>Here I thought protest was a staple of democracy, not an example of heinous coercion. Do people not have a right to express their views, simply because said views might be influenced by their religious convictions? Are religious people second-class citizens in that regard?
Protest against government actions (or at least the actions of one in a position of power over you) certainly - but does protest against fellow citizens really fall under the same umbrella ? If it does, should it? \ Surely the ability to protest the actions of your neighbours and actively attempt to interfere with those actions (e.g. picket-lines) do not in any way promote democracy, and may very well in most (if not all) cases overstep the boundaries of your freedom ending where mine begins ?
That said - I wouldn't want to trust the government with stifling ANY protest because I sure won't trust them to keep the lines in a sane place. Since the very purpose of allowed protest is the ability to protest the government they are by definition the worst possible people to allow to restrict protest in any way.
So I would say -the allowance we make for protesting your fellow citizens is NOT made for the sake of democracy, indeed using it is actively undemocratic - we allow it only because there is no sane and sensible way to prohibit it without risking serious harm to the kind of protest we DO require and which IS democratic.
Hey ! You insensitive clod ! As a deacon in the church of the the intergalactic immaterial invisible purple penis I find your statement grossly offensive to my believes. May you never enter the intergalactic immaterial invisible pink vagina... or any others either.
>Why should he? Your God never did. That's just some stuff you made up.
Actually - His God does, sort off. There's a whole chapter in Leviticus about it, only they don't talk about abortion per-se but about the closest thing that ancient medical technology could arrange: stoning-the-baby-at-birth. An allowable way to avoid motherhood apparently under at least SOME conditions - notably it mentions pregnancy resulting from incest and rape.
Now call me crazy, but I think modern medical abortions are a damn sight less cruel way to deal with a rape-caused pregnancy than actually letting the baby be born and then killing it with rocks. But I suppose if you're a true fundamentalist then you must promote that.
After all, the same republicans who do all in their power to prevent the needy from avoiding unplanned parenthood, will also do all in their power to avoid doing anything to help shelter, feed and educate the results.
>So... "Do what I say or I'll beat you up" is coercive, but "Do what I say or my friend Bubba will beat you up" is not coercive because I won't be dealing the punishment personally?
Not quite, the line is different. Just how coercive is: "Do what I say or my IMAGINARY friend Mike will beat you up" ?
If you don't believe in God, THAT is what it comes down to when somebody tells you you're going to hell.
Fair enough - I was just pointing out that it's actually rather likely. Those of us who have met him and spent time with him socially do tend to start calling him "Richard" because he is quite insistent about it in any social setting. One of the less known "nice" attributes of somebody who is not generally known for his social skills is a genuine dislike of veneration.
This is where you get the wrong conclusion from the right facts. See the difference between software and bridges is that it costs a lot less to produce a software Proof-of-concept and if it fails then nobody drowns in the river.
Those 10-thousand dead projects ? They aren't failures of OSS - they are the reason the rest is so successfull. FOSS allows you to cheaply market-test a PoC and continue development on those that meet real needs. That actually is a MUCH better way of doing it because we can test and evaluate EVERY idea - and go with ALL the good ones, no good ideas lost because you failed to sell it to a venture capitalist. It's straight to market at low cost, where you sink or swim, and if you sink - you learn some lessons and move on to your next project (or helping another one) as a smarter coder.
What's more your statistics are (deliberately?) deceptive. Look at the size of the debian/ubuntu package list. Those are all successful, actively maintained, software. Many of them small niche applications. That's thousands of programs that are being actively developed and maintained by lively communities - because they meet somebodies needs. Even if there is a thousand failures for every success that's not a problem, there could be a MILLION failures for every success and it would STILL not be a problem. The ability to try EVERY idea and see which ones are REALLY good (which is RARELY obvious beforehand) is not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
>took me a second to realize you meant rms. do you know him personally?
