I'd say that 90% of the world are _convinced_ they believe in some god because they where brainwashed with it from early age. It's simply culturally accepted child molestation of the mind which is harder to prove than physical harm. If there was a law that prohibited people from influencing children with these outrageous ideas, religions would see a rapid decline in membership. It would be hard to convert someone who thought for themselves for 21 years, then to be presented with the idea that there is a man in the sky that designed this world. Religion needs an age of consent.
I cannot agree with you more. One of my friends, a well educated software engineer, is a fundamentalist Christian who believes that indoctrinating children is a moral imperative. While I have no doubts as to the purity of his motives, the indoctrination mindset itself sickens me beyond expression. I tend to think of religion as a virus of the mind, an infection that can only be resisted with an acquired -- rather than a native -- immunity. In an ideal world, children would not be exposed to religious ideas until they are of suitable intellectual strength to evaluate the ideas presented to them on their own merit. Then they could choose their favorite mythology.
I live in Texas, where most freeways were designed with a 70MPH speed limit in mind. Unsurprisingly, the normal flow of traffic moves between 65 and 75MPH, even on roads where the speed limit was lowered to 55-60MPH despite the road's rated design speed. In my experience, this doesn't cause any obvious safety problems; however, an actual safety problem arises when a group of cars passes by a highway patrolman parked on the side of the road in speed-trap mode. Without fail, the drivers at the front of the line slam on their brakes, inevitably surprising the drivers behind them. Domino effect chaos ensues. The patrolmen are supposed to make traffic flow more smoothly, but when speed limits are lower than the normal flow of traffic, their presence is a mild hazard.
And that's yet another reason you don't want to have anything to do with facebook, twitter, ping or other social networking sites
They can and will ruin your life if they feel like it.
FTFY
While I wholeheartedly agree with your feelings toward social media, Facebook is not culpable here. If this young woman had gone and plastered her silly comment on a billboard, would the billboard be at fault? Jury rules exist for the citizens' protection and should be enforced judiciously. This girl acted stupidly. The medium transmitting that stupidity had nothing to do with the infraction itself.
I'm young and in good health, so I haven't given much thought to the long term health implications of too much sitting. What I can anecdotally report is that the more time I spend in a chair, the worse I feel. The relationship is almost linear. Not coincidentally, the realization didn't dawn on me until after I graduated from college and began working full time. Before graduation, I spent a lot of time on my feet walking to and from class and to work, since I had the good fortune to have an internship within walking distance of my college campus. This was only eight months ago, but the change in my energy level is very discernible. I can only imagine how pronounced the effect would be when magnified over the course of many years.
But that's just the job. I imagine that for most of the Slashdot audience, sitting at work is often unavoidable, unless you can afford a nice walkstation setup. What about when you're not actually at your desk, though? Usually, you're still sitting, even if you're going somewhere.
The biggest sitting problem (for Americans, at least) outside of work is that our cities, our jobs, and even our recreation is not really intended for pedestrians. I love to walk, but many places and jobs are not pedestrian-friendly. I have so grown to loathe driving that my long term plans include moving to a city where it's easier to get places by walking or riding a bike, possibly for this reason alone. Currently I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, which I feel is one of the least walkable areas on the planet (though there are notable neighborhoods that provide exceptions). The metropolitan area has suffered badly from the urban sprawl blight, so if you're lucky enough to live with your romantic partner, chances are, at least one of you is going to have to deal with a commute. The course of my day starts off with a thirty minute drive, followed by sitting on my tush for the subsequent eight hours. Then I drive another forty-five minutes home. Unless I then drive to the nearest gym, which, due to the sprawl here, is likely to be more than six miles away, I'm pretty much stuck indoors again. Side note: a 117 degree heat index does not a happy human make. I have seen Texans drive to their mail box.
The economic forces that drive sprawl really kill the cores of cities and make life miserable for commuters. My partner is burgeoning traffic engineer, and he's taught me some of the things that walkability projects can do to improve life for both residents and businesses in a city. Suburban Nation is an excellent read on the subject. You can also check out Walkscore to see how your neighborhood ranks. It's pretty neat stuff, and I wish more people would care about this issue.
