Because we all know there aren't such a thing as CRT monitors? Seriously, I bought the one I'm using for $7 bucks many years ago, and have had others simply donated to me over the years. Monitors are dirt cheap now and there isn't anything work related (assuming a normal job) that you can't do on a CRT monitor that you can on an LCD.
Actually, suicide is illegal in some jurisdictions, though people are only prosecuted for attempt.
Which, in all honesty, is a pretty stupid law. Its your life, if you choose to end it, well, that is your choice.
Smoking marijuana is not a crime that only affects you, though I'd argue that eating it or otherwise consuming it probably is as close as you can get.
Who else does it affect? If you are in your own home, smoking marijuana, it affects only you (assuming for a moment you are the only one in the house) yet it is still illegal.
Numerous studies done by independent researchers show that marijuana has lesser harmful effects and a lower possibility of being addicted than either alcohol or tobacco, both of which are perfectly legal to consume in your own home. Yet the government has lied, cheated and indoctrinated its people with false information, by claiming that it was related to heroin, classifying it as a narcotic, etc.
and partially about making sure society doesn't have bear the costs of whatever you do "to yourself.
And with a sane, less powerful government, society wouldn't have to bear any costs of what you do to yourself.
It isn't your right to do anything not mentioned in the Constitution. Otherwise Congress wouldn't have the power to pass any laws.
No, but it -should- be our right to live our lives in whatever way we see fit, believe what we wish to believe, speak what we wish to speak, and use our money how we wish to so long as it doesn't harm anyone. That is what a free society should aim for.
Painting drug use and possession as mere agriculture is deceptive spin.
A deceptive spin on what? In the end that is all it is. It is simply a plant. Nothing more.
The term "political prisoner" means something more than "I just don't like the law some people are locked up for breaking." Otherwise we'd be "wrong" for going after Warren Jeffs for child molestation and incest just because he and his followers are convinced that it's okay.
There is a difference. Warren Jeffs physically harmed someone, a lot of people in jails right now didn't even harm property, let alone a human being. Some are in there simply because of technicalities, others have had unfair trials, biased juries or sometimes even no law was really broken at all.
Yes, price fixing is bad, but seriously "victimized" consumers? Yeah, they overpaid for an LCD, but they -chose- to pay that amount for an LCD. No one made them choose an LCD monitor/TV, its possible to watch TV/use a computer without an LCD display (CRT, Plasma, etc) and such. Once patents expired (or if hopefully patents are either abolished or weakened) theres nothing stopping a full-on price war where the people price fixing will lose big time.
Yes, but you have to realize that the internet is not lethal. I am thankful that growing up my parents didn't insist on censoring the internet or what I read or the music I listened to. There were still some R rated movies that were off limits, but the internet was unfiltered and I could read just about every book I wanted to. I didn't get killed because I looked at some "inappropriate" sites, or read books where characters swore a lot. Despite reading books with many swear words in them, listening to music with swear words and reading internet sites with large amount of swear words I rarely if ever swear. Violence didn't "mess up" my mind. Despite playing all the "violent" video games at the time, being a hunter, and on my school's clay pigeon team, I never once seriously considered or attempted to shoot anyone. And while my parent's didn't drink, they weren't stupid about alcohol and told me growing up sane amounts to drink, and how if I was to drink I would need to never drink and drive, etc.
Censorship of information does not help in growing up. Allow access to as much information as possible. Information does not kill.
Yeah, most employers are pretty petty these days. Just about any job opening is going to get many, many, many, many, applicants be it cleaning toilets or for a new CEO. Assuming this was a mid-level job, why should they take a risk on this guy rather than give it to some random guy with no record? Its not like there is a shortage of labor these days....
The difference is, lack of safety in the workplace might kill you, same with toys, chemicals, etc. Whats the worst thing porn is going to do to you? Or bad language? The answer is not much. No one has been killed by swear words, no one has been killed by watching porn, no one has been raped by watching R rated movies, etc.
