I'm nowhere near as paranoid as I once was, but I try to keep my Facebook account usable for my friends while near useless for anyone else.
Same here. Contact information is true enough, as in email sent to the email address listed in my Facebook profile will reach me. Other information are mostly lies and jokes, but my friends should know (and I tell them in person) which ones are lies and which ones aren't.
I should make my profile a little more professionally acceptable, though, in case a future employer finds the profile and somehow links it to me...
I am really worried about the fact that Facebook has access to data such as people's real name (that's the point of it, right?)
Um, no it doesn't. It has no real name verification mechanism, so if you are like me and you go by a nickname among your friends, you can register using a nickname. I think at some point they changed it so that you couldn't change the name easily once you register ('didn't used to be that way in its first year), but if you start out with a pseudonym, they don't stop you.
As for other infos, well, use TOR and litter your profile (and friend list) with a lot of false information so that they cannot separate the truth from lie.
What is to one person "some stupid shit", to another person (or maybe the whole neighborhood), it's public nuisance. If you had been a good neighbor, your neighbor wouldn't have cause to call cops on you---I'm sure it's a crime to call cops without actual crime or emergency.
I've acceded to possibilities of accidental discovery (as in cops weren't looking for drugs when they searched you, either with warrant or due cause)---and harsh sentences for simple possession may be unfair---but I do not believe that a majority of people serving time for drug related crimes are serving time because of simple possession and because their simple possession was accidentally discovered.
To protect the most US Soldiers (still all volunteers), we should pull out now. Now we just need to figure out if a US soldier's life is more important than an Iraqi/Afghani citizen's.
Of course it is more important. I would estimate that one U.S. soldier's life is worth at least 10 Iraqi/Afghani/French citizens, at a very conservative estimate.
That isn't the question you should be asking. The reason we want stable Afghanistan isn't because we want to be charitable to those poor people. It's because a stable Afghanistan means one fewer training ground for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So the ultimate goal is to protect American lives.
Whether we are doing that effectively with our missions in the region is a different question, but as an abstract goal, American soldiers must feel that protecting American lives is a worthwhile goal, or they wouldn't have joined our volunteer force.
The drug laws are one of the few things where if you are not a danger to others and doing it in complete privacy the law can and if they don't like you will arrest you and convict you.
Complete privacy? As in no one sees you doing drugs; you are not nuisance to others doing drugs; you are in your own, closed, private room/house and there is no sign whatsoever outside that you are doing drugs?
Exactly how do law enforcement find out that you are doing drugs, arrest you and convict you?
While I realize some people are convicted of possession of drugs (the possession being discovered by accident, i.e. when stopped for traffic violation, etc.), those are small fractions. Others are convicted for dealing drugs, or committing other crimes related to drugs. Doing drugs is not, in a majority of cases, a "victimless crime". There are victims; you don't have to get murdered or beaten up to become a victim—having a crackhouse in your neighborhood isn't safe or desirable.
This is not to say that we can be... smarter about drug laws—some parts of War on Drugs are ineffective and they hurt more lives than they help. But to pretend that there are no consequences beyond those directly on the user of drugs is... intellectual dishonesty.
Why on earth would I post my DOB, address, phone number there for example??
To throw your pursuers off the trail. My Facebook profile is littered with false information and misleading data.
If you meant putting your real DOB, address, or phone number, I whole-heartedly agree. Anyone who needs to know them can ask me directly, in person. Anyone who can't do that doesn't need to know them.
If correlation != causation, then surely lack of correlation != lack of causation. Right?
Bad logic.
If presence of smoke does not necessarily imply that there's fire, if you do not see smoke, would you conclude that it does not mean that there's no fire?
Causation gives rise to correlation (i.e. P implies Q). This does not mean that correlation means there had to be causation giving rise to it (i.e. P => Q does not imply Q => P). However, as P => Q implies not Q => not P, lack of correlation implies lack of causation (if there were causation, you would have seen some sort of correlation).
Of course, this is assuming that all other variables were controlled so that you don't have two opposite effects canceling each other out, and at first glance this study does not seem very thorough in that aspect so it could mean that cell phones do cause brain cancer (or at least retardedness), but that's experimental error, not error in logic.
This story needs the "duh" tag. Radio frequency has been around much longer than cell phones. If RF caused cancer, we would have known it long before the advent of cell phones.
<paranoid> But cell phones use microwaves, the kind of radiation you use to nuke your dinner.
