Christians are being blamed because it is Biblical Christianity that supports "Zionism". Perhaps you haven't heard of the go to Bible verse: "I will bless those that bless thee and curse those who curse thee" (Genesis 12:3)? Most evangelical Christians I know are die hard supporters of Israel no matter what.
If you think that the trade with Native Americans wasn't coerced or anything other than the product of ignorance, I have a bridge to sell you. To oversimplify, I will quote from Corky and the Juice Pigs' "Americans":
Hey you, Indian, here's a bunch of glass beads, gimme all your land!
No.
I got a great big gun here...
Nice beads!
And as for age of consent, in the first place implicit in the concept is that there are persons who by nature of immaturity are unable to act wisely as agents for themselves. As a parent I know this is true of children, and as an adult who like all adults was once a child I know that for almost everybody this phase comes to an end. Treating people like children who are not is the very definition of paternalization. I do not want a society that treats everybody like children to be condescended to.
In the second place, there are exceptions in both directions in these systems. For children there is the status of emancipated minor, though the sort of hardships that must be endured before such status is granted is not to be envied. For adults who are mentally children, they frequently have legal guardians their entire lives if they are not institutionalized.
So yes, I admit that some persons are by age or by disability unable to make decisions for themselves. I do not agree that this should be true of more people just so somebody can have the power trip of deciding for others what will make them happy.
This is the second time somebody has said that this necessarily leads to selling children into slavery. Its so distorted and disingenuous I can't imagine where you get off calling me a terrible person. Selling children into slavery implies involuntary actors, whether they be de facto or de jure, and so are excluded from possible scenarios of voluntary acts as a class. It's quite ludicrous, but you are so desperate to defend your mindset that there is no emotional appeal you won't sink to using, even if it is demonstrably inapplicable. You just hope people will be so blinded by a 'think of the children' argument that they won't realize you are using this specter to try to deprive people of choices just because you personally think the choices are bad.
In a way you are correct, I 'advocate pointless suffering' where people choose pointless suffering. For example I think being a monk is 'pointless suffering', but I don't think that my opinion of somebody else's lifestyle should be forced on them. If somebody wants to be a monk, it's not my right to stop them, nor is it society's right just because a lot of people might agree that it's a stupid lifestyle. Each person's life choices should not be at the whim of another's tyranny, whether that be the tyranny of a dictator or of the majority.
Each individual needs to be the final arbiter of their own happiness. You have no authority to decide for others what constitutes suffering for them against their own wishes. That will ultimately lead to far more individual suffering than it will prevent.
Acceptance is always optional, or the contract is invalid on its face. If somebody is aiming a gun at a person and says 'sign this contract or I will kill you' then the contract is not legally binding. But of course when you say 'not optional' you mean 'because they need it!' Need is not coercion. So yes, you are not entitled to terms that are perfect for you in every way. If you want something from somebody, you play by their rules, except where otherwise prohibited by law (discrimination against protected classes, etc.).
And yes, it is an entitlement mindset to think that corporations who have interests in the political and economic climate that they must operate in should be censored by the government. Money is speech, that is more than just a principle, it is a precedent established by more than one Supreme Court decision. The way that lobbying works could use some reform, but nothing is worth censorship. Businesses should be as free to have political say as any other person or organization. In the end everybody still has one vote, regardless of who they work for.
It is not involuntary just because it is not achievable by other means. By your logic I *must* pull off an enormous robbery so that I can afford a new Lambourghini. It isn't voluntary for me because I have no other way of doing it. Nonsense, I can just not do it. That jackass who sold a kidney for ipad could have just realized he didn't really need the ipad. That's the whole point 'voluntary'.
I also find it highly amusing that while trying to spin my comment as US-centric you completely ignore the fact that almost every nation has some form of age of consent legislation. That the ages involved are different from ours is immaterial, and I for one largely respect the autonomy and sovereignty of other societies to make those decisions for themselves. In the end it doesn't change the fact that we are still talking about scenarios in which all parties can and do consent.
