>Note that the entire Bill of Rights once only limited the Federal government, not the State governments. Then the States passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended the Bill of Rights (and every other Constitutional provision) to everyone in the USA, against anyone who'd care to try to infringe upon them.
Yet nobody seems to have a problem with employers censoring their employees speech ? There's your exception right there. Clearly the U.S. constitution is NOT held to apply to corporations.
That was YOUR example -not mine. Passing somebody over for promotion in favor of a lesser candidate purely on the grounds of skincolor IS harming them, considering that a status of employment is a business deal and there is a certain expectation of fairness and honesty IN business deals I would say it borders on deliberate fraud. Luckily we don't have to try and figure out what sort of fine lines we have to draw between other business deals and employment contracts (it's generally not thought that every consumer right applies to every employee - or vice versa) - because there is already a simple solution: make discrimination illegal.
Yes a legal definition from 1934 is perfectly adequate to consider this scenario through. If anything I would say that the very definition you cite supports MY view more than yours. Because it's broadcast that MAKES it intended for the public. The law was written to control who is ALLOWED to broadcast on licensed spectrums. On an unlicensed spectrum EVERYBODY is allowed to broadcast, that doesn't mean what you do there ISN'T broadcasting. The meaning of that word is well defined in engineering and it's EXACTLY what WIFI does. You cite examples of in-the-clear broadcasts that were not meant to be public - but you yourself indicate how special legislation had to be passed to make eavesdropping on such broadcasts illegal. The law assumes a broadcast to be MEANT for public reception except where it makes specific exceptions (like e.g. baby-monitors).
There is no such exception law for WIFI - it would make things like public hotspots a legal nightmare as you struggle to define what constitutes permission. Since WIFI is on an unlicensed spectrum it's incredibly hard to control who broadcasts there (and it isn't supposed to be) or who listens - basically it's clearly not practical to MAKE it an exception.
Instead the technology allows for the means to make broadcasts in this spectrum private if so desired - by encrypting them. Deliberate (and considering that nature of modern wifi's - generally intentional) failure to use the privacy feature must then default to the base legal position: that since it's a broadcast, it's INTENDED to be public. Since a lot of such wifi broadcasts ARE intended to be public (again - public access hotspots spring to mind) this is the only REASONABLE position to take.
The only difference is - you aren't interesting enough for anybody to do it. But if you are famous, be sure that exactly that can and will happen all the time.
>>If a policeman walking down the road sees you shooting a gun at your girlfriend through the window with the open blinds he will damn sure rush in and intervene. "Plain sight" is not covered by the 4th ammendment and broadcast data is much closer to "plain sight" than thermal imagery from INSIDE the house.
>Actually, no. The difference here is between a policeman walking down the road happens to see something and a policeman sets up equipment to spy on you. That is the difference, not the part of electromagnetic spectrum used. Well, that and the difference between immediate life-and-death emergency situation and an ongoing investigation.
Well I was showing you limits to your 4th amendment -either way the US constitution restricts the government, you've made it abundantly clear that it does not apparently restrict corporations. The point is there is a huge difference between seeing through a window and looking through a solid wall. The former was DESIGNED to be seen through, and provided with the means to prevent this feature when so desired. Leaving the blinds open is thus can be taken as a clear intent NOT to make whatever is visible private (as every exhibitionist in the world will tell you).
>>More-over there is no practical way to PREVENT thermal energy if you want to,
>Of course there is: just put thermal insulation in your walls. It'll also save you a lot of money in heating/cooling bills, and might help save the planet.
That can prevent it being easily visible through a wall, it doesn't prevent it being created. More-over - unless your house came with it you would need to spend extra money and time to obtain this protection. Practically every house comes with curtain rails already installed. By the same token - every router comes with the ability to encrypt connections already included. You need not go to any additional expense nor to more than a brief 5 minutes of trouble to make the data private if you so wish, so it's reasonable to assume that not doing so is a clear indication of a desire to make it public.
Every router on the market has supported WPA for years, and generally it's the recommended default in the auto-setup wizard. On the contrary - you have to actively CHOOSE not to be secure before google could collect anything. The practical way to evade is the recommended default !
>So you think your DNA isn't private? You leave it everywhere you go so it's in the public domain. Is it OK for a company to collect it, store it and profile it for its own purposes?
Considering the amount of DNA that/. readers have distributed into socks and keyboards, I think the readership is actively campaigning to make DNA automatically public domain.
