Heat Death is the "Big Freeze", although I suppose you could view it as the universe burning out. Personally, I'm not too worried. IMO, anyone concerned that any life will be around to worry about the universe fizzling out is way too optimistic.
It's not that it's not interesting and "The Last Question" (linked above) is a neat fatalistic take on surviving to that point, but face it. We'll all be screwed long before it's an issue - All the way down to the hardiest little bacteria.
I may have to re-submit my FBI request. The first one I filed (when they told me I'd never been investigated) was about 6 years ago. It would be interesting to see if there's a file there now.
My guess is that they've got a very short file that lists nothing except the date of my FOIA request.
...should start wondering WHY you can't afford it...
Because I have better things to spend my money on. I can put together a system that satisfies all of my needs at dell.com or using computer chunks found at pricewatch.com for a small fraction of the price.
Not for no reason - I was told by the investigating agency that they were looking at me and I was interviewed twice, thus my interest in acquiring whatever they found. I knew pretty definitively that "they" had something on me. The point is, once they decide to look at you, they really try hard to look at you. So, if you know or suspect that you've got a file, read it - It's interesting.
Part of the fun for me was looking at the various 'Red Flags' that turned up (They turned up the facts that I used to home-brew explosives, make improvised explosives (some multiple pounds)*, and get high all the time** - Those, for some reason, were lesser red-flags than the fact that I've had a common nick-name since Junior High and therefore use an 'alias'). Another fun area was looking at their interview list. For the interview list, my reaction was mostly, "How in the heck did you find him?" or "Man, if you wanted dirt on me you really talked to the wrong people..."
* Stopped within a year after high-school ** Stopped after college
...even public information is available at anytime -- for a modest fee.
Just as an aside on that point, this guy found out about this investigation because he issued a FOIA on himself. If you have any inkling that you might have been looked at, file one. It takes a while, but it's easy. In my case, I've filed two. In one case (FBI), they told me that they didn't (yet) have anything that involved me. In the second case, they sent me a document that totaled 88 pages and was terribly interesting to read and included interviews with people I went to high-school with, known aliases (common nick-names), and information dating back to when I was 9.
Unlike the story at hand, all of this was done at no cost to me (surprisingly - the administrative work and postage must have cost something). They did ask on the FOIA form how much I'd be willing to pay to get my information, but I was never charged a penny.
Aside from the aside: I do not currently commit nor do I plan on committing criminal acts in the near future. I also have no criminal record.
This sounds like my door-to-door survey which indicates that homelessness is a complete myth. Or my phone survey where I did a random sampling from the Yellow Pages and discovered that not a single person has so far given up their land-line.
I think I have to object to your definition of "Center". The democrats and republicans are way too alike for my tastes, but if you're going to say that most of the US is right of center, you've got to decide where you're putting the center. When referencing US politics/voters, I'd call the center somewhere around the middle of the political stances of American politicians and voters. Defining a "global" center seems pretty meaningless for any useful discussion on local politics. Sure, you can say that Holland is generally left of the US. Or you can say that Iran is generally right of the US. But neither of those things mean much for a US-centric discussion.
Relevant to this discussion, about all you can say is that journalists tend to be to the left of the American center. Or that Americans in general tend to be to the left/right of Country X (although I fail to see how that would relate to the death of American newspapers).
I'm sorry, I got side-tracked. How does your post relate to newspapers dying again? You're rated at +5, so I'm assuming that I'm missing something important here.
The only reason I knew how to spell it was the magic of IMDB.
[I had to go check because I almost referred to Samuel L Jackson as that guy from Pee-Wee's Playhouse and had to go verify that it was indeed Laurence Fishburne, not Jackson. Sorry Sammy. My bad - It's been a while since I watched that show.]
Rather than having adamantium grafted to his skeleton, Wolverine could have had glass grafted instead.
Man, you couldn't have included a Spoiler Alert? I was just about to start reading the Wolverine comics, but now that I know he's got an adamantium skeleton (thank you very much), I guess I'll just skip it altogether...
Ooh! Just got a M Night Shyamalan movie from Netflix starring that guy from Die Hard and that guy from Snakes on a Plane - Off to watch it!
That's not necessarily how it works - At least not if the folks serving ads are worth their salt.
