and try to address the actual arguments made.
Wasn't too long ago that scientific consensus was that the world was flat....
The scientific consensus has never been that the world was flat; at least in terms of Western civilization, the Earth was fairly conclusively established to be round, and most of the educated people knew and accepted this, long before the scientific method was ever articulated, much less an active community dedicated to it existed such that there could be any "scientific consensus" as the term is used today.
There is credible evidence that global warming is caused more by solar activity and cow farts than the exhaust of my SUV.
Perhaps for extraordinarily loose definitions of either "credible" or "evidence" or both.
No - he's saying that if you have an AGENDA, be open and up front about it so that people can determine for themselves if it's the data or the political beliefs speaking.
If people are competent to understand the data, they can review the data and determine what is speaking. The objectivity of empirical facts and the repeatably of systematic testing of empirical hypotheses is rather the point of science.
Most people - including the vast majority on slashdot, who tend to be much better educated and intelligent than "the great unwashed" (myself included), don't have the specific knowledge or background to be able to properly weigh the data presented in the debate.
Asking that scientists disclose their biases and a litany of how they affected their results isn't going to acheive that, for several reasons. First, people aren't going to claim they are biased, either because they don't believe they are biased, or if they are biased and working deliberately from that bias, because they won't want to reveal it. Second, any publication of scientific results is a claim that the scientific method was applied, i.e., that agenda did not influence the results. So that's exactly what anyone currently publishing would claim if they followed the prescription offered.
Of course, the politician making the recommendation knows this isn't going anywhere, he is just trying to sell the idea that the scientific consensus is both not real and entirely the product of bias by acting as if that is an established conclusion from the outset and railing for a correction.
When an Oil company exec says something about global warming, you're going to take that into account when you look at any data he presents.
I've never seen an Oil company exec present data about global warming. I've seen oil company execs make bald, conclusory statements without presenting the supporting data. There is an important difference between the two things.
Likewise, when the president of "People for the Full Eradication of Technology and Man" gives HIS views on the subject, you should also take THAT into account when looking at data he presents.
Sure, if someone is presenting their views. Data != views.
It's got exactly ZERO to do with ad hominem arguments
Yes, arguing that someone's arguments should be evaluated based on personal affiliation is ad hominem argument, except where the argument is supported only by personal authority of the source and the challenge is to bias or credibility of that source. Where the argument is presented based on verifiable evidence, challenges of bias of the source remain ad hominem.
If a number of your friends and acquaintances talk about how many thousands of songs and hundreds of movies they have downloaded, you can easily extrapolate the potential loss caused that group of people.
Uh, no, you can't. First of all, because your friends are not a random sample, so extrapolation from them is invalid ("the plural of anecdote is not data"), and second of all because a download is not a lost sale.
People download things they have bought legally, buy things legally that they have previously downloaded, and download things that they would not have bought legally had they had the alternative. Counting up all downloads of copyright-protected material might (if you could do it in the first place) give you an extremely high maximum limit on the losses downloading is responsible for, but it wouldn't give you a reasonable estimate of the losses.
The safe harbor provision of the DMCA applicable to carriers (there are different provisions for hosts and caches) requires, in part, that, for its protection to be available, that the "transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage" of material be carried out "without selection of the material by the service provider". (17 U.S.C. Sec. 512(a)(2))
I don't know if there is any case law yet on this, but at first blush it would seem that the more selectivity the carrier applies to what content is allowed and what is blocked, the less clear it is that they are within the protection of the safe harbor. And while it might seem paradoxical that the carrier could become more liable for copyright infringement for blocking some infringing materials, there is a good reason for this—it makes a carrier choose whether it wants copyright to be the responsibility of the users (and thus, it is "hands off"), or whether it wants to seek the potential rewards (in terms of favorable details with copyright holders to monitor and enforce) along with the potential costs (in terms of liability to those whose rights are violated despite the carrier's intervention) of taking a "hands on" policy.
I believe they said the likelyhood of that happening was 1% of the lifetime of the earth, whatever that really means.
Are you sure that wasn't a 1% chance in the lifetime of the Earth, i.e., a 1% chance of such a burst occurring close enough and with the right orientation to cause the described harm to the Earth before the Earth was destroyed through other means (mainly, the death throes of our own Sun)? Because that (no idea if it is true or not) makes more sense than 1% of the lifetime of the earth...
I'm sorry, but if you review the huge arguments going on about how you can release closed source on Linux, well it's no wonder a lot of vendors chose to go Windows only.