>Rocket jumps would not have existed it if realism was simulated. We built a unique style of play because of those, in Quake I:-)
And how awesome was it ? I miss rocket-jumping - there were quite a few places where knowing how to do it could sway the game one way or the other. My all-time favorite Q2 map was the space-station. Low-gravity, huge jumps and lots of momentum - if you could keep from banging into the walls a rocket jump could send you clear to the other end of a hall while blowing the hell out of anybody running along it.
Seriously ? You think "equal" in the context of people have the same meaning as in maths ? Ever heard of context ?
Your own statement contradicts it. If it's not provable fact then it CANNOT be the same kind of equal. I think that since science has proven that the degree of genetic difference between people is even in the most diverse cases so tiny as to be statistically utterly insignificant - that makes our equality a proven fact. What makes us unique and different is the choices we make. On that we can and must be judged. What we are born as is, essentially and for everybody so close to the exact same thing that it is actually comes very close to even the mathematical meaning - and that you CAN prove and it HAS been proven. There was a theory in the late 90's that humans are not one species but in fact several closely related species, that each race is in fact a different species - just related enough to allow interbreeding. Scientists investigated the theory - and not only proved it wrong, but ended up proving that we are not only all the same species but the differences between "races" are literally so immeasurably small that for all matters of practicality race only exists in our heads. The actual physical and genetic differences are so minimal as to be be practically non-existent.
So I agree - people are equal, and I believe it IS in fact even better than provable fact: it's proven fact. Fact proven by science - and barring an entire redesign of the theory of genetics - something that cannot change ever again. It's as solid a fact as "The earth revolves around the sun".
Value to society and value as a person are two different things. Potential is yet another thing altogether. I was not the one who confused them.
Not even close to the same ballpark... hell it's not even the same damn sport.
If a policeman walking down the road sees you shooting a gun at your girlfriend through the window with the open blinds he will damn sure rush in and intervene. "Plain sight" is not covered by the 4th ammendment and broadcast data is much closer to "plain sight" than thermal imagery from INSIDE the house. More-over there is no practical way to PREVENT thermal energy if you want to, but it's easy to prevent broadcasting unencrypted wifi. Every damn router on the market has an easy setup wizard that suggests encryption as the RECOMMENDED DEFAULT. That makes disabling it an act of choice. Usually made to avoid the hassle of passwords. Well the price you pay for that convenience is the choice to make your data public.
Every router I have seen in at least the last 5 years will suggest encryption as the default setting during the initial setup wizard. You generally have to manually CHOOSE not to secure it, most people who do so choose this to avoid the hassle of a password.
So I think the more common default is in fact to automatically secure wifi. Of course I speak from my own country and experience but I seriously doubt the same companies use such radically different firmware everywhere else.
You are BROADCASTING the information - you probably CHOSE "Use unsecured *WARNING THIS COULD REVEAL YOUR PRIVATE DATA*" - and now you complain because somebody reads it ?
The point is- nobody entered your house here, to use your own analogy. It's more like you left the curtains open and now you're complaining because they could see what color your couch is from the street. In terms of usefulness and level of intrusion of the information - what google took is marginally less important than the color of your couch.
>In the same way when you sunbathe in your backyard or fuck your girlfriend in the window you probably don't mind if your neighbors see you, but you have every right to be pissed if someone decides to take photographs.
If you can't be arsed to close the curtains - then you don't have the right to complain if I DO take photos.
I was trying to talk to you on your own terms. By myself- I would never have used either word. The person with Down's is equal in every way to every other person. I said it in another comment. The ONLY valid grounds by which to judge a person is the things they CHOSE. Since somebody cannot CHOOSE whether or not to have Down's it's not a valid grounds for judgement - NOR generalization.
In fact I have an in-law with Downs' - she is also an Olympic medalist - no not special olympics. She's an Olympic medalist in gymnastics (a few years ago now) in the normal Olympic games. Obviously she was born with a potential neither your nor I had (well I never made it to the Olympics in anything and since you're posting on/. I'm going to assume neither did you).
In San Francisco lives a girl with Down's whom I don't know but I saw one of those true-life dramas about her. She also holds a PHD from UCB. She's in the Guinnies book of records as the first person with a mental disability to ever obtain one (note I saw this a long time ago - I honestly can't REMEMBER the full details and it may be an honorary PHD for achievements outside direct academics - if somebody knows the details feel free to correct me).