Are you sure you want to put your head in your microwave oven and turn it on? </paranoid>
You know you can make ear holes in the tin foil hat, right? As long as the hole is 10 times smaller than the wavelength of rays you are worried about (microwaves are about 1 cm long, so, say millimeter-sized holes), the hat is as effective as if it didn't have the holes.
At least that's what my dealer who gave me my holey hat told me...
In return for offering various free services, all they ask for is some information on you so that they can better target advertising that interests _YOU_. It's not rocket science - it's just incredibly effective marketing.
The question is, is there anything that might go beyond marketing?
To a marketer, my search queries are little more than statistics and I am little more than a statistical point among millions of people. To my enemies and opponents, however, my DNS queries and more traditional Google searches are, well, a gold mine for dirt.
Will Google stay in marketing or will it, shall we say, expand into "consulting service" for my enemies?
I didn't say every religion did it, however if you do want an example of the catholic church going against scientific findings, try the arguments over efficacy of condoms.
I don't think this example works. It's not that Catholic church doesn't believe that condoms work (either in terms of preventing STDs or babies, at least some 90+ percent of the time). It's that Catholic church believes use of contraceptives like condoms is morally wrong—science is silent in the matters of morality, at least generally speaking.
You can very well argue that church's position is not morally correct (at least to the extent that church's position on condoms may have helped spread STDs), but to say that they have the science wrong is, well, incorrect?
Religions object only to research into topics where they have already been proven wrong.
Citation needed?
Where they have already been proven wrong, religions often have modified their dogma to be consistent with the latest scientific findings.
It may surprise you to learn this, but the Catholic church (and a lot of protestant churches), for example, has no problem with the theory of evolution. They have already integrated it into their teaching about how evolution is the mechanism God used to create us. The hardcore people who deny every aspect of evolution, including microevolution, are a very small minority even among the pious.
And of course, given how conveniently it fits into church doctrine, the Catholic church was one of the first to accept the Big Bang theory, for whatever that may be worth.
So based on this, if I smash two sheets of paper together fast enough, I'll have enough mass-energy to build a car from the resulting debris? Or will the Lorentz factor mean that I could do it, but the resulting vehicle would only exist for a short period of time?
Yes, provided that you build a car and an anti-car at the same time.
There are conservation laws beside from energy conservation. For one, to a good approximation, lepton number (i.e. number of electrons minus number of positrons) and baryon number (number of protons minus number of anti protons) are conserved, so if you started with energy and little else, for every proton (i.e. car) that you create, you must also create an anti-proton (i.e. anti-car).
It's Fox news, if it's really leftist propaganda then why the fuck is the most right wing news station in the US putting the exact same slant on it? Do you think Fox has been taken over by the left too now or something?
It might have something to do with the fact that it's not Fox News report—it's an Associated Press report; just look at the by-line. Foxnews.com, like most high-volume news websites, has most of its reporting done by third parties. I am just guessing but I would guess less than 10% of stories on Foxnews.com are written by actual Fox staffers.
P.S. And when you have learned to read by-lines, you might want to learn to read the news for bias—the only reason Fox News is "the most right wing news" outlet is because the rest of the mainstream media is so damned liberal. Look for fairness and facts (and non-distortion of facts or blackout of coverage of particular news item, such as the global warming fraud story in the last couple weeks), and you will see that even though Fox does lean right somewhat (especially in opinion media like Beck and Hannity), they are mostly fair and they don't make up stuff.
And when you default on the student loans your wages and other income gets garnished. That renders your point moot.
Provided that you have an income. If someone is defaulting on hist student loan (and given the generous forbearance and other options before the dishonorable default), what makes you think he actually still has his job?
If someone has a mortgage, then unless he's done something illegal he does have a house that can be repossessed—it may be worth less than the mortgage, but it's still something, unlike with education.
If politicians had to listen to all hypotheticals, including all the batshit insane ones, they'd never find time to deal with reality. If it hasn't happened once in the entire history of the courts, it's probably not worth piling another law on top of an extremely long list already to deal with it unless it's a major new principle.
That's what some of the founding fathers who were opposed to the Bill of Rights said too. They thought it was unthinkable that anything in the Constitution implied that such fundamental rights as right to free speech, association, and the right to defend oneself could be abridged by the state.
But, a good number of them, including James Madison, had better foresight and included explicit protection of those natural rights into the Constitution by the first 10 amendments. Can you say that you are sorry that they had those written into the written law of the land?
It is incumbent upon the lawmakers to guard against the worst case scenarios---especially with the abuse of the state power---as best as they can. I do understand the potential problem with complicating the code, but given the kind of laws they enact---complicating the criminal and civil code in the service of state power and to the encroachment into individual liberties---I don't think that's why they didn't consider these "hypothetical" abuses of power by the authorities and prevent them.
