Fear sells. The media's been doing it forever. Do you all really believe that you're going to die from the same fucking flu you've been getting (and living through) almost every Winter in your entire life?!
Suburban housewives and other miscellaneous yuppies can be frightened into buying and voting for anything. From the Wikipedia article about Megan's law, shortened for clarity:
A...study by Kristen Zgoba Ph.D., Philip Witt Ph.D., Melissa Dalessandro M.S.W., and Bonita Veysey Ph.D. found that Megan's Law has no effect on community tenure (i.e., time to first re-arrest), showed no demonstrable effect in reducing sexual re-offenses, has no effect on the type of sexual re-offense or first time sexual offense (still largely child molestation/incest), and has no effect on reducing the number of victims involved in sexual offenses. Moreover costs associated with the initial implementation as well as ongoing expenditures continued to grow over time...The authors feel that given the lack of demonstrated effect of Megan's Law on sexual offenses, the growing costs may not be justifiable. Philip Witt is a psychologist and the co-principal author of the study who helped implement Megan's Law in New Jersey.[6]
Leopard and Snow leopard are like Metallica's Load and Re-load: you know it's gonna suck when they start running out of names. I wouldn't be surprised if they named 10.7 "Def Leopard".
The more energy we have, the cheaper transportation and food is which in turn lets people have more money for charity to help people who need food.
The more energy we have, the greedier the corporations controlling it will become. Constant rate hikes, cutting corners on infrastructure and safety, passing the costs of their own follies onto their ratepayers, creating artificial shortages a la OPEC, etc.
Your vision of a warm and fuzzy utopia will not happen until after a bloody proletarian revolt which will hopefully happen in another 10-20 years.
"...I used to be disappointed that so many of the best minds in the country were being devoted to this enterprise...I mean lawyers, after all, don't produce anything...and I worry that we are devoting too many of out best minds to this enterprise...I don't have any complaint about the quality of the council, except maybe we're wasting some of our best minds"
-- Antonin Scalia, in a June interview with C-SPAN
But Murdoch's brand of news is quickly becoming more discordant with the American political environment than the others. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has always been a decent read* until Rupe got his hands on it. Now its editorial section isn't even worthy of wiping asses. I hope that more and more Americans are quickly falling out of favor with Australian-style right-wing bullshit**.
* I am leftist scum.
** To their credit, FoxNews posted this article and its follow-up when no other mainstream media did. Kudos Rupe, now let's hear a little more truth and noone will get hurt;)
You forgot to mention an important point about Anthrax - Military personnel and contractors involved in biosecurity or deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Korea are required to get the Anthrax vaccine. It's sparked many dismissals, lawsuits, and controversies as well as some adverse effects and was widely believed to be a cause of Gulf War Syndrome.
If your boy scout master or your priest propositions you for sex, what do you do? Would you tell people, or keep it under your hat?
Burn 'em at the stake, I say. There is nothing worse than a pontificating hypocrite in a position of authority, especially with regard to homosexuality - you know, the assholes who preach about "family values" and vote against equal-rights legislation as they solicit men and boys through IM and in public restrooms.
Realistically, if you're not a cop (or a kid) of some sort and there was no recording of the action, then nobody would believe you anyway. You may get an out-of-court settlement of you're lucky.
Even military secrets which violate international treaties?
And in the U.S., even Michelle Obama's favorite brand of tampon is classified Top Secret on the grounds of "national security" - you'd never know when those terrorists would infiltrate the Tampax factory and replace all the tampons with M-80's.
Exactly what I was thinking. There are already applications that use text keyboards for that purpose, but that's masochistic.
It would work if they vertically extended and color-coded(black and white as on a piano) the keys a bit as part of a laptop designed for that purpose. You'd have a 2 * 1.5 octave dual-manual with keys left over for drawbar and other functions. Maybe they could put a little mod wheel or two on the side, maybe a little ribbon controller. I'm getting a hard-on just thinking about it.
Groups of angry zealots could easily coordinate by phone, possibly with one or more persons actually following a mark around.
