Of course, this makes Indiana the 41st state to take this interpretation of the law (it was a state supreme court ruling, not a law passing). 40 others already make it illegal to resist or interfere with a police officer even when they are doing something illegal like kicking in the door without a warrant.
I'd be at the rally in Indy next Wednesday, but the economy is so bad out here in Indiana that I can't afford to take the time off from work. Let alone for political purposes. How's that for living in a police state? Keep 'em scared enough economically, socially, and of the cops themselves to do anything about it.
Shit, this actually has me agreeing with the teabaggers out here. How bad can a law be to make me do that?
Gotta disagree with this. Netflix prices have only been going up, and it seems to be due to the cost of streaming content. I've never found the streaming selection useful and the video quality is generally just not up to par. I subscribe for access to Blu-ray and DVDs and wish they would offer a disk only plan without the streaming costs. I've actually just put my plan on hold and am thinking about canceling due to the price levels...
Save this post somewhere. In 2-5 years look back in on it and laugh that you thought paying $10-$20 for all that Netflix offers was expensive. Between the facts that Netflix is an incredible value for all the legal content you get, that on even a 1Mb/s pipe it looks great, and that in a few years we won't be able to find a deal remotely in the ballpark that we're getting now, your post will make me cry then.
True, they'll probably go out of business in many locations. But will that open the door for the small bookseller to move back in? It's now time for big retailers to adapt or die like they used to love to tell the mom and pop shops to do.
~Stop talking sense man! People might hear you and learn that they can live without the latest gadgets, or even realize that they don't need the highest levels of all services available to them. If that happens their bank accounts might fill up, their anxiety might go down, and they won't have to use shopping/services as a security blanket in their unfulfilled lives. Stop trying to undo 100 years of marketing already!~
And to whoever modded you off-topic, forget them. The hardest thing about railing against corporations which screw us: learning that it's not rape when we're helping them.
Finish reading, and start living now. Ever think that the poor people who feel that they have to go m2f are taking charge? How much must you feel that you simply are a certain way to take charge with a step like that? Go out and meet some people. I've never known a gay person who thought it was cool when they realized what was going on in their head, only people who've dealt with their situation better or worse; it's gotta be bad enough to know that large parts of society will never accept them, please don't make it worse by telling them to will themselves a way that they aren't.
Anecdote time! Just before checking slashdot today I took a second to read the fine print in my local cable company's latest ad for cable internet access. On all plans 2-year contracts are required. Period. Can't get internet otherwise through them. Oh, and they are the only cable provider in the county.
The other half of the story is this... The banks gave out loans that they knew had very little chance of ever being repaid and then sold those bad loans off to the unwary as fast as they could. Legal does not equal ethical. Remember that, and you'll know why people are so pissed at the banks. If they were in it to make an ethical buck, then they could have still made those loans, kept the risk, then re-mortgaged people who were in trouble at more favorable (to the borrower), but less profitable terms (for the owner of the loan), which would have still made the banks (less) money AND kept people in their homes. Instead, the banks chose to foreclose, as that way they could charge the people they sold the bad loans to for administering the foreclosure, not have to worry about losing the principle or interest on the loans, and leaving borrowers bankrupt and homeless. Sure, the people who took those loans shouldn't have, but if only one party, ie the banks, had done the right thing at any step of the way, everyone could have still come out of this without it having been half as bad as it's been.
That's the thing; I'm sure that there's way more than one leak in their dam. If wikileaks managed to get a hold of this information, why would anyone believe that every intelligence agency on the planet didn't already have all this information? I'm perplexed at the persecution that wikileaks has faced over this cable release as all they really did was expose the U.S. government's inability to keep classified information out of the hands of, well, anyone and everyone. I mean, the government would try to shift the focus away from their failure, but do people really not get that this info has probably been in the hands of every enemy we have for a good long time?
The system is broken. We can either fix it or try to blow smoke about the "terrorist organization" that let us all know how glaringly lax our security is. I guess now that our government is locking useful information away from every one who does need it, we know if they are concerned with keeping us safe or keeping themselves from being embarrassed.
No shit, Sherlock. Of course it'd cause them to suffer!
Did you honestly think that I felt the need to point out that people being robbed would suffer? The person doing the taking would suffer too is the point, duh.