While I think it's an empty vanity personally, I'm not against someone making a public exhibit of themselves if that's what they wish to do. What I would like to see, however, is for those people to do this with a full awareness of how it could be used against them. The deck is somewhat stacked against them because the black hats thoroughly study how to misuse information, whereas the average user just wants to communicate with friends. That can change, and it really should.
I agree that people need to be more concerned about privacy, but I don't think believe that the situation is without hope. My admittedly anecdotal experience leaves me with the impression that people are slowly becoming aware of the potential consequences of freely sharing information on public social networking sites. The easiest way to raise awareness with individual people, I've found, is to simply point to one of the plentiful news stories detailing a case where some individual was passed over for a job opportunity because of some mostly innocuous posting on Facebook or MySpace.
That strategy may not work with teenagers who have little yet to lose, but it usually makes their elders think twice about what they publish online.
This isn't 4chan, take your meme shit back to the pedophile hole where it (and inevitably, you) belong.
I have attempted to do as you suggest, but I'm afraid I've been unable to locate either feces of meme or a perforated pedophile. Nevertheless, I appreciate your advice.
They also have a nasty habit of breeding strains that can not reproduce on their own.
DRM isn't that good of an idea for digital entertainment. But DRM on the human food supply? That is jumping off a cliff into cartoonish insane evil mega-corporation territory.
Your post makes me think of the calorie companies in Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. Amongst other things, the book rather chillingly portrays the hypothetical worst-case consequences of granting corporations complete control over the reproductive capacities of the human food supply.
Big Tobacco health data. Big Pharma test data. Big Oil environmental data. Enron accounting or trading data. Retails sales zappers.
There is no way all this data "tweaking" can be done without involving IT people: DBA's, programmers, techies.
Right now, at this very moment, some of these Digital Era Henchmen are reading Slashdot on iPhones or 32 inch monitors purchased with blood money. And chances are that some of these people are making snide comments about Microsoft or Darl McBride's ethics. Tsk tsk.
Or maybe you're one of them, and the above comment is just a clever way to direct attention away from yourself. But what if, with this comment, I'm trying to achieve the same thing?
"Politically correct" bullshit makes it a crime for anyone to speak out against queer sumbitches who want to get married, and take over the churches, schools, military, or whatever else offends them. Opposition to homosexuality becomes a "hate crime".
Don't ever confuse "polite" and "politically correct".
Polite pretends that the queer isn't a cocksucker. Politically correct demands approval of cocksuckers.
As an incorrigible cocksucking queer sumbitch myself, I would like to take this opportunity to offer to you my sincerest gratitude for your honesty. My partner and I have been denied housing by "polite" people here in Texas who are always be forced to go far out of their way to find some valid excuse to support their obviously bogus decision. Everyone in the room knows the truth, but for some reason, the mores of politeness demand that no one verbally acknowledge it.
Fuck that. It's much better when people just come out and say what they believe. I'm old enough and wise enough now that I truly don't give a shit what people think of me, but they should at least have the courage not to hide their feelings behind a veneer of "politeness." I can respect them for that.
Read the PDF that is linked in the article. At no point does it advocate hiring international students over United States citizens. The document does mention that a company can conceivably save money since the majority of these students are exempt from Medicare and FICA tax requirements. Furthermore, the document is published by the university's international services department. It is their purpose to try to get the best deal for international students.
I'm a gay guy, and the underfed look is not a form of beauty I'd recommend for anybody. Please don't think that the flamboyant assclowns who go around spouting nonsense about the latest fad starvation diet represent all of us.
At the very least, these kids will have learned not to blindly trust authority. Most of my friends had more prosperous childhoods than did I, and it is amazing to me how many of them honestly believe that all policemen are incorruptible, that the justice system is never wrong, and that large corporations always have the peoples' welfare at heart.
That said, these kids have been used as cash cows. Their sentences should be nulled and their records cleared. The state will probably try to avoid it, though, since re-trying them would cost a lot of money. Gotta build those football stadiums, ya know.
