Hey, idiot, none of that has the slightest bit to do with what we're talking about. Google 'privacy laws' does not magically make them relevant the conversation.
The first link is a overview of California law, none of which is relevant. The second link is for banks. The third link is about security breaches and social security numbers, as is, obviously, the fourth link. The fifth is about identity theft. The sixth is about security breaches.
The seventh, interestingly, is about the few specific laws on that topic. There actuallyare specific laws protecting specific customer records for specific businesses, such as video rentals
Now, SHOW ME WHERE A LAW COVERS BOOK PURCHASES, or shut the hell up and stop pretending random google searches prove your point.
No shit. And, as others have pointed out, it's not just a server thing. They might have enough servers and yet still not want every single person in the world creating their character at the same time and heading out into the same newbie zone. Just because the servers can handle 500,000 people doesn't mean they can handle 200,000 in the same room, and even if they can 'handle' it it still might be quite unusable for the players.
And you're right, practically every single MMO I've heard of seems to have died in the first week. There's always something that didn't scale correctly.
So trickling people into the sever is quite possibly the sanest decision I've ever heard of for an MMO.
Plus, restricting access to a new product, if done to a small extent, increases hype for it. Restricting it too much just pisses people off, but if people can get in within a month or so, it's fine.
And who turns review boards that will determine if certain treatments are worth the cost for specific patients into "end of life consoling"? You really believe that those boards were there to make the people who were denied treatment feel better about their life ending?
See? It it downright astonishing how many fucking lies the right believes. Hey, moron, 'end of life consoling' has nothing to do with any sort of 'review boards', and said review boards do not exist.
A budget that doesn't have as large an increase in spending as liberals want is a budget cut.
Please, continue yammering your nonsense about whatever you think you're talking about.
Dumping billions of dollars on "shovel ready projects" will keep the unemployment rate below 9%.
Hey, you loon, the government hiring people would reduce unemployment, by definition.
That Obama will close Gitmo "on day one".
That Obama will pull us out of Iraq "on day one".
Campaign promises that aren't kept are not 'inaccuracies', you fucking imbecile.
I'd say "every word of the Obamacare bill", but very few on the left even read it before they voted for it. They simply didn't have time to do so.
Ah, yes, the 'Politics is complicated and the bills are too big' whine.
Perhaps you should finish your snack and take a nap so that actual adults can get on with running the country.
You are aware, I assume, that Mr. Obama admitted that lowering taxes on the rich would result in higher tax revenues, which one would assume can be considered a benefit for all. He admitted this during a democratic candidate debate upon questioning by Mr. Blitzer. He said, rather clearly, that he understood that lower tax rates result in higher revenues, but that higher rates for the rich is "fair" -- despite them already paying the majority of the income tax revenue.
You are aware of my premise the Republicans lie, right? That the right believes lies more than the left?
Actually repeating lies is not a way to demonstrate I am incorrect.
Yeah, I was reading about that yesterday on some blog. The US political system really has no defense against outright lies. It used to have the media, but that sadly was eaten by brainslugs around 1994.
And, well, Republican lie. I know I'll be modded down, I know that someone will try to show the Democrats do also...but, no.
Republicans lie. Just...lie. They turn end of life consoling into death panels. They just make up blatant nonsense about how social security is causing the deficit. They claim Obama wasn't born in the US. They claim Iraq has WMDs. Etc, etc.
Oh, but wait. Some of those lies were repeated by Democrats. Yeah, Democrats are morons, we already knew that. The Republicans managed to trick them, huzzah.
Oh, and some of the other lies were just danced around, and never actually stated. Obama, not American? Why, no one actually said that! It's downright astonishing how many factual inaccuracies that Republican voters somehow end up believing, isn't it?
Where are the factual inaccuracies believed by the left? The last group of believers of those I can think of would be 9/11 Truthers...and, uh, those pretty quickly got kicked out of 'the left'. (OTOH, plenty of people on the left appear to have fallen for the lies of the right.)
And that's not getting into some of the Republican policy claims, which at this point would be proven as lies in any field but politics, like lowering taxes on the rich helps anyone but the rich. If this were economics or history, that claim would have been obviously disproven, but this is politics, so actual facts WRT policy results do not matter. (OTOH, sometimes the Democrats will show up making equally silly claims, which is what I was talking about above...but they usually have not based their entire political platform on such nonsense, nor are they allowed to get away with it by the media.)
You do realize that if you didn't agree to a contract, Borders could have just done anything they wanted with the data, right? Like sell it repeatedly to spammers? Or post it on billboards? (I love the fact you think 'The law applies' would help here.)
However, Borders couldn't have sent email to anyone, because that requires consent, and you've just decided to blow up contract law so no one can consent to anything, ever. Neither can Borders actually sell you stuff, because they can't charge your credit card without your consent, which now does not exist, at least not online.
Perhaps you should stop being stupid. If you want to require contracts be simpler, go ahead, but you can't just require they don't exist at all.
People signed up to get notifications about email books from Borders. They created an account at Borders that allowed Borders to track them. (I have never bought from Border online, but I assume that they could have purchased without one, like you can at B&N.)
Now Barnes and Noble, for all intents and purposes, is Borders. They are now doing that. They appear to be doing exactly what Borders did with that data.
I am baffled as to what the problem is even supposed to be.
And the idea that this is 'opt out' email, because we all know opt-out is bad, right? Except this is an additional chance to opt-out of something they already opted-in to. They signed up at Borders to receive email about books and discounts they might be interested in! B&N will now be sending exactly same sort of email instead.