That is obviously not a voluntary arrangement for all parties so it makes for a pretty poor strawman argument. I don't see anybody advocating for arrangements which are involuntary either on their face or by way of age of consent laws.
Ipse dixit, eh? Who exactly died and made you king? If their privacy is, for whatever reason, worth more than their labor, who are you to say that they should not able to use this value about themselves?
This is just like the people who argue against legal prostitution. They assume that it is somehow intrinsically harmful and debasing and that nobody actually wants to do it, or if they do it must be because they have problems, because these people who lobby against it and generally have little to no first hand knowledge of the practice or its practitioners know better than they do what they should want and why.
People should be allowed to decide for themselves what they want to do. Get out of their business and stop telling people what they should and shouldn't want just because you think you're more morally sophisticated and developed than they are. If you are really advocating for respect than start with respecting people's decisions about their own lives.
I get so sick of this whiny, hypersensitive attitude that voluntary agreements aren't really voluntary if you need it. The circumstances of need are not de facto coercion, no matter how badly your entitlement mindset wants them to be.
"Negative" aspects of agreements are essentially part of the cost weighed by actors within a market. If a person wants to choose to be part of this project instead of paying a higher upfront cost, it is to the mutual benefit of both parties. I don't see how it is unethical to give somebody an economic advantage in exchange for consent to some random images. The only argument against it that would still benefit the participants in this project is that they could afford to dispose of the equipment without the condition, which while true would offer less motivation to do so, which reduces if not eliminates supply, and so the poor get nothing.
In the end the Hobson's Choice still provides the willing with a service they otherwise could not have. If it is really a system wherein one must accept a small negative effect to receive a larger positive effect, is it really fair for you or anybody other than the interested parties to determine that it should be nothing instead? Isn't it presumptuous to assume that just because you might not act under the same conditions, that those conditions should not be offered at all?
In the end it's a damn better use of the devices than junking them and letting them end up in a toxic heap in the same countries to be picked over by urchins who will get lead poisoning melting them down.
What's the deal with all the "it's too complex, it'll crash" posts here?
Precedent. Remember the Mars Polar Lander? Yeah, nobody else does either, because its only lasting accomplishment was a spectacular thud into the Martian surface. Why? Because of a malfunction in its landing procedure. Beagle 2 was also probably rendered inoperable by its landing procedure as well.
And don't forget that Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed because the engineers forgot to properly convert metric to imperial. NASA is not an organization that inspires confidence these days. "Trying" shouldn't be good enough for the sort of money and talent involved. Failure should be an outside chance, not 10-20+% as it has been the last couple decades.
Although I address this above in a reply to an AC, nobody seems to read it, so I'll expand.
In an absolute sense, if there were no other options and the potential fatalities were a real and imminent threat that would be guaranteed to be avoided by said torture, then yes. Quite frankly I would question the humanity of somebody who didn't, or wouldn't even volunteer, in absolute circumstances.
However when the circumstances are grayer, it becomes increasingly more difficult to justify. If the potential fatalities are hypothetical, where people could/might die as opposed to people will certainly die, I would say no. If the ratio of those sacrificed to those saved were smaller, I would say no. If there were an ulterior motive to the arrangement that would have negative repercussions that cancel out the positive effect over time, I would say no.
Ethics and morality can be made into very simple black and white scenarios, but those ones are not the problem. Each person must decide for themselves where they stand and why, and it helps to have as broad an experience in the humanities as possible, but one should not let neither history nor jurisprudence be a straightjacket. In order to learn from others' mistakes one sometimes has to recognize them as mistakes where others have yet to do so.
It reminds me actually of the King of the Hill episode where Hank's dad is tricked in 'buying' a timeshare in Mexico. Americans cannot own land in Mexico, but the timeshare people go to any length to stifle anybody who brings that fact up.