Yeah, because many vendors resolve questions like this by asking Slashdot.
Botnets were never a problem until Microsoft Windows became ubiquitous.
Windows was ubiquitous long before botnets became a problem.
Botnets became a problem as full-time internet access by unsophisticated home users became more ubiquitous, and Windows was the primary target because it was the main OS used by the targeted users. If there had been a Mac OS or Linux monoculture instead, people would have been tricked into install malicious software on those platforms instead.
True, but... In this case I'll bet that buried among all the replies are better answers than he'd get from 99.9% of attorneys (the 0.1% being those intimately familiar with GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPL, the glibc licence, the BSD licence, etc, etc).
Attorneys—those that don't particularly want to get sued for malpractice and subjected to professional discipline, anyway—that aren't intimately familiar with a particular law, license, etc., either provide a referral to a lawyer more familiar with that area or research the question thoroughly before answering it for a client.
Participants on internet fora often spout whatever they've come to believe either because its conventional wisdom, some other non-expert told it to them, its the way they think it should be, etc.
And, of course, are completely unaccountable for wrong answers.
Slashdot may be full of geeks, but many (true, non-poseur) geeks DO know this stuff.
And many "true, non-poseur" geeks don't know the legalities, but believe very strongly that they do. Technical expertise does not imply legal expertise any more than the reverse.
Unless you already know the right answer, its not particularly easy for someone asking a question to determine which type of geek they are getting the answer from: a non-knowledgeable poseur, or non-knowledgeable genuine geek, or a knowledgeable genuine geek.
1up has coverage of a strange development: a gaming portal focused on tabletop and strategy games. The site is slated to be a editorial/community site focusing on Avalon Hill and Wizards products, as well as potentially offering a venue for independent PC games.
Why is it a "strange development" that a manufacturer of various entertainment products would open up a portal devoted to that type of products, and particularly its own products (Avalon Hill is a division of Wizards)?
But this is not the first attempt (unsurprisingly) at trying to put together an objective system of predicting military outcomes. Actually, lots of models have been applied, such as the Tactical Numerical Determinisitic Model with varying degrees of success.
It astounds me that Apple flips the bird to all of the Windows UI conventions for marketing purposes and nobody seems to care.
Microsoft does it with every release of Office, and nobody seems to care, either. And Microsoft is no less firm than Apple in saying that people designing for their platform should follow their conventions, even though Microsoft itself doesn't in its big moneymaking software packages.
Since I would assume the point of Apple releasing Safari for Windows is either to promote Mac OS X or as a wedge to get people into the Apple style of application to prepare the way for a broader suite of Apple-on-Windows software (or both), I'm not at all surprised that they have not adapted it to the platform UI standards, since the idea is to change expectations, not follow them.
Whether it succeeds or not is still up in the air, but it wouldn't make any sense for them to go any other way given what clearly seems to be their goal.
Sounds much like every Java app. A lot of GTK+ apps.
And, for that matter, Office 2007. I'm using the Safari beta at home, alongside Firefox. Yeah, it doesn't follow some windows conventions. Some of the defaults seem like odd choices (the statusbar defaults to not being displayed, for instance.)
But its certainly usable, and it has a lot of nice little nifties compared to other browsers: highlighting active fields is very nice. And the page loading speed isn't a small improvement, either. Bonjour is interesting, too, though many home users probably won't notice it or get much use out of it. I'm not sure I'm going to switch over to Safari as may main windows browser, but its certainly got my interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly incompetence, which may be why the school district declared bankruptcy and its intent to shut down all operations in 1991, after all or most of the orders at issue had occurred, and is only operating today because of a state bailout that came along with a partial administrative takeover.
You misunderstood the story.
The restructuring of the loan occurred in 1993, and was negotiated between the district and IBM. The state was involved because, during the life of the "emergency loan"--essentially a state bailout--a state trustee has been involved in running the WCCUSD, but any state officials around at the time the earlier state loan occurred and its repayment was set weren't the same state officials that are around now. What is not mentioned in the article is that the repayment term on the state emergency loan have since been extended to 2018, and additional special grants have been made to the district. So, no, the "same state officials" have not "ensured the school made all it's state loan payments". By both extending the repayment of the state loan and providing additional special grants specifically to give the district money it missed out on as a direct result of the terms of the original state takeover, the state has eased up on what it demanded from the district.
Further research would show that the area served by the West Contra Costa County School District is very different from the Contra Costa County as a whole. Particularly, the residents there are generally less well off, and poverty is something like twice as high. Richmond isn't Walnut Creek.