"Hey, you bought a motherboard yesterday - Do you need a graphics card?" "Hey, you bought a DVD player yesterday - Would you like a Netflix subscription?" "Hey, you bought a tent yesterday - Would you like a lantern?"
It's slightly more complicated than "Sell PCs to the guy who buys PCs," but it's not rocket surgery.
It probably depends on how you phrase it (TFA might mention it, but how would I know?) "Do you want targeted ads on web-sites you visit?" No. "Would you rather have ads tailored to your tastes or ads delivered at random?" Tailored. "If a site has ads, would you mind having them predict what kind of ads would be most suited to you as long as it didn't interfere with your experience?" No. "Would you mind having sites hide files on your computer that they can use to track your every Internet activity?" Yes.
You jest, but I've heard compelling arguments for requesting that ISPs disconnect computers doing malicious stuff even if the owner is unaware of it until they clean up their act. I could even be swayed to believe that ISPs should be held partially responsible/liable for malicious traffic they're relaying just to convince them to enforce such measures. It puts an additional burden on ISPs, but where else can we stop clueless users from polluting our Interwebs?
I see no reason why individuals volunteering information about their machines or habits should be any kind of privacy breech. Just leave it off by default and, should you choose, don't click the box.
First, let me rebut your anti-turnip driven remarks. If said turnip is able to pass the driving test and refrain from excessive bad driving behavior, by all means give it a license and toss it behind the wheel. Although it may throw off our "new" facial recognition features factored into our license pictures...
Many places already have "distracted driving" laws - I went to defensive driving school with a guy ticketed for just that. He'd been drinking a soda while in motion (and I assume didn't get along well with the cop). [For anyone interested, I'd been grabbed for a rolling stop in the middle of nowhere with nobody around for miles other than me and the cop hiding behind a burm...] I'm not sure that specifying specific laws about texting/cells/shaving/whatever is really necessary - Give the cops a little bit of credit. Make sure that you've got a "distracted driving" law on the books and let the cops decide who to ticket for driving like a douche.
I realize that the idea will panic a lot of people because we have a lot of power-hungry cops who abuse any flexibility that they're given (e.g. ticketing somebody for drinking through a straw while driving), but are we really going to make separate laws for texting, lipstick application, shaving, talking on the phone, changing shirts, peeing into a Gatorade bottle, beating the kids in the back seat to shut them up, checking your purse to make sure you remembered your dry-cleaning ticket, changing the time on the radio to reflect daylight savings, eating a taco, eating a burrito, etc?
Nothing is real time. Not even real life in most cases. Some things are just closer to real-time than others. Sure the term is overused, but it's really just a description for how things are behaving behind the scenes - E.g. Is it a requested refresh or a push? Is the lag significant enough that the user/target will notice or be meaningfully affected?
One big flaw with that plan though. If you sell a piece of digital art to a museum for some large sum and then tell them that you also plan to upload a high-resolution copy to a file-sharing site, they may object. Possibly strongly.
So their jobs are stressful. So what? Mine is too. But I don't come in and check out a GOV for joy-riding. Nor do I go to the lab and fire up the lasers to burn smiley faces on things. And those are government assets - Abusing personal assets is far worse.
You wanna play Wii? Fine - Buy one or befriend somebody who has one. Breaking into somebody's house (warrant or no) is NOT grounds for just playing around with their stuff.
Should this invalidate evidence found on the premises? Hell no. Should those officers be suspended for taking control of and playing with property that was completely aside from the investigation? Hell yes. They're probably short of theft, but if they're just playing in the guy's house - Charge 'em with trespassing.
Slashdot Mirror
Heat Death is the "Big Freeze", although I suppose you could view it as the universe burning out. Personally, I'm not too worried. IMO, anyone concerned that any life will be around to worry about the universe fizzling out is way too optimistic.
It's not that it's not interesting and "The Last Question" (linked above) is a neat fatalistic take on surviving to that point, but face it. We'll all be screwed long before it's an issue - All the way down to the hardiest little bacteria.
I may have to re-submit my FBI request. The first one I filed (when they told me I'd never been investigated) was about 6 years ago. It would be interesting to see if there's a file there now.