People were investigated for stock trades made pre-9/11. It was determined to be a coincidence. The excessive trading on America Airlines on Sept 6 was due to a weird strategy that had the same people buying a shitload of their stock on Sept 10, which was hardly a way to make money. The United stock trades were due to a newsletter the previous day.
As for the SEC, look up "plausible deniability". It's easier to ignore current criminal wrongdoing than past cases for which you have a mountain of evidence and victims at your door demanding action.
You do know that the SEC has recently been called out for destroying evidence from previous cases, right? Since 1992? Illegally destroying it, mind you. So all investigators had to start from scratch?
So that means, to destroy all these 'evidence' you think they had...all they had to do was close whatever investigation they were using it for, and, poof, they destroyed it as part of procedure. (According to the National Archives this is illegal, sure, but hardly as illegal as being accessories to mass murder. And considering they're done it thousands of times, I can't imagine they got cold feet just that once.)
Maybe they just wanted those records really destroyed.
Oh, and I forgot to address the 'explosives' nonsense in the other post.
There is absolutely no reason for the US government to destroy the WTC. If they were trying to create a 'national emergency', that does not require the collapse of the WTC at all.
Just flying airplanes into it was enough. Nothing in their supposed plan required it to go down. The buildings were frickin unusable either way, and planting explosives is incredibly risky for a dozen reasons. (In fact, if you're going to plant explosive, there's, you know, the parking deck, where we would all assume it was bin Laden. You can just leave the planes out of it.)
In fact, the WTC is a somewhat stupid thing to attack, considering how much finance goes through it and how much it hurt the economy. (Well, and how much it hurt the banks, which, as we have later learned, the government will do anything for, even after they've carefully blown their own legs off.) That is why it was attacked by bin Laden in actual real life.
Compare that to, for example, the Statue of Liberty. That would have been a nice symbolic attack and gotten everyone really upset...and done no actual harm to the country, and the vast majority of the dead would be from the airplane passengers. Sure, some people would go 'All in all, that was a dumb target, all it did was piss us off', but whatever.
This is why the conspiracy theories invent the idea that somehow the WTC owner was in on it, and that part of this was the equivalent of burning it down for insurance money. Which, as I pointed out in my other post, is idiotic on the face of it...no one going to be an accessory to the murder of thousands of people for the frickin insurance money, nor do mass murderers need or want 'permission' to destroy a building, nor would mass murderers let such people live with such knowledge afterward.
I was just pointing out that a lot of the 'evidence' doesn't even make sense to actually accomplish the goals of the supposed conspiracy. Why hit the Pentagon with a missile instead of airplane? Why, as the other poster claim, risk the entire conspiracy with fricking stock trades? And, no, they didn't need to blow up the incredibly ineffectual SEC.
If the US government was going to hijack airplanes as a pretense for war, they would, you know, actually hijack them. Or, even better, cut off communication with them, and then remote control them. Swapping out the airplanes for fakes is utterly nonsensical...now you have to do that, and get rid of the planes and kill everyone on board. (And while you can easily find a sociopath who will remote-control a plane into a building, if instead you're landing the plane, now you need an actual security force willing to commit cold-blooded murder, in person, of hundreds of people. Just because those are both the same amount of murders does not make them equal difficulty.)
Conspiracies happen. Some conspiracies are real.
The easiest way to see if they are or not is to look at the 'evidence', and try to figure out it's just every single random 'anomaly' that people can invent, regardless of whether or not those would advance the actual story about what they proport happen.
Something like 80% of the 'anomaly' that the Truther leap up and down pointing at do not even slightly appear to advance the actual goals of the supposed conspiracy.
For example, why would the government steal the identities of Saudis if they wanted a reason to go to war in Iraq? (Why would they steal the identities of anyway alive? Wouldn't it be easy enough to just make up some Iraqis, and then build a 'headquarters' in Iraq for the invasion force to discover, with messages from Bin Laden and uncashed checks from Saddam?)
There are so many holes in their theories that they have to being in random third parties, like the WTC owner and some random stock traders and stuff. Hey, here's a fun question: When you're about to commit mass murder, do you go around looking for people to help commit insurance fraud with?
'Hey, I'm going to kill some people, and I know your restaurant isn't going so well, so can I drug them and put them in there, and then burn it down?' 'Why, sure, that sounds like a great idea, and there's no way that could backfire on me if this agreement ever came out. And no way that, after killing thousands of people, you might want to later kill me, either.'
I'll at least listen to the 'let it happen on purpose' people who assert that various people in the government managed to piece together what was going to happen and then deliberately ignored it. Those people are wrong, at least they are not sprouting such utter nonsense as the 'false flag' people.
Hey, idjit, the stock trading thing is exactly the sort of nonsense I was talking about. Why the fuck would the government try to make a few billion in stock trades during 9/11? They obviously wouldn't, so now you're got to bring extra people that the US has inexplicably informed in advance, and who jeopardize the entire conspiracy.
Of course, such trading did happen, and it's entirely possible that the people who did it knew enough about the attacks...but that does not, in any way, point to the US government, which is usually a good deal more secret about black ops that murder thousands of Americans. All that means is that terrorists have access to the stock market.
As for the SEC, I think it's been very well demonstrated that they didn't bother to investigate anything under Bush anyway, and, again, you're trying to dilute the plot in ways that make no sense: Not only is the US government committing mass murder in an attempt to mislead people into a war...but it's decided it, for some reason, can't just ignore criminal cases (like it did all the time under Bush) and can't just have a 'fire' or something to destroy evidence...no, it needs to blow up a fucking building to...hide evidence that only it has access to anyway.