Nice troll. The law does specifically require a warrant. I'm rather upset that the police thought they could get away with it and wanted to test it. Just get the damn warrant! If your suspicions are sound you should be able to get it!
O.K. So I was wrong on that, and I guess I may be wrong on the next thing I am saying, as I am unfamiliar with this particular Massachusetts law, but what the law should have done is specify punishment (or at least require the police departments to come up with disciplinary procedure) if an officer tries to place a tracking device without warrant.
Requiring warrant with no negative consequences in the event of noncompliance (beyond being unable to use the evidence, which would have been the case anyway without warrant, with or without the tracking device) is nothing but weaseling out of the responsibility (by the legislators)---kinda like how some legislators keep claiming national health care will not cover undocumented aliens but continue to oppose any verification mechanisms.
is that there had to be a case where the Police overstepped their authority, and did this without a warrant, before this question of law could be settled.
That's a definite flaw in our legal system: someone has to be abused (at least) once before the courts can rule.
Um, no. That's the flaw in the common law system, but that flaw exists by definition, since the judges cannot rule on cases that have not been brought before them.
In America, though, nothing stopped the state legislators from passing a law explicitly saying that police may not surreptitiously place a tracker on a car before getting a warrant. They could have done that long before any police officer got it in their head to overstep their boundary.
But of course, they were---especially in Massachusetts---too busy taxing and spending their constituent's money to devote any time to protecting their fundamental rights. But make no mistake. It is not the system that has failed, it's the legislators that the people of Massachusetts elected that have failed.
I, for one, take anything on NYT with a huge grain of salt. (Oh, and remember all the stories they aren't covering because they can't find a way to spin it the way they want.)
Well, as I said, I recognize that possibility: even though a single planting of high-yield variety does use more fertilizer than a single planting of normal variety, in terms of how many people they feed, high-yield variety may use less.
But where is the proof or some sort of concrete evidence? Without it, all we can say is that cultivating high-yield variety is highly dependent on heavy fertilizer use. I don't want to miss the forest for the trees, but right now, all I have are evidences that some trees (i.e. what happens in small scale) exist, but no indication to the size or character of a forest that may or may not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds easy on paper, but try staying hydrated after you've passed out.
Same here. Contact information is true enough, as in email sent to the email address listed in my Facebook profile will reach me. Other information are mostly lies and jokes, but my friends should know (and I tell them in person) which ones are lies and which ones aren't.
I should make my profile a little more professionally acceptable, though, in case a future employer finds the profile and somehow links it to me ...
I am really worried about the fact that Facebook has access to data such as people's real name (that's the point of it, right?)
Um, no it doesn't. It has no real name verification mechanism, so if you are like me and you go by a nickname among your friends, you can register using a nickname. I think at some point they changed it so that you couldn't change the name easily once you register ('didn't used to be that way in its first year), but if you start out with a pseudonym, they don't stop you.
As for other infos, well, use TOR and litter your profile (and friend list) with a lot of false information so that they cannot separate the truth from lie.
Or, as you said, don't use Facebook.
someone gets mad you over some stupid shit
What is to one person "some stupid shit", to another person (or maybe the whole neighborhood), it's public nuisance. If you had been a good neighbor, your neighbor wouldn't have cause to call cops on you---I'm sure it's a crime to call cops without actual crime or emergency.
I've acceded to possibilities of accidental discovery (as in cops weren't looking for drugs when they searched you, either with warrant or due cause)---and harsh sentences for simple possession may be unfair---but I do not believe that a majority of people serving time for drug related crimes are serving time because of simple possession and because their simple possession was accidentally discovered.
To protect the most US Soldiers (still all volunteers), we should pull out now. Now we just need to figure out if a US soldier's life is more important than an Iraqi/Afghani citizen's.
Of course it is more important. I would estimate that one U.S. soldier's life is worth at least 10 Iraqi/Afghani/French citizens, at a very conservative estimate.
That isn't the question you should be asking. The reason we want stable Afghanistan isn't because we want to be charitable to those poor people. It's because a stable Afghanistan means one fewer training ground for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So the ultimate goal is to protect American lives.
Whether we are doing that effectively with our missions in the region is a different question, but as an abstract goal, American soldiers must feel that protecting American lives is a worthwhile goal, or they wouldn't have joined our volunteer force.
