If I had mod points and hadn't already posted, I would mod this up to 5. The Justine Sacco case is particularly heartbreaking. The only real crime she's guilty of is not realizing that a P.R. person needs to be emotionless and humorless, along with other people in high-profile positions of corporations.
An interesting part of the Curt Schilling case and the whole Gamergate thing is that it fully democratizes who is targeted by online mobs. You don't need to be a person of great standing to attract interest of a mob now.
And yet, if you asked people how best to allocate police resources, do you think "sitting in speed traps" would be at the top of anyone's list?
Maybe not speed traps, but most people would say that local policing in the community is far more important than a local cop in Chattanooga, Tennessee trying and failing to do something because someone in Sioux City, Iowa said something mean on the Internet. Especially once you cross state lines, police interest in the matter (and ability to do anything about it) will greatly wane.
It's not this semi-non-existent alternative reality that "doesn't count."
It's a Lord of the Flies environment. It shows what people will do to each other if they think there are no rules that will be applied to them and they can do whatever they want without consequence. Given that, I'm amazed how well the Internet works. Maybe it's a reason to be optimist after all, that it's still just a small number of vocal people who act out of misanthropy.
But while I have little sympathy for these dickheads, and I completely understand his motivation, I don't like this eye-for-an-eye response. There is no proportionality when something like this goes viral.
Before the Internet, if you made those sorts of threats to a teenage girl, you would have gotten the shit kicked out of you, because you had to actually face people in your local community with the public shame your actions brought. But now, millions of people are more closely connected than ever before and the possibilities for consequence-free trolling are greater. Schilling was bringing back a bit of the public shame aspect, the notion that maybe people (or at least, not as many) would make those attacks if people knew it was them.
Should these guys have their lives ruined over this? Should they be subjected to the same bullying magnified through the lens of a million internet users out for "justice"? I think not. If one of these idiots kills himself over the response Curt will have effectively sentenced him to death.
If you want to make rapey threats to a teenage girl, then you had better be willing to stand by those statements. Publicly. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
If one of those idiots kills himself from the embarrassment, there is one, and exactly one person to blame: that idiot making the threat in the first place.
SJW used to be a great term. It was descriptive and just denigrating enough to show how SJW actions were far more offensive than the imagined-or-not offense of their target.
Then Gamergate happened and "SJW" got hijacked to the point where it's useless as a term, and says as much about the people using it as it does the people it's being applied to.
If police actually investigated crime that is important to citizens, rather than wasting their time going after drug users and speed limit violations, vigilante, responses would be less attractive
Speed limit violations are easy, low-hanging fruit compared to the confusing morass of online investigations. You think the standard beat cop would make a good online detective?
Not to mention, speed limit violations involve crimes that may be physically dangerous (as opposed to "someone said something on the Internet"), are actually within jurisdiction of police departments, and have the added benefit of bringing money into the police department.
You do realize that the ISIS uprising is a direct consequence of pulling out too early after the second Iraqi war, don't you?
How long were we supposed to stay? We had already been there for 10 years. Do we stay and send our soldiers to die from IEDs for... 20 years? 25? 30? What is the cut-off?
When will we admit that maybe the Middle East has to solve their own problems, and that peace can't be militarily imposed upon them?
The problem seems to be with Greek society, specifically the corruption that has become a matter of course there. I was a bit sad that "austerity" did nothing to address one of the bigger issues: tax evasion.
Huh? The Iranian dictator was put in place by the US. Cozening up shouldn't be needed unless they screwed up majorly and put a psychopath in charge as usual.
I... what?
The Iranian people once looked up to western democracies, removed their dictator and got a democracy. When their elected leader started talking about nationalizing the oil (As a way to build a welfare society without having extreme taxes.) CIA decided that it was against the interest of the US and helped with reinstating the dictatorship.
Are you confusing Iran with Iraq or something? The current leadership in Iran has been in place since 1979.