Chris Burke has probably out-earned us both a few thousand times over - and is an incredibly talented actor, quite the feat for somebody with a "debilitating mental disability" no ?
I met a lecturer from Oxford a while ago. He teaches languages there. Several of them. He can fluently write, speak and read something like 18 different languages. He also has severe autism. He is unable to deal with more than one person at a time so he records his lecturers on video to be shown in class and answers questions only in one-on-one interviews with students. A truly debilitating dissability - yet inside a savant who is a true genius in his field. All the rarer because most Savantism occurs in mathematics and other very hard skills - a savant in language skills would have sounded impossible except (at least) one really exists.
So my point ? Don't generalize. Don't assume things about people - that IS discrimination, without exception and more often than not, you're doing them a terrible injustice with it. Judge people as individuals based on their individual choices and actions. Everything else is essentially non-existent, any other thing you think you can judge on exists only in your mind and hardly ever has any actual correlation to reality. That makes it not only morally wrong to do, but stupid because it's factually wrong as well.
I'm guessing because "the people you know" is not a sufficiently large sample size to give statistical validity ?
Or else, based on your tone... perhaps it's because everybody you know is an overweight, unemployed loser anyway regardless of wheter or not they also play WoW. Birds of a feather and all that...
>When I was running the NoSoftwarePatents campaign years ago, it also felt like real-time strategy in many respects:-) And lots of Orcs to fight against.
TroYL won't get a subscription from me till they fix the respawn bug. Seriously, it seems once you die in TRoYL you just get stuck in the graveyard, no spirit healers or anything - I know some people who have been waiting to respawn their chars for years now and the developers simply don't seem to care about fixing this glaringly obvious bug that really hampers gameplay. Nobody is prepared to take even the slightest risks in bossfights because of it.
Having said that, one thing I do miss about TRoYL - it had the best implementation of/fucking I have EVER played.
So by your logic if you place an ad in the new york times I shouldn't be allowed to keep (or perhaps even buy) a copy of the paper as it would invade your "privacy" for me to store information you have CHOSEN to make public ?!?!?!?
Not securing your wifi is CHOOSING to make it public. There is no other logical or reasonable way to look at it.
I think there is a difference though. Apple collected information - without fully informing users they would be doing so. Information that otherwise would have been quite hard to obtain especially en-mass. (a dhcp server would know it - but you'd still need to know exactly when the phone connected). Google collected information that was being publicly broadcast by people who CHOSE not to make it private. It's that simple, if you choose not to secure your wifi, you've chosen to make any information travelling over it public. That's what the word "broadcast" means. Perhaps we should use a different word for using encryption to limit who can receive a broadcast - which makes the information private - narrowcast perhaps ?
>For me privacy is not about the place, privacy is about the person.
Perhaps - but what google did isn't like hiding in a bush behind you recording your conversation with your girlfriend. It's more like you are standing on top of a chair shouting "I love you Jane Fonda will you marry me" and they record it.
Seriously - when you BROADCAST information, without making any attempt to limit who can receive it despite your broadcasting device being equipped with the means to do so you can't expect it to be private afterward.
Or to use an analogy I used in a previous story on this topic: If you shag your girl against the window without closing the blinds you can't blame the neighbours for staring - not even the pervy fat-guy across the road who videotapes it (and then posts on slashdot about privacy concerns).
I can even give you a car analogy. If I take pictures of the highway as you drive by - and thus get a picture of your car showing make, model and registration - how did I invade your privacy ? If I do it in your own front yard I still didn't invade your privacy - especially since, if you really cared, you could easily have draped a car-condom over it.
Information you broadcast without limiting who can receive/understand it - is not private information - your own actions have MADE it public information.
When you actually know the sociologists meaning of the words "barbarian" and "tribal" as I use it, you can argue about what it means.
I'm sick of pointing out that my original text was badly phrased, I had meant ACTING on thoughts of racism with discriminatory behavior. I do think those thoughts themselves are wrong, but I don't think it makes any sense to make a law about them - if only because it's impossible to enforce and I damn well don't want to live in a world where it IS possible to enforce because we both know it wouldn't ONLY get used to suppress the thoughts NOBODY should have. I stand by my position though - if you call somebody a racist slur and he beats the shit out of you for it, he shouldn't be guilty of a crime either - you drew first blood.