It is the former, not the latter, that is relevant, if anything at all.
Of course, its not Contra Costa County that owes the money, but the West Contra Costa County School District, which does not include the wealthier areas of the county that are responsible for much of the overall statistics the comment quoted by the parent refers to. The area in the WCCUSD has substantially higher poverty and lower average incomes than Contra Costa County as a whole.
Since they already entered into an agreement in which the payments were deferred and there is no interest, there is no reason to beg for what has already been given. OTOH, asking to be let off completely can't hurt.
Whether or not anyone can find the equipment or the documentation of the original order and delivery now, presumably the time to raise any question of the validity of the underlying debt was at the time of the discussions which led to the 1993 "long-term settlement", not 15 years later.
No, the State is not. 4 out of 120 state legislators, representing West Contra Costa County and nearby areas, are. Big difference.
Even TFA seems badly confused, referring to the school district first as "the Contra Costa school district" and, in the next sentence, as "the West Contra Cost School District". TFA also is similary inconsistent in referring to the story in the Contra Costa Times from which TFA is apparently derived sometimes as a "Contra Cost Times story" and sometimes as a "Contra Costa story".
coondoggie seems to be just following TFA's "randomly dropping words out of proper names doesn't matter" philosophy when he alters the school district's name to "the Costa school district" in the summary.
Did similar past decisions regarding public phones and postal mail compel telecoms and the USPS to encrpyt all telephone transmissions and letters?
Nothing in the current decision suggests that, since it is about the meaning of the Fourth Amendment and therefore the limits of government power.
So are much of the the hardcopy material in which you have a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. Encryption has never been a Constitutional prerequisite to a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Unlikely. Slashdot comments are public by design. Webmail is simply an interface to otherwise regular email message, which this covers under the logic they are intended for an identified recipient and provided to other intermediaries on the way for delivery, much like traditional mail.
If either format wins, the catalogs each had at launch will be mostly irrelevant; every movie for which a market exists, including older titles, will be available in whichever format wins.
The longer the two compete, the longer there will be distinct catalogs and exclusives which inhibit the utility of both formats.
So? Those people need to either get competent to review the data or find (and, in the case of policy-makers, who can afford to do this and have a positive obligation on the public behalf to do so, hire) people they can trust who are qualified to review the data. These people's potential sources of bias, of course, must be reviewed as well as their other qualifications, but that's just part of the recruitment and hiring process.
Demanding that scientists doing research list their own biases and describe how they influenced their research is not useful at all.
There is certainly a difference between those two things, but the second, inasmuch as it is a valid problem at all, is not even remotely addressed—for the reasons I stated in my earlier response—by the proposal made.
Yes, he is. Whether you happen to believe that the idea he is trying to sell is true or not is irrelevant to whether he is trying to sell it to others.
I didn't dismiss "him" because he's a politician or because I believe he thinks global warming isn't real. I dismissed his proposal, and gave specific, concrete reasons why, even assuming the problem he addressed was real and significant, the proposal he made could not address it. However, you've ignored that in your response, and made a bunch of completely irrelevant comments that miss the point.
Stop arguing against your own fantasies, and try to address the actual arguments made.
The scientific consensus has never been that the world was flat; at least in terms of Western civilization, the Earth was fairly conclusively established to be round, and most of the educated people knew and accepted this, long before the scientific method was ever articulated, much less an active community dedicated to it existed such that there could be any "scientific consensus" as the term is used today.
Perhaps for extraordinarily loose definitions of either "credible" or "evidence" or both.
If people are competent to understand the data, they can review the data and determine what is speaking. The objectivity of empirical facts and the repeatably of systematic testing of empirical hypotheses is rather the point of science.
Asking that scientists disclose their biases and a litany of how they affected their results isn't going to acheive that, for several reasons. First, people aren't going to claim they are biased, either because they don't believe they are biased, or if they are biased and working deliberately from that bias, because they won't want to reveal it. Second, any publication of scientific results is a claim that the scientific method was applied, i.e., that agenda did not influence the results. So that's exactly what anyone currently publishing would claim if they followed the prescription offered.
Of course, the politician making the recommendation knows this isn't going anywhere, he is just trying to sell the idea that the scientific consensus is both not real and entirely the product of bias by acting as if that is an established conclusion from the outset and railing for a correction.
I've never seen an Oil company exec present data about global warming. I've seen oil company execs make bald, conclusory statements without presenting the supporting data. There is an important difference between the two things.
Sure, if someone is presenting their views. Data != views.