The thing to ask about any conspiracy is to take each individual claim and ask 'Did this actually further any claimed aim of the conspiracy?'.
Let's pretend for a second that the government was behind 9/11?
Firstly, no, people don't get to combine conspiracy theories. You don't get to have a theory saying 'It was the most massive false flag operation in existence' and at the same time claim it was an attempt to make a few billion dollars by the owners of the WTC. If the government wanted to fly airplanes into the WTC, it's hardly going to ask permission, nor participate in a conspiracy to make some money.
Same with airplanes. Why would the government not use the actual airplanes? That introduces an incredible layer of complexity and it's worth pointing out that every airframe is incredibly well documented and accounted for, so it's not like reuse of the airplanes is actually possible.
Same with blowing up WTC 7. Why on earth would the government participate in that? If the purpose of taking down the WTC was have a 'terrorist attack', I think it was pretty damn successful when the twin towers went down. The WTC 7 is utterly pointless to worry about.
There really only _one_ sane 'piece of evidence' that truthers have. The whole 'The WTC should not have collapsed like that, so there were explosives.'. I don't mean that's true, I mean that's the only thing that if it was true would actually advance their conspiracy.
3: Copy files to hard disks, and keep copying them every so often to new media. Likely the best way, but takes time and trouble.
I get baffled by any other solution.
The best way to keep old data? BACKUP YOUR DATA.
When you install a new hard drive, or a disaster happens, copy it back onto your hard drive, so it gets backed up again. I'm not sure how this takes 'time and trouble' when it's something you have to do anyway when disaster hits.
I find the idea anyone has to do anything special is very odd. If you keep pictures on your hard drive...and back up your hard drive...hey, look, you backed up the pictures.
I don't understand when this became rocket science. It used to get complicated when you needed to keep more stuff than could fit on a hard drive...but if you have so many pictures they won't fit on a hard drive, I have to suggest you're taking too many damn pictures.(1) It'd be another thing if we were talking about raw video or something.
A much saner ask slashdot question is 'What is the cheapest offsite backup?' (As the other poster suggested, swapping USB drives with friends is a good idea, if annoying.)
1) New parents, it's probably a good idea to ask yourself: What exactly am I recording all this for? What are the scenarios where I would want this picture later?
Take pictures are regular intervals or memorable events. You don't need to take ten pictures because you're at the park. That's going to be the pictures that people flip past trying to find the interesting ones.
While I actually think it's dumb to not support epubs, I'm a little baffled at the thought this is really important.
How the heck are people putting epubs on there? They just have some epubs laying around in a directory and copy them over? Really?
Most people keep their books in some sort of program like Calibre that can convert the books automatically. (Or they buy them on the device, and they are presumably supplied in correct format.)
What sort of DRM is supported is important. What format file, when it's trivial to convert it, and most people use something to manage their books that can automatically do it? No so much.
I'm of the idea that perhaps throwing eight billion things into 'ereaders' is pretty stupid. But this isn't really an ereader.
In fact, in my universe, ereaders all have eink screens and no sound or bluetooth capabilities. (If I want to listen to music over bluetooth, I already have a cell phone. Why are people walking around with their ereaders and not their cell phones? No, the fact that 'audio books' exist does not mean there's crossover.)
Tablets, like laptops, are multimedia devices. Sound, video, text, etc. Just like laptops, sometimes they will come with features like microphones and cameras, and sometimes not.
Ereaders are unimedia devices. They get a screen optimized for reading. They get text, and occasionally some B&W graphics. They have slow refresh, because that's still faster than physically turning a page.
I've got nothing against tablets (I'd probably get a laptop instead, but whatever.), but find this weird overlap where we've decided to call cheap tablets 'ereaders', and then bitch and moan because they have the features of ereaders, and not tablets, very confusing. If there's a 'low-end tablet' market, let's call it that instead of 'ereaders', which is just silly. Ereaders are already a thing.
And, yes, sometimes people read books on tablets...and they sometimes read books on laptops, or cell phones, or whatever. Ereaders are just a thing designed to only read books(1) on. The second it starts really being designed for anything else, let's just call it a tablet, and stop this confusion.
1) Well, and things besides books. Access to Wikipedia or even web sites in general makes sense if it has net access, as does offering a store to buy books or a place to subscribe to magazines. Or even an RSS reader. The important thing is the device is for 'reading', and people are not expecting to, for example, visit youtube or use Skype or write novels or whatever.
I think the person was talking about research professors. They might indeed get some money from the grant, but they are paid at some salary by the college. (All their staff, OTOH, is not.)
But this salary is probably rather small, especially if they only teach one or two classes.
Anyway, trying to blame 'research' for sucking up college money is absurd. In fact, research is right up there with sports as things that are not actually teaching, but colleges do them because they make the college more money.
Oh, and I've never heard of any school that disallowed people from having hats.
I have, however, heard of teachers who would not let students wear them.
But never anyone, from top to bottom, who had a problem with anyone at all possessing hats, even in class. Students would have hats just blatantly laying on their desks, no one would say a thing.
You really need to learn what we're actually talking here, if you think 'wearing hats' is a relevant analogy. Because ti is, but not in the way you think. Just like some teachers would not let students wear hats, some, in fact all, teachers do not let students use cell phones during class. (And note by 'using' I mean texting and even reading texts.)
Absolutely no one on this entire discussion thinks this is unreasonable at all.
What is unreasonable, however, is attempt to stop students from having cell phones they aren't using. (You know, from 'having them at school'.) This is akin to stopping students from having a hat in their pocket.
