That actually ties them to us more than it ties us to them. If they're exporting $250 billion worth of goods to us each year, that's $250B that they can use to buy goods from Europe or the rest of Asia. If that money stops going in, their economy is in for a colossal hurt. We'll be hurt too, but only to the tune of $50B per year. Europe would do just fine, as both China and the US will need a place to dump goods, so discounts there will reign supreme while our markets are closed to each other.
If they go to war with us, their war machine will swiftly grind to a halt. As a nation, we are far more self-sufficient than they are, due to all the resources we have. They want that kind of power, they have to invade Russia to get it. This will lead to Tom Clancy being seen as a visionary for having already written about it.
Cyberwar actually makes the most sense for them. Focus on stealing our secrets. Steal from Boeing, steal from Microsoft, steal from NASA. Then they can actually make war a winning proposition within several years by using a disposable military with the intent to cause the most harm for the least cost.
Here's a scenario: Quietly upgrade a few cargo ships into troop transports. Fill them with militia types, so that they can keep the ratcheting up of their military as hidden as possible. And at LA, seize territory, secure it, and use it to absorb neighboring areas.
Partially. That word is important. There was a lot less blacklung going around before the Industrial Revolution, because we didn't need coal miners. There's been a lot more asthma than there used to be. I realize that for the most part this isn't the problem, I was just saying that this post's great-grandparent was not completely baseless and unfounded.
1- This is not a conspiracy. This was an overt hostile action, albeit one that was launched by surprise. I do not claim conspiracy in the attacks on Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that many more men were involved in that.
2- I am willing to accept that the plane crashes in and of themselves may not have been sufficient to cause the damage observed. This is part of not knowing the numbers. I merely suggest a different delivery mechanism for the explosives that are rumored to have been planted within the towers without anyone noticing. My way doesn't involve treason being committed by people who would probably rather not suffer the consequences of being caught. Treason holds a death penalty, and our government has shown a desire to avoid getting killed. The hijackers, on the other hand, embraced death as a necessary part of accomplishing their goal. My bombs have better odds than your bombs.
3- How lovely, almost two minutes worth of using the same tactics they're accusing everyone else of using. That video starts by introducing a bias, and then shows equivocal evidence in such a way that the bias is supported. We're given two photos, one with less damage than the other. Then, we're told that that means one of them must be lying, and it's obviously the one that disagrees with the video makers position. 1:40 just isn't long enough to mention that there may be a time differential between when the pictures were taken. It could even be a simple matter of perspective, where one picture is at an angle that conceals some of the damage. Then, having made the conspiracy self-evident, they simply mention that the collapse looks the same as a collapse from a controlled demolition, and the statement that it was caused by the plane then looks weak and vacuous. On the other hand, there are parallels to be drawn between the collapse as claimed to have occurred, and the collapse as would be expected with controlled demolition. First, and most importantly, the damage in both cases was and would be inflicted from the inside. A missile or a hurricane or an earthquake all induce damage from the exterior, which is the normal comparison to be had. I have seen buildings that have collapsed after being gutted with fire, and it is much the same. The internal structure is degraded, and the building just crumples. Both tails are trying to wag the dog here, and the whole circumstance has become bogged down by the same sort of crap that cluttered the JFK assassination. No one will ever know for sure what happened. Any attempt to sway the masses will require making the other side look like either fools or liars. And when you get right down to it, now that the event has occurred, how doesn't matter anymore. The VP took over, the US went to the Middle East again. Will either of us being right change anything now?
Do you realize how much damage elitist punks like you do to Apple? Or is that the point? Nietzsche said that the most perfidious way of doing harm to a position is to argue poorly on its behalf.
I partially agree with you, though some of your ideas hurt my brain. The big one: Explosion of new diseases. Is this at least partially due to all sorts of industrialization and chemical manufacture? Probably. But there's other stuff too. Ebola's probably been around for thousands of years. It wasn't until information spread got good that people started knowing about it. Before, it'd appear, destroy a village or tribe, and it's gone. Now, people start to survive, or people take proper precautions around blood and see it without catching it, and people find out about it. How long was it that there were just 'crazy people' who got put in asylums? Now we've got names like autism, Asperger's, Down's syndrome, schizophrenia, the whole set of dissociative disorders, etc. Better research and knowledge provides 'more' diseases, but most of them are things that were already there, and are just now being named or separated out from other things.