It's all too easy to get people riled up against a common enemy - as an example, my (conservative) hometown newspaper recently tried to convince everybody, via editorial, that the enemy were fellow Californians who were collecting unemployment checks, in a county with a 24.7% unemployment rate in a state with a unemployment rate which is 12+% and rising!
The target audience are, of course, people who still believe that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are keeping America safe from terror...but what can you do when you live in a whole city full of them and you choose to be an atheist communist homosexual?
Alternately, what about a large group of laid-off factory workers who have nothing else to do all day? It would allow them an opportunity to displace their anger upon other citizens and not on the government which caused the loss of their jobs in the first place.
Community-based "policing" is always a bad idea. It's mob rule! Neighborhood watch groups, community church groups, "not-in-my-neighborhood"-ers, will all get together and find somebody to harass. Humans are but animals, and this is the pack mentality at work. The funny thing is that these are the same hypocrites who would publicly condemn the actions of 4chan's/b/ . That style of stalking is always driven by self-righteousness and is done in a secret, Kafka-esque manner because the people who gang up have no spines individually. Being able to hide behind a camera only makes it worse. It is tacitly tolerated by U.S. law enforcement, but I have a bad feeling that this kind of crap may be the future of the idiocracy.
No, this is dangerous. Very Stasi-like. This is a disturbing trend in official and informal law-enforcement because it encourages things like community-based harassment. People will band together and participate in government-sanctioned stalking of atheists, commies, homosexuals, or whomever else they just don't like.
It is simply turning the people against each other to distract them from their discontent with their government.
Not it's not. They haven't done much worth a damn except spend their budget.
They just troll for weak-minded "anti-Americans" who (to paraphrase another slashdotter) could be convinced to rob a hotdog stand, then undercover FBI agents and overpaid snitches* develop some big scheme** and then cram it down the target's throat until the target agrees***, then they bust the target as soon as he agrees and the media makes a big circus of it telling everybody that millions of lives were saved and another 9/11 was thwarted.
* To the tune of $250,000 apiece. Think about that when you're eating ramen tonight.
** Which makes FBI better terror planners than the so-called "terrorists" themselves!
*** Or otherwise utilize entrapment and other illegal techniques. But who cares? it's Terrorists we're talking about here!
While it is probably an accident, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that this was at least partially deliberate.
Corporations and the sociopaths who run them will only become greedier and greedier, especially if left unchecked. Sony weren't punished for the rootkit fiasco and they obviously don't believe they will be punished for criminally negligent behavior such as skipping entire phases of testing and expecting their entire userbase to be unwitting beta-testers. This applies to the hardware as well as the software world, and I'll list the recent Peavey Vypyr Guitar amplifier as an example, because I bought one and taking it in to service fixed NOTHING. Posts like this, this, and this only scratch the surface.
I dealt with this kind of crap even more intimately at my last job, but I didn't mind it so much then because it paid my bills and I didn't need any of the stuff I was fixing. So the particulars of the rant may be slightly off-base, but you shouldn't be the least bit surprised that corporations would try to get away with shit like that.
You laugh, but L. Ron Hubbard has 3 books in Modern Library's top 100 reader list:
3) Battlefield Earth
9) Mission Earth
10) Fear
Anybody (myself included) who's read anything L. Ron Hubbard wrote would question the legitimacy of that list, because LRH writes like a short-bus driver who writes instruction manuals for "special" adults.
Apparently the job has alredy been delegated to the DHS/ICE who conduct clandestine international operations under the guises of thinking of the children among other things.
Based on the way the DHS conducts themselves at state and international borders inside or out of airports, giving them more ability to bully citizens is certainly a bad idea. In fact, the creation of the DHS was a bad idea. Soon agents will be receiving warrants to sieze all of your computers because they saw that you visited the pirate bay or isohunt.