Or, for that matter, stopping students who are not in class from using a cell phone. There's no any logical justification for that...if students are free to talk in the halls, they should be free to use cell phones there.
Last I checked, at least where I went to school, we had these miraculous inventions called lockers for placing things which we didn't immediately need, or were not allowed to have, like, I don't know, cell phones,hats and other electronics.
Really? In your universe you're allowed to put things you're not allowed to have at school in your locker? So, like, you can bring a gun to school, as long as you leave it in your locker?
You, along with a vast group of other people here, do not seem to understand how 'not allowed to have in school' works. If students cannot have it at school, they are not allowed to possess it on school property. (Or sometimes they are, but only long enough to turn it into the office, like medication. Which doesn't work for cell phones, for the simple fact that the office is usually closed by the time afterschool activities are finished.)
If something is not allowed at school, they can't fucking stick it in their locker. That would come under the banner of them having it at school.
If you want to ban them from possession in class, perhaps you should say that.
Of course, such a rule is obvious and does not even slightly need mentioning, except apparently to the group of crazy people here running around thinking 'not allowed in school' and 'not allowed in class' are the same thing, so are running around causing idiotic arguments by not understanding basic logic.
The second is crap since it is perfectly doable to require children to put their phones on silent mode or to keep them in their locker during classes. The school should teach them the discipline to do that. They will carry phones for the rest of their lives and will have to deal with it no matter what.
Teaching cell phone etiquette is actually useful, educationally. Before anyone thinks oddly about that, I have to point out that school does most socialization education anyway, just ask a kindergarten teacher. The fact we'd do it with cellphone 8 years later is not that different.
But the most important reason why it is crap, is that it is none of the schools business what a child carries in its bag or clothes as long as it does not interfere with the lessons.
No shit. Unless someone's carrying some plutonium or something, or has been actually accused of specific wrongdoing and there's some sort of evidence that could be found on them, they shouldn't be searched, period, and it's no one's business what they are carrying on their person. (I'm not saying it should require a search warrant, but it should be something like 'Another student claims you threatened him and took his wallet. We'll be searching you for his wallet, and any people's wallets you might have while we're at it.' Instead of just 'You're a troublemaker, and I'm suspicious. Turn out your pockets.')
Of course, the real problem there is that schools make carrying all sorts of things illegal. You couldn't have a pager at my old high school, 15 years ago, because of the nonsensical idea that drug dealers had pagers. (Perhaps they did, but that is certainly not how a drug dealer in a school of 500 students would behave. No one's going to go to the payphone and page a drug dealer! They would just, you know, walk around and find him.)
Likewise, schools nowadays seem to think it's acceptable to keep students from having prescription drugs or even over-the-counter drugs. Uh, no. Just no. Students should perhaps be required to carry prescription medication in actual prescription bottles, but that's the limit of any of this nonsense.
Schools have too much power to search students, and on top of that they have way too many things that are not allowed at schools for utterly nonsensical reasons. I would not be adverse to some disruptive (but legal) things being banned, I think a school has the perfect right to say 'No, you can't walk around with a spray can, because someone keeps putting graffiti in the bathroom. If that's for a school project, you'll have to drop that off at the art room. If it not, you'll have to leave it in the office.' (And, of course, some stuff is just illegal, like guns.)
That doesn't mean they have the right to search people preemptively, and it doesn't mean they can just ban anything they want, even stuff sitting inside bags that are not causing any sort of 'disturbance' at all.
I see the whole getting home part, but this doesn't tell me why the kid needs a phone in school.
Because leaving the phone laying on the ground outside tends to get it stolen?
I'm a little baffled here. Obviously grade schoolers shouldn't be using phones in class. Hell, adults shouldn't be using phones in class.
But for some reason, apparently a large group of people here seem to think the options are a) have a phone at school, in which case obviously they're going to be talking on it class, b) have it magically appear as they exit the building.
Why the fuck are people constantly talking about 'having a phone in school'. Do you people honestly not understand how idiotic that is? When people have have cell phones, they have them all the time. That's the fucking point of a cell phone.
Erm, while it seems like 'research-only professors wasting money' would be a good thing to pin the issue on, in actual fact, those sort of positions have been massively reduced over the past few decades.
You can argue they're a waste of money, but they're clearly not the cause of the current problem.
And it's worth pointing out that they usually aren't a waste on money, as they tend to operate off grants (Which the college does not pay) and the only expense they have is their own paycheck and lab space, and in return they tend to get all sorts of expensive equipment like centrifuges and refrigerators and lasers and whatnot...that the university gets to keep.
He's a guy making the equivalent of ten student's tuition. If he can bring in ten students via his name, and get them another five students-cost worth of equipment, he's earned his keep. The college doesn't actually pay for the research he's doing.
I never said anything like this. It is taxing the individual. Both the first and second tax happened, and especially in this case, since this is where you believe is the only place the first tax happens.
Just repeatedly asserting that corporations pay taxes on money they use (to raise the value of their stock price) has been repeatedly pointed out as wrong, and you refuse to even consider it's wrong or even do the slightest bit of research that would you show it's wrong, so I'm done, I'm out of here. You go live in your own world where you don't know how corporate income tax works.
If by 'riot', you mean 'the superrich making an astroturf campaign to misled idiots into objecting, despite the fact that it's only if you have assets over a million dollars', then, yes. Yes we would.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, idiot, none of that has the slightest bit to do with what we're talking about. Google 'privacy laws' does not magically make them relevant the conversation.
The first link is a overview of California law, none of which is relevant. The second link is for banks. The third link is about security breaches and social security numbers, as is, obviously, the fourth link. The fifth is about identity theft. The sixth is about security breaches.