>Really, you think that someone suffering from Down's syndrome has the same potential as someone with normal genetics?
No - but I think the potential he does have is no less valuable to society as a whole, and you do realize that you're argument is only one incredibly small step away from eugenics don't you ? I hope you know what that means because I really don't feel like Godwinning myself to give you an example.
>This might be acceptable in some cases, but only if you can get most other countries to agree to it. Most of the time, you're not going to get such agreement. Apartheid is a pretty extreme example; it's hard to find large groups of people willing to defend that, and easy to get a lot of countries to gang up on the one country that still practices it openly. What about other things? You yourself have advocated thoughtcrimes in other posts here. Would you try to get countries to boycott the USA because they refuse to pass laws banning certain thoughts? What about laws banning mocking of Islam or making drawings of Mohammed? The Islamic countries would love to make everyone pass such laws, even though it goes against the idea of freedom of speech and thought that those of us in the USA cherish.
I clarified in another post that I was reffering to the practice of actions based on racist thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. I know I was unclear in my original post- but I did by now spell out a lot of time. Not thoughtcrime, I'm not even happy with what OUR constitution says about it. But most certainly control what people can DO about those thoughts.
The thing is, how many countries would NOT support equal rights for women for example ? Do you really think we're not the majority ? Not even considering we have ALL the money.
The thing is - my original post was idealistic. I suggested the kind of world I would like to live in - where everybody has at least basic human rights. I have no delusion that we can achieve that anytime soon, but is it so bad to WANT it ? Without wanting ideals - they NEVER come true, and many ideals that once were thought impossible ARE true now, because people kept wanting.
First bloody sentence (I'm paraphrasing but the meaning is intact): We recognize the injustices of the past and will ensure that it never happens again.
Next paragraph: To guarantee that nobody will be subject to discrimination based on race, sexual preference, religion or creed.
Slashdot Mirror
>Note that the entire Bill of Rights once only limited the Federal government, not the State governments. Then the States passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended the Bill of Rights (and every other Constitutional provision) to everyone in the USA, against anyone who'd care to try to infringe upon them.
Yet nobody seems to have a problem with employers censoring their employees speech ? There's your exception right there. Clearly the U.S. constitution is NOT held to apply to corporations.
>Not hiring someone is not harming them.
That was YOUR example -not mine. Passing somebody over for promotion in favor of a lesser candidate purely on the grounds of skincolor IS harming them, considering that a status of employment is a business deal and there is a certain expectation of fairness and honesty IN business deals I would say it borders on deliberate fraud. Luckily we don't have to try and figure out what sort of fine lines we have to draw between other business deals and employment contracts (it's generally not thought that every consumer right applies to every employee - or vice versa) - because there is already a simple solution: make discrimination illegal.
>BROADCASTING
Yes a legal definition from 1934 is perfectly adequate to consider this scenario through. If anything I would say that the very definition you cite supports MY view more than yours. Because it's broadcast that MAKES it intended for the public. The law was written to control who is ALLOWED to broadcast on licensed spectrums. On an unlicensed spectrum EVERYBODY is allowed to broadcast, that doesn't mean what you do there ISN'T broadcasting.
The meaning of that word is well defined in engineering and it's EXACTLY what WIFI does. You cite examples of in-the-clear broadcasts that were not meant to be public - but you yourself indicate how special legislation had to be passed to make eavesdropping on such broadcasts illegal. The law assumes a broadcast to be MEANT for public reception except where it makes specific exceptions (like e.g. baby-monitors).
There is no such exception law for WIFI - it would make things like public hotspots a legal nightmare as you struggle to define what constitutes permission. Since WIFI is on an unlicensed spectrum it's incredibly hard to control who broadcasts there (and it isn't supposed to be) or who listens - basically it's clearly not practical to MAKE it an exception.
Instead the technology allows for the means to make broadcasts in this spectrum private if so desired - by encrypting them. Deliberate (and considering that nature of modern wifi's - generally intentional) failure to use the privacy feature must then default to the base legal position: that since it's a broadcast, it's INTENDED to be public.
Since a lot of such wifi broadcasts ARE intended to be public (again - public access hotspots spring to mind) this is the only REASONABLE position to take.
The entire paparazzi industry says you are wrong.
The only difference is - you aren't interesting enough for anybody to do it. But if you are famous, be sure that exactly that can and will happen all the time.