Consider I live in a little third world country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and I know him personally and have had fun discussions with him while taking pictures in the mountains - the odds of the OP knowing him personally probably rather better than you think.
Bruce Schneier will point out that there have been several attempts since, all of them stopped effectively - and all stopped by security that was already there BEFORE 9/11. In fact the TSA has made no difference to security and the attempts since then would not have been caught by them.
Only two changes since 9/11 has actually IMPACTED on security. 1) Passengers changed their mindset from "do as we're told" to "fight back" - because the terrorists were no longer going to let you live if you obeyed. 2) They reinforced the cockpit doors (one could argue THAT should have been done in the FIRST place).
>The most religious president in the past couple decades has been Clinton. I do not understand why you seem to think the republicans have this locked up. Perhaps it is just your perception and new found phobias that is different.
So it was Clinton who came up with that "appease the religious right" idea to remove federal funding from any schools that don't teach abstinence-only sex-ed and single-handedly quadrupled America's teen-pregnancy rate while more than doubling it's teen STD-infection rate ?
Oh... no wait, that was Bush. Score one for the republicans on this question.
Okay, so it was Clinton who stated that the courts (e.g. the only one of the three chambers of government that is directly answerable to a citizen which comes before it) should not be allowed to express an opinion on the constitutionality of abortion laws - so that religious-minded politicians can make them ? Oh now wait, that was Paul Ryan. In the VP's debate. Score another for the republicans. (In case you were wondering - despite not being a huge fan of the Obama/Biden camp - Biden's answer to that SAME question was the ONLY one acceptable from any politician on this question - EVER "I will not let push my beliefs onto equally devout holders of OTHER faiths" [no seriously - if I could vote in US elections - I'd be voting for Jill Stein])
Oh but of course it was Clinton who first instituted "don't-ask-don't-tell" so I guess the democrats has to score one there... then again that was only done because at the time it was the closest that was politically possible to get from the Reagan-era outright ban on homosexuality in the military - it was a decent step-in-the-right-direction which the NEXT democrat could then build on to get to where it SHOULD be which is: zero discrimination allowed. Fine, call this one a tie.
Mind you - since Clinton - all those ultra-right-wing religious nutjob candidates have been running on democrat tickets. Michelle Bachman and Rick Santorum and... oh wait... score a few dozen more for the republicans.
Sorry pal... but the GP has this one right: when it comes to overly religious politics, the republicans are the scary ones.
>Romney: weak, but also vicious and self serving? You seem a bit conflicted there
You seem to be suggesting that these concepts are somehow contradictory ? At best you could argue that weakness would make one less efficient at these things. On the other hand the GP's argument is that these traits themselves WEAKEN one in the different context of an election - which is a perfectly reasonable thing to believe.
The picture is bleaker than you paint it. When I was about 18 I had the privilege of meeting one of the very first programmers who lived in my country. Some 40 years earlier (in the late 50's and early 60's) he had created the countries first database for social welfare on a computer the size of a building with 64 kilobytes of ram - and all the data in punch-cards. He always used to say "today's programmers can't program - if your ALGORYTHMS can't fit in 64k of ram, they are badly written"
But the point is this - because of the sheer manual labour of finding the right punch card and loading it in - looking up a case-file alone took 20 to 30 minutes, before the person trying to see it could even read it. Then there was whatever the cause was for reading it, whatever new notes were added, and ultimately replacing his punch-card with an updated one which had to be filed. Editing a case file to add "payment made $DATE" took an hour. And that was the most advanced technology available in the day - that hour sounds long, but it was 4 hours less than when the WHOLE process was manual (and you couldn't do things like do searches and extract statistics automatically AT ALL - even if they were slow due to card loading times). What percentage of disability recipients were still war victims ? My grandfather worked in the department (that's how I got to meet this man) when he started there in the late 1940's answering that question would take two months. By the 1960's with their big computer - it would take just over a week.
Today any well-run such department could extract the answer to a question like that in seconds, a few minutes at worst.