If the average American gets 44.8% of their information from the TV, per day. Something is wrong with the MPAA/RIAA's facts. Also odd seems to be the 10.59% of radio that the average American listens to. And also strange is the 1.11% of recorded music that the average American listens to. That means that 55.44% of words that Americans listen to is controlled by many factors, including the government and private (think RIAA/MPAA) interests. This study should more or less prove that the RIAA is in no danger, as user created and RIAA/MPAA uncontrolled mediums only add up to 28.28% of what an average American is exposed to.
Actually, with the exception of the posts mentioning me on/. , the other accounts were completely unrelated to me. Which is actually quite funny to see the many accounts with similar user names to my/. account. Especially the one on EBay from Germany, the Habbo Hotel one with an avatar that looks nothing like me, and the various fan art pages. The actual name from my account started out from a very short lived and poorly planned MMO that me and a few friends were "developing" (I use this in the loosest sense of the word, none of us knew any server-side coding, thus making the MMO part impossible) called 404 (named after the 404- File Not Found Error because none of us could come up with a good name) and each of us was going to be assigned a username with an element than 404 after it, I got Darkness404. Around the same time that we were planning this, I started coming on/. more and more so I finally decided to create an account, not knowing what else to put I put down Darkness404. As for 404 it quickly fell apart and about the only requirements of it are a few pieces of some item art we created and a few Python scripts.
So, while it is interesting to see all the other people who picked "Darkness404" as a username, none of them but my/. account is me.
Because of the separation between online and reality. For example, your Facebook is more in the reality section, you generally only accept people you know, can keep a tight control on your profile, etc. On the other hand, you have your online profiles, things such as perhaps your/. account, various online games, forums, etc. And most of the time without technical interference they stay separate. I have little doubt that someone could identify me between accounts by looking at my word choice, writing styles, opinions and such on/. but no one has any motivation to do that. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of/. users, millions of other Facebooks, millions of MySpaces, million of blogs, etc. the odds that someone could wade through all of those without the accounts giving away the e-mail address or the accounts having similar usernames is very slim unless someone has -lots- of time on their hands. Plus, "publish" may only require one or two clicks, someone with very short access to a computer with Facebook logged in could seriously damage someone's reputation by publishing a few links that are using Facebook's API.
It depends on your feelings of privacy. Myself I tend to give out a decent amount of information to my Facebook friends because the vast majority of them either A) are trusted friends or B) random strangers who I might never meet in my life. However, beacon is a bad thing for a lot of people who might need privacy or who have Facebook-stalking loved ones who may jump to conclusions. Think about it this way, you are on a business trip and decide to order at an upscale restaurant for just you because you like the food, yet your Facebook-stalking wife/girlfriend sees a beacon post about your reservation and thinks that you -clearly- are seeing someone other than her and no one would ever eat at an upscale restaurant just by themselves and clearly your business trip you are on is simply a front for you to cheat on her. And yes, stuff like this does happen. If you are lucky enough like some people (like you and me) not to have friends who don't trust you, but some people are unlucky enough to have situations like this.
Because A) Most of us aren't in the disposable mindset, most of us prefer to re-use working machines B) Most of us have had programming instruction and know that a slow application is the result of crappy coding or a crappy architecture C) Most of us don't take out loans/financing on our toys. You would be surprised the number of people who don't or can't pay cash on their computers, TVs, or other electronics and instead either put them on the credit card so the $1,000 laptop quickly becomes a $1,500 laptop.
If I have a Pentium M laptop with 1 gig of RAM and everything is working fine, there is no reason why things should have to have a multi-core CPU or more RAM unless I'm doing something really CPU/memory intensive (encoding, etc). There is no point in me spending $1,000 more on a new laptop because someone is crap at coding. And honestly, if you can fit a networked GUI onto a floppy disk in assembly, theres no reason why you can't make a decent program in C that runs fine on a Pentium III and 256 MB of RAM or less.