Nintendo Wii, and it was for her three kids. Also, a nurse called the radio station to warn them about the dangers of drinking water like this, and got blown off. Last I saw the radio station wasn't getting sued, but pretty much everyone who had anything to do with the contest was out on their collective asses.
I have difficulty believing in conspiracy theories. I will always start with the assumption that things could be an accident, and then try to find how that could be. I realize that this is a scientific weakness of mine, but there it is. Bias exposed, here are more possibilities: 1) Some of the steel was substandard. 2) Given the ease of beating airport security, especially pre-9/11, some of the pieces of luggage were explosives or high-end incendiaries. 3) One of the more solid pieces of the airplane, probably an engine, was unlucky enough to rip through a major support or two. 4) Metal that's still glowing could be a metal that glows at a lower temperature. 5) Metal could have spent those weeks in an area that was remarkably well insulated, due to ash, or some of the fireproofing insulation that was present in the building.
I have not taken a serious look at the WTC collapse. I have not taken the time to look at more than a few numbers, nor have I engaged in any simulations. If the numbers you have seen do correspond to reality (i.e. 1 is not true), and those numbers all point to what you claim, then we must start looking to human intervention. Personally, I like number 2. We know the hijackers planned to die. We know that it would have been possible for a suitcase full of thermite or thermate to have gotten aboard, and that it's likely the hijackers would have taken these kinds of measures. And that would explain pretty much everything else.
IANAP, but I have some training and hands on experience with structural integrity under adverse conditions. First, metal doesn't have to melt to be weakened. Blacksmiths do not reduce iron to a liquid, they ruin the structural integrity with heat, then use pressure to deform it. Steel columns could easily buckle under the given stresses.
Aluminum will melt at lower temperatures than iron or steel. Pooled and running metal was expected, but it was aluminum from the airplane. Also, if there was enough heat transmitted to steel beams without fire being present, it would start to oxidize. Combined with the molten aluminum, a thermite reaction could have started. That's not something I'd put money on, but it's too close for me to bet against it either.
As for the speed of the collapse, I have a friend who is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He's demonstrated to me the 'trick' to sending a fist or foot crashing through a stack of concrete slabs. You put a couple pencils between each slab to create a gap. This helps with showmanship, by making the stack look much taller than it is, and with physics, as you lose much less power per brick by enlisting gravity to pull the smashed bricks through the ones underneath. As such, it does not increase his total breaking time if he uses concrete instead of wood. Once the tower started to collapse, it was going to continue to do so, and it was not going to slow down because of the steel between the falling section and the ground.
Ah yes, lets all redefine words so that we can accuse people of not using them our way. Dictionary.com talks about a color and a fabric.
Here, I'm going to use the word 'economics.' What I mean when I use this word is Mac doesn't have enough market share to turn away users. Feel free to dis my non-iPod mp3 player, there you've got enough. Elitism only works when you have to turn people away, like MIT, or nobility. You've taken a company that makes a decent product, I'll admit, but made poor decisions early on, economically. Now you've decided that the fact that they had market share and lost it, and are only recently creeping back, means that you're better than the rest of us because we had successful marketing back in the day.
Keep your minority-based prejudice to yourself, you give the rest of the Mac users a bad name.
Ah. I actually avoid politics as much as is humanly possible. That's why I gave a 'the numbers might be less bad than they look' when talking about Gore, and gave economic principles for the use of carbon credits and the failings of American network infrastructure. Besides that, I voted against Gore, I didn't like his gun control or economics.
I seem to remember hearing that he -spends- about 20x the average person, not -uses- about 20x the average person. Given that it costs more to buy green power, he may not be nearly as out of line as you claim.
The reason the US has very little true broadband infrastructure is because we started the internet. We designed everything, we implemented it years ago, and it's very expensive to go through and rip things up to replace it. Why does Estonia have one of the worlds most integrated online banking systems? Because the internet existed when Estonia broke off of the former USSR, and it was actually starting to show promise when Estonia was building this stuff. As the first ones to lay infrastructure, we're going to be among the last place for modern infrastructure, because we've got something that works, and it's not worth the money to rip it all up so we can lay down something else for an increase in ability.