We are literally ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more productive than our grandfathers were. We do in minutes what took them days and weeks. Simply because we have the technological capacity to achieve this.
So why are we, on average, working 30% longer every week than they were - for the same salaries our parents earned ? (On an HOURLY measurement for real hours worked, middle class salaries have decreased 30% over the past 3 decades) .
Where is that mass of extra productivity going ? It sure as hell isn't making our lives better - it sure as hell isn't improving our average quality of life like it used to. It isn't eradicating poverty either - indeed part of why unemployment is a growing problem world-wide is because there is too MUCH productivity available for the economy to make use off.
What is happening to the enormity of creation we all produce every week - so much more than any previous generation ever could - that we're working longer than they did and earning less for it?
Personally - I think the only logical conclusion is that every penny of that productivity is going into the pockets of a tiny elite.
This is when I remember the warning Adam Smith gave us nearly 2 centuries ago: High wages is good for society, high profit margins are bad for society. The only logical conclusion is that there is only one kind of healthy economy and it's one where labour is the most valuable and expensive comoddity you can find and companies make virtually NO profit at all -just enough to survive, spending almost everything they make on salaries. Exactly the OPPOSITE of the society we've built.
Officially, the single most deserving of "insightful" post I have read on slashdot, ever. And I've been here since 1999. Seriously... I have been tweeting selected quotes from your post for the past 10 minutes... you may have just hit a nail on the head so damn huge that nobody has seen it because it's in the way.
There are a few of us around who were here when Bruce posted that first comment. My how the world has changed. I sometimes wonder why I come back (pay no attention to the high UID - I changed usernames a few years ago). I can only put it down to a kind of nostalgia for the war we fought and, in a round-about-way, won.
> It's not any more normal than people that like to be whipped or shit on
For that statement to be true you first have to define "normal". Pretty much the entire rest of your post is about all the reasons why this, basically, impossible. You can't have "abnormal" without some a conclusive line of what is "normal" - and when it comes to human behavior, the only thing you can say with any certainty is that there is NO normal.
>I've been added to several,er, 'fairly extreme view' groups without my confirmation/consent.
For friends to add you to such groups, they must already be members themselves.... sounds to me like you need new friends. Ones who don't hold views you consider "fairly extreme" perhaps ?
>Dont put personal shit on the internet, ever. unless you are ok with it getting out, because that is inevitable.
Did you even read the summary - let alone the article ? She didn't put "personal shit" on the internet. She joined a group in meat-space that shared her interests. They added her to their facebook group, which she had no say in (because facebook allows you to add people to groups without checking with them first) - and her father saw that addition to the group. She was outed on facebook by what OTHER people did online, in relation to what she did in real life. Effectively - she never put this personal information on facebook - other people put it there without her knowledge or consent (and it must be said: without any ill intentions).
>Of course they aired it because it was exciting, and statistically, suicides are rare.
This is true, you are only about 4 times as likely to die from suicide as you are from terrorism. Even if you're stationed in Basra.
Seems they can't stop talking about that either... guess Bruce Schneier was right: if it's on the news, it's NEVER going to happen to YOU. If it was common, it wouldn't BE news.
That's what stock certificates ARE. That's what the stock-market is FOR.
The only thing that kickstarter changes is the nature of the transaction. Instead of the wealthy investing in the company (or more accurately these days: investing in the likely future value of a piece of the company - which as it's own set of products) the future CUSTOMERS invest in a PRODUCT they want to buy.
If anything that is a MORE sustainable model than the old one, but the idea of crowdfunding a business isn't new. It was invented by the East India Company about 400 years ago. The kickstarter model just means that entrepeneurs can fund their vision without having to give away the actual fruits of their labour.