My guess is that they've got a very short file that lists nothing except the date of my FOIA request.
...should start wondering WHY you can't afford it...
Because I have better things to spend my money on. I can put together a system that satisfies all of my needs at dell.com or using computer chunks found at pricewatch.com for a small fraction of the price.
...start planning HOW you can afford it...
No. Let's go back to WHY.
So they had 88 pages on you for no reason?
Not for no reason - I was told by the investigating agency that they were looking at me and I was interviewed twice, thus my interest in acquiring whatever they found. I knew pretty definitively that "they" had something on me. The point is, once they decide to look at you, they really try hard to look at you. So, if you know or suspect that you've got a file, read it - It's interesting.
Part of the fun for me was looking at the various 'Red Flags' that turned up (They turned up the facts that I used to home-brew explosives, make improvised explosives (some multiple pounds)*, and get high all the time** - Those, for some reason, were lesser red-flags than the fact that I've had a common nick-name since Junior High and therefore use an 'alias'). Another fun area was looking at their interview list. For the interview list, my reaction was mostly, "How in the heck did you find him?" or "Man, if you wanted dirt on me you really talked to the wrong people..."
* Stopped within a year after high-school
** Stopped after college
OK... No additional direct cost to me. Thanks for chipping in for postage =)
Sadly, in your (accurate) context, I helped pay for them to investigate me...
...even public information is available at anytime -- for a modest fee.
Just as an aside on that point, this guy found out about this investigation because he issued a FOIA on himself. If you have any inkling that you might have been looked at, file one. It takes a while, but it's easy. In my case, I've filed two. In one case (FBI), they told me that they didn't (yet) have anything that involved me. In the second case, they sent me a document that totaled 88 pages and was terribly interesting to read and included interviews with people I went to high-school with, known aliases (common nick-names), and information dating back to when I was 9.
Unlike the story at hand, all of this was done at no cost to me (surprisingly - the administrative work and postage must have cost something). They did ask on the FOIA form how much I'd be willing to pay to get my information, but I was never charged a penny.
Aside from the aside: I do not currently commit nor do I plan on committing criminal acts in the near future. I also have no criminal record.
It's wild buckwheat native to southwestern North America. So it probably smells like buckwheat.
Of course, never having been on a Little Rascals set, I have no idea what Buckwheat smells like.
Oh that's the Hotel CA reference.
I was thinking that I can stab it with my steely knife, but I just can't kill the beast...
This sounds like my door-to-door survey which indicates that homelessness is a complete myth. Or my phone survey where I did a random sampling from the Yellow Pages and discovered that not a single person has so far given up their land-line.
I think I have to object to your definition of "Center". The democrats and republicans are way too alike for my tastes, but if you're going to say that most of the US is right of center, you've got to decide where you're putting the center. When referencing US politics/voters, I'd call the center somewhere around the middle of the political stances of American politicians and voters. Defining a "global" center seems pretty meaningless for any useful discussion on local politics. Sure, you can say that Holland is generally left of the US. Or you can say that Iran is generally right of the US. But neither of those things mean much for a US-centric discussion.
Relevant to this discussion, about all you can say is that journalists tend to be to the left of the American center. Or that Americans in general tend to be to the left/right of Country X (although I fail to see how that would relate to the death of American newspapers).
I'm sorry, I got side-tracked. How does your post relate to newspapers dying again? You're rated at +5, so I'm assuming that I'm missing something important here.
The only reason I knew how to spell it was the magic of IMDB.
[I had to go check because I almost referred to Samuel L Jackson as that guy from Pee-Wee's Playhouse and had to go verify that it was indeed Laurence Fishburne, not Jackson. Sorry Sammy. My bad - It's been a while since I watched that show.]
Rather than having adamantium grafted to his skeleton, Wolverine could have had glass grafted instead.
Man, you couldn't have included a Spoiler Alert? I was just about to start reading the Wolverine comics, but now that I know he's got an adamantium skeleton (thank you very much), I guess I'll just skip it altogether...
Ooh! Just got a M Night Shyamalan movie from Netflix starring that guy from Die Hard and that guy from Snakes on a Plane - Off to watch it!
Sorry - That was terrible. I guess you can beat a dead horse to water, but you can't look him in the mouth...