So while Spotify/Steam/Amazon etc. don't falsely tell people that they 'own' what they are paying money for, they don't ever talk about the fact that they are licensing it either. They want people to think that they are buying things in a sense of ownership, because that is what people value, and if anybody starts talking about how it's only licensed and the 'purchasers' are completely helpless about what happens to it, those companies will try to downplay that because it hurts sales.
I would respect these operations a lot more if they came right out and used truthful terms like 'rent' and 'license' in places other than the enormous cryptic TOS that few people ever actually read.
Worse this was done after they said they wouldn't do it again. The fact that they even have the capability should be enough to wary any thinking person, but that they break their 'word' on the matter should shatter any false confidence once and for all.
It's not panicky, it's real. People need to wake up. Look at how Amazon has deleted things people have purchased for the Kindle, with no warning and recourse.
DO NOT TRUST THE CLOUD FOR ANYTHING.
If you do not wholly control a non-DRMed local file, you don't have shit. When you use services like Steam or Spotify or any content delivery service that retains the right to delete things you've bought whenever they feel like it, you're asking for a disaster eventually. Even if the whole service doesn't tank, it will just be a matter of time before they start doing things like Amazon and deleting things you've purchased without warning. Whether it's a licensing issue or 'for the children', it will happen and you won't be able to do jack.
At a certain threshold, yes. There have been many instances of human genocide where the fear of what might happen to one's immediate family has led to the death of millions. When each decides as individual to put themselves and their loved ones over the lives of millions just because they are strangers, the aggregate effect is things like the holocaust.
It's very much a topic explored by things like the game '1378' which has players take turns as border guards and defectors in East Germany. As a border guard you can choose to shoot the defectors, knowing they are innocents simply trying to find a better life, or you can let them go. The latter will land you and potentially your family in prison by the DDR, but the former will land you in prison later after reunification. You have to figure out what is really right or wrong, you can't rely simply on laws or immediate consequences.
Actually we don't understand dolphin or whale communication sufficiently yet to say how it compares to human language. As uncomfortable as it may be, early research suggests that it could be equivalent.
As for birds, parrots and myna birds can already mimic human speech. They might not understand grammar as you say, but they can say "stop" just as surely as a hypothetical parahuman rat could.
Do you know what has to happen before nature can 'rapidly select out' bad mutations? They have to exist first. We are a part of nature, produced by natural processes, and I would argue that making mutated things with a purpose is better than other natural mutations that are mere accidents of reproduction. "Bad" mutations are going to happen anyway, they might as well at least be useful.
All of this requires perspective. Tests done on animals that were both fatal and brutal have in the end saved millions of lives. I would gladly personally torture an animal or a dozen to death if it would save a million human lives, and that is a natural instinct. It's what's put us where we are in the first place. Animals that are vicious tend to survive better in a universe that doesn't care.
Yes, let's scare more people with a bunch of fictional nonsense intended to play on people's fears and fool them into believing that fear response is the same as morality.
H.G. Wells was a great author, but that does not qualify him to be a credible source of perspective on the ethics of genetic research, especially when his implicit goal was to be salacious enough to sell books, not to have the most honest and balanced possible view.
To further expand on the China scenario specifically, one of the few places where there are both persons with the requisite technical skill and the political passion to oppose the CCP directly is Taiwan. However, the Taiwanese, even independence extremists, know that if they publicly hacked and released secrets from the Chinese mainland it would quickly be used by the Chinese as a pretense for war. Many would die and Taiwanese autonomy would be crushed, and if the US actually went through with OPLAN 5077 it could damn well bring about WW3.
The stakes for hacking China are much higher for something which is ultimately less interesting. As callous as it is, everybody already knows China is doing bad things to otherwise innocent people, so there is not really any surprise to reveal. However, if all their dirty laundry were aired, it might provoke a disproportionate response, either personally in an extrajudicial attack to punish the hacker(s), or geopolitically to the point of even open war.