As far as carbon credits go, there's a limited number of carbon credits to be had. If someone else can be more efficient than they need to at pulling carbon out of their emissions, why shouldn't they be able to sell their unused credits to a company that has more carbon? This is simple economics, that which is easiest to do will be done first. If you're a company, and you can reduce your emissions by 10% by putting cheap filters in place on exhaust systems, you're going to do that instead of reduce emissions by that same 10% by buying new, redesigned equipment. One of the reasons for that is the same as the internet issue, if you put off getting new machines, the ones that are at the same price are better than they were 5 years ago. Also, by allowing companies to sell carbon credits, those companies actually get their emission-reducing equipment subsidized by their fellow companies, providing an incentive to not just do the bare minimum necessary.
Facts have their place, but they're no substitute for the truth.
It depends. I've got the Fantasia set that was released a few years ago. Three DVDs, each with separate cases, and there's a cardboard thing that they came in. It's convenient to keep them in, so I've still got it.
Wait, I'm losing the/. crowd. You know how when you bought the Star Wars Original Trilogy on DVD, it came in that gold cardboard thing? That's what it's talking about.
We'd be paying for the courts anyway. Jack Thompson is hardly a man of poverty, and Microsoft can drain him without taxpayers sending money their way too. I actually appreciate him, he actually helps my case for video games. It's easy to polarize the issue to 'video games are good' and 'video games are bad.' I just set him up on the 'video games are bad' side, and let his comments about Burger King sponsoring murder because they made a few crappy X-box games drive most people who don't see shades of gray over to my side of the fence.
I believe it was Nietzsche who said that there is no more perfidious way to harm a cause than to argue poorly on its behalf.
I believe it's called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Some people clean things. Some people count. Jack Thompson sues game manufacturers.
Also, the fact that he can attempt to wield the power of the courts to enforce his warped perception is not scary in the least. The fact that you feel some people should not have access to the courts as arbiters is very scary, and if you were someone with even a modicum of power over the courts, it would immediately upgrade to scary as hell. The courts are the perfect place for this. Let Jack Thompson sue Microsoft. Microsoft will eat him. I would love to see them just skip to the third 'E' here. He should be able to do everything in his power under the law to force his views on the world at large, because now the world at large gets to apply massive backlash.
Ah, but the more open you are, the harder it's going to be for a blackmailer to convince people that you have some guilty secret.
Exactly. That's why this is a good idea. It doesn't get any more open than this. We all know the aphorism of 'If you're not guilty, you don't need to hide anything,' but what we don't realize is that it's actually true. No, I'm not advocating that this level of openness become enforced, but the biggest problem he's going to have with his 'life without privacy' is keeping the website updated, it'd be an impossible task for a procrastinator/paperwork avoider like me.
As far as you're concerned, the secret encounter type of blackmail wouldn't do it. How about drugs, alcohol, or gambling? Crime? Pretty much no matter who you are, there's going to be something. I hate to use fictional references, but the beginning of the movie Firewall? People reconstitute some shredded documents to get personal information, and set him up with thousands of dollars worth of gambling debts. In the movie, it was done to lower the trust other people had in him, instead of making him do things, but it can go any way you want.
You think the government are the only people who can make your life miserable if you want to keep your privacy? Think blackmail. These days, you don't even have to do something embarrassing, as long as the blackmailers can get someone you care about to think you did something. Due process doesn't apply to relationships.
So, if someone said to you, give me a couple hundred dollars, or your wife will leave you, what happens? Maybe the hassle isn't worth the money. But now you're actually concealing something, and a missing $200 can have all sorts of connotations, from hookers, to gambling, to drunken revelry. It could also be something like a present for your wife, or you loaned it to a buddy of yours, but spin is a very big thing, and it's definitely powerful enough to turn that $200 into more.
Compare that to this guy. He's got the perfect alibi, because millions of people can confirm it. He's completely immune to any game that relies on suspicion. And how much privacy has he really lost? Most people won't care, most of the ones who do care will never meet him, and most of the ones that do care and do meet him won't put two and two together, especially if he doesn't put a picture on the site. He's really only lost vulnerability.
Hyperfocusing would be even more cool if I could control it. There are few things worse for your grades than hyperfocusing on NetHack instead of homework. It seems to work ok for reading, though, I went through the Wheel of Time in a week.