The seventh, interestingly, is about the few specific laws on that topic. There actuallyare specific laws protecting specific customer records for specific businesses, such as video rentals
Now, SHOW ME WHERE A LAW COVERS BOOK PURCHASES, or shut the hell up and stop pretending random google searches prove your point.
No shit. And, as others have pointed out, it's not just a server thing. They might have enough servers and yet still not want every single person in the world creating their character at the same time and heading out into the same newbie zone. Just because the servers can handle 500,000 people doesn't mean they can handle 200,000 in the same room, and even if they can 'handle' it it still might be quite unusable for the players.
And you're right, practically every single MMO I've heard of seems to have died in the first week. There's always something that didn't scale correctly.
So trickling people into the sever is quite possibly the sanest decision I've ever heard of for an MMO.
Plus, restricting access to a new product, if done to a small extent, increases hype for it. Restricting it too much just pisses people off, but if people can get in within a month or so, it's fine.
Really?
Would you like to point what what law, exactly, stops someone from selling your address, phone number, books you've bought, etc?
Because I don't know what universe you live in, but such laws do not exist in America.
And who turns review boards that will determine if certain treatments are worth the cost for specific patients into "end of life consoling"? You really believe that those boards were there to make the people who were denied treatment feel better about their life ending?
See? It it downright astonishing how many fucking lies the right believes. Hey, moron, 'end of life consoling' has nothing to do with any sort of 'review boards', and said review boards do not exist.
A budget that doesn't have as large an increase in spending as liberals want is a budget cut.
Please, continue yammering your nonsense about whatever you think you're talking about.
Dumping billions of dollars on "shovel ready projects" will keep the unemployment rate below 9%.
Hey, you loon, the government hiring people would reduce unemployment, by definition.
That Obama will close Gitmo "on day one".
That Obama will pull us out of Iraq "on day one".
Campaign promises that aren't kept are not 'inaccuracies', you fucking imbecile.
I'd say "every word of the Obamacare bill", but very few on the left even read it before they voted for it. They simply didn't have time to do so.
Ah, yes, the 'Politics is complicated and the bills are too big' whine.
Perhaps you should finish your snack and take a nap so that actual adults can get on with running the country.
You are aware, I assume, that Mr. Obama admitted that lowering taxes on the rich would result in higher tax revenues, which one would assume can be considered a benefit for all. He admitted this during a democratic candidate debate upon questioning by Mr. Blitzer. He said, rather clearly, that he understood that lower tax rates result in higher revenues, but that higher rates for the rich is "fair" -- despite them already paying the majority of the income tax revenue.
You are aware of my premise the Republicans lie, right? That the right believes lies more than the left?
Actually repeating lies is not a way to demonstrate I am incorrect.
Yeah, I was reading about that yesterday on some blog. The US political system really has no defense against outright lies. It used to have the media, but that sadly was eaten by brainslugs around 1994.
And, well, Republican lie. I know I'll be modded down, I know that someone will try to show the Democrats do also...but, no.
Democrats prevaricate. Democrats mislead. Democrats selectively quote data.
Republicans lie. Just...lie. They turn end of life consoling into death panels. They just make up blatant nonsense about how social security is causing the deficit. They claim Obama wasn't born in the US. They claim Iraq has WMDs. Etc, etc.
Oh, but wait. Some of those lies were repeated by Democrats. Yeah, Democrats are morons, we already knew that. The Republicans managed to trick them, huzzah.
Oh, and some of the other lies were just danced around, and never actually stated. Obama, not American? Why, no one actually said that! It's downright astonishing how many factual inaccuracies that Republican voters somehow end up believing, isn't it?
Where are the factual inaccuracies believed by the left? The last group of believers of those I can think of would be 9/11 Truthers...and, uh, those pretty quickly got kicked out of 'the left'. (OTOH, plenty of people on the left appear to have fallen for the lies of the right.)
And that's not getting into some of the Republican policy claims, which at this point would be proven as lies in any field but politics, like lowering taxes on the rich helps anyone but the rich. If this were economics or history, that claim would have been obviously disproven, but this is politics, so actual facts WRT policy results do not matter. (OTOH, sometimes the Democrats will show up making equally silly claims, which is what I was talking about above...but they usually have not based their entire political platform on such nonsense, nor are they allowed to get away with it by the media.)
You do realize that if you didn't agree to a contract, Borders could have just done anything they wanted with the data, right? Like sell it repeatedly to spammers? Or post it on billboards? (I love the fact you think 'The law applies' would help here.)
However, Borders couldn't have sent email to anyone, because that requires consent, and you've just decided to blow up contract law so no one can consent to anything, ever. Neither can Borders actually sell you stuff, because they can't charge your credit card without your consent, which now does not exist, at least not online.
Perhaps you should stop being stupid. If you want to require contracts be simpler, go ahead, but you can't just require they don't exist at all.
Yeah, this is somewhat stupid.
People signed up to get notifications about email books from Borders. They created an account at Borders that allowed Borders to track them. (I have never bought from Border online, but I assume that they could have purchased without one, like you can at B&N.)
Now Barnes and Noble, for all intents and purposes, is Borders. They are now doing that. They appear to be doing exactly what Borders did with that data.
I am baffled as to what the problem is even supposed to be.
And the idea that this is 'opt out' email, because we all know opt-out is bad, right? Except this is an additional chance to opt-out of something they already opted-in to. They signed up at Borders to receive email about books and discounts they might be interested in! B&N will now be sending exactly same sort of email instead.