96% of business founders get fired within 3 years of going public. Funding a business via the "sell people bits of ownership" model of crowdfunding means you stop owning it - you can lose the company you created. With the kickstarter model - you instead are offering people the opportunity to fund the creation of a product they want to buy, a product they could not otherwise have bought. It is true consumer driven market - this probably does and SHOULD scare those whose livelihoods depend on the belief of entrepeneurs that the only way to fund their products is to sell ownership -but it's a good thing for both customers AND entrepeneurs.
Crowdfunding a business has a 400 year history of success. Crowdfunding a business while still being able ot make the product YOU envisioned, and that YOUR customers actually WANTED - now THAT is an improvement.
>If I kill you by accident, that is alright then? Maybe. You won't be charged with murder. You MAY be charged with manslaughter. The legal test for manslaughter is: 'caused a death where a reasonable person would not'.
So if reasonable precautions on your part would have prevented the death - and you didn't take them - then you're guilty, otherwise you are indeed innocent. To make up a random example. You're a forklift driver. Your forklift runs downhil while you stop for lunch, runs over a car and kills the driver. Are you guilty ? Well if you had left the handbrake off - then you are. If you had pulled it up but the brake FAILED while you were gone, then you're innocent.
See how it works ?
So we can apply a similar test to this accident if it helps you feel better. We know (and an appeals court judge has declared) based on the available evidence that there was no intent here. But was the accident excusable ? Well it depends - was it an accident a reasonable person would have been able to avoid ? For that one would have to look at the interface of the specific phone, the methods that led to this happening and the particular circumstances of the case. You cannot just universally make a declaration about it. There is even the possibility that this was caused by an obscure or sporadic bug in that version of the blackberry OS - that even RIM may not know about yet and NO action of his would have prevented it. Such bugs can and do happen - this site is full of programmer's we've all seen bugs like that. If that is the case (and we - and likely HE doesn't know that) then he would be completely innocent by the "reasonable person" measure.
I sincerely doubt the Jury ever really tried to question how reasonable his actions were since they never even asked the intent question despite the strong evidence showing there wasn't any. Now the fact is that this question quite academic - the question of whether he had acted in a reasonable manner hasn't been answered and we don't have enough information to answer it. The appeals judge may have, and may have decided on those grounds that he did NOT take reasonable precautions to keep his sexual message away from the minors and this is why he remains guilty - but the judge DID agree the actions were without INTENT and this is why his sentence was so significantly mitigated. But that is just a guess - I haven't read the actual court reports so don't take this as a claim of fact, just a likely explanation of the outcome.
>No, they go to the parents who transport their children to the meetings. So I'll ask again; Why did he have the phone numbers of 13 and 14 year olds on his phone?
Because they were 13 and 14 year old's NOT 6 and 7 year olds. That means they were high-school aged. Now I know in America you treat highschool teenagers that age as if they were babies but in the rest of the world they are allowed and indeed EXPECTED to take a modicum of responsibility for their own actions.
Including almost CERTAINLY having to get to practise THEMSELVES using available public transport, bycicles and the like.
My parents would have found the idea of "taking a high school kid to a sports practise" stupid beyond measure. They bought me a bike instead.
Even aside from that - there IS such a thing as non-sexual friendships between adults and teenagers. Teens seeking advice, role models and the like - and adults who are willing to play that role, often ones in positions like coaches, guidance councillors and such who are able and willing to give good advice to difficult questions that those kids may not be as comfortable discussing with their parents. That's not just innocent, it's a NORMAL part of growing up and depriving kids of that thinking you're protecting them is a very good way to make them less likely to grow up into responsible adults.
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>Here I thought protest was a staple of democracy, not an example of heinous coercion. Do people not have a right to express their views, simply because said views might be influenced by their religious convictions? Are religious people second-class citizens in that regard?
Protest against government actions (or at least the actions of one in a position of power over you) certainly - but does protest against fellow citizens really fall under the same umbrella ?
If it does, should it? \
Surely the ability to protest the actions of your neighbours and actively attempt to interfere with those actions (e.g. picket-lines) do not in any way promote democracy, and may very well in most (if not all) cases overstep the boundaries of your freedom ending where mine begins ?