Complete privacy? As in no one sees you doing drugs; you are not nuisance to others doing drugs; you are in your own, closed, private room/house and there is no sign whatsoever outside that you are doing drugs?
Exactly how do law enforcement find out that you are doing drugs, arrest you and convict you?
While I realize some people are convicted of possession of drugs (the possession being discovered by accident, i.e. when stopped for traffic violation, etc.), those are small fractions. Others are convicted for dealing drugs, or committing other crimes related to drugs. Doing drugs is not, in a majority of cases, a "victimless crime". There are victims; you don't have to get murdered or beaten up to become a victim—having a crackhouse in your neighborhood isn't safe or desirable.
This is not to say that we can be ... smarter about drug laws—some parts of War on Drugs are ineffective and they hurt more lives than they help. But to pretend that there are no consequences beyond those directly on the user of drugs is ... intellectual dishonesty.
Why on earth would I post my DOB, address, phone number there for example??
To throw your pursuers off the trail. My Facebook profile is littered with false information and misleading data.
If you meant putting your real DOB, address, or phone number, I whole-heartedly agree. Anyone who needs to know them can ask me directly, in person. Anyone who can't do that doesn't need to know them.
If correlation != causation, then surely lack of correlation != lack of causation. Right?
Bad logic.
If presence of smoke does not necessarily imply that there's fire, if you do not see smoke, would you conclude that it does not mean that there's no fire?
Causation gives rise to correlation (i.e. P implies Q). This does not mean that correlation means there had to be causation giving rise to it (i.e. P => Q does not imply Q => P). However, as P => Q implies not Q => not P, lack of correlation implies lack of causation (if there were causation, you would have seen some sort of correlation).
Of course, this is assuming that all other variables were controlled so that you don't have two opposite effects canceling each other out, and at first glance this study does not seem very thorough in that aspect so it could mean that cell phones do cause brain cancer (or at least retardedness), but that's experimental error, not error in logic.
This story needs the "duh" tag. Radio frequency has been around much longer than cell phones. If RF caused cancer, we would have known it long before the advent of cell phones.
<paranoid>
But cell phones use microwaves, the kind of radiation you use to nuke your dinner.
Are you sure you want to put your head in your microwave oven and turn it on?
</paranoid>
You know you can make ear holes in the tin foil hat, right? As long as the hole is 10 times smaller than the wavelength of rays you are worried about (microwaves are about 1 cm long, so, say millimeter-sized holes), the hat is as effective as if it didn't have the holes.
At least that's what my dealer who gave me my holey hat told me ...
In return for offering various free services, all they ask for is some information on you so that they can better target advertising that interests _YOU_. It's not rocket science - it's just incredibly effective marketing.
The question is, is there anything that might go beyond marketing?
To a marketer, my search queries are little more than statistics and I am little more than a statistical point among millions of people. To my enemies and opponents, however, my DNS queries and more traditional Google searches are, well, a gold mine for dirt.
Will Google stay in marketing or will it, shall we say, expand into "consulting service" for my enemies?
I didn't say every religion did it, however if you do want an example of the catholic church going against scientific findings, try the arguments over efficacy of condoms.
I don't think this example works. It's not that Catholic church doesn't believe that condoms work (either in terms of preventing STDs or babies, at least some 90+ percent of the time). It's that Catholic church believes use of contraceptives like condoms is morally wrong—science is silent in the matters of morality, at least generally speaking.
You can very well argue that church's position is not morally correct (at least to the extent that church's position on condoms may have helped spread STDs), but to say that they have the science wrong is, well, incorrect?
Religions object only to research into topics where they have already been proven wrong.
Citation needed?
Where they have already been proven wrong, religions often have modified their dogma to be consistent with the latest scientific findings.
It may surprise you to learn this, but the Catholic church (and a lot of protestant churches), for example, has no problem with the theory of evolution. They have already integrated it into their teaching about how evolution is the mechanism God used to create us. The hardcore people who deny every aspect of evolution, including microevolution, are a very small minority even among the pious.
And of course, given how conveniently it fits into church doctrine, the Catholic church was one of the first to accept the Big Bang theory, for whatever that may be worth.
So based on this, if I smash two sheets of paper together fast enough, I'll have enough mass-energy to build a car from the resulting debris? Or will the Lorentz factor mean that I could do it, but the resulting vehicle would only exist for a short period of time?
Yes, provided that you build a car and an anti-car at the same time.
There are conservation laws beside from energy conservation. For one, to a good approximation, lepton number (i.e. number of electrons minus number of positrons) and baryon number (number of protons minus number of anti protons) are conserved, so if you started with energy and little else, for every proton (i.e. car) that you create, you must also create an anti-proton (i.e. anti-car).