Has there been any evidence to show that ANYONE knows how the economy works? The world economy is based on emotions and speculation, which are faaar from exact sciences. Find me anyone who can predict the market and knows how it works and I will find you a billionaire keeping a secret. No one knows how it works exactly, there are some that just read it better than others.
While he's not a deity, I'd say Warren Buffet comes pretty close to what you describe. I say this out of observation of the fact that his investments tend to do much better than the overall market even in hard financial times. For myself, I know precisely jack about the economy.
Ultimately, this is why piracy is attractive - piracy gives you a "better" copy - a copy you can use anywhere and move anywhere.
This point deserves emphasis. Historically, pirated CDs, disks, and video tapes have been of lower overall quality than their legal commercial counterparts, a fact that provided some impetus for people to fork over the dough for a copy guaranteed to have decent quality. But the situation has changed: it is now the case that pirated copies are of both higher quality (due to the lack of DRM) and easier to obtain through downloading. While Amazon's selection isn't all-inclusive due to lack of licensing agreements with a few labels, TPB comes damn close to having everything.
So other than personal honesty and the potential barrier provided by a lack of technical knowledge, what motivation exists for an average person to buy music legally, subjecting themselves to DRM or a limited selection, instead of simply downloading the file from one of the many file-sharing services?
DRM is not the solution to piracy. The only way to substantially curb piracy is to follow these guidelines:
Make downloads convenient and fast (Amazon and iTunes both do a pretty good job of this).
Don't hold your customers' data hostage! This will just piss them off and give them an excuse to pirate.
Get the labels to agree to online downloading. Most people don't want to buy CDs now that they can download music without leaving their home. Once the can is opened, it can't be closed. If Joe can't find the song he wants on Amazon, instead of going to Barnes & Noble to buy the CD (and pay extra for all the filler songs), he'll probably consider downloading it illegally. Or asking his teenager to do it for him.
I don't comment very much, and this topic has been repeatedly beaten to death by the Slashdot community, but sheesh. I just don't understand why media industries insist on pissing off the customers that actually pay for their products while doing nothing at all to inhibit the actual pirates. It's ridiculous.
If you didn't want people attacking you legally then maybe you shouldn't have made big legal threats of your own. It is my understanding that Mr. Gregerson first asked Vilana Financial to pay the licensing fee, and when they refused, wrote about it on the web. Vilana Financial themselves initiated the actual legal action when they sued Gregerson for defamation, and in response to this that he sued Vilana Financial for copyright infringement. Unless I'm misinterpreting—which is quite possible—Gregerson didn't so much "make big legal threats" as to refuse to take it up the ass sans lube.
I guess I have been living in the stone ages. The last time that I checked, Amazon's music selection was very limited compared to iTunes', but this no longer appears to be the case. Thank you for the tip.
I will have be forced to stop using the iTunes store if the Hymn project disappears. I don't own an iPod—I don't *want* an iPod—but I do want to play my music on the Linux-powered media box in my living room. Is that really too much to ask?
The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
Humor aside, the whole idea of warning labels has gotten way out of hand. It's perfectly reasonable and sane to put warning labels on things that might not be obvious on first inspection (for instance, many non-technical people don't know that the capacitors in television can hold a charge long after the set has been unplugged), but for common sense items like coffee, it's just obnoxious. Starbucks should not have to put warning labels on their coffee because Joe Sixpack does not understand that hot coffee is hot. The fact that not putting these irritating labels on everything opens companies up to liability is one of the downsides of our legal system.
On a related note, I'm getting really tired of hearing about all these "studies" demonstrating that using technology X increases your chance of addiction, heart disease, cancer, depression, or (insert FUD term here). Guess what: living is the leading cause of death. Driving to work every day statistically increases your chances of getting killed in an accident, but most people don't complain about that because they accept the cost of risk in exchange for the supposed convenience of driving. Last time I checked, there wasn't a label on my steering wheel informing me that if I drive the vehicle, I might die in an accident.
Yes, there are risks inherent in most technologies, but what we need to focus on is risk versus benefit. Only by taking both of these factors into account can we determine whether the risks, if any, are worth taking. But I guess that reasonable analysis doesn't generate catchy headlines.
