It hasn't created bilingual versions of its software -- something of a necessity in Los Angeles.
Bunk.
I say this as a bilingual person, fluent in both my native English and in Spanish, who has lived in both LA and (a predominantly Mexican area of) San Diego. I have never personally been in a situation in either place where my Spanish was "a necessity." Sure, it makes things easier when dealing with people whose English isn't so good, but even then, most people either speak enough English to get by or have someone (frequently one of their own teenage-or-older children) on hand who can interpret, because English is the lingua franca of the country they're living in.
And the place where it is the least necessary, to the point of being actively harmful, is the education of little children. Kids whose parents won't or can't teach them English are the ones most in need of English language education. It's a necessity to get by in an English-speaking country, and trying to pretend otherwise does a disservice both to them and to their communities. It leads to isolation and alienation in the long run.
This is actually a tremendously important topic. The word "barbarian" means "uncivilized person" in the modern lexicon. But the original term comes from ancient Greek. The Greeks would mock people who spoke an unfamiliar language, calling it gibberish and saying that they went around saying nothing but "bar bar bar bar" all the time. The new meaning came about because if you can't communicate effectively with someone, then no matter how rich and well-developed their culture may be--or your own, for that matter--you are as barbarians to each other, unable to work together to build civilization.
Is that really what we want to inflict upon children entrusted to our care?
It guarantees freedom of religion (twice), freedom of speech, freedom of the press, "the right of the people peaceably to assemble," and the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." This last one is known in the modern lexicon as "having your day in court."
Dreyfuss and Wagner allege that studios often attempt to deter those seeking unpaid residuals with ... binding arbitration.
And there's another major problem. We talk about "corporate sovereignty" in the context of ISDS and international trade treaties, but this is what it looks like here at home. The First Amendment guarantees the people the right to have their day in court, and the Constitution trumps all other laws in the USA, including contract law. Therefore, isn't any contract that strips a person of their right to petition the Government for redress of grievances unenforceable per se?
This should have been the end of the encounter, but the officer went on a fishing expedition, hoping to have Rodriguez grant him permission to have a drug dog sniff his vehicle. Rodriguez refused but the officer detained him until another officer arrived and walked the dog around the vehicle anyway. It alerted and a search of the vehicle uncovered a bag of methamphetamines.
The term "fishing expedition" implies a certain element of chance, that you're looking for "whatever bites". But when the officer specifically was looking for drugs, and he ended up finding drugs, to me that suggests that he had a reasonable suspicion that was grounded in something objective...
Finally, what was entirely missing from this article was a plan of action.
I believe that was actually the point of the article: we don't need to do anything, and more specifically, we don't need Congress to pass cybersecurity laws, especially since they don't seem to even be aware of the basics.
(Note: I'm not saying here that I agree with that viewpoint, only that I believe that that was (at least part of) the argument being made in this article.)
I actually don't think the solution is to get rid of political parties, because as you point out, realistically, that won't work. What we need to get rid of is "two political parties."
In 2003, I was living in Argentina. It was an interesting time, and one of the things that happened was a presidential election. There were five major candidates, and in the end it came down to two guys, where the margin of victory was smaller than the margin of error. Former president Carlos Ménem, trying to win his way back into La Casa Rosada (in the USA we have the White House; the Argentine equivalent is the Pink House,) garnered a very narrow plurality of the vote, with Néstor Kirchner coming in a very close second.
The most recent US election at the time was the one in 2000, and we all remember what a horrendous mess that was. (For values of "all" including US citizens who are not significantly younger than myself.) So it was interesting to watch what happened.
The short version is, instead of wasting time and money on endless recounts and re-recounts and re-re-recounts and court cases and whatnot, they scheduled a runoff election in a few weeks' time. But here's the interesting thing: that runoff election never happened. It quickly became clear that almost everyone who had not voted for Ménem the first time was going to support Kirchner in the runoff, and so Ménem conceded. And I couldn't help but think, this is so much more civilized than the way we did it.
But something like that can't happen without multiple strong parties in the first place.
For the life of me I can't figure out how a guy who got caught giving weapons to America's enemies, who inflated the national debt like a balloon, and who championed a law severely weakening traditional marriage and the family, laying the foundation that the gay marriage movement built upon in later years, is considered some sort of paragon to conservatives today.
So you don't think that technology that can be used to make weapons of mass destruction--or even weapons in general--is inherently applicable to ethics?
A trigger, by definition, is only one thing, a small thing, that causes a disproportionately large and dramatic effect when activated. True, there are other things involved--the gun has to be loaded with properly-prepared bullets, for example--but it's not at all incorrect to say that this was what triggered the riots.