People were investigated for stock trades made pre-9/11. It was determined to be a coincidence. The excessive trading on America Airlines on Sept 6 was due to a weird strategy that had the same people buying a shitload of their stock on Sept 10, which was hardly a way to make money. The United stock trades were due to a newsletter the previous day.
As for the SEC, look up "plausible deniability". It's easier to ignore current criminal wrongdoing than past cases for which you have a mountain of evidence and victims at your door demanding action.
You do know that the SEC has recently been called out for destroying evidence from previous cases, right? Since 1992? Illegally destroying it, mind you. So all investigators had to start from scratch?
So that means, to destroy all these 'evidence' you think they had...all they had to do was close whatever investigation they were using it for, and, poof, they destroyed it as part of procedure. (According to the National Archives this is illegal, sure, but hardly as illegal as being accessories to mass murder. And considering they're done it thousands of times, I can't imagine they got cold feet just that once.)
Maybe they just wanted those records really destroyed.
Oh, and I forgot to address the 'explosives' nonsense in the other post.
There is absolutely no reason for the US government to destroy the WTC. If they were trying to create a 'national emergency', that does not require the collapse of the WTC at all.
Just flying airplanes into it was enough. Nothing in their supposed plan required it to go down. The buildings were frickin unusable either way, and planting explosives is incredibly risky for a dozen reasons. (In fact, if you're going to plant explosive, there's, you know, the parking deck, where we would all assume it was bin Laden. You can just leave the planes out of it.)
In fact, the WTC is a somewhat stupid thing to attack, considering how much finance goes through it and how much it hurt the economy. (Well, and how much it hurt the banks, which, as we have later learned, the government will do anything for, even after they've carefully blown their own legs off.) That is why it was attacked by bin Laden in actual real life.
Compare that to, for example, the Statue of Liberty. That would have been a nice symbolic attack and gotten everyone really upset...and done no actual harm to the country, and the vast majority of the dead would be from the airplane passengers. Sure, some people would go 'All in all, that was a dumb target, all it did was piss us off', but whatever.
This is why the conspiracy theories invent the idea that somehow the WTC owner was in on it, and that part of this was the equivalent of burning it down for insurance money. Which, as I pointed out in my other post, is idiotic on the face of it...no one going to be an accessory to the murder of thousands of people for the frickin insurance money, nor do mass murderers need or want 'permission' to destroy a building, nor would mass murderers let such people live with such knowledge afterward.
Yeah, I know.
I was just pointing out that a lot of the 'evidence' doesn't even make sense to actually accomplish the goals of the supposed conspiracy. Why hit the Pentagon with a missile instead of airplane? Why, as the other poster claim, risk the entire conspiracy with fricking stock trades? And, no, they didn't need to blow up the incredibly ineffectual SEC.
If the US government was going to hijack airplanes as a pretense for war, they would, you know, actually hijack them. Or, even better, cut off communication with them, and then remote control them. Swapping out the airplanes for fakes is utterly nonsensical...now you have to do that, and get rid of the planes and kill everyone on board. (And while you can easily find a sociopath who will remote-control a plane into a building, if instead you're landing the plane, now you need an actual security force willing to commit cold-blooded murder, in person, of hundreds of people. Just because those are both the same amount of murders does not make them equal difficulty.)
Conspiracies happen. Some conspiracies are real.
The easiest way to see if they are or not is to look at the 'evidence', and try to figure out it's just every single random 'anomaly' that people can invent, regardless of whether or not those would advance the actual story about what they proport happen.
Something like 80% of the 'anomaly' that the Truther leap up and down pointing at do not even slightly appear to advance the actual goals of the supposed conspiracy.
For example, why would the government steal the identities of Saudis if they wanted a reason to go to war in Iraq? (Why would they steal the identities of anyway alive? Wouldn't it be easy enough to just make up some Iraqis, and then build a 'headquarters' in Iraq for the invasion force to discover, with messages from Bin Laden and uncashed checks from Saddam?)
There are so many holes in their theories that they have to being in random third parties, like the WTC owner and some random stock traders and stuff. Hey, here's a fun question: When you're about to commit mass murder, do you go around looking for people to help commit insurance fraud with?
'Hey, I'm going to kill some people, and I know your restaurant isn't going so well, so can I drug them and put them in there, and then burn it down?' 'Why, sure, that sounds like a great idea, and there's no way that could backfire on me if this agreement ever came out. And no way that, after killing thousands of people, you might want to later kill me, either.'
I'll at least listen to the 'let it happen on purpose' people who assert that various people in the government managed to piece together what was going to happen and then deliberately ignored it. Those people are wrong, at least they are not sprouting such utter nonsense as the 'false flag' people.
Hey, idjit, the stock trading thing is exactly the sort of nonsense I was talking about. Why the fuck would the government try to make a few billion in stock trades during 9/11? They obviously wouldn't, so now you're got to bring extra people that the US has inexplicably informed in advance, and who jeopardize the entire conspiracy.
Of course, such trading did happen, and it's entirely possible that the people who did it knew enough about the attacks...but that does not, in any way, point to the US government, which is usually a good deal more secret about black ops that murder thousands of Americans. All that means is that terrorists have access to the stock market.
As for the SEC, I think it's been very well demonstrated that they didn't bother to investigate anything under Bush anyway, and, again, you're trying to dilute the plot in ways that make no sense: Not only is the US government committing mass murder in an attempt to mislead people into a war...but it's decided it, for some reason, can't just ignore criminal cases (like it did all the time under Bush) and can't just have a 'fire' or something to destroy evidence...no, it needs to blow up a fucking building to...hide evidence that only it has access to anyway.