Slashdot Mirror
So if the laws don't work, what is a better solution to preventing texting while driving accidents?
Natural selection.
I'd say that 90% of the world are _convinced_ they believe in some god because they where brainwashed with it from early age. It's simply culturally accepted child molestation of the mind which is harder to prove than physical harm. If there was a law that prohibited people from influencing children with these outrageous ideas, religions would see a rapid decline in membership. It would be hard to convert someone who thought for themselves for 21 years, then to be presented with the idea that there is a man in the sky that designed this world. Religion needs an age of consent.
I cannot agree with you more. One of my friends, a well educated software engineer, is a fundamentalist Christian who believes that indoctrinating children is a moral imperative. While I have no doubts as to the purity of his motives, the indoctrination mindset itself sickens me beyond expression. I tend to think of religion as a virus of the mind, an infection that can only be resisted with an acquired -- rather than a native -- immunity. In an ideal world, children would not be exposed to religious ideas until they are of suitable intellectual strength to evaluate the ideas presented to them on their own merit. Then they could choose their favorite mythology.
Surely you jest - this site shows the beauty that is out there ;)
Sweet Jesus indeed. I just about had a seizure. You should put a warning label on that link.
I live in Texas, where most freeways were designed with a 70MPH speed limit in mind. Unsurprisingly, the normal flow of traffic moves between 65 and 75MPH, even on roads where the speed limit was lowered to 55-60MPH despite the road's rated design speed. In my experience, this doesn't cause any obvious safety problems; however, an actual safety problem arises when a group of cars passes by a highway patrolman parked on the side of the road in speed-trap mode. Without fail, the drivers at the front of the line slam on their brakes, inevitably surprising the drivers behind them. Domino effect chaos ensues. The patrolmen are supposed to make traffic flow more smoothly, but when speed limits are lower than the normal flow of traffic, their presence is a mild hazard.
And that's yet another reason you don't want to have anything to do with facebook, twitter, ping or other social networking sites
They can and will ruin your life if they feel like it.
FTFY
While I wholeheartedly agree with your feelings toward social media, Facebook is not culpable here. If this young woman had gone and plastered her silly comment on a billboard, would the billboard be at fault? Jury rules exist for the citizens' protection and should be enforced judiciously. This girl acted stupidly. The medium transmitting that stupidity had nothing to do with the infraction itself.
Sitting just hurts.
I'm young and in good health, so I haven't given much thought to the long term health implications of too much sitting. What I can anecdotally report is that the more time I spend in a chair, the worse I feel. The relationship is almost linear. Not coincidentally, the realization didn't dawn on me until after I graduated from college and began working full time. Before graduation, I spent a lot of time on my feet walking to and from class and to work, since I had the good fortune to have an internship within walking distance of my college campus. This was only eight months ago, but the change in my energy level is very discernible. I can only imagine how pronounced the effect would be when magnified over the course of many years.
But that's just the job. I imagine that for most of the Slashdot audience, sitting at work is often unavoidable, unless you can afford a nice walkstation setup. What about when you're not actually at your desk, though? Usually, you're still sitting, even if you're going somewhere.
The biggest sitting problem (for Americans, at least) outside of work is that our cities, our jobs, and even our recreation is not really intended for pedestrians. I love to walk, but many places and jobs are not pedestrian-friendly. I have so grown to loathe driving that my long term plans include moving to a city where it's easier to get places by walking or riding a bike, possibly for this reason alone. Currently I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, which I feel is one of the least walkable areas on the planet (though there are notable neighborhoods that provide exceptions). The metropolitan area has suffered badly from the urban sprawl blight, so if you're lucky enough to live with your romantic partner, chances are, at least one of you is going to have to deal with a commute. The course of my day starts off with a thirty minute drive, followed by sitting on my tush for the subsequent eight hours. Then I drive another forty-five minutes home. Unless I then drive to the nearest gym, which, due to the sprawl here, is likely to be more than six miles away, I'm pretty much stuck indoors again. Side note: a 117 degree heat index does not a happy human make. I have seen Texans drive to their mail box.