That said - I wouldn't want to trust the government with stifling ANY protest because I sure won't trust them to keep the lines in a sane place. Since the very purpose of allowed protest is the ability to protest the government they are by definition the worst possible people to allow to restrict protest in any way.
So I would say -the allowance we make for protesting your fellow citizens is NOT made for the sake of democracy, indeed using it is actively undemocratic - we allow it only because there is no sane and sensible way to prohibit it without risking serious harm to the kind of protest we DO require and which IS democratic.
>intergalatic immaterial invisible purple penis
Hey !
You insensitive clod ! As a deacon in the church of the the intergalactic immaterial invisible purple penis I find your statement grossly offensive to my believes.
May you never enter the intergalactic immaterial invisible pink vagina... or any others either.
Gmf.
>Why should he? Your God never did. That's just some stuff you made up.
Actually - His God does, sort off. There's a whole chapter in Leviticus about it, only they don't talk about abortion per-se but about the closest thing that ancient medical technology could arrange: stoning-the-baby-at-birth.
An allowable way to avoid motherhood apparently under at least SOME conditions - notably it mentions pregnancy resulting from incest and rape.
Now call me crazy, but I think modern medical abortions are a damn sight less cruel way to deal with a rape-caused pregnancy than actually letting the baby be born and then killing it with rocks. But I suppose if you're a true fundamentalist then you must promote that.
After all, the same republicans who do all in their power to prevent the needy from avoiding unplanned parenthood, will also do all in their power to avoid doing anything to help shelter, feed and educate the results.
>So... "Do what I say or I'll beat you up" is coercive, but "Do what I say or my friend Bubba will beat you up" is not coercive because I won't be dealing the punishment personally?
Not quite, the line is different. Just how coercive is: "Do what I say or my IMAGINARY friend Mike will beat you up" ?
If you don't believe in God, THAT is what it comes down to when somebody tells you you're going to hell.
Fair enough - I was just pointing out that it's actually rather likely. Those of us who have met him and spent time with him socially do tend to start calling him "Richard" because he is quite insistent about it in any social setting.
One of the less known "nice" attributes of somebody who is not generally known for his social skills is a genuine dislike of veneration.
This is where you get the wrong conclusion from the right facts. See the difference between software and bridges is that it costs a lot less to produce a software Proof-of-concept and if it fails then nobody drowns in the river.
Those 10-thousand dead projects ? They aren't failures of OSS - they are the reason the rest is so successfull.
FOSS allows you to cheaply market-test a PoC and continue development on those that meet real needs. That actually is a MUCH better way of doing it because we can test and evaluate EVERY idea - and go with ALL the good ones, no good ideas lost because you failed to sell it to a venture capitalist.
It's straight to market at low cost, where you sink or swim, and if you sink - you learn some lessons and move on to your next project (or helping another one) as a smarter coder.
What's more your statistics are (deliberately?) deceptive. Look at the size of the debian/ubuntu package list. Those are all successful, actively maintained, software. Many of them small niche applications.
That's thousands of programs that are being actively developed and maintained by lively communities - because they meet somebodies needs.
Even if there is a thousand failures for every success that's not a problem, there could be a MILLION failures for every success and it would STILL not be a problem.
The ability to try EVERY idea and see which ones are REALLY good (which is RARELY obvious beforehand) is not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
>took me a second to realize you meant rms. do you know him personally?
Consider I live in a little third world country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and I know him personally and have had fun discussions with him while taking pictures in the mountains - the odds of the OP knowing him personally probably rather better than you think.
Bruce Schneier will point out that there have been several attempts since, all of them stopped effectively - and all stopped by security that was already there BEFORE 9/11.
In fact the TSA has made no difference to security and the attempts since then would not have been caught by them.
Only two changes since 9/11 has actually IMPACTED on security.
1) Passengers changed their mindset from "do as we're told" to "fight back" - because the terrorists were no longer going to let you live if you obeyed.