They ran into a potentially dangerous system error, and could not immediately determine the source. If I were running the shop over there, the very first thing I would ask is "Is there any possible way this could be initiated from the outside?" Because I don't want someone to say "Of course not," and go on their merry way. I want someone to be able to explain what happened, why it happened, and what potential circumstances could possibly cause it to happen again. When I ask if it could possibly be started by someone on the outside, I want them to check every path between a line in, and the problem.
The only real laws I can think of in this country about obscenity are Disturbing the Peace, and whatever the FCC uses to fine people who break the rules. Disturbing the Peace -is- a societal thing, where government only provides the punishment, someone else has to provide the offended citizen. I suppose laws regarding nudity count too.
That's true, but requires you to first assume that society as a whole is rational. If you want a reason, it's going to be inertia. This word is bad because my father taught me it's bad. You looked at that as mere learned behavior, but it's actually more than that. It's tradition, in a way. My father taught me this word is bad because he believed it, because he learned that from his father. This is the same way prejudices and stereotypes are passed on. Do you ask why there's the racist notion among some people that black people are less than white people in some way? It's the same reason, learned behavior passed through generations. If you go far enough back, you find that black people used to be used as slaves in America, and that's where the inherent thought that they were less human came from. I'm sure that if we could go far enough back, some guy just needed a word to describe something in foul terms, and that 'bad' word has been passed down, keeping its vulgarity all the way.
Swear words are separated from their less offensive brethren by connotation and social norms. According to my aunt overseas, the word 'bugger' is more obscene in the UK than it is in the US. Depending on the culture, different gestures can be incredibly offensive or common courtesy, the 'thumbs-up' being the easiest example to think of. Shit is more offensive than crap is more offensive than poo because that's how the social norms go. Across individual families, the values may be different. One of my friends was brought up in a family where 'crap' was put on the same level as 'shit,' as far as obscenities go. Same family had no issues with the word 'piss,' which my family dislikes.
I personally tend to shy away from using 'foul' language as much as possible, especially avoiding its utility in insulting people, because I love the rich variety of the English language, and hate to tie myself down to this small subset. Also, it brings me great pleasure to be able to insult someone's intelligence when they ask me to explain the insult I just cast at them.
Slashdot Mirror
That actually ties them to us more than it ties us to them. If they're exporting $250 billion worth of goods to us each year, that's $250B that they can use to buy goods from Europe or the rest of Asia. If that money stops going in, their economy is in for a colossal hurt. We'll be hurt too, but only to the tune of $50B per year. Europe would do just fine, as both China and the US will need a place to dump goods, so discounts there will reign supreme while our markets are closed to each other.
If they go to war with us, their war machine will swiftly grind to a halt. As a nation, we are far more self-sufficient than they are, due to all the resources we have. They want that kind of power, they have to invade Russia to get it. This will lead to Tom Clancy being seen as a visionary for having already written about it.
Cyberwar actually makes the most sense for them. Focus on stealing our secrets. Steal from Boeing, steal from Microsoft, steal from NASA. Then they can actually make war a winning proposition within several years by using a disposable military with the intent to cause the most harm for the least cost.
Here's a scenario: Quietly upgrade a few cargo ships into troop transports. Fill them with militia types, so that they can keep the ratcheting up of their military as hidden as possible. And at LA, seize territory, secure it, and use it to absorb neighboring areas.
Partially. That word is important. There was a lot less blacklung going around before the Industrial Revolution, because we didn't need coal miners. There's been a lot more asthma than there used to be. I realize that for the most part this isn't the problem, I was just saying that this post's great-grandparent was not completely baseless and unfounded.
1- This is not a conspiracy. This was an overt hostile action, albeit one that was launched by surprise. I do not claim conspiracy in the attacks on Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that many more men were involved in that.
2- I am willing to accept that the plane crashes in and of themselves may not have been sufficient to cause the damage observed. This is part of not knowing the numbers. I merely suggest a different delivery mechanism for the explosives that are rumored to have been planted within the towers without anyone noticing. My way doesn't involve treason being committed by people who would probably rather not suffer the consequences of being caught. Treason holds a death penalty, and our government has shown a desire to avoid getting killed. The hijackers, on the other hand, embraced death as a necessary part of accomplishing their goal. My bombs have better odds than your bombs.
