Maybe a cop runs a red light because he's lazy or maybe he runs one because he's following a suspect car. I'd rather let the cops have leeway and discretion in this matter.
Still, as I see it, there is no reason they shouldn't get a ticket if there is no clear evidence of the applicability of an emergency exception (clearly, if the camera shows their emergency lights on, that's another story), and be allowed to respond to the ticket and present the case for a non-obvious exception if they so desire.
Wow. Last satellite internet service I had had astounding delays.
Well, yeah. You were, I presume, on the ground. Chances are, so were the computers with which you were ultimately trying to connect. That's often going to give you a big delay going through a satellite compared to going through ground-based routers exclusively.
They are talking about reducing delays for IP traffic between other satellites compared to going through ground-based routers, which is a pretty different scenario.
Yeah, I made the mistake of trusting the summary and only clicking through to the spec, not the email that the summary, loosely speaking, "summarized".
Maybe its just me, but I think its a good sign that a proposed spec isn't ready for adoption when it contains this warning on one of its elements (see 5.4.1 The UndoManager interface):
This API sucks. Seriously. It's a terrible API. Really bad. I hate it.
Its also not a good sign when it has sections with a note of the form "Does anyone know enough about $foo to write this section" or "Need to write this section".
Certainly I can see a need and utility for something like the Web Applications 1.0/"HTML5" standard, but it certainly doesn't seem ready for adoption as a Recommendation yet.
Why doesn't he government provide online tax processing website?
Because politicians get massive campaign contributions from the industry that provides software and services for tax processing, and generally believe in not biting the hand that feeds them lavishly, and because their is no public outcry for this that would offset the allure of the campaign cash. Politicians don't, mostly, lead even if they get called "leaders", they follow, and what they mostly follow is money, though a clear enough weight of votes on the other side may deflect them from that course.
Though, IIRC, John Edwards, as part of his present Presidential campaign, has proposed both an IRS online tax entry website and, even further, having the IRS take the information that is filed with it and preparing draft tax returns for taxpayers that would, where no additional information is needed (as is often the case) simply require confirmation and no additional data entry, calculations, or other work by the taxpayer.
First, I said a free market was a relative lack of government intervention, not complete anarchy.
You also said "every other system requires the hand of government". The "Free market" (which you also claim is "not a system") in fact requires the hand of government. It, in fact, requires the hand of government to be more strongly applied than in alternative systems in particular cases, because it other systems restrain enforcement of contract and property based on public interest concerns.
Second, enforcement of contracts and property rights is fairly minimal, and not limited to free markets.
No, it is simply an area where the "free market" system frequently calls for more, not less, government intervention than alternatives. The distinguishing feature of "free markets" is not the degree of government intervention, but the focus of government intervention.
Arguing that free markets don't work because they aren't true anarchies is specious and silly.
Perhaps, but I didn't argue that. I argued that the "free market" is not a system that does not rely on the hand of government in economic matters, and that a system that really was as you described would be anarchy. I never argued that "free markets" don't work in any broad sense. Free markets work for a wide variety of goods and services for which certain conditions hold (such as that it is practical for competing makers to enter the market, and that those on both sides of the exchange can have a good idea of the expected utilities before making the exchange). Now, there are a vast number of goods and services for which those conditions largely hold, and therefore a roughly "free" market works well. There are also goods and services for which those conditions do not even approximately hold, and for which substantial regulation may be desirable (though the effectiveness of particular kinds of regulation always has to be examined, too; even where the free market doesn't work well, it may be difficult to craft a regulatory scheme that works better.)
When I say that free markets are not a system, I mean that there is no need for government to manage facets of the economy.
This both implies a rather odd definition of system and requires a rather odd definition of "economy"; while it may be true in that context, I'm not sure its useful to distort the language until the things you'd like to be able to say are true-by-definition; usually, that's mostly useful for misleading by implicit equivocation.
The economy is the game, not the playing field.
The economy is neither a game nor a playing field, but the entire distribution of goods and services in a community.
Governments can certainly ensure level playing fields without resorting to heavy handed economic czars and bureaucratic regulatory machines.
While that may be a valid statement of your economic faith, it doesn't seem well-supported by evidence. There are few, if any, examples of governments actually ensuring level "playing fields" in the economy, by any reasonable interpretation of that metaphor, and those that might reasonably be seen as doing that tend to do it through at least some of the kind of regulation (often, the specific regulations) that "free marketeers" rail against.