Slashdot Mirror
Suburban housewives and other miscellaneous yuppies can be frightened into buying and voting for anything. From the Wikipedia article about Megan's law, shortened for clarity:
A...study by Kristen Zgoba Ph.D., Philip Witt Ph.D., Melissa Dalessandro M.S.W., and Bonita Veysey Ph.D. found that Megan's Law has no effect on community tenure (i.e., time to first re-arrest), showed no demonstrable effect in reducing sexual re-offenses, has no effect on the type of sexual re-offense or first time sexual offense (still largely child molestation/incest), and has no effect on reducing the number of victims involved in sexual offenses. Moreover costs associated with the initial implementation as well as ongoing expenditures continued to grow over time...The authors feel that given the lack of demonstrated effect of Megan's Law on sexual offenses, the growing costs may not be justifiable. Philip Witt is a psychologist and the co-principal author of the study who helped implement Megan's Law in New Jersey.[6]
Arnold Murray?
You lil' homewrecker, you!
Leopard and Snow leopard are like Metallica's Load and Re-load: you know it's gonna suck when they start running out of names. I wouldn't be surprised if they named 10.7 "Def Leopard".
The more energy we have, the cheaper transportation and food is which in turn lets people have more money for charity to help people who need food.
The more energy we have, the greedier the corporations controlling it will become. Constant rate hikes, cutting corners on infrastructure and safety, passing the costs of their own follies onto their ratepayers, creating artificial shortages a la OPEC, etc.
Your vision of a warm and fuzzy utopia will not happen until after a bloody proletarian revolt which will hopefully happen in another 10-20 years.
Right. And they are punishing her because she did what she felt was the right thing to do, which was to declare the extra income!
;)
Note to the unemployed - W2 or it didn't happen
"...I used to be disappointed that so many of the best minds in the country were being devoted to this enterprise...I mean lawyers, after all, don't produce anything...and I worry that we are devoting too many of out best minds to this enterprise...I don't have any complaint about the quality of the council, except maybe we're wasting some of our best minds"
-- Antonin Scalia, in a June interview with C-SPAN
But Murdoch's brand of news is quickly becoming more discordant with the American political environment than the others. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has always been a decent read* until Rupe got his hands on it. Now its editorial section isn't even worthy of wiping asses. I hope that more and more Americans are quickly falling out of favor with Australian-style right-wing bullshit**.
;)
* I am leftist scum.
** To their credit, FoxNews posted this article and its follow-up when no other mainstream media did. Kudos Rupe, now let's hear a little more truth and noone will get hurt
You forgot to mention an important point about Anthrax - Military personnel and contractors involved in biosecurity or deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Korea are required to get the Anthrax vaccine. It's sparked many dismissals, lawsuits, and controversies as well as some adverse effects and was widely believed to be a cause of Gulf War Syndrome.
Wiki Link.
It's NASA speak for "*sigh*, what the fuck are we even doing?"
Exactly. Juggling jobs is like juggling cops - Nobody bothers to dig deeper as long as the stories are consistent.
Too bad "social networking" is soooooo 5 years ago.
If your boy scout master or your priest propositions you for sex, what do you do? Would you tell people, or keep it under your hat?
Burn 'em at the stake, I say. There is nothing worse than a pontificating hypocrite in a position of authority, especially with regard to homosexuality - you know, the assholes who preach about "family values" and vote against equal-rights legislation as they solicit men and boys through IM and in public restrooms.
Realistically, if you're not a cop (or a kid) of some sort and there was no recording of the action, then nobody would believe you anyway. You may get an out-of-court settlement of you're lucky.
Even military secrets which violate international treaties?
And in the U.S., even Michelle Obama's favorite brand of tampon is classified Top Secret on the grounds of "national security" - you'd never know when those terrorists would infiltrate the Tampax factory and replace all the tampons with M-80's.
Exactly what I was thinking. There are already applications that use text keyboards for that purpose, but that's masochistic.
It would work if they vertically extended and color-coded(black and white as on a piano) the keys a bit as part of a laptop designed for that purpose. You'd have a 2 * 1.5 octave dual-manual with keys left over for drawbar and other functions. Maybe they could put a little mod wheel or two on the side, maybe a little ribbon controller. I'm getting a hard-on just thinking about it.
Groups of angry zealots could easily coordinate by phone, possibly with one or more persons actually following a mark around.