Western democracies are less likely (though it does happen) to use an extrajudicial method against troublemakers overseas so long as they don't constitute a material threat. However that sort of attitude is not so true of totalitarian autocracies with terrible human rights records. If somebody managed to upset China enough, an agent or mercenary might find a way for the hacker to have a 'tragic accident'.
I used to use Google maps like twice or thrice as much when you used to be able to filter by rating.
I also very much miss the 4 column format for iGoogle. How is that now that everybody has widescreen displays, that's when they get rid of the best format to view on them?
Google doesn't give a shit about anything either. There will be hundreds of people in their feedback forums going "give it back we used that" and they don't even explain anything or make even the pretense of an apology. They just ignore them all. I'm pretty much a Google whore, but their attitude of 'fuck you if you're inconvenienced' is really antithetical to anything approaching customer service.
I call myself a historian, but I do so on the basis that I passionately study history and historiography. I will readily admit that I do not have any formal degree in the discipline, but I plan to earn some when I leave the IT industry. In fact I plan to eventually teach history at a university level, probably for ungrateful, jaded, know-it-all undergrads. They're the ones that need it most.
Yes, I'm sure that thieves will conveniently set their stolen property outside where it has full view of street signs and house numbers instead of pointing at a nondescript wall in one of a billion buildings somewhere. The best thing it would do is get a picture of the guy that took the device; however with delinquent renters that point is moot since the rental agency already ostensibly knows what the renters look like and where they are supposed to reside.
The best thing you can do to help recover a stolen computer is to have it report a tracert output to a server somewhere every time it is booted up with a network connection. Then when it falls into the wrong hands you at least have the hostnames and IPs that are near where it's connected, and you can try to get the ISP revealed by that information to help you track down the location. Good luck even with that though.
Slashdot Mirror
Christians are being blamed because it is Biblical Christianity that supports "Zionism". Perhaps you haven't heard of the go to Bible verse: "I will bless those that bless thee and curse those who curse thee" (Genesis 12:3)? Most evangelical Christians I know are die hard supporters of Israel no matter what.
Hey you, Indian, here's a bunch of glass beads, gimme all your land!
No.
I got a great big gun here...
Nice beads!
And as for age of consent, in the first place implicit in the concept is that there are persons who by nature of immaturity are unable to act wisely as agents for themselves. As a parent I know this is true of children, and as an adult who like all adults was once a child I know that for almost everybody this phase comes to an end. Treating people like children who are not is the very definition of paternalization. I do not want a society that treats everybody like children to be condescended to.
In the second place, there are exceptions in both directions in these systems. For children there is the status of emancipated minor, though the sort of hardships that must be endured before such status is granted is not to be envied. For adults who are mentally children, they frequently have legal guardians their entire lives if they are not institutionalized.
So yes, I admit that some persons are by age or by disability unable to make decisions for themselves. I do not agree that this should be true of more people just so somebody can have the power trip of deciding for others what will make them happy.
This is the second time somebody has said that this necessarily leads to selling children into slavery. Its so distorted and disingenuous I can't imagine where you get off calling me a terrible person. Selling children into slavery implies involuntary actors, whether they be de facto or de jure, and so are excluded from possible scenarios of voluntary acts as a class. It's quite ludicrous, but you are so desperate to defend your mindset that there is no emotional appeal you won't sink to using, even if it is demonstrably inapplicable. You just hope people will be so blinded by a 'think of the children' argument that they won't realize you are using this specter to try to deprive people of choices just because you personally think the choices are bad.
In a way you are correct, I 'advocate pointless suffering' where people choose pointless suffering. For example I think being a monk is 'pointless suffering', but I don't think that my opinion of somebody else's lifestyle should be forced on them. If somebody wants to be a monk, it's not my right to stop them, nor is it society's right just because a lot of people might agree that it's a stupid lifestyle. Each person's life choices should not be at the whim of another's tyranny, whether that be the tyranny of a dictator or of the majority.