It's not an order, it's a treaty, or at least an agreement there. You need to two to tango there, and Iraq's leadership insisted on one of two outcomes: total withdrawal by the previously agreed-upon date, or subjecting American troops to foreign laws and trials.
Our partner in the government from 2006 to 2014, al-Maliki, is maybe the only Iraqi leader I can think of who was worse for his country than Saddam Hussein. Saddam's hideous policies were certainly barbaric against his own people, but at least he was a strong enough leader that he could suppress rebellion without them coalescing into groups like ISIS. Maliki was a Shia who saw no problem with brutalizing the Sunni majority, because apparently fucking Shia and Sunni can never get along, and he's one of the few in power who was happy to really twist the screws. However, he was no where near the sort of strongman dictator that you would need to be to maintain power, so his policies directly fed into the creation of ISIS. Fuck that guy.
Health insurance. I'm paying considerably MORE for my health insurance than I did in years past.
If Obamacare had never passed, would you be paying considerably MORE for your health insurance now than you did in years past? Yes, yes you would, because they insurers raise rates sky-high because they can. The law gives them a great deflection tool, though, a way for the insurers to try to claim that they wouldn't have raised rates if that law hadn't forced them to. What a joke.
Queer people marry? Nope. It doesn't happen. You can have a legal fiction built in the image of marriage, but queers can't marry. And - you're going to give CREDIT TO OBAMA FOR THAT???? Utter nonsense. Activist judges around the nation deserve the blame for that. They have been moving forward with this agenda for the past twenty years.
Depending on the state, some gay people can marry. I certainly did. But you're right, Obama deserves credit merely for going with the flow. Once numerous states allowed gay marriage, he simply said the feds would recognize it if the states allowed it. But that's probably the way it should be, with individual states deciding it's time, and the feds taking their direction from then. That sort of thing usually works better than a top-down imposition of doctrine, federal-to-state.
Activist judges around the nation deserve the blame for that. They have been moving forward with this agenda for the past twenty years
"Activist judges" is usually code for "they issued a decision based on law rather than my personal moral/religious beliefs, so I don't like that." In most cases, anti-gay-marriage laws ran afoul of the states' own constitutions.
Yes, they are identical
They're identical.... in different ways. Yes, those sound like weasel words, but it means that both parties will have a "my way or the highway" attitude, coming up with their own vision and agenda of The Way Things Ought to Be, with that being strictly imposed. But the differences in those agendas... man, the differences mean the world to many.
1) If you didn't have "download all purchases automatically" checked (not checked by default), then it didn't happen
I want my phone to download MY purchases automatically. What this stunt did is it reduced the value of that option. What should have been put in place was a free voucher for U2 on iTunes. But then, the album wouldn't have found its way onto everyone's phone, reducing its value as an advertisement. That's what spam marketers found out long ago -- it's fine to push their spam to 95% percent of the people who didn't want it as long as they can get a payoff from that 5%. The 5% may like the product being sold, the annoyance from the others is worth it to the person trying to push his product. Not so much for the other 95% though.
They could have sent everyone an email with a promo code, but, honestly, lots of people who would have wanted it but weren't that tech-savy or busy during the window would have missed out. Lots of consideration was given to be less greedy and more generous to EXISTING customers.
And you prove my point above. Yes, the incredible generosity Apple showed using my phone as an advertising platform. Boy, I should just be so thankful that they're pushing that to my phone.
2) The spirit was truly good.
I don't give a shit. That's not even the point.
Though, airing Firefly out of order may have caused it to get cancelled, it didn't lower the fanbase just because Fox doesn't know how to count
I really enjoyed Firefly. Sad it got cancelled. Have mixed feelings about how the film wrapped things up. However, I don't think airing it out of order killed it. I think fans like to tell themselves that so they could blame "dumb executives" rather than the series itself, which was expensive, quirky, and just not mainstream enough to get the sort of audience for it to pay for itself.