Simply put, laws against theft (property protection) and fraud (contract enforcement) are not the definition of an economic system.
Laws which define who is entitled to goods and services are certainly the definition of a government economic system, regardless of what the basis for that definition is. And government coercive action to implement those laws is certainly government involvement in the economy.
I can easily think of hundreds of examples of non-anarchies where the s
Cool, with that kind of benefit, I'm sure you can point to some significant applications that have been written in a functional language which have been written for parallel execution.
Would the telephone switching systems that Erlang was made for the express purpose of implementing count, or the air traffic control systems also implemented with it, or would it have to be something more of a significant application than that?
This kind of pisses me off. People who are functional programming ethusists are always telling other people that they should be using functional languages but they never write anything significant in these languages.
The problem most people have with the free market is that they think it is a system.
It is a system of allocating goods and services. Pretending it is not is not helpful. Further, real critiques of particular policies sold as "free market" is usually based, ultimately, on the belief that the conditions which, even theoretically, make the free market work are not present in the specific context under discussion. Free market fundamentalists tend to be, or pretend to be, ignorant of those conditions.
It is not a system, it is the lack (or relative lack) of a system. The free market is merely an economy with a relative lack of government interventions and controls.
No, its not. As usually used, it is a system with a very particular kind of government intervention and control, to wit, strong enforcement of "property" and "contract", with minimal or no consideration of public costs and benefits in the process. A "system" without a government control of distribution of goods and services is anarchy, not a free market. The two are decidedly not the same.
The problem with the "activity" metaphor is that it's restrictive: you can perform the activitites we've thought of in advance and presented to you.
I don't know much about the "activity" metaphor outside of the context of OLPC, but the OLPC idea of an Activity isn't restricted in that way.
It is better viewed as an alternative to the more traditional application/document model as far as the relation between a running instance of a program and the associated data; in the activity model of the OLPC they are more tightly bound. But that misses quite a bit too, perhaps the best thing is to read the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines, which elaborates on the OLPC concept of Activities, and a lot of the context surrounding it.
The starting point for info on OLPC security is the Bitfrost specification. I've only skimmed it, myself, and don't have any particular comment except that it looks interesting.
How insecure does this guy have to be to sue students? Can't he just try to suspend them for a few days or make them clean the school toilets with tooth brushes?
Seems to me suing them is more appropriate. It is essentially a private dispute, not principally a violation of school rules where the school has legitimate authority. Abusing his power as a school administrator to extract revenge is inappropriate; exercising his legal recourse as a citizen is not.
It appears that Indiana's juvenile justice system uses "delinquency petitions" stating the equivalent adult crimes in place of criminal charges where someone is charged with a juvenile offense, rather than charged as an adult with a crime. This does not appear to be a way around specific criminal laws, as the specific criminal laws that allegedly would have been violated if the wrongdoer was an adult are cited and the application of those laws to the facts appears to be the legal basis for a finding of "delinquency"; here, delinquency appears to be simply a procedural designation that indicates that the rules and consequences are those of the juvenile, rather than adult, justice system.
Your complaints, whatever general merits they might have, appear misplaced in this case.
The speech occurred off campus and wasn't illegal. Punishing the student for it was a violation of the US Constitution, and the judge ruled accordingly.
Actually, no. The appeals court ruled it was a violation of the Indiana Constitution, not the federal Constitution, a matter on which the court expressly did not rule.
OTOH, I was forced to switch to a smaller, locally-owned DSL provider (selling service on the local phone co's lines, oddly enough) when I moved and the phone company (who had previously told me that DSL was available at the new address, and then cut-off my service at the old address two weeks earlier than I requested, supposedly because it took that long to transfer service and they wanted to make sure it was available at the new address on the date I requested) spent a several months stringing me along with various stories and finally told me that DSL service wasn't available at my new address, despite the fact that their online "check for access" service said it was.
Been with them for years (and through another move) with no problems, and gotten much better service than with the phone company, though I guess I missed out on all the "customized browser" and "special software" that the phone company was pushing through their marketing partnership with Yahoo!
I think this deals more with the broader issue of whether schools can regulate or impose disciplinary actions related to a studen's off-campus activities.