I really wish I could pay that bill... sigh.
But would you pay that bill if you could? I personally wouldn't.
Really, just look here:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,576786,00.html
It's Fox news, if it's really leftist propaganda then why the fuck is the most right wing news station in the US putting the exact same slant on it? Do you think Fox has been taken over by the left too now or something?
It might have something to do with the fact that it's not Fox News report—it's an Associated Press report; just look at the by-line. Foxnews.com, like most high-volume news websites, has most of its reporting done by third parties. I am just guessing but I would guess less than 10% of stories on Foxnews.com are written by actual Fox staffers.
P.S. And when you have learned to read by-lines, you might want to learn to read the news for bias—the only reason Fox News is "the most right wing news" outlet is because the rest of the mainstream media is so damned liberal. Look for fairness and facts (and non-distortion of facts or blackout of coverage of particular news item, such as the global warming fraud story in the last couple weeks), and you will see that even though Fox does lean right somewhat (especially in opinion media like Beck and Hannity), they are mostly fair and they don't make up stuff.
And when you default on the student loans your wages and other income gets garnished. That renders your point moot.
Provided that you have an income. If someone is defaulting on hist student loan (and given the generous forbearance and other options before the dishonorable default), what makes you think he actually still has his job?
If someone has a mortgage, then unless he's done something illegal he does have a house that can be repossessed—it may be worth less than the mortgage, but it's still something, unlike with education.
Don't you mean, "Please tell me this research is being done on a remote island", in case something goes wrong?
Um. I think that's the wrong article. Look at the date: it's published in 2008; that's hardly news.
Here's the correct one published ... um, on 15th—probably in U.K., since it's still 14th here.
That's what some of the founding fathers who were opposed to the Bill of Rights said too. They thought it was unthinkable that anything in the Constitution implied that such fundamental rights as right to free speech, association, and the right to defend oneself could be abridged by the state.
But, a good number of them, including James Madison, had better foresight and included explicit protection of those natural rights into the Constitution by the first 10 amendments. Can you say that you are sorry that they had those written into the written law of the land?
It is incumbent upon the lawmakers to guard against the worst case scenarios---especially with the abuse of the state power---as best as they can. I do understand the potential problem with complicating the code, but given the kind of laws they enact---complicating the criminal and civil code in the service of state power and to the encroachment into individual liberties---I don't think that's why they didn't consider these "hypothetical" abuses of power by the authorities and prevent them.
O.K. So I was wrong on that, and I guess I may be wrong on the next thing I am saying, as I am unfamiliar with this particular Massachusetts law, but what the law should have done is specify punishment (or at least require the police departments to come up with disciplinary procedure) if an officer tries to place a tracking device without warrant.
Requiring warrant with no negative consequences in the event of noncompliance (beyond being unable to use the evidence, which would have been the case anyway without warrant, with or without the tracking device) is nothing but weaseling out of the responsibility (by the legislators)---kinda like how some legislators keep claiming national health care will not cover undocumented aliens but continue to oppose any verification mechanisms.
Um, no. That's the flaw in the common law system, but that flaw exists by definition, since the judges cannot rule on cases that have not been brought before them.
In America, though, nothing stopped the state legislators from passing a law explicitly saying that police may not surreptitiously place a tracker on a car before getting a warrant. They could have done that long before any police officer got it in their head to overstep their boundary.
But of course, they were---especially in Massachusetts---too busy taxing and spending their constituent's money to devote any time to protecting their fundamental rights. But make no mistake. It is not the system that has failed, it's the legislators that the people of Massachusetts elected that have failed.
If you can't trust the stories they run, what makes you trust their ads?
I, for one, take anything on NYT with a huge grain of salt. (Oh, and remember all the stories they aren't covering because they can't find a way to spin it the way they want.)
Yes I do. I also expect the phrase "too big to fail" to be used as justification.
And expect them to extol the virtues of "free press"* in the workings of a democracy.
* for an "appropriate" definition of "free"
Well, as I said, I recognize that possibility: even though a single planting of high-yield variety does use more fertilizer than a single planting of normal variety, in terms of how many people they feed, high-yield variety may use less.
But where is the proof or some sort of concrete evidence? Without it, all we can say is that cultivating high-yield variety is highly dependent on heavy fertilizer use. I don't want to miss the forest for the trees, but right now, all I have are evidences that some trees (i.e. what happens in small scale) exist, but no indication to the size or character of a forest that may or may not exist.