The economic forces that drive sprawl really kill the cores of cities and make life miserable for commuters. My partner is burgeoning traffic engineer, and he's taught me some of the things that walkability projects can do to improve life for both residents and businesses in a city. Suburban Nation is an excellent read on the subject. You can also check out Walkscore to see how your neighborhood ranks. It's pretty neat stuff, and I wish more people would care about this issue.
While I think it's an empty vanity personally, I'm not against someone making a public exhibit of themselves if that's what they wish to do. What I would like to see, however, is for those people to do this with a full awareness of how it could be used against them. The deck is somewhat stacked against them because the black hats thoroughly study how to misuse information, whereas the average user just wants to communicate with friends. That can change, and it really should.
I agree that people need to be more concerned about privacy, but I don't think believe that the situation is without hope. My admittedly anecdotal experience leaves me with the impression that people are slowly becoming aware of the potential consequences of freely sharing information on public social networking sites. The easiest way to raise awareness with individual people, I've found, is to simply point to one of the plentiful news stories detailing a case where some individual was passed over for a job opportunity because of some mostly innocuous posting on Facebook or MySpace.
That strategy may not work with teenagers who have little yet to lose, but it usually makes their elders think twice about what they publish online.
Fucking stupid sentences are fucking stupid.
This isn't 4chan, take your meme shit back to the pedophile hole where it (and inevitably, you) belong.
I have attempted to do as you suggest, but I'm afraid I've been unable to locate either feces of meme or a perforated pedophile. Nevertheless, I appreciate your advice.
I prefer aardvarks.
Misleading headline is misleading. These public profiles haven't been leaked. They've simply been aggregated.
They also have a nasty habit of breeding strains that can not reproduce on their own.
DRM isn't that good of an idea for digital entertainment. But DRM on the human food supply? That is jumping off a cliff into cartoonish insane evil mega-corporation territory.
Your post makes me think of the calorie companies in Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. Amongst other things, the book rather chillingly portrays the hypothetical worst-case consequences of granting corporations complete control over the reproductive capacities of the human food supply.
Big Tobacco health data. Big Pharma test data. Big Oil environmental data. Enron accounting or trading data. Retails sales zappers.
There is no way all this data "tweaking" can be done without involving IT people: DBA's, programmers, techies.
Right now, at this very moment, some of these Digital Era Henchmen are reading Slashdot on iPhones or 32 inch monitors purchased with blood money. And chances are that some of these people are making snide comments about Microsoft or Darl McBride's ethics. Tsk tsk.
Or maybe you're one of them, and the above comment is just a clever way to direct attention away from yourself. But what if, with this comment, I'm trying to achieve the same thing?
I... I just don't know anymore.
"Politically correct" bullshit makes it a crime for anyone to speak out against queer sumbitches who want to get married, and take over the churches, schools, military, or whatever else offends them. Opposition to homosexuality becomes a "hate crime".
Don't ever confuse "polite" and "politically correct".
Polite pretends that the queer isn't a cocksucker. Politically correct demands approval of cocksuckers.
As an incorrigible cocksucking queer sumbitch myself, I would like to take this opportunity to offer to you my sincerest gratitude for your honesty. My partner and I have been denied housing by "polite" people here in Texas who are always be forced to go far out of their way to find some valid excuse to support their obviously bogus decision. Everyone in the room knows the truth, but for some reason, the mores of politeness demand that no one verbally acknowledge it.
Fuck that. It's much better when people just come out and say what they believe. I'm old enough and wise enough now that I truly don't give a shit what people think of me, but they should at least have the courage not to hide their feelings behind a veneer of "politeness." I can respect them for that.
Read the PDF that is linked in the article. At no point does it advocate hiring international students over United States citizens. The document does mention that a company can conceivably save money since the majority of these students are exempt from Medicare and FICA tax requirements. Furthermore, the document is published by the university's international services department. It is their purpose to try to get the best deal for international students.
This article is trolling. Move on.
I'm a gay guy, and the underfed look is not a form of beauty I'd recommend for anybody. Please don't think that the flamboyant assclowns who go around spouting nonsense about the latest fad starvation diet represent all of us.