Really, fingerprinting is based on the belief that no two people have identical fingerprints, furthermore, most commercial/personal scanners are going to have a degree of forgiveness, after all, you don't want to be locked out of your laptop for having a dirty hand or something. Fingerprints are not secure, they can be manipulated, changed, altered, etc. A fingerprint is nothing more than a key.
Theres nothing wrong with a content producer owning content distribution. It is only when there are monopolies that it becomes a problem. For example, there is nothing wrong with Disney making a DVD player because there are -lots- of DVD players out there, but due to artificial regulations imposed by the government (patents, a copyright mess, the DMCA, etc) it can become a problem.
With an open marketplace unhampered by much artificial regulation, there is nothing wrong with content producers owning distribution channels. But sadly I don't see the economy opening up any time soon...
How hard is it to just release a totally OSS version of your OS with all applications and stuff there and let people modify it and put it on your phone? I really don't see the point of trying to complicate things by closing the OSS. Release everything for free and you can take a lot more free code and not having to worry about paying lots of money when you are caught.
But computer programming is a practical, "doing" field, and things change. For example, 10 years ago if you were trying to optimize your code for general desktop use for use on multiple CPU or multi-core CPUs you would be laughed at. Today though, its important because nearly all CPUs are multi-core CPUs. The human mind, and human nature doesn't change much, that is why books written long ago still are relevant such as Shakespeare, the bible, Norse/Greek/Roman/Egyptian mythology, etc.
Perhaps your major is different than mine, but in computer science unless you get a really good textbook (yeah, good luck with that) most everything is either A) irrelevant for what you do or B) is obsolete by the time you graduate. About the only textbooks I would even think of keeping is literature books, but most of it is public domain anyways and the stories long lost their charm after many essays...
The problem with textbooks are twofold, either A) You have to buy the textbooks themselves, and they are worthless after you stop taking that class (I mean, does anyone re-read old textbooks?) or B) Are given to you buy your education institution. Used electronic junk is usually pretty worthless and sometimes nasty (anyone want to get a pre-used keyboard?) and what is the use of a dedicated e-reader that will be used only for a semester?
Not really, there are lots of MMORPG-style games that attract a lot of women players (think pet sites like Neopets), its just Farmville has a large amount of players because of A) the incentive to recruit (you can get gifts from people) B) The need to come back constantly (otherwise your crops die) and C) Coming back regularly improves the game (even if your crops might not die if you don't get there right as they are ready, but you can plant more crops then). Mix all that with the social networking side of it (anyone can see the farm and you can post pictures) and the decorating side of it (lots of items to decorate) and you have an MMO that many women enjoy.
It depends though, Urban Dictionary you can usually figure out what a word that someone says really means. Using traditional dictionaries you would think that someone says that someone sucks on a rooster...
While I agree with you on the whole (this is about a totally different topic) I wouldn't exactly call the bills being "voted" on, especially not by the general public.
Actually, Best Buy does have some cheap laptops (they had a $200 Black Friday deal with a Celeron 900, 2 gigs of RAM and a 160 gig HDD) while their desktops are going to be expensive they have reasonable prices on their laptops especially with the cheap end. Yeah, if I spent another $200 I could get a better CPU, more memory, perhaps a SSD, etc. but as a nearly full-time student wanting a laptop to replace a dead one (and Ubuntu runs fine on the specs even with no memory upgrade and no slowdowns) the cheap laptops (actually got a $300 Toshiba with identical specs over the summer) are a godsend, I don't have much disposable cash to buy a decent laptop yet and you can't really beat the prices.
But similarly, most people who get a smartphone don't care about memory (and these days memory is -cheap- both Flash and RAM) and battery life to most isn't a killer (so long as it lasts a day with moderate internet usage people will use it) just look at the iPhone, a few hours of web browsing and your phone is dead.
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Because we all know there aren't such a thing as CRT monitors? Seriously, I bought the one I'm using for $7 bucks many years ago, and have had others simply donated to me over the years. Monitors are dirt cheap now and there isn't anything work related (assuming a normal job) that you can't do on a CRT monitor that you can on an LCD.