>>If a policeman walking down the road sees you shooting a gun at your girlfriend through the window with the open blinds he will damn sure rush in and intervene. "Plain sight" is not covered by the 4th ammendment and broadcast data is much closer to "plain sight" than thermal imagery from INSIDE the house.
>Actually, no. The difference here is between a policeman walking down the road happens to see something and a policeman sets up equipment to spy on you. That is the difference, not the part of electromagnetic spectrum used. Well, that and the difference between immediate life-and-death emergency situation and an ongoing investigation.
Well I was showing you limits to your 4th amendment -either way the US constitution restricts the government, you've made it abundantly clear that it does not apparently restrict corporations. The point is there is a huge difference between seeing through a window and looking through a solid wall. The former was DESIGNED to be seen through, and provided with the means to prevent this feature when so desired. Leaving the blinds open is thus can be taken as a clear intent NOT to make whatever is visible private (as every exhibitionist in the world will tell you).
>>More-over there is no practical way to PREVENT thermal energy if you want to,
>Of course there is: just put thermal insulation in your walls. It'll also save you a lot of money in heating/cooling bills, and might help save the planet.
That can prevent it being easily visible through a wall, it doesn't prevent it being created. More-over - unless your house came with it you would need to spend extra money and time to obtain this protection. Practically every house comes with curtain rails already installed. By the same token - every router comes with the ability to encrypt connections already included.
You need not go to any additional expense nor to more than a brief 5 minutes of trouble to make the data private if you so wish, so it's reasonable to assume that not doing so is a clear indication of a desire to make it public.
>I sometimes wonder if theres an IQ test politicians have to take and anyone who makes it into 3 digits can't become one.
Close, it's more like everybody who doesn't make it into 2 digits are destined to be one.
>There's no practical way to evade.
Every router on the market has supported WPA for years, and generally it's the recommended default in the auto-setup wizard. On the contrary - you have to actively CHOOSE not to be secure before google could collect anything. The practical way to evade is the recommended default !
>So you think your DNA isn't private? You leave it everywhere you go so it's in the public domain. Is it OK for a company to collect it, store it and profile it for its own purposes?
Considering the amount of DNA that /. readers have distributed into socks and keyboards, I think the readership is actively campaigning to make DNA automatically public domain.
>Rocket jumps would not have existed it if realism was simulated. We built a unique style of play because of those, in Quake I :-)
And how awesome was it ? I miss rocket-jumping - there were quite a few places where knowing how to do it could sway the game one way or the other. My all-time favorite Q2 map was the space-station. Low-gravity, huge jumps and lots of momentum - if you could keep from banging into the walls a rocket jump could send you clear to the other end of a hall while blowing the hell out of anybody running along it.
Seriously ?
You think "equal" in the context of people have the same meaning as in maths ? Ever heard of context ?
Your own statement contradicts it. If it's not provable fact then it CANNOT be the same kind of equal. I think that since science has proven that the degree of genetic difference between people is even in the most diverse cases so tiny as to be statistically utterly insignificant - that makes our equality a proven fact.
What makes us unique and different is the choices we make. On that we can and must be judged. What we are born as is, essentially and for everybody so close to the exact same thing that it is actually comes very close to even the mathematical meaning - and that you CAN prove and it HAS been proven.
There was a theory in the late 90's that humans are not one species but in fact several closely related species, that each race is in fact a different species - just related enough to allow interbreeding.
Scientists investigated the theory - and not only proved it wrong, but ended up proving that we are not only all the same species but the differences between "races" are literally so immeasurably small that for all matters of practicality race only exists in our heads. The actual physical and genetic differences are so minimal as to be be practically non-existent.
So I agree - people are equal, and I believe it IS in fact even better than provable fact: it's proven fact.
Fact proven by science - and barring an entire redesign of the theory of genetics - something that cannot change ever again. It's as solid a fact as "The earth revolves around the sun".
Value to society and value as a person are two different things. Potential is yet another thing altogether. I was not the one who confused them.
Not even close to the same ballpark... hell it's not even the same damn sport.
If a policeman walking down the road sees you shooting a gun at your girlfriend through the window with the open blinds he will damn sure rush in and intervene. "Plain sight" is not covered by the 4th ammendment and broadcast data is much closer to "plain sight" than thermal imagery from INSIDE the house.