/b/ . That style of stalking is always driven by self-righteousness and is done in a secret, Kafka-esque manner because the people who gang up have no spines individually. Being able to hide behind a camera only makes it worse. It is tacitly tolerated by U.S. law enforcement, but I have a bad feeling that this kind of crap may be the future of the idiocracy.
It's all too easy to get people riled up against a common enemy - as an example, my (conservative) hometown newspaper recently tried to convince everybody, via editorial, that the enemy were fellow Californians who were collecting unemployment checks, in a county with a 24.7% unemployment rate in a state with a unemployment rate which is 12+% and rising!
The target audience are, of course, people who still believe that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are keeping America safe from terror...but what can you do when you live in a whole city full of them and you choose to be an atheist communist homosexual?
Alternately, what about a large group of laid-off factory workers who have nothing else to do all day? It would allow them an opportunity to displace their anger upon other citizens and not on the government which caused the loss of their jobs in the first place.
Community-based "policing" is always a bad idea. It's mob rule! Neighborhood watch groups, community church groups, "not-in-my-neighborhood"-ers, will all get together and find somebody to harass. Humans are but animals, and this is the pack mentality at work. The funny thing is that these are the same hypocrites who would publicly condemn the actions of 4chan's
The excessively self-righteous will band together and participate in government-sanctioned stalking of whomever dosen't fit their ideal.
Fixed.
No, this is dangerous. Very Stasi-like. This is a disturbing trend in official and informal law-enforcement because it encourages things like community-based harassment. People will band together and participate in government-sanctioned stalking of atheists, commies, homosexuals, or whomever else they just don't like.
It is simply turning the people against each other to distract them from their discontent with their government.
Some of us might even say that Ralph Lauren was walking a thin line between "ideal" beauty and pedophilia after seeing that awful picture.
Not it's not. They haven't done much worth a damn except spend their budget.
They just troll for weak-minded "anti-Americans" who (to paraphrase another slashdotter) could be convinced to rob a hotdog stand, then undercover FBI agents and overpaid snitches* develop some big scheme** and then cram it down the target's throat until the target agrees***, then they bust the target as soon as he agrees and the media makes a big circus of it telling everybody that millions of lives were saved and another 9/11 was thwarted.
* To the tune of $250,000 apiece. Think about that when you're eating ramen tonight.
** Which makes FBI better terror planners than the so-called "terrorists" themselves!
*** Or otherwise utilize entrapment and other illegal techniques. But who cares? it's Terrorists we're talking about here!
While it is probably an accident, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that this was at least partially deliberate.
Corporations and the sociopaths who run them will only become greedier and greedier, especially if left unchecked. Sony weren't punished for the rootkit fiasco and they obviously don't believe they will be punished for criminally negligent behavior such as skipping entire phases of testing and expecting their entire userbase to be unwitting beta-testers. This applies to the hardware as well as the software world, and I'll list the recent Peavey Vypyr Guitar amplifier as an example, because I bought one and taking it in to service fixed NOTHING. Posts like this, this, and this only scratch the surface.
I dealt with this kind of crap even more intimately at my last job, but I didn't mind it so much then because it paid my bills and I didn't need any of the stuff I was fixing. So the particulars of the rant may be slightly off-base, but you shouldn't be the least bit surprised that corporations would try to get away with shit like that.
The only thing management is good at changing are pretty colored charts.
Larceny.
You laugh, but L. Ron Hubbard has 3 books in Modern Library's top 100 reader list:
3) Battlefield Earth
9) Mission Earth
10) Fear
Anybody (myself included) who's read anything L. Ron Hubbard wrote would question the legitimacy of that list, because LRH writes like a short-bus driver who writes instruction manuals for "special" adults.
Apparently the job has alredy been delegated to the DHS/ICE who conduct clandestine international operations under the guises of thinking of the children among other things.
Recent Slashdot article somewhat related.
Based on the way the DHS conducts themselves at state and international borders inside or out of airports, giving them more ability to bully citizens is certainly a bad idea. In fact, the creation of the DHS was a bad idea. Soon agents will be receiving warrants to sieze all of your computers because they saw that you visited the pirate bay or isohunt.
I'll believe 'em after we find the WMD in Iraq. Oh, wait.