2) They reinforced the cockpit doors (one could argue THAT should have been done in the FIRST place).
Thank you for the inspiration:
http://silentcoder.co.za/2012/10/new-poem-the-shit-splattered-banner/
>The most religious president in the past couple decades has been Clinton. I do not understand why you seem to think the republicans have this locked up. Perhaps it is just your perception and new found phobias that is different.
So it was Clinton who came up with that "appease the religious right" idea to remove federal funding from any schools that don't teach abstinence-only sex-ed and single-handedly quadrupled America's teen-pregnancy rate while more than doubling it's teen STD-infection rate ?
Oh... no wait, that was Bush.
Score one for the republicans on this question.
Okay, so it was Clinton who stated that the courts (e.g. the only one of the three chambers of government that is directly answerable to a citizen which comes before it) should not be allowed to express an opinion on the constitutionality of abortion laws - so that religious-minded politicians can make them ?
Oh now wait, that was Paul Ryan. In the VP's debate.
Score another for the republicans.
(In case you were wondering - despite not being a huge fan of the Obama/Biden camp - Biden's answer to that SAME question was the ONLY one acceptable from any politician on this question - EVER "I will not let push my beliefs onto equally devout holders of OTHER faiths" [no seriously - if I could vote in US elections - I'd be voting for Jill Stein])
Oh but of course it was Clinton who first instituted "don't-ask-don't-tell" so I guess the democrats has to score one there... then again that was only done because at the time it was the closest that was politically possible to get from the Reagan-era outright ban on homosexuality in the military - it was a decent step-in-the-right-direction which the NEXT democrat could then build on to get to where it SHOULD be which is: zero discrimination allowed.
Fine, call this one a tie.
Mind you - since Clinton - all those ultra-right-wing religious nutjob candidates have been running on democrat tickets. Michelle Bachman and Rick Santorum and ... oh wait... score a few dozen more for the republicans.
Sorry pal... but the GP has this one right: when it comes to overly religious politics, the republicans are the scary ones.
>the human language. ...the what ? You're aware that the species known as "homo sapience" or colloquially "human" have more than one language right ?
>Romney: weak, but also vicious and self serving? You seem a bit conflicted there
You seem to be suggesting that these concepts are somehow contradictory ? At best you could argue that weakness would make one less efficient at these things.
On the other hand the GP's argument is that these traits themselves WEAKEN one in the different context of an election - which is a perfectly reasonable thing to believe.
what if you put some favourite pix on a compact flash card, load it in there... and use the thing to look at the photos or display them to visitors ?
The picture is bleaker than you paint it. When I was about 18 I had the privilege of meeting one of the very first programmers who lived in my country. Some 40 years earlier (in the late 50's and early 60's) he had created the countries first database for social welfare on a computer the size of a building with 64 kilobytes of ram - and all the data in punch-cards.
He always used to say "today's programmers can't program - if your ALGORYTHMS can't fit in 64k of ram, they are badly written"
But the point is this - because of the sheer manual labour of finding the right punch card and loading it in - looking up a case-file alone took 20 to 30 minutes, before the person trying to see it could even read it.
Then there was whatever the cause was for reading it, whatever new notes were added, and ultimately replacing his punch-card with an updated one which had to be filed.
Editing a case file to add "payment made $DATE" took an hour.
And that was the most advanced technology available in the day - that hour sounds long, but it was 4 hours less than when the WHOLE process was manual (and you couldn't do things like do searches and extract statistics automatically AT ALL - even if they were slow due to card loading times).
What percentage of disability recipients were still war victims ? My grandfather worked in the department (that's how I got to meet this man) when he started there in the late 1940's answering that question would take two months. By the 1960's with their big computer - it would take just over a week.
Today any well-run such department could extract the answer to a question like that in seconds, a few minutes at worst.
We are literally ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more productive than our grandfathers were. We do in minutes what took them days and weeks. Simply because we have the technological capacity to achieve this.