Each individual needs to be the final arbiter of their own happiness. You have no authority to decide for others what constitutes suffering for them against their own wishes. That will ultimately lead to far more individual suffering than it will prevent.
Acceptance is always optional, or the contract is invalid on its face. If somebody is aiming a gun at a person and says 'sign this contract or I will kill you' then the contract is not legally binding. But of course when you say 'not optional' you mean 'because they need it!' Need is not coercion. So yes, you are not entitled to terms that are perfect for you in every way. If you want something from somebody, you play by their rules, except where otherwise prohibited by law (discrimination against protected classes, etc.).
And yes, it is an entitlement mindset to think that corporations who have interests in the political and economic climate that they must operate in should be censored by the government. Money is speech, that is more than just a principle, it is a precedent established by more than one Supreme Court decision. The way that lobbying works could use some reform, but nothing is worth censorship. Businesses should be as free to have political say as any other person or organization. In the end everybody still has one vote, regardless of who they work for.
It is not involuntary just because it is not achievable by other means. By your logic I *must* pull off an enormous robbery so that I can afford a new Lambourghini. It isn't voluntary for me because I have no other way of doing it. Nonsense, I can just not do it. That jackass who sold a kidney for ipad could have just realized he didn't really need the ipad. That's the whole point 'voluntary'.
I also find it highly amusing that while trying to spin my comment as US-centric you completely ignore the fact that almost every nation has some form of age of consent legislation. That the ages involved are different from ours is immaterial, and I for one largely respect the autonomy and sovereignty of other societies to make those decisions for themselves. In the end it doesn't change the fact that we are still talking about scenarios in which all parties can and do consent.
That is obviously not a voluntary arrangement for all parties so it makes for a pretty poor strawman argument. I don't see anybody advocating for arrangements which are involuntary either on their face or by way of age of consent laws.
Their privacy shouldn't be negotiable.
Ipse dixit, eh? Who exactly died and made you king? If their privacy is, for whatever reason, worth more than their labor, who are you to say that they should not able to use this value about themselves?
This is just like the people who argue against legal prostitution. They assume that it is somehow intrinsically harmful and debasing and that nobody actually wants to do it, or if they do it must be because they have problems, because these people who lobby against it and generally have little to no first hand knowledge of the practice or its practitioners know better than they do what they should want and why.
People should be allowed to decide for themselves what they want to do. Get out of their business and stop telling people what they should and shouldn't want just because you think you're more morally sophisticated and developed than they are. If you are really advocating for respect than start with respecting people's decisions about their own lives.
I get so sick of this whiny, hypersensitive attitude that voluntary agreements aren't really voluntary if you need it. The circumstances of need are not de facto coercion, no matter how badly your entitlement mindset wants them to be.
"Negative" aspects of agreements are essentially part of the cost weighed by actors within a market. If a person wants to choose to be part of this project instead of paying a higher upfront cost, it is to the mutual benefit of both parties. I don't see how it is unethical to give somebody an economic advantage in exchange for consent to some random images. The only argument against it that would still benefit the participants in this project is that they could afford to dispose of the equipment without the condition, which while true would offer less motivation to do so, which reduces if not eliminates supply, and so the poor get nothing.
In the end the Hobson's Choice still provides the willing with a service they otherwise could not have. If it is really a system wherein one must accept a small negative effect to receive a larger positive effect, is it really fair for you or anybody other than the interested parties to determine that it should be nothing instead? Isn't it presumptuous to assume that just because you might not act under the same conditions, that those conditions should not be offered at all?
In the end it's a damn better use of the devices than junking them and letting them end up in a toxic heap in the same countries to be picked over by urchins who will get lead poisoning melting them down.
Nice logic there. It *could* be a Hobson's Choice therefore it *must* be a Hobson's Choice.