3- How lovely, almost two minutes worth of using the same tactics they're accusing everyone else of using. That video starts by introducing a bias, and then shows equivocal evidence in such a way that the bias is supported. We're given two photos, one with less damage than the other. Then, we're told that that means one of them must be lying, and it's obviously the one that disagrees with the video makers position. 1:40 just isn't long enough to mention that there may be a time differential between when the pictures were taken. It could even be a simple matter of perspective, where one picture is at an angle that conceals some of the damage. Then, having made the conspiracy self-evident, they simply mention that the collapse looks the same as a collapse from a controlled demolition, and the statement that it was caused by the plane then looks weak and vacuous. On the other hand, there are parallels to be drawn between the collapse as claimed to have occurred, and the collapse as would be expected with controlled demolition. First, and most importantly, the damage in both cases was and would be inflicted from the inside. A missile or a hurricane or an earthquake all induce damage from the exterior, which is the normal comparison to be had. I have seen buildings that have collapsed after being gutted with fire, and it is much the same. The internal structure is degraded, and the building just crumples. Both tails are trying to wag the dog here, and the whole circumstance has become bogged down by the same sort of crap that cluttered the JFK assassination. No one will ever know for sure what happened. Any attempt to sway the masses will require making the other side look like either fools or liars. And when you get right down to it, now that the event has occurred, how doesn't matter anymore. The VP took over, the US went to the Middle East again. Will either of us being right change anything now?
Do you realize how much damage elitist punks like you do to Apple? Or is that the point? Nietzsche said that the most perfidious way of doing harm to a position is to argue poorly on its behalf.
I partially agree with you, though some of your ideas hurt my brain. The big one: Explosion of new diseases. Is this at least partially due to all sorts of industrialization and chemical manufacture? Probably. But there's other stuff too. Ebola's probably been around for thousands of years. It wasn't until information spread got good that people started knowing about it. Before, it'd appear, destroy a village or tribe, and it's gone. Now, people start to survive, or people take proper precautions around blood and see it without catching it, and people find out about it. How long was it that there were just 'crazy people' who got put in asylums? Now we've got names like autism, Asperger's, Down's syndrome, schizophrenia, the whole set of dissociative disorders, etc. Better research and knowledge provides 'more' diseases, but most of them are things that were already there, and are just now being named or separated out from other things.
Nintendo Wii, and it was for her three kids. Also, a nurse called the radio station to warn them about the dangers of drinking water like this, and got blown off. Last I saw the radio station wasn't getting sued, but pretty much everyone who had anything to do with the contest was out on their collective asses.
I have difficulty believing in conspiracy theories. I will always start with the assumption that things could be an accident, and then try to find how that could be. I realize that this is a scientific weakness of mine, but there it is. Bias exposed, here are more possibilities:
1) Some of the steel was substandard.
2) Given the ease of beating airport security, especially pre-9/11, some of the pieces of luggage were explosives or high-end incendiaries.
3) One of the more solid pieces of the airplane, probably an engine, was unlucky enough to rip through a major support or two.
4) Metal that's still glowing could be a metal that glows at a lower temperature.
5) Metal could have spent those weeks in an area that was remarkably well insulated, due to ash, or some of the fireproofing insulation that was present in the building.
I have not taken a serious look at the WTC collapse. I have not taken the time to look at more than a few numbers, nor have I engaged in any simulations. If the numbers you have seen do correspond to reality (i.e. 1 is not true), and those numbers all point to what you claim, then we must start looking to human intervention. Personally, I like number 2. We know the hijackers planned to die. We know that it would have been possible for a suitcase full of thermite or thermate to have gotten aboard, and that it's likely the hijackers would have taken these kinds of measures. And that would explain pretty much everything else.
IANAP, but I have some training and hands on experience with structural integrity under adverse conditions. First, metal doesn't have to melt to be weakened. Blacksmiths do not reduce iron to a liquid, they ruin the structural integrity with heat, then use pressure to deform it. Steel columns could easily buckle under the given stresses.
Aluminum will melt at lower temperatures than iron or steel. Pooled and running metal was expected, but it was aluminum from the airplane. Also, if there was enough heat transmitted to steel beams without fire being present, it would start to oxidize. Combined with the molten aluminum, a thermite reaction could have started. That's not something I'd put money on, but it's too close for me to bet against it either.