I think you are wrong, because this case doesn't concern school disciplinary action at all. The only school involvement is that the questionable postings were seen and reported by a principal: the delinquency petition was not filed by the school, but by the state, and the authority for it was the state's general juvenile justice authority, not its authority over the school system. So its pretty hard to read this as dealing with the issue you want it to be about.
Desktop development is easier, faster, more productive, and infinitely more enjoyable -- right?
From my perspective as something of a time-strapped hobbyist developer who mostly makes stuff for my own personal use, the easiest, fastest, most productive, most enjoyable, and least stressful way I've found to make useful applications with pleasant interfaces to be run locally is...Ruby on Rails.
I wonder how many people claiming they can see a difference between 1080i and 1080p happily listen to compressed audio with earbud headphones.
I wonder why anyone would care. After all, people who notice and care about fine differences in video quality may not be the same people that notice and care about fine differences in audio quality.
Generally speaking, it would seem to me that warmer temperatures would lead to longer growing seasons,
They do.
which would lead to greater food supplies, not lesser.
It would, if that's all that warming did. Unfortunately, it also changes patterns of precipitation and seasonal melting that supply water, and in both cases in ways which will further stress already taxed freshwater supplies.
As you are probably aware, we have extremely expensive agricultural support programmes because we grow too much food.
Well, no, lots of western countries have agricultural support programmes to keep the market price of food high and subsidize already wealth agricultural megacorporations who aren't pleased with natural market prices and who want surplus profits beyond that which the market would otherwise supply and who have the power over government to influence policy to secure those advantages.
If farmland productivity went down, perhaps there would be a better balance of supply and demand and we could quit wasting billions of dollars supporting agricultural prices and paying people not to farm.
I doubt that. Reduced farm productivity doesn't change the actual dynamic behind farm subsidies.
But here is a question. We have recently had climactic variations that are many times greater than those being suggested by global warming.
No, we haven't. This is false. We've recently had a few notable anomalies in weather that are small previews of what are predicted to be seen as global warming progresses. We haven't had, recently or anytime in recorded history, greater climactic variations than those suggested by global warming.
Our winters have probably been a good 10degF warmer than average for the past couple of years, nothing horrible has happened, and yet you guys are saying we're facing the apocalypse over a 1-2 degF change.
You are confusing your local short-term temperature variation with long-term variations in the mean global temperature, confusing local weather with global climate. The two aren't the same thing: changes in the global mean will produce much larger changes in many local baselines, and in many cases in the degree of variation around those baselines. And, even at that, you are probably exaggerating the local temperature variation.
I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound plausible to me.
Yeah, well since you don't seem to understand what is being discussed (like the difference between "weather" and "climate"), I'm not sure why anyone would be particularly concerned with what you find plausible.
When it seems like every five years or so some kind of fad comes into place and says we're all doomed, that there is going to be a giant ice age or global warming or all the species of the world are becoming extinct... and yet somehow it never seems to happen.
I suppose it might seem that way to an unsophisticated media consumer with difficulty counting (global warming's been a major issue for quite a bit longer than five years, the concern about the a "new ice age" was never the subject of the kind of scientific consensus that exists around global warming, etc.)
I have fundamentally lost faith in this idea that we are doomed, because we've cried wolf too many times, and the really crazy thing is that no matter what problem we face, it's always our industrial society that's to blame and the solution is always to quit our mechanized society and go beet farming.
It is not a question about which anyone is asking you to "have faith", nor is it one about which the dominant recommendation is to abandon mechanized society and "go beet farming". Indeed, most of the leading recommendations are to address the problem with employment of existing, but not widely adopted, advanced technology, and invest in additional advanced technology.
I'm not convinced that a world with warmer weather would be, overall, a worse world than one with the same or colder weather.
Um, okay.
It seems like common sense that most of the climate in the United States would be far more comfortable under the warming conditions being discussed.
Perhaps, if you mean, it would be more pleasant to spend time outside (ignoring the more frequent and more severe storms in many areas, that are part of the "warming conditions being discussed"), then maybe you are right.
OTOH, if you mean it would be generally more pleasant to live with the reduced food supplies, coastal flooding, and reduced viability of farmland (all part of the "warming conditions being discussed"), then, well, I don't think so. But your tastes may vary.
I am, however, a little puzzled in that we've been having exceptionally mild winters recently, and yet they cannot be explained by the tiny oneDegF change we're allegedly going through during global warming.