The thing to ask about any conspiracy is to take each individual claim and ask 'Did this actually further any claimed aim of the conspiracy?'.
Let's pretend for a second that the government was behind 9/11?
Firstly, no, people don't get to combine conspiracy theories. You don't get to have a theory saying 'It was the most massive false flag operation in existence' and at the same time claim it was an attempt to make a few billion dollars by the owners of the WTC. If the government wanted to fly airplanes into the WTC, it's hardly going to ask permission, nor participate in a conspiracy to make some money.
Same with airplanes. Why would the government not use the actual airplanes? That introduces an incredible layer of complexity and it's worth pointing out that every airframe is incredibly well documented and accounted for, so it's not like reuse of the airplanes is actually possible.
Same with blowing up WTC 7. Why on earth would the government participate in that? If the purpose of taking down the WTC was have a 'terrorist attack', I think it was pretty damn successful when the twin towers went down. The WTC 7 is utterly pointless to worry about.
There really only _one_ sane 'piece of evidence' that truthers have. The whole 'The WTC should not have collapsed like that, so there were explosives.'. I don't mean that's true, I mean that's the only thing that if it was true would actually advance their conspiracy.
3: Copy files to hard disks, and keep copying them every so often to new media. Likely the best way, but takes time and trouble.
I get baffled by any other solution.
The best way to keep old data? BACKUP YOUR DATA.
When you install a new hard drive, or a disaster happens, copy it back onto your hard drive, so it gets backed up again. I'm not sure how this takes 'time and trouble' when it's something you have to do anyway when disaster hits.
I find the idea anyone has to do anything special is very odd. If you keep pictures on your hard drive...and back up your hard drive...hey, look, you backed up the pictures.
I don't understand when this became rocket science. It used to get complicated when you needed to keep more stuff than could fit on a hard drive...but if you have so many pictures they won't fit on a hard drive, I have to suggest you're taking too many damn pictures.(1) It'd be another thing if we were talking about raw video or something.
A much saner ask slashdot question is 'What is the cheapest offsite backup?' (As the other poster suggested, swapping USB drives with friends is a good idea, if annoying.)
1) New parents, it's probably a good idea to ask yourself: What exactly am I recording all this for? What are the scenarios where I would want this picture later?
Take pictures are regular intervals or memorable events. You don't need to take ten pictures because you're at the park. That's going to be the pictures that people flip past trying to find the interesting ones.
While I actually think it's dumb to not support epubs, I'm a little baffled at the thought this is really important.
How the heck are people putting epubs on there? They just have some epubs laying around in a directory and copy them over? Really?
Most people keep their books in some sort of program like Calibre that can convert the books automatically. (Or they buy them on the device, and they are presumably supplied in correct format.)
What sort of DRM is supported is important. What format file, when it's trivial to convert it, and most people use something to manage their books that can automatically do it? No so much.
I'm of the idea that perhaps throwing eight billion things into 'ereaders' is pretty stupid. But this isn't really an ereader.
In fact, in my universe, ereaders all have eink screens and no sound or bluetooth capabilities. (If I want to listen to music over bluetooth, I already have a cell phone. Why are people walking around with their ereaders and not their cell phones? No, the fact that 'audio books' exist does not mean there's crossover.)
Tablets, like laptops, are multimedia devices. Sound, video, text, etc. Just like laptops, sometimes they will come with features like microphones and cameras, and sometimes not.
Ereaders are unimedia devices. They get a screen optimized for reading. They get text, and occasionally some B&W graphics. They have slow refresh, because that's still faster than physically turning a page.
I've got nothing against tablets (I'd probably get a laptop instead, but whatever.), but find this weird overlap where we've decided to call cheap tablets 'ereaders', and then bitch and moan because they have the features of ereaders, and not tablets, very confusing. If there's a 'low-end tablet' market, let's call it that instead of 'ereaders', which is just silly. Ereaders are already a thing.
And, yes, sometimes people read books on tablets...and they sometimes read books on laptops, or cell phones, or whatever. Ereaders are just a thing designed to only read books(1) on. The second it starts really being designed for anything else, let's just call it a tablet, and stop this confusion.
1) Well, and things besides books. Access to Wikipedia or even web sites in general makes sense if it has net access, as does offering a store to buy books or a place to subscribe to magazines. Or even an RSS reader. The important thing is the device is for 'reading', and people are not expecting to, for example, visit youtube or use Skype or write novels or whatever.
I don't understand why my Nook doesn't come with a built-in theremin. What if I want to make some music?!
I think the person was talking about research professors. They might indeed get some money from the grant, but they are paid at some salary by the college. (All their staff, OTOH, is not.)
But this salary is probably rather small, especially if they only teach one or two classes.
Anyway, trying to blame 'research' for sucking up college money is absurd. In fact, research is right up there with sports as things that are not actually teaching, but colleges do them because they make the college more money.
Oh, and I've never heard of any school that disallowed people from having hats.
I have, however, heard of teachers who would not let students wear them.
But never anyone, from top to bottom, who had a problem with anyone at all possessing hats, even in class. Students would have hats just blatantly laying on their desks, no one would say a thing.
You really need to learn what we're actually talking here, if you think 'wearing hats' is a relevant analogy. Because ti is, but not in the way you think. Just like some teachers would not let students wear hats, some, in fact all, teachers do not let students use cell phones during class. (And note by 'using' I mean texting and even reading texts.)
Absolutely no one on this entire discussion thinks this is unreasonable at all.