So why are we, on average, working 30% longer every week than they were - for the same salaries our parents earned ? (On an HOURLY measurement for real hours worked, middle class salaries have decreased 30% over the past 3 decades) .
Where is that mass of extra productivity going ? It sure as hell isn't making our lives better - it sure as hell isn't improving our average quality of life like it used to. It isn't eradicating poverty either - indeed part of why unemployment is a growing problem world-wide is because there is too MUCH productivity available for the economy to make use off.
What is happening to the enormity of creation we all produce every week - so much more than any previous generation ever could - that we're working longer than they did and earning less for it?
Personally - I think the only logical conclusion is that every penny of that productivity is going into the pockets of a tiny elite.
This is when I remember the warning Adam Smith gave us nearly 2 centuries ago: High wages is good for society, high profit margins are bad for society.
The only logical conclusion is that there is only one kind of healthy economy and it's one where labour is the most valuable and expensive comoddity you can find and companies make virtually NO profit at all -just enough to survive, spending almost everything they make on salaries.
Exactly the OPPOSITE of the society we've built.
Officially, the single most deserving of "insightful" post I have read on slashdot, ever. And I've been here since 1999.
Seriously... I have been tweeting selected quotes from your post for the past 10 minutes... you may have just hit a nail on the head so damn huge that nobody has seen it because it's in the way.
There are a few of us around who were here when Bruce posted that first comment. My how the world has changed. I sometimes wonder why I come back (pay no attention to the high UID - I changed usernames a few years ago).
I can only put it down to a kind of nostalgia for the war we fought and, in a round-about-way, won.
> It's not any more normal than people that like to be whipped or shit on
For that statement to be true you first have to define "normal". Pretty much the entire rest of your post is about all the reasons why this, basically, impossible.
You can't have "abnormal" without some a conclusive line of what is "normal" - and when it comes to human behavior, the only thing you can say with any certainty is that there is NO normal.
>I've been added to several,er, 'fairly extreme view' groups without my confirmation/consent.
For friends to add you to such groups, they must already be members themselves.... sounds to me like you need new friends. Ones who don't hold views you consider "fairly extreme" perhaps ?
>Dont put personal shit on the internet, ever.
unless you are ok with it getting out, because that is inevitable.
Did you even read the summary - let alone the article ?
She didn't put "personal shit" on the internet. She joined a group in meat-space that shared her interests. They added her to their facebook group, which she had no say in (because facebook allows you to add people to groups without checking with them first) - and her father saw that addition to the group.
She was outed on facebook by what OTHER people did online, in relation to what she did in real life.
Effectively - she never put this personal information on facebook - other people put it there without her knowledge or consent (and it must be said: without any ill intentions).
>Of course they aired it because it was exciting, and statistically, suicides are rare.
This is true, you are only about 4 times as likely to die from suicide as you are from terrorism. Even if you're stationed in Basra.
Seems they can't stop talking about that either... guess Bruce Schneier was right: if it's on the news, it's NEVER going to happen to YOU. If it was common, it wouldn't BE news.
That's what stock certificates ARE. That's what the stock-market is FOR.
The only thing that kickstarter changes is the nature of the transaction. Instead of the wealthy investing in the company (or more accurately these days: investing in the likely future value of a piece of the company - which as it's own set of products) the future CUSTOMERS invest in a PRODUCT they want to buy.
If anything that is a MORE sustainable model than the old one, but the idea of crowdfunding a business isn't new. It was invented by the East India Company about 400 years ago. The kickstarter model just means that entrepeneurs can fund their vision without having to give away the actual fruits of their labour.
96% of business founders get fired within 3 years of going public. Funding a business via the "sell people bits of ownership" model of crowdfunding means you stop owning it - you can lose the company you created. With the kickstarter model - you instead are offering people the opportunity to fund the creation of a product they want to buy, a product they could not otherwise have bought. It is true consumer driven market - this probably does and SHOULD scare those whose livelihoods depend on the belief of entrepeneurs that the only way to fund their products is to sell ownership -but it's a good thing for both customers AND entrepeneurs.