It depends - is it the sound of Beiber choking to death on a ham sandwich? (RIP Mama Cass, yes, I know the ham sandwich is an urban legend, but the media never let the facts get in the way of a good story:-)
If Mama Cass has just split that sandwich with Karen Carpenter, they both could be alive today.
Good heavens, I knew that Keanu was sad, but I didn't realize that the sandwich incident was a suicide attempt.
Let us say that if your patent suit has the sole purpose of stopping legitimate competition in spite of the fact you are using patents in a trollish manner, and are being a patent troll. If you offer no services or products then all you are is a patent troll.
The -entire- point of a patent is to stop (or otherwise receive compensation for) "legitimate competition." A patent means "I invented this, only I can use it or lease/sell it."
And what about Samsung? They have filed retaliatory Patent suits against Apple, and they aren't a member of Rockstar.
The patent system is the cold war. Most of the time, large companies have a patent war chest potent enough to discourage patent lawsuits. No one wants mutually-assured destruction. The ones who get screwed are the smaller companies (Latin America/Eastern Europe) who don't have a war chest they can use to fend off the bigger companies. So they get pushed around a lot. The exception would be the patent trolls. Like a terrorist cell that just got their hands on a nuke, the patent troll doesn't have anything other than the patent, so they don't particularly care about retaliation.
Slashdot Mirror
Technical and social advance, not deliberately holding countries back because they're seen by the World Policemen as too primitive to handle whatever
The folks in ISIS are too primative to handle whatever. Their descendants may not be. But we're absolutely right to denigrate primitive cultures.
Osama Bin Laden didn't blow up the WTC. IF you believe the official reports it was a bunch of Saudi's nationals ...
... organized by, trained by, and paid by Osama bin Laden.
But you're right that Saudi Arabia is not our friend.
Glad to see a mod on her toes in modding thearent trol!
I would have modded it -1, Spelling, almost incoherent.
Hey buddy, you're starting to sound as dumb as apk. Don't go down that road, 'k?
Let's take for example this article [shaktivahini.org] which claims a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes
That poor woman...
If I had mod points and hadn't already posted, I would mod this up to 5. The Justine Sacco case is particularly heartbreaking. The only real crime she's guilty of is not realizing that a P.R. person needs to be emotionless and humorless, along with other people in high-profile positions of corporations.
An interesting part of the Curt Schilling case and the whole Gamergate thing is that it fully democratizes who is targeted by online mobs. You don't need to be a person of great standing to attract interest of a mob now.
In this case you have people literally flying around on metaphorical brooms on Twitter
I... this is hurting my brain.
And yet, if you asked people how best to allocate police resources, do you think "sitting in speed traps" would be at the top of anyone's list?
Maybe not speed traps, but most people would say that local policing in the community is far more important than a local cop in Chattanooga, Tennessee trying and failing to do something because someone in Sioux City, Iowa said something mean on the Internet. Especially once you cross state lines, police interest in the matter (and ability to do anything about it) will greatly wane.
Because the internet is real life.
It's not this semi-non-existent alternative reality that "doesn't count."
It's a Lord of the Flies environment. It shows what people will do to each other if they think there are no rules that will be applied to them and they can do whatever they want without consequence. Given that, I'm amazed how well the Internet works. Maybe it's a reason to be optimist after all, that it's still just a small number of vocal people who act out of misanthropy.
But while I have little sympathy for these dickheads, and I completely understand his motivation, I don't like this eye-for-an-eye response. There is no proportionality when something like this goes viral.
Before the Internet, if you made those sorts of threats to a teenage girl, you would have gotten the shit kicked out of you, because you had to actually face people in your local community with the public shame your actions brought. But now, millions of people are more closely connected than ever before and the possibilities for consequence-free trolling are greater. Schilling was bringing back a bit of the public shame aspect, the notion that maybe people (or at least, not as many) would make those attacks if people knew it was them.