More-over there is no practical way to PREVENT thermal energy if you want to, but it's easy to prevent broadcasting unencrypted wifi. Every damn router on the market has an easy setup wizard that suggests encryption as the RECOMMENDED DEFAULT. That makes disabling it an act of choice. Usually made to avoid the hassle of passwords.
Well the price you pay for that convenience is the choice to make your data public.
>The average consumer does not think of wireless networking as "broadcast" information
The average consumer also doesn't think drunk driving is such a big deal - we still hold them accountable when they kill somebody.
Failing to recognize the potential consequences of your actions does not absolve you from being responsible for them.
Every router I have seen in at least the last 5 years will suggest encryption as the default setting during the initial setup wizard. You generally have to manually CHOOSE not to secure it, most people who do so choose this to avoid the hassle of a password.
So I think the more common default is in fact to automatically secure wifi. Of course I speak from my own country and experience but I seriously doubt the same companies use such radically different firmware everywhere else.
You are BROADCASTING the information - you probably CHOSE "Use unsecured *WARNING THIS COULD REVEAL YOUR PRIVATE DATA*" - and now you complain because somebody reads it ?
The point is- nobody entered your house here, to use your own analogy. It's more like you left the curtains open and now you're complaining because they could see what color your couch is from the street. In terms of usefulness and level of intrusion of the information - what google took is marginally less important than the color of your couch.
>In the same way when you sunbathe in your backyard or fuck your girlfriend in the window you probably don't mind if your neighbors see you, but you have every right to be pissed if someone decides to take photographs.
If you can't be arsed to close the curtains - then you don't have the right to complain if I DO take photos.
I was trying to talk to you on your own terms.
By myself- I would never have used either word. The person with Down's is equal in every way to every other person. I said it in another comment. The ONLY valid grounds by which to judge a person is the things they CHOSE. Since somebody cannot CHOOSE whether or not to have Down's it's not a valid grounds for judgement - NOR generalization.
In fact I have an in-law with Downs' - she is also an Olympic medalist - no not special olympics. She's an Olympic medalist in gymnastics (a few years ago now) in the normal Olympic games. Obviously she was born with a potential neither your nor I had (well I never made it to the Olympics in anything and since you're posting on /. I'm going to assume neither did you).
In San Francisco lives a girl with Down's whom I don't know but I saw one of those true-life dramas about her. She also holds a PHD from UCB. She's in the Guinnies book of records as the first person with a mental disability to ever obtain one (note I saw this a long time ago - I honestly can't REMEMBER the full details and it may be an honorary PHD for achievements outside direct academics - if somebody knows the details feel free to correct me).
Chris Burke has probably out-earned us both a few thousand times over - and is an incredibly talented actor, quite the feat for somebody with a "debilitating mental disability" no ?
I met a lecturer from Oxford a while ago. He teaches languages there. Several of them. He can fluently write, speak and read something like 18 different languages. He also has severe autism. He is unable to deal with more than one person at a time so he records his lecturers on video to be shown in class and answers questions only in one-on-one interviews with students.
A truly debilitating dissability - yet inside a savant who is a true genius in his field. All the rarer because most Savantism occurs in mathematics and other very hard skills - a savant in language skills would have sounded impossible except (at least) one really exists.
So my point ? Don't generalize. Don't assume things about people - that IS discrimination, without exception and more often than not, you're doing them a terrible injustice with it. Judge people as individuals based on their individual choices and actions.
Everything else is essentially non-existent, any other thing you think you can judge on exists only in your mind and hardly ever has any actual correlation to reality. That makes it not only morally wrong to do, but stupid because it's factually wrong as well.
I'm guessing because "the people you know" is not a sufficiently large sample size to give statistical validity ?
Or else, based on your tone... perhaps it's because everybody you know is an overweight, unemployed loser anyway regardless of wheter or not they also play WoW. Birds of a feather and all that...
>When I was running the NoSoftwarePatents campaign years ago, it also felt like real-time strategy in many respects :-) And lots of Orcs to fight against.
Not to mention all the trolls...
TroYL won't get a subscription from me till they fix the respawn bug. Seriously, it seems once you die in TRoYL you just get stuck in the graveyard, no spirit healers or anything - I know some people who have been waiting to respawn their chars for years now and the developers simply don't seem to care about fixing this glaringly obvious bug that really hampers gameplay. Nobody is prepared to take even the slightest risks in bossfights because of it.