Crowdfunding a business has a 400 year history of success. Crowdfunding a business while still being able ot make the product YOU envisioned, and that YOUR customers actually WANTED - now THAT is an improvement.
>If I kill you by accident, that is alright then?
Maybe. You won't be charged with murder. You MAY be charged with manslaughter. The legal test for manslaughter is: 'caused a death where a reasonable person would not'.
So if reasonable precautions on your part would have prevented the death - and you didn't take them - then you're guilty, otherwise you are indeed innocent.
To make up a random example. You're a forklift driver. Your forklift runs downhil while you stop for lunch, runs over a car and kills the driver. Are you guilty ? Well if you had left the handbrake off - then you are. If you had pulled it up but the brake FAILED while you were gone, then you're innocent.
See how it works ?
So we can apply a similar test to this accident if it helps you feel better.
We know (and an appeals court judge has declared) based on the available evidence that there was no intent here. But was the accident excusable ? Well it depends - was it an accident a reasonable person would have been able to avoid ?
For that one would have to look at the interface of the specific phone, the methods that led to this happening and the particular circumstances of the case. You cannot just universally make a declaration about it. There is even the possibility that this was caused by an obscure or sporadic bug in that version of the blackberry OS - that even RIM may not know about yet and NO action of his would have prevented it. Such bugs can and do happen - this site is full of programmer's we've all seen bugs like that. If that is the case (and we - and likely HE doesn't know that) then he would be completely innocent by the "reasonable person" measure.
I sincerely doubt the Jury ever really tried to question how reasonable his actions were since they never even asked the intent question despite the strong evidence showing there wasn't any.
Now the fact is that this question quite academic - the question of whether he had acted in a reasonable manner hasn't been answered and we don't have enough information to answer it. The appeals judge may have, and may have decided on those grounds that he did NOT take reasonable precautions to keep his sexual message away from the minors and this is why he remains guilty - but the judge DID agree the actions were without INTENT and this is why his sentence was so significantly mitigated.
But that is just a guess - I haven't read the actual court reports so don't take this as a claim of fact, just a likely explanation of the outcome.
>No, they go to the parents who transport their children to the meetings. So I'll ask again; Why did he have the phone numbers of 13 and 14 year olds on his phone?
Because they were 13 and 14 year old's NOT 6 and 7 year olds. That means they were high-school aged. Now I know in America you treat highschool teenagers that age as if they were babies but in the rest of the world they are allowed and indeed EXPECTED to take a modicum of responsibility for their own actions.
Including almost CERTAINLY having to get to practise THEMSELVES using available public transport, bycicles and the like.
My parents would have found the idea of "taking a high school kid to a sports practise" stupid beyond measure. They bought me a bike instead.
Even aside from that - there IS such a thing as non-sexual friendships between adults and teenagers. Teens seeking advice, role models and the like - and adults who are willing to play that role, often ones in positions like coaches, guidance councillors and such who are able and willing to give good advice to difficult questions that those kids may not be as comfortable discussing with their parents.
That's not just innocent, it's a NORMAL part of growing up and depriving kids of that thinking you're protecting them is a very good way to make them less likely to grow up into responsible adults.
>Actually, I doubt they would.
I'm sure they WOULD find a reason to do it.
What they would NOT do is strap the kennel to the roof of the car WITH THE DOG STILL INSIDE IT !
>>the fact that he's spending more time of the golf course than with his financial advisors and his national security team combined
>In nearly 3-1/2 years (1200 days), he's played 100 rounds of golf
Now let's put some context on that. During his first year in office, G.W. Bush spent 184 days (that's rather more than half the year) on vacation.
Man, I wouldn't mind a job where I can get paid millions of dollars for working roughly 5 months a year...