Ask yourself this question: if that video never existed, would the riots have still happened when the officers were found not guilty? (Assuming they even went to trial over it in the first place, that is?) Obviously not. There might have been a race riot in LA at some later point, triggered by some other event, or there might not, but the historical event we're familiar with would not have happened.
that includes Lipton's excellent reporting (with Nick Wingfield) using the leaked Sony emails to detail how the MPAA was trying to bring back SOPA via influencing various State Attorneys General.
It's times like this I wonder why the Founding Fathers, with all their tremendous foresight and wisdom, never thought to put a "no means no" provision into the section on Congress's power to make laws.
The cops in the Rodney King trial got off the first time.
That's because they didn't do anything wrong, and until they were put on trial a second time, (for political purposes, in blatant violation of 5th amendment guarantees of protection against such things,) that was all that mattered.
Everyone remembers the Rodney King video. What most people don't remember, because it wasn't in the video, is what happened before that. The video didn't show the way he led police on a high-speed chase, putting the lives of everyone around them in danger, while drunk. The video doesn't show the way he acted like he was under the influence of worse stuff than alcohol once the police finally pulled him over. The video doesn't show the way he managed to fight off four police officers attempting to restrain him.
No, all the video shows is what eventually happened when the police finally got serious about subduing a person who had already shown himself to be violent, intoxicated, and lacking any restraint or concern for the well-being of those around him. It's like walking in on Act II of a play--you don't know who the characters are or how they got here; all you see is the dramatic action without the context. And when the events were properly examined in context, the jury did not find sufficient evidence to convict the police officers.
Not that that mattered to the people who had seen the video. The video had taken on a life of its own by this point. Today, we'd say it had "gone viral," and it reached a point where the video was more important than the truth. And so when the truth came out and it didn't match the deceptive narrative told by the video, rioting broke out.
After over 2400 deaths and injuries, $1 billion in property damage, and one military intervention to pacify the area, things finally got settled down. In light of all this, is it any wonder the institutional memory of police nationwide looks upon being filmed with worry? How would you like to be the guy whose actions touched off a billion-dollar riot because a YouTuber with an agenda posted an unflattering video of you doing your job and trying to help protect those around you?
Once again, I'm reminded of how Jack Valenti declared in 1982 that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Except, at least back then Hollywood wasn't so stupid as to not embrace the VCR.
Interesting how times change. The "VCR" in question died out long before the advent of the DVD made VHS obsolete, but the original device that caused such a stir among the motion-picture types was... drumroll please... the Sony Betamax.
This takes copyright insanity to a whole new level.
Considering the extreme anti-Nazi stance taken by the German government--with a good deal of support from the German people, no less--I find it difficult to understand what could possess this guy to step up and essentially say, publicly, "My father was a member of Hitler's inner circle, and on that authority I order you to stop doing what you are doing."
Most of the time, I can understand someone's motivation for doing something I don't agree with, but this... this just makes no sense.
If someone posts a negative review that is accurate and they get sued for it, 99% of the time they will just remove the review to avoid the lawsuit. That's not a path to justice either.
Truth is an absolute defense against a defamation suit. If the problem is that, even being in the right, the lawsuit is ruinously expensive to defend yourself against, that's a completely different issue, and one that I agree sorely needs to be addressed.
One of the less well-known freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment is the right to "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," or, in the modern parlance, "to have your day in court." The idea is that if you believe you're in the right, you should have nothing to fear in trying to get a judge to set it right. Unfortunately, over the centuries since the passage of the First Amendment, lawyers have completely torn that "guarantee" to shreds by the simple expedient of pricing justice out of the market. But you never hear politicians (a large percentage of whom come from a law background) talking about fixing that...
Google: Don't be evil. And we occasionally make bad decisions, but when called on it, we generally try and make it right.
Facebook: Don't even bother pretending. Build the system on someone else's stolen work, blatantly declare that "privacy means whatever I say it means" and "users don't care about privacy anyway," screw investors over with insider trading, support climate destruction, disappear critical posts, and laugh all the way to the bank.
Why doesn't Mark Zuckerberg just grow a big black mustache and twirl it while he's at it?
On the post: LA School District's iPad Farce Reaches Nadir As Officials Demand Refunds From Apple, Answer Questions From The SEC
Bunk.