Which coincidentally is also an excellent movie directed by Sir David Lean.
What's the deal with all the "it's too complex, it'll crash" posts here?
Precedent. Remember the Mars Polar Lander? Yeah, nobody else does either, because its only lasting accomplishment was a spectacular thud into the Martian surface. Why? Because of a malfunction in its landing procedure. Beagle 2 was also probably rendered inoperable by its landing procedure as well.
And don't forget that Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed because the engineers forgot to properly convert metric to imperial. NASA is not an organization that inspires confidence these days. "Trying" shouldn't be good enough for the sort of money and talent involved. Failure should be an outside chance, not 10-20+% as it has been the last couple decades.
Although I address this above in a reply to an AC, nobody seems to read it, so I'll expand.
In an absolute sense, if there were no other options and the potential fatalities were a real and imminent threat that would be guaranteed to be avoided by said torture, then yes. Quite frankly I would question the humanity of somebody who didn't, or wouldn't even volunteer, in absolute circumstances.
However when the circumstances are grayer, it becomes increasingly more difficult to justify. If the potential fatalities are hypothetical, where people could/might die as opposed to people will certainly die, I would say no. If the ratio of those sacrificed to those saved were smaller, I would say no. If there were an ulterior motive to the arrangement that would have negative repercussions that cancel out the positive effect over time, I would say no.
Ethics and morality can be made into very simple black and white scenarios, but those ones are not the problem. Each person must decide for themselves where they stand and why, and it helps to have as broad an experience in the humanities as possible, but one should not let neither history nor jurisprudence be a straightjacket. In order to learn from others' mistakes one sometimes has to recognize them as mistakes where others have yet to do so.
I see you are being modded down for telling the truth. Too bad.
It reminds me actually of the King of the Hill episode where Hank's dad is tricked in 'buying' a timeshare in Mexico. Americans cannot own land in Mexico, but the timeshare people go to any length to stifle anybody who brings that fact up.
So while Spotify/Steam/Amazon etc. don't falsely tell people that they 'own' what they are paying money for, they don't ever talk about the fact that they are licensing it either. They want people to think that they are buying things in a sense of ownership, because that is what people value, and if anybody starts talking about how it's only licensed and the 'purchasers' are completely helpless about what happens to it, those companies will try to downplay that because it hurts sales.
I would respect these operations a lot more if they came right out and used truthful terms like 'rent' and 'license' in places other than the enormous cryptic TOS that few people ever actually read.
Yes, there were others you don't know about.
Worse this was done after they said they wouldn't do it again. The fact that they even have the capability should be enough to wary any thinking person, but that they break their 'word' on the matter should shatter any false confidence once and for all.
It's not panicky, it's real. People need to wake up. Look at how Amazon has deleted things people have purchased for the Kindle, with no warning and recourse.
DO NOT TRUST THE CLOUD FOR ANYTHING.
If you do not wholly control a non-DRMed local file, you don't have shit. When you use services like Steam or Spotify or any content delivery service that retains the right to delete things you've bought whenever they feel like it, you're asking for a disaster eventually. Even if the whole service doesn't tank, it will just be a matter of time before they start doing things like Amazon and deleting things you've purchased without warning. Whether it's a licensing issue or 'for the children', it will happen and you won't be able to do jack.
You've been warned.
At a certain threshold, yes. There have been many instances of human genocide where the fear of what might happen to one's immediate family has led to the death of millions. When each decides as individual to put themselves and their loved ones over the lives of millions just because they are strangers, the aggregate effect is things like the holocaust.
It's very much a topic explored by things like the game '1378' which has players take turns as border guards and defectors in East Germany. As a border guard you can choose to shoot the defectors, knowing they are innocents simply trying to find a better life, or you can let them go. The latter will land you and potentially your family in prison by the DDR, but the former will land you in prison later after reunification. You have to figure out what is really right or wrong, you can't rely simply on laws or immediate consequences.