Actually, suicide is illegal in some jurisdictions, though people are only prosecuted for attempt.
Which, in all honesty, is a pretty stupid law. Its your life, if you choose to end it, well, that is your choice.
Smoking marijuana is not a crime that only affects you, though I'd argue that eating it or otherwise consuming it probably is as close as you can get.
Who else does it affect? If you are in your own home, smoking marijuana, it affects only you (assuming for a moment you are the only one in the house) yet it is still illegal.
Numerous studies done by independent researchers show that marijuana has lesser harmful effects and a lower possibility of being addicted than either alcohol or tobacco, both of which are perfectly legal to consume in your own home. Yet the government has lied, cheated and indoctrinated its people with false information, by claiming that it was related to heroin, classifying it as a narcotic, etc.
and partially about making sure society doesn't have bear the costs of whatever you do "to yourself.
And with a sane, less powerful government, society wouldn't have to bear any costs of what you do to yourself.
It isn't your right to do anything not mentioned in the Constitution. Otherwise Congress wouldn't have the power to pass any laws.
No, but it -should- be our right to live our lives in whatever way we see fit, believe what we wish to believe, speak what we wish to speak, and use our money how we wish to so long as it doesn't harm anyone. That is what a free society should aim for.
Painting drug use and possession as mere agriculture is deceptive spin.
A deceptive spin on what? In the end that is all it is. It is simply a plant. Nothing more.
The term "political prisoner" means something more than "I just don't like the law some people are locked up for breaking." Otherwise we'd be "wrong" for going after Warren Jeffs for child molestation and incest just because he and his followers are convinced that it's okay.
There is a difference. Warren Jeffs physically harmed someone, a lot of people in jails right now didn't even harm property, let alone a human being. Some are in there simply because of technicalities, others have had unfair trials, biased juries or sometimes even no law was really broken at all.
Yes, price fixing is bad, but seriously "victimized" consumers? Yeah, they overpaid for an LCD, but they -chose- to pay that amount for an LCD. No one made them choose an LCD monitor/TV, its possible to watch TV/use a computer without an LCD display (CRT, Plasma, etc) and such. Once patents expired (or if hopefully patents are either abolished or weakened) theres nothing stopping a full-on price war where the people price fixing will lose big time.
I think more and more people kept making dummy accounts to accumulate mod points and use them to shape discussions.
Is this really any different than using Legos to make pixel art?
Yes, but you have to realize that the internet is not lethal. I am thankful that growing up my parents didn't insist on censoring the internet or what I read or the music I listened to. There were still some R rated movies that were off limits, but the internet was unfiltered and I could read just about every book I wanted to. I didn't get killed because I looked at some "inappropriate" sites, or read books where characters swore a lot. Despite reading books with many swear words in them, listening to music with swear words and reading internet sites with large amount of swear words I rarely if ever swear. Violence didn't "mess up" my mind. Despite playing all the "violent" video games at the time, being a hunter, and on my school's clay pigeon team, I never once seriously considered or attempted to shoot anyone. And while my parent's didn't drink, they weren't stupid about alcohol and told me growing up sane amounts to drink, and how if I was to drink I would need to never drink and drive, etc.
Censorship of information does not help in growing up. Allow access to as much information as possible. Information does not kill.
Yeah, most employers are pretty petty these days. Just about any job opening is going to get many, many, many, many, applicants be it cleaning toilets or for a new CEO. Assuming this was a mid-level job, why should they take a risk on this guy rather than give it to some random guy with no record? Its not like there is a shortage of labor these days....
The difference is, lack of safety in the workplace might kill you, same with toys, chemicals, etc. Whats the worst thing porn is going to do to you? Or bad language? The answer is not much. No one has been killed by swear words, no one has been killed by watching porn, no one has been raped by watching R rated movies, etc.