Somalia? Exaggerate much? Or do you just not know what it's really like in a failed state? The U.S. is still (by far) the largest producer anywhere, let alone per capita. We're not quite the powerhouse that we were, but fear mongering and looking for excuses to act like uncivilized gangsters will only hasten the decline.
The ones who will suffer the least will be those with the most guns and ammunition, because they can simply take food and water from those who don't.
Seriously?
If you don't think that taking life-sustaining goods from another human would cause a person to suffer, then I pity you. The one great lesson of history is that those who take in the way that you've described (kings, despots, lunatics) wind up very unhappy, alone, and, for lack of a better descriptor, soulless. Suffering takes many more forms than hunger and thirst.
While I hate the RIAA (passionately might I add) and even more the how the US govt. has handled the prosecution of piracy, there is a very valid argument to be made that the over-all sum of pirated goods (software and music are just the start) does add up in to the hundreds of millions of dollars and Uncle Sam wants his taxes on it. In a cash strapped time like now every penny counts and national security is a money hog.
Then why are they supporting the MPAA in this instance? We're talking about the industry that used Forest Gump as a tax write-off as their accountants jiggered the numbers to make it look like they lost money on the movie. Oh, or was that only after the "donations" went out? They're the first "citizens" to protect...
Look, I don't think people should copy illegally. I've advocated again and again that if you don't like the company or product then you should just not use that product. I really don't like the counterfeit goods dealers as they hurt both the companies and the purchasers. But we have tons of laws, and only those without bucket-fulls of cash have to follow them. Someone copies 25 songs? Millions in fines. Someone fraudulently uses my credit card number (proportionately & absolutely much higher damage)? Here's a report number, give it to your credit card company and have a nice day. Some people are upset that their toys are being taken away, many more of us are upset that society has swung so far back toward having laws applied based not on fairness but on money.
Legally, you are of course correct. However, find me any person who knows all the laws the U.S.A. Please. Heck, even the people who have full, unfettered access to all legislation and case law, the Supreme Court, can't agree on interpretation of it once they look it up! It's stupid that an average person cannot hope to grasp all the laws related to running a local hardware store, let alone a website that serves to a national and international audience.
Hoax or not, this case spotlights how easily our current legal system can be used to spread FUD.
Call me paranoid, but either U.S. Customs/DHS is totally stupid, or smuggling data into the country physically is the only way to get it in without being noticed nowadays. Has anyone looked into the possibility that Echelon and it's progeny might be active after all? Maybe the NSA can, to a high degree of confidence, wade though all online data traveling across the U.S. backbones. If they can't, and it's really that easy to get data into the U.S. via the 'Net, then the searches of the laptops are either A) only a good way to catch the two people too dumb not to keep their drug kingpin boss's accounts in quickbooks, or B) so incredibly daft that it's mind-blowing. Or, to take it to the next level of crazy paranoia, they want us to think that we have to send data over the interwebs to get it "past customs" so they can slurp it all up into their giant multi-petaflop interweb analyzer.
I'd love to see statistics on how many prosecutions have resulted from border-laptop-searches. Unfortunately, I think the dumb answer is probably correct.
Well, there's the bitch of it. Based on our own western rules Hamas is a legitimate government because they were elected democratically. Now, that's not to say that I agree with them or their methods, but it certainly reveals a flaw in our own rhetoric. It's a dirty and nasty thing, but sometimes democracy is not compatible with our other stated goals of human rights and security. Democracy gives people what the (sometimes slim) majority (of voters) wants; it does not give people neccesarily what they need, or what makes them good neighbors (or even human beings).
The format used to encode a data stream isn't copyrightable? I'll easily grant you that user-generated data wouldn't be copyrightable by MS (eg the image of you jumping around), but the encoded stream would be if it used a proprietary, closed format, wouldn't it? If so, it' might break the US's DMCA just to try to read the data stream, no?
LOL. I remember this argument in college. And you are correct, everybody makes their own meaning (more so on post modern and later literature, but that's the point of that genre, no?). So? Did you have a bad experience with a professor who got upset that you didn't see the same meaning?