ICE kicks people out of the country, they don't pull people into the country.
This would be the FBI's jurisdiction, because they don't have anything better to do than waste resources on illicit URLs.
Actually we don't understand dolphin or whale communication sufficiently yet to say how it compares to human language. As uncomfortable as it may be, early research suggests that it could be equivalent.
As for birds, parrots and myna birds can already mimic human speech. They might not understand grammar as you say, but they can say "stop" just as surely as a hypothetical parahuman rat could.
Do you know what has to happen before nature can 'rapidly select out' bad mutations? They have to exist first. We are a part of nature, produced by natural processes, and I would argue that making mutated things with a purpose is better than other natural mutations that are mere accidents of reproduction. "Bad" mutations are going to happen anyway, they might as well at least be useful.
All of this requires perspective. Tests done on animals that were both fatal and brutal have in the end saved millions of lives. I would gladly personally torture an animal or a dozen to death if it would save a million human lives, and that is a natural instinct. It's what's put us where we are in the first place. Animals that are vicious tend to survive better in a universe that doesn't care.
Yes, let's scare more people with a bunch of fictional nonsense intended to play on people's fears and fool them into believing that fear response is the same as morality.
H.G. Wells was a great author, but that does not qualify him to be a credible source of perspective on the ethics of genetic research, especially when his implicit goal was to be salacious enough to sell books, not to have the most honest and balanced possible view.
To further expand on the China scenario specifically, one of the few places where there are both persons with the requisite technical skill and the political passion to oppose the CCP directly is Taiwan. However, the Taiwanese, even independence extremists, know that if they publicly hacked and released secrets from the Chinese mainland it would quickly be used by the Chinese as a pretense for war. Many would die and Taiwanese autonomy would be crushed, and if the US actually went through with OPLAN 5077 it could damn well bring about WW3.
The stakes for hacking China are much higher for something which is ultimately less interesting. As callous as it is, everybody already knows China is doing bad things to otherwise innocent people, so there is not really any surprise to reveal. However, if all their dirty laundry were aired, it might provoke a disproportionate response, either personally in an extrajudicial attack to punish the hacker(s), or geopolitically to the point of even open war.
Western democracies are less likely (though it does happen) to use an extrajudicial method against troublemakers overseas so long as they don't constitute a material threat. However that sort of attitude is not so true of totalitarian autocracies with terrible human rights records. If somebody managed to upset China enough, an agent or mercenary might find a way for the hacker to have a 'tragic accident'.
I used to use Google maps like twice or thrice as much when you used to be able to filter by rating.
I also very much miss the 4 column format for iGoogle. How is that now that everybody has widescreen displays, that's when they get rid of the best format to view on them?
Google doesn't give a shit about anything either. There will be hundreds of people in their feedback forums going "give it back we used that" and they don't even explain anything or make even the pretense of an apology. They just ignore them all. I'm pretty much a Google whore, but their attitude of 'fuck you if you're inconvenienced' is really antithetical to anything approaching customer service.
I call myself a historian, but I do so on the basis that I passionately study history and historiography. I will readily admit that I do not have any formal degree in the discipline, but I plan to earn some when I leave the IT industry. In fact I plan to eventually teach history at a university level, probably for ungrateful, jaded, know-it-all undergrads. They're the ones that need it most.
Yes, I'm sure that thieves will conveniently set their stolen property outside where it has full view of street signs and house numbers instead of pointing at a nondescript wall in one of a billion buildings somewhere. The best thing it would do is get a picture of the guy that took the device; however with delinquent renters that point is moot since the rental agency already ostensibly knows what the renters look like and where they are supposed to reside.
The best thing you can do to help recover a stolen computer is to have it report a tracert output to a server somewhere every time it is booted up with a network connection. Then when it falls into the wrong hands you at least have the hostnames and IPs that are near where it's connected, and you can try to get the ISP revealed by that information to help you track down the location. Good luck even with that though.