If the average American gets 44.8% of their information from the TV, per day. Something is wrong with the MPAA/RIAA's facts. Also odd seems to be the 10.59% of radio that the average American listens to. And also strange is the 1.11% of recorded music that the average American listens to. That means that 55.44% of words that Americans listen to is controlled by many factors, including the government and private (think RIAA/MPAA) interests. This study should more or less prove that the RIAA is in no danger, as user created and RIAA/MPAA uncontrolled mediums only add up to 28.28% of what an average American is exposed to.
Actually, with the exception of the posts mentioning me on /. , the other accounts were completely unrelated to me. Which is actually quite funny to see the many accounts with similar user names to my /. account. Especially the one on EBay from Germany, the Habbo Hotel one with an avatar that looks nothing like me, and the various fan art pages. The actual name from my account started out from a very short lived and poorly planned MMO that me and a few friends were "developing" (I use this in the loosest sense of the word, none of us knew any server-side coding, thus making the MMO part impossible) called 404 (named after the 404- File Not Found Error because none of us could come up with a good name) and each of us was going to be assigned a username with an element than 404 after it, I got Darkness404. Around the same time that we were planning this, I started coming on /. more and more so I finally decided to create an account, not knowing what else to put I put down Darkness404. As for 404 it quickly fell apart and about the only requirements of it are a few pieces of some item art we created and a few Python scripts.
/. account is me.
So, while it is interesting to see all the other people who picked "Darkness404" as a username, none of them but my
Because of the separation between online and reality. For example, your Facebook is more in the reality section, you generally only accept people you know, can keep a tight control on your profile, etc. On the other hand, you have your online profiles, things such as perhaps your /. account, various online games, forums, etc. And most of the time without technical interference they stay separate. I have little doubt that someone could identify me between accounts by looking at my word choice, writing styles, opinions and such on /. but no one has any motivation to do that. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of /. users, millions of other Facebooks, millions of MySpaces, million of blogs, etc. the odds that someone could wade through all of those without the accounts giving away the e-mail address or the accounts having similar usernames is very slim unless someone has -lots- of time on their hands. Plus, "publish" may only require one or two clicks, someone with very short access to a computer with Facebook logged in could seriously damage someone's reputation by publishing a few links that are using Facebook's API.
It depends on your feelings of privacy. Myself I tend to give out a decent amount of information to my Facebook friends because the vast majority of them either A) are trusted friends or B) random strangers who I might never meet in my life. However, beacon is a bad thing for a lot of people who might need privacy or who have Facebook-stalking loved ones who may jump to conclusions. Think about it this way, you are on a business trip and decide to order at an upscale restaurant for just you because you like the food, yet your Facebook-stalking wife/girlfriend sees a beacon post about your reservation and thinks that you -clearly- are seeing someone other than her and no one would ever eat at an upscale restaurant just by themselves and clearly your business trip you are on is simply a front for you to cheat on her. And yes, stuff like this does happen. If you are lucky enough like some people (like you and me) not to have friends who don't trust you, but some people are unlucky enough to have situations like this.
Because A) Most of us aren't in the disposable mindset, most of us prefer to re-use working machines B) Most of us have had programming instruction and know that a slow application is the result of crappy coding or a crappy architecture C) Most of us don't take out loans/financing on our toys. You would be surprised the number of people who don't or can't pay cash on their computers, TVs, or other electronics and instead either put them on the credit card so the $1,000 laptop quickly becomes a $1,500 laptop.
If I have a Pentium M laptop with 1 gig of RAM and everything is working fine, there is no reason why things should have to have a multi-core CPU or more RAM unless I'm doing something really CPU/memory intensive (encoding, etc). There is no point in me spending $1,000 more on a new laptop because someone is crap at coding. And honestly, if you can fit a networked GUI onto a floppy disk in assembly, theres no reason why you can't make a decent program in C that runs fine on a Pentium III and 256 MB of RAM or less.