As for the speed of the collapse, I have a friend who is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. He's demonstrated to me the 'trick' to sending a fist or foot crashing through a stack of concrete slabs. You put a couple pencils between each slab to create a gap. This helps with showmanship, by making the stack look much taller than it is, and with physics, as you lose much less power per brick by enlisting gravity to pull the smashed bricks through the ones underneath. As such, it does not increase his total breaking time if he uses concrete instead of wood. Once the tower started to collapse, it was going to continue to do so, and it was not going to slow down because of the steel between the falling section and the ground.
That was humor. Mod it funny, if you so desire. But no one should have wasted points downmodding him.
Ah yes, lets all redefine words so that we can accuse people of not using them our way. Dictionary.com talks about a color and a fabric.
Here, I'm going to use the word 'economics.' What I mean when I use this word is Mac doesn't have enough market share to turn away users. Feel free to dis my non-iPod mp3 player, there you've got enough. Elitism only works when you have to turn people away, like MIT, or nobility. You've taken a company that makes a decent product, I'll admit, but made poor decisions early on, economically. Now you've decided that the fact that they had market share and lost it, and are only recently creeping back, means that you're better than the rest of us because we had successful marketing back in the day.
Keep your minority-based prejudice to yourself, you give the rest of the Mac users a bad name.
Ah. I actually avoid politics as much as is humanly possible. That's why I gave a 'the numbers might be less bad than they look' when talking about Gore, and gave economic principles for the use of carbon credits and the failings of American network infrastructure. Besides that, I voted against Gore, I didn't like his gun control or economics.
I seem to remember hearing that he -spends- about 20x the average person, not -uses- about 20x the average person. Given that it costs more to buy green power, he may not be nearly as out of line as you claim.
The reason the US has very little true broadband infrastructure is because we started the internet. We designed everything, we implemented it years ago, and it's very expensive to go through and rip things up to replace it. Why does Estonia have one of the worlds most integrated online banking systems? Because the internet existed when Estonia broke off of the former USSR, and it was actually starting to show promise when Estonia was building this stuff. As the first ones to lay infrastructure, we're going to be among the last place for modern infrastructure, because we've got something that works, and it's not worth the money to rip it all up so we can lay down something else for an increase in ability.
As far as carbon credits go, there's a limited number of carbon credits to be had. If someone else can be more efficient than they need to at pulling carbon out of their emissions, why shouldn't they be able to sell their unused credits to a company that has more carbon? This is simple economics, that which is easiest to do will be done first. If you're a company, and you can reduce your emissions by 10% by putting cheap filters in place on exhaust systems, you're going to do that instead of reduce emissions by that same 10% by buying new, redesigned equipment. One of the reasons for that is the same as the internet issue, if you put off getting new machines, the ones that are at the same price are better than they were 5 years ago. Also, by allowing companies to sell carbon credits, those companies actually get their emission-reducing equipment subsidized by their fellow companies, providing an incentive to not just do the bare minimum necessary.
Facts have their place, but they're no substitute for the truth.
It depends. I've got the Fantasia set that was released a few years ago. Three DVDs, each with separate cases, and there's a cardboard thing that they came in. It's convenient to keep them in, so I've still got it.
/. crowd. You know how when you bought the Star Wars Original Trilogy on DVD, it came in that gold cardboard thing? That's what it's talking about.
Wait, I'm losing the
We'd be paying for the courts anyway. Jack Thompson is hardly a man of poverty, and Microsoft can drain him without taxpayers sending money their way too. I actually appreciate him, he actually helps my case for video games. It's easy to polarize the issue to 'video games are good' and 'video games are bad.' I just set him up on the 'video games are bad' side, and let his comments about Burger King sponsoring murder because they made a few crappy X-box games drive most people who don't see shades of gray over to my side of the fence.
I believe it was Nietzsche who said that there is no more perfidious way to harm a cause than to argue poorly on its behalf.
I believe it's called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Some people clean things. Some people count. Jack Thompson sues game manufacturers.
Also, the fact that he can attempt to wield the power of the courts to enforce his warped perception is not scary in the least. The fact that you feel some people should not have access to the courts as arbiters is very scary, and if you were someone with even a modicum of power over the courts, it would immediately upgrade to scary as hell. The courts are the perfect place for this. Let Jack Thompson sue Microsoft. Microsoft will eat him. I would love to see them just skip to the third 'E' here. He should be able to do everything in his power under the law to force his views on the world at large, because now the world at large gets to apply massive backlash.