I was actually part of the very experiment you described (again, in college). We found that interpretations varied widely. It was both frustrating and fun. It taught most of us that even when given the same input, people would come to hugely different (and often equally logically valid) conclusions. One reason for this is past experiences. Knowing all this helps me all the time; how else can you explain logical, reasoned analysis of the same input leading to both Smart Conservatives and Smart Liberals? Both have equally defensible points logically, but their starting interpretations of the data are so divergent that they're unlikely to agree. If you can find the divergences, one can better figure out how to re-frame the starting arguments to bring them both to a more agreeable position.
Example: Randall Munroe. I interpret that comic as a dig against literary analysis, but not a definitive one. Randall appears to see everything in life through the lens of mathematics, making Deconstructionism, a highly interpretive practice which is heavily influenced by Philosophy, as unintelligible to him as mathematics above 7 dimensions was to me. However, I can appreciate both his frustration and see how he can be just like the nincompoops who think that since they don't understand the equations behind how quantum foam behaves near an event horizon that it's both useless and meaningless (just in reverse). We all do it sometimes, and it doesn't make me dislike XKCD (it is the only comic I read religiously), but it seems we have different takes on this strip.
You, sir, have a good question. Literary analysis is, by definition, the analysis of literature, so it's taught on literature. I was unclear in saying that it's used all over. The skills used in literary analysis are used all the time. It's our ability to interpret, analogize, and make inferences about meaning that make communication richer than simple communication of action. Listen to or read Carl Sagan's works for a great example of how very intricate and exciting scientific ideas can be communicated in a rich and interesting way that would not be possible without skills which are often described as "interdisciplinary". My overarching message was just that all studies are important; yes, to varying degrees to different people due to both their work and aptitude. But if we completely ignore any subject we do so at our own peril.
You're obviously correct, it didn't help you; but that's probably more to do with you being an asshat than any lack of value of a liberal arts education. For the educable among us, well, we take something from everything. Today I learned that some douchebags think that their experiences apply to everybody, and that if it's not in their experience, it can't exist.
For those who missed the joke, parent was being disingenuous, which in this case is funny as that's the crime the article's author was committing. We all use literary analysis every time we read a news site, watch a movie, or myriad other situations every day; but just like with math we're not tested on it by writing an essay or an equation. Doesn't mean we don't need both. (On a side note, this use of saying the opposite of what you actually mean is true irony.)
Unless I'm reading too much into the parent post, then he's just an asshat;)
Slashdot Mirror
Nail head, direct hit.
Of course, this makes Indiana the 41st state to take this interpretation of the law (it was a state supreme court ruling, not a law passing). 40 others already make it illegal to resist or interfere with a police officer even when they are doing something illegal like kicking in the door without a warrant.
I'd be at the rally in Indy next Wednesday, but the economy is so bad out here in Indiana that I can't afford to take the time off from work. Let alone for political purposes. How's that for living in a police state? Keep 'em scared enough economically, socially, and of the cops themselves to do anything about it.
Shit, this actually has me agreeing with the teabaggers out here. How bad can a law be to make me do that?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chibrknews-ind-ruling-on-illegal-police-entry-sparks-protest-20110519,0,4882870.story
Save this post somewhere. In 2-5 years look back in on it and laugh that you thought paying $10-$20 for all that Netflix offers was expensive. Between the facts that Netflix is an incredible value for all the legal content you get, that on even a 1Mb/s pipe it looks great, and that in a few years we won't be able to find a deal remotely in the ballpark that we're getting now, your post will make me cry then.
Thank you sir.
True, they'll probably go out of business in many locations. But will that open the door for the small bookseller to move back in? It's now time for big retailers to adapt or die like they used to love to tell the mom and pop shops to do.
~Stop talking sense man! People might hear you and learn that they can live without the latest gadgets, or even realize that they don't need the highest levels of all services available to them. If that happens their bank accounts might fill up, their anxiety might go down, and they won't have to use shopping/services as a security blanket in their unfulfilled lives. Stop trying to undo 100 years of marketing already!~
And to whoever modded you off-topic, forget them. The hardest thing about railing against corporations which screw us: learning that it's not rape when we're helping them.
Finish reading, and start living now. Ever think that the poor people who feel that they have to go m2f are taking charge? How much must you feel that you simply are a certain way to take charge with a step like that? Go out and meet some people. I've never known a gay person who thought it was cool when they realized what was going on in their head, only people who've dealt with their situation better or worse; it's gotta be bad enough to know that large parts of society will never accept them, please don't make it worse by telling them to will themselves a way that they aren't.