Having said that, one thing I do miss about TRoYL - it had the best implementation of /fucking I have EVER played.
So by your logic if you place an ad in the new york times I shouldn't be allowed to keep (or perhaps even buy) a copy of the paper as it would invade your "privacy" for me to store information you have CHOSEN to make public ?!?!?!?
Not securing your wifi is CHOOSING to make it public. There is no other logical or reasonable way to look at it.
I think there is a difference though. Apple collected information - without fully informing users they would be doing so. Information that otherwise would have been quite hard to obtain especially en-mass. (a dhcp server would know it - but you'd still need to know exactly when the phone connected).
Google collected information that was being publicly broadcast by people who CHOSE not to make it private. It's that simple, if you choose not to secure your wifi, you've chosen to make any information travelling over it public. That's what the word "broadcast" means.
Perhaps we should use a different word for using encryption to limit who can receive a broadcast - which makes the information private - narrowcast perhaps ?
>For me privacy is not about the place, privacy is about the person.
Perhaps - but what google did isn't like hiding in a bush behind you recording your conversation with your girlfriend. It's more like you are standing on top of a chair shouting "I love you Jane Fonda will you marry me" and they record it.
Seriously - when you BROADCAST information, without making any attempt to limit who can receive it despite your broadcasting device being equipped with the means to do so you can't expect it to be private afterward.
Or to use an analogy I used in a previous story on this topic: If you shag your girl against the window without closing the blinds you can't blame the neighbours for staring - not even the pervy fat-guy across the road who videotapes it (and then posts on slashdot about privacy concerns).
I can even give you a car analogy. If I take pictures of the highway as you drive by - and thus get a picture of your car showing make, model and registration - how did I invade your privacy ? If I do it in your own front yard I still didn't invade your privacy - especially since, if you really cared, you could easily have draped a car-condom over it.
Information you broadcast without limiting who can receive/understand it - is not private information - your own actions have MADE it public information.
When you actually know the sociologists meaning of the words "barbarian" and "tribal" as I use it, you can argue about what it means.
I'm sick of pointing out that my original text was badly phrased, I had meant ACTING on thoughts of racism with discriminatory behavior. I do think those thoughts themselves are wrong, but I don't think it makes any sense to make a law about them - if only because it's impossible to enforce and I damn well don't want to live in a world where it IS possible to enforce because we both know it wouldn't ONLY get used to suppress the thoughts NOBODY should have.
I stand by my position though - if you call somebody a racist slur and he beats the shit out of you for it, he shouldn't be guilty of a crime either - you drew first blood.
>Really, you think that someone suffering from Down's syndrome has the same potential as someone with normal genetics?
No - but I think the potential he does have is no less valuable to society as a whole, and you do realize that you're argument is only one incredibly small step away from eugenics don't you ? I hope you know what that means because I really don't feel like Godwinning myself to give you an example.
>This might be acceptable in some cases, but only if you can get most other countries to agree to it. Most of the time, you're not going to get such agreement. Apartheid is a pretty extreme example; it's hard to find large groups of people willing to defend that, and easy to get a lot of countries to gang up on the one country that still practices it openly. What about other things? You yourself have advocated thoughtcrimes in other posts here. Would you try to get countries to boycott the USA because they refuse to pass laws banning certain thoughts? What about laws banning mocking of Islam or making drawings of Mohammed? The Islamic countries would love to make everyone pass such laws, even though it goes against the idea of freedom of speech and thought that those of us in the USA cherish.
I clarified in another post that I was reffering to the practice of actions based on racist thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. I know I was unclear in my original post- but I did by now spell out a lot of time. Not thoughtcrime, I'm not even happy with what OUR constitution says about it. But most certainly control what people can DO about those thoughts.
The thing is, how many countries would NOT support equal rights for women for example ? Do you really think we're not the majority ? Not even considering we have ALL the money.
The thing is - my original post was idealistic. I suggested the kind of world I would like to live in - where everybody has at least basic human rights. I have no delusion that we can achieve that anytime soon, but is it so bad to WANT it ? Without wanting ideals - they NEVER come true, and many ideals that once were thought impossible ARE true now, because people kept wanting.
First bloody sentence (I'm paraphrasing but the meaning is intact): We recognize the injustices of the past and will ensure that it never happens again.
Next paragraph: To guarantee that nobody will be subject to discrimination based on race, sexual preference, religion or creed.