I suspect that Netflix is the driving force behind this tiered plan: Time Warner wants you to use their on demand service, not Netflix Instant.
Which is why we shouldn't allow one of the nation's largest media conglomerates to operate one of the nation's largest content delivery services.
At the very least, these kids will have learned not to blindly trust authority. Most of my friends had more prosperous childhoods than did I, and it is amazing to me how many of them honestly believe that all policemen are incorruptible, that the justice system is never wrong, and that large corporations always have the peoples' welfare at heart.
That said, these kids have been used as cash cows. Their sentences should be nulled and their records cleared. The state will probably try to avoid it, though, since re-trying them would cost a lot of money. Gotta build those football stadiums, ya know.
So if I don't see very well and at the end of a long day I prefer listening rather than reading, I guess I'm fucked?
The Author's Guild can bite me.
Has there been any evidence to show that ANYONE knows how the economy works? The world economy is based on emotions and speculation, which are faaar from exact sciences. Find me anyone who can predict the market and knows how it works and I will find you a billionaire keeping a secret. No one knows how it works exactly, there are some that just read it better than others.
While he's not a deity, I'd say Warren Buffet comes pretty close to what you describe. I say this out of observation of the fact that his investments tend to do much better than the overall market even in hard financial times. For myself, I know precisely jack about the economy.
Ultimately, this is why piracy is attractive - piracy gives you a "better" copy - a copy you can use anywhere and move anywhere.
This point deserves emphasis. Historically, pirated CDs, disks, and video tapes have been of lower overall quality than their legal commercial counterparts, a fact that provided some impetus for people to fork over the dough for a copy guaranteed to have decent quality. But the situation has changed: it is now the case that pirated copies are of both higher quality (due to the lack of DRM) and easier to obtain through downloading. While Amazon's selection isn't all-inclusive due to lack of licensing agreements with a few labels, TPB comes damn close to having everything.
So other than personal honesty and the potential barrier provided by a lack of technical knowledge, what motivation exists for an average person to buy music legally, subjecting themselves to DRM or a limited selection, instead of simply downloading the file from one of the many file-sharing services?
DRM is not the solution to piracy. The only way to substantially curb piracy is to follow these guidelines:
I don't comment very much, and this topic has been repeatedly beaten to death by the Slashdot community, but sheesh. I just don't understand why media industries insist on pissing off the customers that actually pay for their products while doing nothing at all to inhibit the actual pirates. It's ridiculous.
I guess I have been living in the stone ages. The last time that I checked, Amazon's music selection was very limited compared to iTunes', but this no longer appears to be the case. Thank you for the tip.
I think you need to check your pirate manual, matey. Most pirates don't get their booty from the iTunes music store.
I will have be forced to stop using the iTunes store if the Hymn project disappears. I don't own an iPod—I don't *want* an iPod—but I do want to play my music on the Linux-powered media box in my living room. Is that really too much to ask?
Humor aside, the whole idea of warning labels has gotten way out of hand. It's perfectly reasonable and sane to put warning labels on things that might not be obvious on first inspection (for instance, many non-technical people don't know that the capacitors in television can hold a charge long after the set has been unplugged), but for common sense items like coffee, it's just obnoxious. Starbucks should not have to put warning labels on their coffee because Joe Sixpack does not understand that hot coffee is hot. The fact that not putting these irritating labels on everything opens companies up to liability is one of the downsides of our legal system.
On a related note, I'm getting really tired of hearing about all these "studies" demonstrating that using technology X increases your chance of addiction, heart disease, cancer, depression, or (insert FUD term here). Guess what: living is the leading cause of death. Driving to work every day statistically increases your chances of getting killed in an accident, but most people don't complain about that because they accept the cost of risk in exchange for the supposed convenience of driving. Last time I checked, there wasn't a label on my steering wheel informing me that if I drive the vehicle, I might die in an accident.
Yes, there are risks inherent in most technologies, but what we need to focus on is risk versus benefit. Only by taking both of these factors into account can we determine whether the risks, if any, are worth taking. But I guess that reasonable analysis doesn't generate catchy headlines.