I say this as a bilingual person, fluent in both my native English and in Spanish, who has lived in both LA and (a predominantly Mexican area of) San Diego. I have never personally been in a situation in either place where my Spanish was "a necessity." Sure, it makes things easier when dealing with people whose English isn't so good, but even then, most people either speak enough English to get by or have someone (frequently one of their own teenage-or-older children) on hand who can interpret, because English is the lingua franca of the country they're living in.
And the place where it is the least necessary, to the point of being actively harmful, is the education of little children. Kids whose parents won't or can't teach them English are the ones most in need of English language education. It's a necessity to get by in an English-speaking country, and trying to pretend otherwise does a disservice both to them and to their communities. It leads to isolation and alienation in the long run.
This is actually a tremendously important topic. The word "barbarian" means "uncivilized person" in the modern lexicon. But the original term comes from ancient Greek. The Greeks would mock people who spoke an unfamiliar language, calling it gibberish and saying that they went around saying nothing but "bar bar bar bar" all the time. The new meaning came about because if you can't communicate effectively with someone, then no matter how rich and well-developed their culture may be--or your own, for that matter--you are as barbarians to each other, unable to work together to build civilization.
Is that really what we want to inflict upon children entrusted to our care?
On the post: Aaron's Law Reintroduced To Try To Reform Dangerous, Broken Anti-Hacking Law
On the post: Cable's Top Lobbyist Just Can't Understand Why People Like Google Better
In the immortal words of his sidekick...
On the post: Richard Dreyfuss Takes Disney To Court Over Its Refusal To Allow An Outside Auditor To Examine Its Accounting Methods
Re: Re:
On the post: Richard Dreyfuss Takes Disney To Court Over Its Refusal To Allow An Outside Auditor To Examine Its Accounting Methods
And there's another major problem. We talk about "corporate sovereignty" in the context of ISDS and international trade treaties, but this is what it looks like here at home. The First Amendment guarantees the people the right to have their day in court, and the Constitution trumps all other laws in the USA, including contract law. Therefore, isn't any contract that strips a person of their right to petition the Government for redress of grievances unenforceable per se?
On the post: Supreme Court Rules That A Traffic Stop Ends When The 'Objective' Is 'Complete,' Rather Than Whenever The Officer Feels It Is
The term "fishing expedition" implies a certain element of chance, that you're looking for "whatever bites". But when the officer specifically was looking for drugs, and he ended up finding drugs, to me that suggests that he had a reasonable suspicion that was grounded in something objective...
On the post: Sony Execs Freaked Out That Its Marketing People Wanted To Use Torrents For Marketing
Re: Re:
On the post: Congress Can't Even Get Its Own Cybersecurity Right, So Why Should We Let It Define Everyone Else's?
Re: ... and whose fault is that, eh?
I believe that was actually the point of the article: we don't need to do anything, and more specifically, we don't need Congress to pass cybersecurity laws, especially since they don't seem to even be aware of the basics.
(Note: I'm not saying here that I agree with that viewpoint, only that I believe that that was (at least part of) the argument being made in this article.)
On the post: Congress Can't Even Get Its Own Cybersecurity Right, So Why Should We Let It Define Everyone Else's?
Re: Re: Re: Politics Unusual
In 2003, I was living in Argentina. It was an interesting time, and one of the things that happened was a presidential election. There were five major candidates, and in the end it came down to two guys, where the margin of victory was smaller than the margin of error. Former president Carlos Ménem, trying to win his way back into La Casa Rosada (in the USA we have the White House; the Argentine equivalent is the Pink House,) garnered a very narrow plurality of the vote, with Néstor Kirchner coming in a very close second.
The most recent US election at the time was the one in 2000, and we all remember what a horrendous mess that was. (For values of "all" including US citizens who are not significantly younger than myself.) So it was interesting to watch what happened.
The short version is, instead of wasting time and money on endless recounts and re-recounts and re-re-recounts and court cases and whatnot, they scheduled a runoff election in a few weeks' time. But here's the interesting thing: that runoff election never happened. It quickly became clear that almost everyone who had not voted for Ménem the first time was going to support Kirchner in the runoff, and so Ménem conceded. And I couldn't help but think, this is so much more civilized than the way we did it.
But something like that can't happen without multiple strong parties in the first place.
On the post: Congress Can't Even Get Its Own Cybersecurity Right, So Why Should We Let It Define Everyone Else's?
Re: Re: Politics as usual
Could someone please explain this?
On the post: Sony Execs Freaked Out That Its Marketing People Wanted To Use Torrents For Marketing
Re: The nuclear bomb card.