Should these guys have their lives ruined over this? Should they be subjected to the same bullying magnified through the lens of a million internet users out for "justice"? I think not. If one of these idiots kills himself over the response Curt will have effectively sentenced him to death.
If you want to make rapey threats to a teenage girl, then you had better be willing to stand by those statements. Publicly. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
If one of those idiots kills himself from the embarrassment, there is one, and exactly one person to blame: that idiot making the threat in the first place.
SJW used to be a great term. It was descriptive and just denigrating enough to show how SJW actions were far more offensive than the imagined-or-not offense of their target.
Then Gamergate happened and "SJW" got hijacked to the point where it's useless as a term, and says as much about the people using it as it does the people it's being applied to.
If police actually investigated crime that is important to citizens, rather than wasting their time going after drug users and speed limit violations, vigilante, responses would be less attractive
Speed limit violations are easy, low-hanging fruit compared to the confusing morass of online investigations. You think the standard beat cop would make a good online detective?
Not to mention, speed limit violations involve crimes that may be physically dangerous (as opposed to "someone said something on the Internet"), are actually within jurisdiction of police departments, and have the added benefit of bringing money into the police department.
You do realize that the ISIS uprising is a direct consequence of pulling out too early after the second Iraqi war, don't you?
How long were we supposed to stay? We had already been there for 10 years. Do we stay and send our soldiers to die from IEDs for ... 20 years? 25? 30? What is the cut-off?
When will we admit that maybe the Middle East has to solve their own problems, and that peace can't be militarily imposed upon them?
The problem seems to be with Greek society, specifically the corruption that has become a matter of course there. I was a bit sad that "austerity" did nothing to address one of the bigger issues: tax evasion.
Huh? The Iranian dictator was put in place by the US. Cozening up shouldn't be needed unless they screwed up majorly and put a psychopath in charge as usual.
I... what?
The Iranian people once looked up to western democracies, removed their dictator and got a democracy. When their elected leader started talking about nationalizing the oil (As a way to build a welfare society without having extreme taxes.) CIA decided that it was against the interest of the US and helped with reinstating the dictatorship.
Are you confusing Iran with Iraq or something? The current leadership in Iran has been in place since 1979.
You guys are funny.
Someone, spare some +1 Funny mods for this shit!
Fortunately we live in real life, not the world of The Ring.
Obama can't countermand the order?
It's not an order, it's a treaty, or at least an agreement there. You need to two to tango there, and Iraq's leadership insisted on one of two outcomes: total withdrawal by the previously agreed-upon date, or subjecting American troops to foreign laws and trials.
Our partner in the government from 2006 to 2014, al-Maliki, is maybe the only Iraqi leader I can think of who was worse for his country than Saddam Hussein. Saddam's hideous policies were certainly barbaric against his own people, but at least he was a strong enough leader that he could suppress rebellion without them coalescing into groups like ISIS. Maliki was a Shia who saw no problem with brutalizing the Sunni majority, because apparently fucking Shia and Sunni can never get along, and he's one of the few in power who was happy to really twist the screws. However, he was no where near the sort of strongman dictator that you would need to be to maintain power, so his policies directly fed into the creation of ISIS. Fuck that guy.
Ah, but you don't like the fact that the law was not from Clinton, you just want him to own it and ignore the whole story.
The President signs in or refuses to sign in laws. He owns it as much as any legislator.
Health insurance. I'm paying considerably MORE for my health insurance than I did in years past.
If Obamacare had never passed, would you be paying considerably MORE for your health insurance now than you did in years past? Yes, yes you would, because they insurers raise rates sky-high because they can. The law gives them a great deflection tool, though, a way for the insurers to try to claim that they wouldn't have raised rates if that law hadn't forced them to. What a joke.
Queer people marry? Nope. It doesn't happen. You can have a legal fiction built in the image of marriage, but queers can't marry. And - you're going to give CREDIT TO OBAMA FOR THAT???? Utter nonsense. Activist judges around the nation deserve the blame for that. They have been moving forward with this agenda for the past twenty years.