Isn't that the point of all this? That it's the rare exception that tracking is useful to anybody?
Anecdote time! Just before checking slashdot today I took a second to read the fine print in my local cable company's latest ad for cable internet access. On all plans 2-year contracts are required. Period. Can't get internet otherwise through them. Oh, and they are the only cable provider in the county.
The other half of the story is this... The banks gave out loans that they knew had very little chance of ever being repaid and then sold those bad loans off to the unwary as fast as they could. Legal does not equal ethical. Remember that, and you'll know why people are so pissed at the banks. If they were in it to make an ethical buck, then they could have still made those loans, kept the risk, then re-mortgaged people who were in trouble at more favorable (to the borrower), but less profitable terms (for the owner of the loan), which would have still made the banks (less) money AND kept people in their homes. Instead, the banks chose to foreclose, as that way they could charge the people they sold the bad loans to for administering the foreclosure, not have to worry about losing the principle or interest on the loans, and leaving borrowers bankrupt and homeless. Sure, the people who took those loans shouldn't have, but if only one party, ie the banks, had done the right thing at any step of the way, everyone could have still come out of this without it having been half as bad as it's been.
That's the thing; I'm sure that there's way more than one leak in their dam. If wikileaks managed to get a hold of this information, why would anyone believe that every intelligence agency on the planet didn't already have all this information? I'm perplexed at the persecution that wikileaks has faced over this cable release as all they really did was expose the U.S. government's inability to keep classified information out of the hands of, well, anyone and everyone. I mean, the government would try to shift the focus away from their failure, but do people really not get that this info has probably been in the hands of every enemy we have for a good long time?
The system is broken. We can either fix it or try to blow smoke about the "terrorist organization" that let us all know how glaringly lax our security is. I guess now that our government is locking useful information away from every one who does need it, we know if they are concerned with keeping us safe or keeping themselves from being embarrassed.
Did you honestly think that I felt the need to point out that people being robbed would suffer? The person doing the taking would suffer too is the point, duh.
Somalia? Exaggerate much? Or do you just not know what it's really like in a failed state? The U.S. is still (by far) the largest producer anywhere, let alone per capita. We're not quite the powerhouse that we were, but fear mongering and looking for excuses to act like uncivilized gangsters will only hasten the decline.
Seriously?
If you don't think that taking life-sustaining goods from another human would cause a person to suffer, then I pity you. The one great lesson of history is that those who take in the way that you've described (kings, despots, lunatics) wind up very unhappy, alone, and, for lack of a better descriptor, soulless. Suffering takes many more forms than hunger and thirst.
Then why are they supporting the MPAA in this instance? We're talking about the industry that used Forest Gump as a tax write-off as their accountants jiggered the numbers to make it look like they lost money on the movie. Oh, or was that only after the "donations" went out? They're the first "citizens" to protect...
Look, I don't think people should copy illegally. I've advocated again and again that if you don't like the company or product then you should just not use that product. I really don't like the counterfeit goods dealers as they hurt both the companies and the purchasers. But we have tons of laws, and only those without bucket-fulls of cash have to follow them. Someone copies 25 songs? Millions in fines. Someone fraudulently uses my credit card number (proportionately & absolutely much higher damage)? Here's a report number, give it to your credit card company and have a nice day. Some people are upset that their toys are being taken away, many more of us are upset that society has swung so far back toward having laws applied based not on fairness but on money.
Legally, you are of course correct. However, find me any person who knows all the laws the U.S.A. Please. Heck, even the people who have full, unfettered access to all legislation and case law, the Supreme Court, can't agree on interpretation of it once they look it up! It's stupid that an average person cannot hope to grasp all the laws related to running a local hardware store, let alone a website that serves to a national and international audience.
Hoax or not, this case spotlights how easily our current legal system can be used to spread FUD.
I don't have mod points today, but you'd get one if I did. Great argument against one-size-fits-all messaging.