You searching for a quick joke must be like searching for a needle in a coal mine...
That's not necessarily how it works - At least not if the folks serving ads are worth their salt.
"Hey, you bought a motherboard yesterday - Do you need a graphics card?"
"Hey, you bought a DVD player yesterday - Would you like a Netflix subscription?"
"Hey, you bought a tent yesterday - Would you like a lantern?"
It's slightly more complicated than "Sell PCs to the guy who buys PCs," but it's not rocket surgery.
It probably depends on how you phrase it (TFA might mention it, but how would I know?)
"Do you want targeted ads on web-sites you visit?" No.
"Would you rather have ads tailored to your tastes or ads delivered at random?" Tailored.
"If a site has ads, would you mind having them predict what kind of ads would be most suited to you as long as it didn't interfere with your experience?" No.
"Would you mind having sites hide files on your computer that they can use to track your every Internet activity?" Yes.
It's easy if you just feed them the answer.
TriBbles. It's an unfortunate organic consumable necessary for disc production, but they're fairly easy to replicate.
"Can != Should" is pretty well agreed upon here.
"Can == Will" is an unfortunate reality in most cases...
You jest, but I've heard compelling arguments for requesting that ISPs disconnect computers doing malicious stuff even if the owner is unaware of it until they clean up their act. I could even be swayed to believe that ISPs should be held partially responsible/liable for malicious traffic they're relaying just to convince them to enforce such measures. It puts an additional burden on ISPs, but where else can we stop clueless users from polluting our Interwebs?
I see no reason why individuals volunteering information about their machines or habits should be any kind of privacy breech. Just leave it off by default and, should you choose, don't click the box.
First, let me rebut your anti-turnip driven remarks. If said turnip is able to pass the driving test and refrain from excessive bad driving behavior, by all means give it a license and toss it behind the wheel. Although it may throw off our "new" facial recognition features factored into our license pictures...
Many places already have "distracted driving" laws - I went to defensive driving school with a guy ticketed for just that. He'd been drinking a soda while in motion (and I assume didn't get along well with the cop). [For anyone interested, I'd been grabbed for a rolling stop in the middle of nowhere with nobody around for miles other than me and the cop hiding behind a burm...] I'm not sure that specifying specific laws about texting/cells/shaving/whatever is really necessary - Give the cops a little bit of credit. Make sure that you've got a "distracted driving" law on the books and let the cops decide who to ticket for driving like a douche.
I realize that the idea will panic a lot of people because we have a lot of power-hungry cops who abuse any flexibility that they're given (e.g. ticketing somebody for drinking through a straw while driving), but are we really going to make separate laws for texting, lipstick application, shaving, talking on the phone, changing shirts, peeing into a Gatorade bottle, beating the kids in the back seat to shut them up, checking your purse to make sure you remembered your dry-cleaning ticket, changing the time on the radio to reflect daylight savings, eating a taco, eating a burrito, etc?
Nothing is real time. Not even real life in most cases. Some things are just closer to real-time than others. Sure the term is overused, but it's really just a description for how things are behaving behind the scenes - E.g. Is it a requested refresh or a push? Is the lag significant enough that the user/target will notice or be meaningfully affected?
One big flaw with that plan though. If you sell a piece of digital art to a museum for some large sum and then tell them that you also plan to upload a high-resolution copy to a file-sharing site, they may object. Possibly strongly.
That's typically true, but there are seldom exceptions - This being one of them.
If something falls at 0 ft/second, it weighs nothing. If it falls up, it weighs less than nothing.
These things, of course, tell you little about the object's mass.
So their jobs are stressful. So what? Mine is too. But I don't come in and check out a GOV for joy-riding. Nor do I go to the lab and fire up the lasers to burn smiley faces on things. And those are government assets - Abusing personal assets is far worse.
You wanna play Wii? Fine - Buy one or befriend somebody who has one. Breaking into somebody's house (warrant or no) is NOT grounds for just playing around with their stuff.
Should this invalidate evidence found on the premises? Hell no. Should those officers be suspended for taking control of and playing with property that was completely aside from the investigation? Hell yes. They're probably short of theft, but if they're just playing in the guy's house - Charge 'em with trespassing.