Depending on the state, some gay people can marry. I certainly did. But you're right, Obama deserves credit merely for going with the flow. Once numerous states allowed gay marriage, he simply said the feds would recognize it if the states allowed it. But that's probably the way it should be, with individual states deciding it's time, and the feds taking their direction from then. That sort of thing usually works better than a top-down imposition of doctrine, federal-to-state.
Activist judges around the nation deserve the blame for that. They have been moving forward with this agenda for the past twenty years
"Activist judges" is usually code for "they issued a decision based on law rather than my personal moral/religious beliefs, so I don't like that." In most cases, anti-gay-marriage laws ran afoul of the states' own constitutions.
Yes, they are identical
They're identical.... in different ways. Yes, those sound like weasel words, but it means that both parties will have a "my way or the highway" attitude, coming up with their own vision and agenda of The Way Things Ought to Be, with that being strictly imposed. But the differences in those agendas... man, the differences mean the world to many.
You mean like electing a new party every few years to 'punish' the old one?
If only it was actually a new party..
1) If you didn't have "download all purchases automatically" checked (not checked by default), then it didn't happen
I want my phone to download MY purchases automatically. What this stunt did is it reduced the value of that option. What should have been put in place was a free voucher for U2 on iTunes. But then, the album wouldn't have found its way onto everyone's phone, reducing its value as an advertisement. That's what spam marketers found out long ago -- it's fine to push their spam to 95% percent of the people who didn't want it as long as they can get a payoff from that 5%. The 5% may like the product being sold, the annoyance from the others is worth it to the person trying to push his product. Not so much for the other 95% though.
They could have sent everyone an email with a promo code, but, honestly, lots of people who would have wanted it but weren't that tech-savy or busy during the window would have missed out. Lots of consideration was given to be less greedy and more generous to EXISTING customers.
And you prove my point above. Yes, the incredible generosity Apple showed using my phone as an advertising platform. Boy, I should just be so thankful that they're pushing that to my phone.
2) The spirit was truly good.
I don't give a shit. That's not even the point.
Though, airing Firefly out of order may have caused it to get cancelled, it didn't lower the fanbase just because Fox doesn't know how to count
I really enjoyed Firefly. Sad it got cancelled. Have mixed feelings about how the film wrapped things up. However, I don't think airing it out of order killed it. I think fans like to tell themselves that so they could blame "dumb executives" rather than the series itself, which was expensive, quirky, and just not mainstream enough to get the sort of audience for it to pay for itself.
It depends - is it the sound of Beiber choking to death on a ham sandwich? (RIP Mama Cass, yes, I know the ham sandwich is an urban legend, but the media never let the facts get in the way of a good story :-)
If Mama Cass has just split that sandwich with Karen Carpenter, they both could be alive today.
Good heavens, I knew that Keanu was sad, but I didn't realize that the sandwich incident was a suicide attempt.
Let us say that if your patent suit has the sole purpose of stopping legitimate competition in spite of the fact you are using patents in a trollish manner, and are being a patent troll. If you offer no services or products then all you are is a patent troll.
The -entire- point of a patent is to stop (or otherwise receive compensation for) "legitimate competition." A patent means "I invented this, only I can use it or lease/sell it."
And what about Samsung? They have filed retaliatory Patent suits against Apple, and they aren't a member of Rockstar.
The patent system is the cold war. Most of the time, large companies have a patent war chest potent enough to discourage patent lawsuits. No one wants mutually-assured destruction. The ones who get screwed are the smaller companies (Latin America/Eastern Europe) who don't have a war chest they can use to fend off the bigger companies. So they get pushed around a lot. The exception would be the patent trolls. Like a terrorist cell that just got their hands on a nuke, the patent troll doesn't have anything other than the patent, so they don't particularly care about retaliation.