What is unreasonable, however, is attempt to stop students from having cell phones they aren't using. (You know, from 'having them at school'.) This is akin to stopping students from having a hat in their pocket.
Or, for that matter, stopping students who are not in class from using a cell phone. There's no any logical justification for that...if students are free to talk in the halls, they should be free to use cell phones there.
Last I checked, at least where I went to school, we had these miraculous inventions called lockers for placing things which we didn't immediately need, or were not allowed to have, like, I don't know, cell phones,hats and other electronics.
Really? In your universe you're allowed to put things you're not allowed to have at school in your locker? So, like, you can bring a gun to school, as long as you leave it in your locker?
You, along with a vast group of other people here, do not seem to understand how 'not allowed to have in school' works. If students cannot have it at school, they are not allowed to possess it on school property. (Or sometimes they are, but only long enough to turn it into the office, like medication. Which doesn't work for cell phones, for the simple fact that the office is usually closed by the time afterschool activities are finished.)
If something is not allowed at school, they can't fucking stick it in their locker. That would come under the banner of them having it at school.
If you want to ban them from possession in class, perhaps you should say that.
Of course, such a rule is obvious and does not even slightly need mentioning, except apparently to the group of crazy people here running around thinking 'not allowed in school' and 'not allowed in class' are the same thing, so are running around causing idiotic arguments by not understanding basic logic.
The second is crap since it is perfectly doable to require children to put their phones on silent mode or to keep them in their locker during classes. The school should teach them the discipline to do that. They will carry phones for the rest of their lives and will have to deal with it no matter what.
Teaching cell phone etiquette is actually useful, educationally. Before anyone thinks oddly about that, I have to point out that school does most socialization education anyway, just ask a kindergarten teacher. The fact we'd do it with cellphone 8 years later is not that different.
But the most important reason why it is crap, is that it is none of the schools business what a child carries in its bag or clothes as long as it does not interfere with the lessons.
No shit. Unless someone's carrying some plutonium or something, or has been actually accused of specific wrongdoing and there's some sort of evidence that could be found on them, they shouldn't be searched, period, and it's no one's business what they are carrying on their person. (I'm not saying it should require a search warrant, but it should be something like 'Another student claims you threatened him and took his wallet. We'll be searching you for his wallet, and any people's wallets you might have while we're at it.' Instead of just 'You're a troublemaker, and I'm suspicious. Turn out your pockets.')
Of course, the real problem there is that schools make carrying all sorts of things illegal. You couldn't have a pager at my old high school, 15 years ago, because of the nonsensical idea that drug dealers had pagers. (Perhaps they did, but that is certainly not how a drug dealer in a school of 500 students would behave. No one's going to go to the payphone and page a drug dealer! They would just, you know, walk around and find him.)
Likewise, schools nowadays seem to think it's acceptable to keep students from having prescription drugs or even over-the-counter drugs. Uh, no. Just no. Students should perhaps be required to carry prescription medication in actual prescription bottles, but that's the limit of any of this nonsense.
Schools have too much power to search students, and on top of that they have way too many things that are not allowed at schools for utterly nonsensical reasons. I would not be adverse to some disruptive (but legal) things being banned, I think a school has the perfect right to say 'No, you can't walk around with a spray can, because someone keeps putting graffiti in the bathroom. If that's for a school project, you'll have to drop that off at the art room. If it not, you'll have to leave it in the office.' (And, of course, some stuff is just illegal, like guns.)
That doesn't mean they have the right to search people preemptively, and it doesn't mean they can just ban anything they want, even stuff sitting inside bags that are not causing any sort of 'disturbance' at all.
I see the whole getting home part, but this doesn't tell me why the kid needs a phone in school.
Because leaving the phone laying on the ground outside tends to get it stolen?
I'm a little baffled here. Obviously grade schoolers shouldn't be using phones in class. Hell, adults shouldn't be using phones in class.
But for some reason, apparently a large group of people here seem to think the options are a) have a phone at school, in which case obviously they're going to be talking on it class, b) have it magically appear as they exit the building.
Why the fuck are people constantly talking about 'having a phone in school'. Do you people honestly not understand how idiotic that is? When people have have cell phones, they have them all the time. That's the fucking point of a cell phone.
Erm, while it seems like 'research-only professors wasting money' would be a good thing to pin the issue on, in actual fact, those sort of positions have been massively reduced over the past few decades.
You can argue they're a waste of money, but they're clearly not the cause of the current problem.
And it's worth pointing out that they usually aren't a waste on money, as they tend to operate off grants (Which the college does not pay) and the only expense they have is their own paycheck and lab space, and in return they tend to get all sorts of expensive equipment like centrifuges and refrigerators and lasers and whatnot...that the university gets to keep.
He's a guy making the equivalent of ten student's tuition. If he can bring in ten students via his name, and get them another five students-cost worth of equipment, he's earned his keep. The college doesn't actually pay for the research he's doing.
I don't know why people are assuming that previous MS OSes won't be, or even aren't already, signed.
I never said anything like this. It is taxing the individual. Both the first and second tax happened, and especially in this case, since this is where you believe is the only place the first tax happens.
Just repeatedly asserting that corporations pay taxes on money they use (to raise the value of their stock price) has been repeatedly pointed out as wrong, and you refuse to even consider it's wrong or even do the slightest bit of research that would you show it's wrong, so I'm done, I'm out of here. You go live in your own world where you don't know how corporate income tax works.
If by 'riot', you mean 'the superrich making an astroturf campaign to misled idiots into objecting, despite the fact that it's only if you have assets over a million dollars', then, yes. Yes we would.