Yes, arguing that someone's arguments should be evaluated based on personal affiliation is ad hominem argument, except where the argument is supported only by personal authority of the source and the challenge is to bias or credibility of that source. Where the argument is presented based on verifiable evidence, challenges of bias of the source remain ad hominem.
Uh, no, you can't. First of all, because your friends are not a random sample, so extrapolation from them is invalid ("the plural of anecdote is not data"), and second of all because a download is not a lost sale.
People download things they have bought legally, buy things legally that they have previously downloaded, and download things that they would not have bought legally had they had the alternative. Counting up all downloads of copyright-protected material might (if you could do it in the first place) give you an extremely high maximum limit on the losses downloading is responsible for, but it wouldn't give you a reasonable estimate of the losses.
The safe harbor provision of the DMCA applicable to carriers (there are different provisions for hosts and caches) requires, in part, that, for its protection to be available, that the "transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage" of material be carried out "without selection of the material by the service provider". (17 U.S.C. Sec. 512(a)(2))
I don't know if there is any case law yet on this, but at first blush it would seem that the more selectivity the carrier applies to what content is allowed and what is blocked, the less clear it is that they are within the protection of the safe harbor. And while it might seem paradoxical that the carrier could become more liable for copyright infringement for blocking some infringing materials, there is a good reason for this—it makes a carrier choose whether it wants copyright to be the responsibility of the users (and thus, it is "hands off"), or whether it wants to seek the potential rewards (in terms of favorable details with copyright holders to monitor and enforce) along with the potential costs (in terms of liability to those whose rights are violated despite the carrier's intervention) of taking a "hands on" policy.
Are you sure that wasn't a 1% chance in the lifetime of the Earth, i.e., a 1% chance of such a burst occurring close enough and with the right orientation to cause the described harm to the Earth before the Earth was destroyed through other means (mainly, the death throes of our own Sun)? Because that (no idea if it is true or not) makes more sense than 1% of the lifetime of the earth...
Yeah, because many vendors resolve questions like this by asking Slashdot.
Windows was ubiquitous long before botnets became a problem.
Botnets became a problem as full-time internet access by unsophisticated home users became more ubiquitous, and Windows was the primary target because it was the main OS used by the targeted users. If there had been a Mac OS or Linux monoculture instead, people would have been tricked into install malicious software on those platforms instead.
Attorneys—those that don't particularly want to get sued for malpractice and subjected to professional discipline, anyway—that aren't intimately familiar with a particular law, license, etc., either provide a referral to a lawyer more familiar with that area or research the question thoroughly before answering it for a client.
Participants on internet fora often spout whatever they've come to believe either because its conventional wisdom, some other non-expert told it to them, its the way they think it should be, etc.
And, of course, are completely unaccountable for wrong answers.
And many "true, non-poseur" geeks don't know the legalities, but believe very strongly that they do. Technical expertise does not imply legal expertise any more than the reverse.
Unless you already know the right answer, its not particularly easy for someone asking a question to determine which type of geek they are getting the answer from: a non-knowledgeable poseur, or non-knowledgeable genuine geek, or a knowledgeable genuine geek.
But this is not the first attempt (unsurprisingly) at trying to put together an objective system of predicting military outcomes. Actually, lots of models have been applied, such as the Tactical Numerical Determinisitic Model with varying degrees of success.
Microsoft does it with every release of Office, and nobody seems to care, either. And Microsoft is no less firm than Apple in saying that people designing for their platform should follow their conventions, even though Microsoft itself doesn't in its big moneymaking software packages.
Since I would assume the point of Apple releasing Safari for Windows is either to promote Mac OS X or as a wedge to get people into the Apple style of application to prepare the way for a broader suite of Apple-on-Windows software (or both), I'm not at all surprised that they have not adapted it to the platform UI standards, since the idea is to change expectations, not follow them.
Whether it succeeds or not is still up in the air, but it wouldn't make any sense for them to go any other way given what clearly seems to be their goal.
And, for that matter, Office 2007. I'm using the Safari beta at home, alongside Firefox. Yeah, it doesn't follow some windows conventions. Some of the defaults seem like odd choices (the statusbar defaults to not being displayed, for instance.)
But its certainly usable, and it has a lot of nice little nifties compared to other browsers: highlighting active fields is very nice. And the page loading speed isn't a small improvement, either. Bonjour is interesting, too, though many home users probably won't notice it or get much use out of it. I'm not sure I'm going to switch over to Safari as may main windows browser, but its certainly got my interest.