On the post: UK Judges Take Their Robes And Go Home After Julian Assange Added As Speaker At Legal Conference
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Ask yourself this question: if that video never existed, would the riots have still happened when the officers were found not guilty? (Assuming they even went to trial over it in the first place, that is?) Obviously not. There might have been a race riot in LA at some later point, triggered by some other event, or there might not, but the historical event we're familiar with would not have happened.
On the post: As Sony Continues Threatening Reporters, NY Times Reporter Wins Pulitzer For Reporting On Sony's Emails
It's times like this I wonder why the Founding Fathers, with all their tremendous foresight and wisdom, never thought to put a "no means no" provision into the section on Congress's power to make laws.
On the post: UK Judges Take Their Robes And Go Home After Julian Assange Added As Speaker At Legal Conference
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
That's because they didn't do anything wrong, and until they were put on trial a second time, (for political purposes, in blatant violation of 5th amendment guarantees of protection against such things,) that was all that mattered.
Everyone remembers the Rodney King video. What most people don't remember, because it wasn't in the video, is what happened before that. The video didn't show the way he led police on a high-speed chase, putting the lives of everyone around them in danger, while drunk. The video doesn't show the way he acted like he was under the influence of worse stuff than alcohol once the police finally pulled him over. The video doesn't show the way he managed to fight off four police officers attempting to restrain him.
No, all the video shows is what eventually happened when the police finally got serious about subduing a person who had already shown himself to be violent, intoxicated, and lacking any restraint or concern for the well-being of those around him. It's like walking in on Act II of a play--you don't know who the characters are or how they got here; all you see is the dramatic action without the context. And when the events were properly examined in context, the jury did not find sufficient evidence to convict the police officers.
Not that that mattered to the people who had seen the video. The video had taken on a life of its own by this point. Today, we'd say it had "gone viral," and it reached a point where the video was more important than the truth. And so when the truth came out and it didn't match the deceptive narrative told by the video, rioting broke out.
After over 2400 deaths and injuries, $1 billion in property damage, and one military intervention to pacify the area, things finally got settled down. In light of all this, is it any wonder the institutional memory of police nationwide looks upon being filmed with worry? How would you like to be the guy whose actions touched off a billion-dollar riot because a YouTuber with an agenda posted an unflattering video of you doing your job and trying to help protect those around you?
Just saying.
On the post: Sony Execs Freaked Out That Its Marketing People Wanted To Use Torrents For Marketing
Interesting how times change. The "VCR" in question died out long before the advent of the DVD made VHS obsolete, but the original device that caused such a stir among the motion-picture types was... drumroll please... the Sony Betamax.
On the post: Virginia's Top Court Refuses To Unmask Anonymous Yelp Reviewers, But Not For First Amendment Reasons
Re:
On the post: Estate Of Joseph Goebbels Using Copyright To Demand Cash From New Biographer
Considering the extreme anti-Nazi stance taken by the German government--with a good deal of support from the German people, no less--I find it difficult to understand what could possess this guy to step up and essentially say, publicly, "My father was a member of Hitler's inner circle, and on that authority I order you to stop doing what you are doing."
Most of the time, I can understand someone's motivation for doing something I don't agree with, but this... this just makes no sense.
On the post: Virginia's Top Court Refuses To Unmask Anonymous Yelp Reviewers, But Not For First Amendment Reasons
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Truth is an absolute defense against a defamation suit. If the problem is that, even being in the right, the lawsuit is ruinously expensive to defend yourself against, that's a completely different issue, and one that I agree sorely needs to be addressed.
One of the less well-known freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment is the right to "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," or, in the modern parlance, "to have your day in court." The idea is that if you believe you're in the right, you should have nothing to fear in trying to get a judge to set it right. Unfortunately, over the centuries since the passage of the First Amendment, lawyers have completely torn that "guarantee" to shreds by the simple expedient of pricing justice out of the market. But you never hear politicians (a large percentage of whom come from a law background) talking about fixing that...
On the post: UK Judges Take Their Robes And Go Home After Julian Assange Added As Speaker At Legal Conference
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Facebook's Zuckerberg Thinks Aggressively Violating Net Neutrality Is Fine...If You Just Mean Well
Re: Re: Zuckerberg and FB
Facebook: Don't even bother pretending. Build the system on someone else's stolen work, blatantly declare that "privacy means whatever I say it means" and "users don't care about privacy anyway," screw investors over with insider trading, support climate destruction, disappear critical posts, and laugh all the way to the bank.
Why doesn't Mark Zuckerberg just grow a big black mustache and twirl it while he's at it?
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