Really, fingerprinting is based on the belief that no two people have identical fingerprints, furthermore, most commercial/personal scanners are going to have a degree of forgiveness, after all, you don't want to be locked out of your laptop for having a dirty hand or something. Fingerprints are not secure, they can be manipulated, changed, altered, etc. A fingerprint is nothing more than a key.
Theres nothing wrong with a content producer owning content distribution. It is only when there are monopolies that it becomes a problem. For example, there is nothing wrong with Disney making a DVD player because there are -lots- of DVD players out there, but due to artificial regulations imposed by the government (patents, a copyright mess, the DMCA, etc) it can become a problem.
With an open marketplace unhampered by much artificial regulation, there is nothing wrong with content producers owning distribution channels. But sadly I don't see the economy opening up any time soon...
How hard is it to just release a totally OSS version of your OS with all applications and stuff there and let people modify it and put it on your phone? I really don't see the point of trying to complicate things by closing the OSS. Release everything for free and you can take a lot more free code and not having to worry about paying lots of money when you are caught.
But computer programming is a practical, "doing" field, and things change. For example, 10 years ago if you were trying to optimize your code for general desktop use for use on multiple CPU or multi-core CPUs you would be laughed at. Today though, its important because nearly all CPUs are multi-core CPUs. The human mind, and human nature doesn't change much, that is why books written long ago still are relevant such as Shakespeare, the bible, Norse/Greek/Roman/Egyptian mythology, etc.
Perhaps your major is different than mine, but in computer science unless you get a really good textbook (yeah, good luck with that) most everything is either A) irrelevant for what you do or B) is obsolete by the time you graduate. About the only textbooks I would even think of keeping is literature books, but most of it is public domain anyways and the stories long lost their charm after many essays...
The problem with textbooks are twofold, either A) You have to buy the textbooks themselves, and they are worthless after you stop taking that class (I mean, does anyone re-read old textbooks?) or B) Are given to you buy your education institution. Used electronic junk is usually pretty worthless and sometimes nasty (anyone want to get a pre-used keyboard?) and what is the use of a dedicated e-reader that will be used only for a semester?
Not really, there are lots of MMORPG-style games that attract a lot of women players (think pet sites like Neopets), its just Farmville has a large amount of players because of A) the incentive to recruit (you can get gifts from people) B) The need to come back constantly (otherwise your crops die) and C) Coming back regularly improves the game (even if your crops might not die if you don't get there right as they are ready, but you can plant more crops then). Mix all that with the social networking side of it (anyone can see the farm and you can post pictures) and the decorating side of it (lots of items to decorate) and you have an MMO that many women enjoy.
It depends though, Urban Dictionary you can usually figure out what a word that someone says really means. Using traditional dictionaries you would think that someone says that someone sucks on a rooster...
particularly policies that have to be VOTED in
While I agree with you on the whole (this is about a totally different topic) I wouldn't exactly call the bills being "voted" on, especially not by the general public.
Not 900 Mhz, But the CPU is just called the Celeron 900, it runs at 2.2 Ghz and has speeds slightly better than Intel's Atom CPU
Actually, Best Buy does have some cheap laptops (they had a $200 Black Friday deal with a Celeron 900, 2 gigs of RAM and a 160 gig HDD) while their desktops are going to be expensive they have reasonable prices on their laptops especially with the cheap end. Yeah, if I spent another $200 I could get a better CPU, more memory, perhaps a SSD, etc. but as a nearly full-time student wanting a laptop to replace a dead one (and Ubuntu runs fine on the specs even with no memory upgrade and no slowdowns) the cheap laptops (actually got a $300 Toshiba with identical specs over the summer) are a godsend, I don't have much disposable cash to buy a decent laptop yet and you can't really beat the prices.
But similarly, most people who get a smartphone don't care about memory (and these days memory is -cheap- both Flash and RAM) and battery life to most isn't a killer (so long as it lasts a day with moderate internet usage people will use it) just look at the iPhone, a few hours of web browsing and your phone is dead.