Annual weather variations happen. Even unusual ones. There are lots of driving factors in that besides long-term climate change, though long-term climate change, by definition, is change in the baseline around which those variations occur.
The problem is that the people who do believe in the rapture and want the Bible to be taught in school make an awful lot of noise and while they are in very large numbers in the USA, they are not in the majority in other places.
Or even a majority of Christians in the USA. What they are in the US, is very well-organized and connected politically.
To cut down on the solar energy we receive, and counter global warming, could we put a big mirror at the Lagrange point [wikipedia.org] between here and the sun?
Cutting down on solar energy received is not a smart way to deal with global warming, since it will reduce the ability of the earth to support photosynthetic life, which—as well as being the base of the food chain almost everything else living on earth, including us, relies on—takes CO2, a key greenhouse gas, out of the atmosphere.
Realistically, there should be quotas- individuals aren't really the problem, but cap them at perhaps a dozen domains, globally. Corporations? Maybe a few dozen, tops.
I have a simpler rule. Any entity with distinct legal personality is limited to registering one domain at the level immediately below any given TLD, unless the TLD belongs to the entity (so the US government can have as many.gov domains as it likes)—a similar limit might also be appropriate for many second level domains like.co.uk.
If they want more, then that's what subdomains are for.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, as I see it, there is no reason they shouldn't get a ticket if there is no clear evidence of the applicability of an emergency exception (clearly, if the camera shows their emergency lights on, that's another story), and be allowed to respond to the ticket and present the case for a non-obvious exception if they so desire.
Well, yeah. You were, I presume, on the ground. Chances are, so were the computers with which you were ultimately trying to connect. That's often going to give you a big delay going through a satellite compared to going through ground-based routers exclusively.
They are talking about reducing delays for IP traffic between other satellites compared to going through ground-based routers, which is a pretty different scenario.
Yeah, I made the mistake of trusting the summary and only clicking through to the spec, not the email that the summary, loosely speaking, "summarized".
Because politicians get massive campaign contributions from the industry that provides software and services for tax processing, and generally believe in not biting the hand that feeds them lavishly, and because their is no public outcry for this that would offset the allure of the campaign cash. Politicians don't, mostly, lead even if they get called "leaders", they follow, and what they mostly follow is money, though a clear enough weight of votes on the other side may deflect them from that course.
Though, IIRC, John Edwards, as part of his present Presidential campaign, has proposed both an IRS online tax entry website and, even further, having the IRS take the information that is filed with it and preparing draft tax returns for taxpayers that would, where no additional information is needed (as is often the case) simply require confirmation and no additional data entry, calculations, or other work by the taxpayer.
You also said "every other system requires the hand of government". The "Free market" (which you also claim is "not a system") in fact requires the hand of government. It, in fact, requires the hand of government to be more strongly applied than in alternative systems in particular cases, because it other systems restrain enforcement of contract and property based on public interest concerns.
No, it is simply an area where the "free market" system frequently calls for more, not less, government intervention than alternatives. The distinguishing feature of "free markets" is not the degree of government intervention, but the focus of government intervention.
Perhaps, but I didn't argue that. I argued that the "free market" is not a system that does not rely on the hand of government in economic matters, and that a system that really was as you described would be anarchy. I never argued that "free markets" don't work in any broad sense. Free markets work for a wide variety of goods and services for which certain conditions hold (such as that it is practical for competing makers to enter the market, and that those on both sides of the exchange can have a good idea of the expected utilities before making the exchange). Now, there are a vast number of goods and services for which those conditions largely hold, and therefore a roughly "free" market works well. There are also goods and services for which those conditions do not even approximately hold, and for which substantial regulation may be desirable (though the effectiveness of particular kinds of regulation always has to be examined, too; even where the free market doesn't work well, it may be difficult to craft a regulatory scheme that works better.)
This both implies a rather odd definition of system and requires a rather odd definition of "economy"; while it may be true in that context, I'm not sure its useful to distort the language until the things you'd like to be able to say are true-by-definition; usually, that's mostly useful for misleading by implicit equivocation.
The economy is neither a game nor a playing field, but the entire distribution of goods and services in a community.
While that may be a valid statement of your economic faith, it doesn't seem well-supported by evidence. There are few, if any, examples of governments actually ensuring level "playing fields" in the economy, by any reasonable interpretation of that metaphor, and those that might reasonably be seen as doing that tend to do it through at least some of the kind of regulation (often, the specific regulations) that "free marketeers" rail against.