As far as you're concerned, the secret encounter type of blackmail wouldn't do it. How about drugs, alcohol, or gambling? Crime? Pretty much no matter who you are, there's going to be something. I hate to use fictional references, but the beginning of the movie Firewall? People reconstitute some shredded documents to get personal information, and set him up with thousands of dollars worth of gambling debts. In the movie, it was done to lower the trust other people had in him, instead of making him do things, but it can go any way you want.
You think the government are the only people who can make your life miserable if you want to keep your privacy? Think blackmail. These days, you don't even have to do something embarrassing, as long as the blackmailers can get someone you care about to think you did something. Due process doesn't apply to relationships.
So, if someone said to you, give me a couple hundred dollars, or your wife will leave you, what happens? Maybe the hassle isn't worth the money. But now you're actually concealing something, and a missing $200 can have all sorts of connotations, from hookers, to gambling, to drunken revelry. It could also be something like a present for your wife, or you loaned it to a buddy of yours, but spin is a very big thing, and it's definitely powerful enough to turn that $200 into more.
Compare that to this guy. He's got the perfect alibi, because millions of people can confirm it. He's completely immune to any game that relies on suspicion. And how much privacy has he really lost? Most people won't care, most of the ones who do care will never meet him, and most of the ones that do care and do meet him won't put two and two together, especially if he doesn't put a picture on the site. He's really only lost vulnerability.
That's akin to Bill Gates saying that poverty has been solved because he has plenty of money. It hasn't been solved, it's just not a problem for you.
Hyperfocusing would be even more cool if I could control it. There are few things worse for your grades than hyperfocusing on NetHack instead of homework. It seems to work ok for reading, though, I went through the Wheel of Time in a week.
They ran into a potentially dangerous system error, and could not immediately determine the source. If I were running the shop over there, the very first thing I would ask is "Is there any possible way this could be initiated from the outside?" Because I don't want someone to say "Of course not," and go on their merry way. I want someone to be able to explain what happened, why it happened, and what potential circumstances could possibly cause it to happen again. When I ask if it could possibly be started by someone on the outside, I want them to check every path between a line in, and the problem.
The only real laws I can think of in this country about obscenity are Disturbing the Peace, and whatever the FCC uses to fine people who break the rules. Disturbing the Peace -is- a societal thing, where government only provides the punishment, someone else has to provide the offended citizen. I suppose laws regarding nudity count too.
Modern GPS unit still wouldn't have any satellites to triangulate with. Just thought I'd throw that one out there.
That's true, but requires you to first assume that society as a whole is rational. If you want a reason, it's going to be inertia. This word is bad because my father taught me it's bad. You looked at that as mere learned behavior, but it's actually more than that. It's tradition, in a way. My father taught me this word is bad because he believed it, because he learned that from his father. This is the same way prejudices and stereotypes are passed on. Do you ask why there's the racist notion among some people that black people are less than white people in some way? It's the same reason, learned behavior passed through generations. If you go far enough back, you find that black people used to be used as slaves in America, and that's where the inherent thought that they were less human came from. I'm sure that if we could go far enough back, some guy just needed a word to describe something in foul terms, and that 'bad' word has been passed down, keeping its vulgarity all the way.
Swear words are separated from their less offensive brethren by connotation and social norms. According to my aunt overseas, the word 'bugger' is more obscene in the UK than it is in the US. Depending on the culture, different gestures can be incredibly offensive or common courtesy, the 'thumbs-up' being the easiest example to think of. Shit is more offensive than crap is more offensive than poo because that's how the social norms go. Across individual families, the values may be different. One of my friends was brought up in a family where 'crap' was put on the same level as 'shit,' as far as obscenities go. Same family had no issues with the word 'piss,' which my family dislikes.
I personally tend to shy away from using 'foul' language as much as possible, especially avoiding its utility in insulting people, because I love the rich variety of the English language, and hate to tie myself down to this small subset. Also, it brings me great pleasure to be able to insult someone's intelligence when they ask me to explain the insult I just cast at them.
This, I mean. Next time, I need to turn on html the first time I post. Also, this.