Call me paranoid, but either U.S. Customs/DHS is totally stupid, or smuggling data into the country physically is the only way to get it in without being noticed nowadays. Has anyone looked into the possibility that Echelon and it's progeny might be active after all? Maybe the NSA can, to a high degree of confidence, wade though all online data traveling across the U.S. backbones. If they can't, and it's really that easy to get data into the U.S. via the 'Net, then the searches of the laptops are either A) only a good way to catch the two people too dumb not to keep their drug kingpin boss's accounts in quickbooks, or B) so incredibly daft that it's mind-blowing. Or, to take it to the next level of crazy paranoia, they want us to think that we have to send data over the interwebs to get it "past customs" so they can slurp it all up into their giant multi-petaflop interweb analyzer.
I'd love to see statistics on how many prosecutions have resulted from border-laptop-searches. Unfortunately, I think the dumb answer is probably correct.
Well, there's the bitch of it. Based on our own western rules Hamas is a legitimate government because they were elected democratically. Now, that's not to say that I agree with them or their methods, but it certainly reveals a flaw in our own rhetoric. It's a dirty and nasty thing, but sometimes democracy is not compatible with our other stated goals of human rights and security. Democracy gives people what the (sometimes slim) majority (of voters) wants; it does not give people neccesarily what they need, or what makes them good neighbors (or even human beings).
D'oh! Thanks for the reminder!
The format used to encode a data stream isn't copyrightable? I'll easily grant you that user-generated data wouldn't be copyrightable by MS (eg the image of you jumping around), but the encoded stream would be if it used a proprietary, closed format, wouldn't it? If so, it' might break the US's DMCA just to try to read the data stream, no?
LOL. I remember this argument in college. And you are correct, everybody makes their own meaning (more so on post modern and later literature, but that's the point of that genre, no?). So? Did you have a bad experience with a professor who got upset that you didn't see the same meaning?
I was actually part of the very experiment you described (again, in college). We found that interpretations varied widely. It was both frustrating and fun. It taught most of us that even when given the same input, people would come to hugely different (and often equally logically valid) conclusions. One reason for this is past experiences. Knowing all this helps me all the time; how else can you explain logical, reasoned analysis of the same input leading to both Smart Conservatives and Smart Liberals? Both have equally defensible points logically, but their starting interpretations of the data are so divergent that they're unlikely to agree. If you can find the divergences, one can better figure out how to re-frame the starting arguments to bring them both to a more agreeable position.
Example: Randall Munroe. I interpret that comic as a dig against literary analysis, but not a definitive one. Randall appears to see everything in life through the lens of mathematics, making Deconstructionism, a highly interpretive practice which is heavily influenced by Philosophy, as unintelligible to him as mathematics above 7 dimensions was to me. However, I can appreciate both his frustration and see how he can be just like the nincompoops who think that since they don't understand the equations behind how quantum foam behaves near an event horizon that it's both useless and meaningless (just in reverse). We all do it sometimes, and it doesn't make me dislike XKCD (it is the only comic I read religiously), but it seems we have different takes on this strip.
You, sir, have a good question. Literary analysis is, by definition, the analysis of literature, so it's taught on literature. I was unclear in saying that it's used all over. The skills used in literary analysis are used all the time. It's our ability to interpret, analogize, and make inferences about meaning that make communication richer than simple communication of action. Listen to or read Carl Sagan's works for a great example of how very intricate and exciting scientific ideas can be communicated in a rich and interesting way that would not be possible without skills which are often described as "interdisciplinary". My overarching message was just that all studies are important; yes, to varying degrees to different people due to both their work and aptitude. But if we completely ignore any subject we do so at our own peril.
You're obviously correct, it didn't help you; but that's probably more to do with you being an asshat than any lack of value of a liberal arts education. For the educable among us, well, we take something from everything. Today I learned that some douchebags think that their experiences apply to everybody, and that if it's not in their experience, it can't exist.
For those who missed the joke, parent was being disingenuous, which in this case is funny as that's the crime the article's author was committing. We all use literary analysis every time we read a news site, watch a movie, or myriad other situations every day; but just like with math we're not tested on it by writing an essay or an equation. Doesn't mean we don't need both. (On a side note, this use of saying the opposite of what you actually mean is true irony.)
Unless I'm reading too much into the parent post, then he's just an asshat ;)
Why'd you post the most insightful comment of this thread AC? I'll bet you know better, but the environment around here may have you skittish. ;)