Laws which define who is entitled to goods and services are certainly the definition of a government economic system, regardless of what the basis for that definition is. And government coercive action to implement those laws is certainly government involvement in the economy.
Would the telephone switching systems that Erlang was made for the express purpose of implementing count, or the air traffic control systems also implemented with it, or would it have to be something more of a significant application than that?
If games are more your thing, how about this.
Please share your definition of "significant".
It is a system of allocating goods and services. Pretending it is not is not helpful. Further, real critiques of particular policies sold as "free market" is usually based, ultimately, on the belief that the conditions which, even theoretically, make the free market work are not present in the specific context under discussion. Free market fundamentalists tend to be, or pretend to be, ignorant of those conditions.
No, its not. As usually used, it is a system with a very particular kind of government intervention and control, to wit, strong enforcement of "property" and "contract", with minimal or no consideration of public costs and benefits in the process. A "system" without a government control of distribution of goods and services is anarchy, not a free market. The two are decidedly not the same.
I don't know much about the "activity" metaphor outside of the context of OLPC, but the OLPC idea of an Activity isn't restricted in that way.
It is better viewed as an alternative to the more traditional application/document model as far as the relation between a running instance of a program and the associated data; in the activity model of the OLPC they are more tightly bound. But that misses quite a bit too, perhaps the best thing is to read the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines, which elaborates on the OLPC concept of Activities, and a lot of the context surrounding it.
The starting point for info on OLPC security is the Bitfrost specification. I've only skimmed it, myself, and don't have any particular comment except that it looks interesting.
Seems to me suing them is more appropriate. It is essentially a private dispute, not principally a violation of school rules where the school has legitimate authority. Abusing his power as a school administrator to extract revenge is inappropriate; exercising his legal recourse as a citizen is not.
I think that your fantasies about both the success and methods employed in problem-solving in the past are amusing.
It appears that Indiana's juvenile justice system uses "delinquency petitions" stating the equivalent adult crimes in place of criminal charges where someone is charged with a juvenile offense, rather than charged as an adult with a crime. This does not appear to be a way around specific criminal laws, as the specific criminal laws that allegedly would have been violated if the wrongdoer was an adult are cited and the application of those laws to the facts appears to be the legal basis for a finding of "delinquency"; here, delinquency appears to be simply a procedural designation that indicates that the rules and consequences are those of the juvenile, rather than adult, justice system.
Your complaints, whatever general merits they might have, appear misplaced in this case.
Actually, no. The appeals court ruled it was a violation of the Indiana Constitution, not the federal Constitution, a matter on which the court expressly did not rule.
OTOH, I was forced to switch to a smaller, locally-owned DSL provider (selling service on the local phone co's lines, oddly enough) when I moved and the phone company (who had previously told me that DSL was available at the new address, and then cut-off my service at the old address two weeks earlier than I requested, supposedly because it took that long to transfer service and they wanted to make sure it was available at the new address on the date I requested) spent a several months stringing me along with various stories and finally told me that DSL service wasn't available at my new address, despite the fact that their online "check for access" service said it was.
Been with them for years (and through another move) with no problems, and gotten much better service than with the phone company, though I guess I missed out on all the "customized browser" and "special software" that the phone company was pushing through their marketing partnership with Yahoo!
From my perspective as something of a time-strapped hobbyist developer who mostly makes stuff for my own personal use, the easiest, fastest, most productive, most enjoyable, and least stressful way I've found to make useful applications with pleasant interfaces to be run locally is...Ruby on Rails.
Now, all they've got to do is make it price-competitive with a portable FM radio.
Or even a majority of Christians in the USA. What they are in the US, is very well-organized and connected politically.
Oh, okay, you simply assert it doesn't cause those things. That's proof enough for me!
Cutting down on solar energy received is not a smart way to deal with global warming, since it will reduce the ability of the earth to support photosynthetic life, which—as well as being the base of the food chain almost everything else living on earth, including us, relies on—takes CO2, a key greenhouse gas, out of the atmosphere.
I have a simpler rule. Any entity with distinct legal personality is limited to registering one domain at the level immediately below any given TLD, unless the TLD belongs to the entity (so the US government can have as many
If they want more, then that's what subdomains are for.