Just wait until California gets a divorce. It's the geologic celebrity moment we've all been waiting for. It'll probably keep the engagement ring too... I mean since she's wracked up so much debt and all...
if it is true, and flying is already safer than road travel, then why do we need all the security?
Money. After 9/11 the airlines were losing cash. They have a powerful lobby, so they petitioned Congress to bail them out (again). One of the side-effects of all this extra security is that the price of tickets has gone up, and the airlines can "blame" the government for this "inconvenience". Of course, if people stop using airlines entirely because of such measures, then they will hike the prices some more for the remainder, citing the need for "additional security", or they will request another bailout.
Regardless of what method you use to travel, the airlines (thanks to their powerful lobby) will be getting paid for it.
Because those families lack the sophistication and resources to leverage several thousand servers across 6 continents to buy not a couple, but many thousands, of tickets, and then resell them at significantly higher rates. Your family is not responsible for causing an artists attempt to make his/her concert accessible to people who could not afford to attend at market rates fail miserably. All those friends and family, in short, were not so greedy they caused a substantial shift in cost and availability in a large market that affected tens of thousands.
They aren't code crackers. That's the NSA's job. The CIA assassinates people, and uses very expensive satellites to watch weenie-roasts in countries you can't pronounce, which are started with very large heavy metal cans and ended very suddenly with a bang and a cheer. They also made the CIA World Factbook... which in my humble opinion may be the only thing they've done for the internet that was useful.
So lay off on them being given a really complex soduku in their backyard and then being upset because they didn't have time to screw with it.
If there were some better alternative, I'd be interested in reading about it.
Whenever a system is policed only by itself, and accessible only to itself, the answer is simple, though difficult to gain acceptance:
Establishing oversight from a group outside the community in question, with the power to levy changes and punishment on it, and which by mandate must remain neutral and apart from outside political interests. It is preferable, though not always practical, for these to be elected positions.
First: For those of you who think avoiding jury duty is an option rather than a duty -- thanks for avoiding one of the simplest and most basic requests that our country makes of you in exchange for citizenship. You must be proud.
Second: If the request gets lost, it gets lost. It doesn't matter whether it's eaten by a computer, an angry mail processing machine, or the dog. Lost is lost. You'll get another summons.
You have a very persuasive argument, except you neglect one minor detail: You assume people will take the moral high ground when money is involved. They usually don't. Lawyers aren't any different than Joe Q. Public on the street, excepting that they dress better, make somewhat more money, and (hopefully) are somewhat better trained for their professional field than most.
Additionally, your argument loses a lot of its intellectual purity and moral superiority when you make the reductio ad absurdum argument in paragraph two. Your post would have gone better without that.
Lastly, there is no transparency in the legal system and you're being intellectually dishonest to state otherwise: The legal system is incredibly complex and largely unavailable to the poor. When you have a system that necessitates the use of lawyers and attorneys in every legal preceding, to the point that attempting to advance a case pro se is laughed at by every judge and legal professional -- what then can we honestly say about transparency in the system? If the system requires experts that are licensed through the state to interpret or apply its rules, then the system is not transparent. In fact, it is utterly impervious to external examination, and any protests against it are swiftly dismissed as "uneducated" or rogue. The system is self-contradictory: Practicing law without a license is a criminal offense, but yet ignorance from the law is no excuse for breaking it.
You can be rid of the bastions of knowledge and reason – lawyers – only at the peril of the concept of principle itself.
This conclusion is fallacious. There are systems of justice for which lawyers and attorneys are forbidden from entry, and serve only their original role as counselors: Unable to act in any way on behalf of their clients or to have any direct influence over legal proceedings. These systems do not simply cease to function without oxford-educated people in expensive suits, and these systems generally avoid overly dense and burdensome legal texts because the participants are unable to interpret or use them in any meaningful capacity.
Lawyers should be optional, not a requirement, in the judicial process. Our system has become broken when it requires people charging several hundred or thousand dollars an hour to act as an "advocate" for their clients, and in the process creating a closed system for which money funnels in, and justice is an occasional byproduct of it, happening as much by coincidence as by design.
So what happens when I'm in a car accident, bleeding to death, and reach for my cell phone and find out it doesn't work because some paper pusher decided I had to be *out* of the car to use my phone... Do I just die, content in the knowledge that it really was for the best?
It is just as bad, it's just not the same kind of bad. China is very public about their activities, whereas western nations prefer smear campaigns, false charges, and complex bureaucratic procedures to blunt the minds of their critics and dampen or perhaps entirely dissipate, protest of its policies. Just because China does in public what other countries do in private does not make the other countries worse.
The United States has the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any first world country, and a larger execution rate than China despite having a far lower population.
If you are a political activist in any country (not just China), don't post things publicly that are unrelated to your cause. Don't post things electronically that are or could be considered illegal, or be used as blackmail material. Remember that you are not representing yourself anymore, you are representing your cause. Everything you say and do will be put under a microscope, and the internet never forgets and never forgives mistakes.
If the dead voted, they would be able to own property.
The dead do vote, predominantly in Chicago, where every few years they re-elect a man without a soul. Some say he raises the dead by means of a dark magic and that voting places are haunted in Chicago. But those who study the dark arts know that he actually has a soul blade that he uses to control the undead voters, and when he loses an election, he will be claimed by the dark powers.
It just has to be enough to provide a reliable contact patch.
Okay, you're not from around here so let me explain Minnesota winter to you:
Imagine drinking battery acid. That is what every breath feels like in January. Now add to that about 6 layers of clothing, so thick that if separated from your person could fill roughly the same space as you. You look like the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man from Ghostbusters. And you know what? It still feels like someone is pouring crushed ice down your back. If you have a dick, it is shriveled up and clinging to the inside of your pants leg and looks like a stack of dimes. Tits, if you have them, are so painfully sharpened they could cut glass.
Now, do you really thing a reliable contact patch is what an all-weather phone needs? Please! In January, my car's happy little voice that greets me in the morning sounds like it got fed the wrong way through a tape player. The GPS speaks in tongues for the first 20 minutes of the trip.
Touch-sensitive phones have limits. Specifically, anywhere north of southern Illinois.
I live in Minnesota. Pity me. That said... You can't use your phone with the gloves we wear up here. You can't even smoke a cigarette in proper winter gloves. The rest of the time take the gloves off! Maybe if they build a phone with a 17" touch screen then I'll consider using it with gloves... but by that point, it won't fit in my pocket, my purse, etc. These people need to think about the human interface a little bit more. Capacitance screens that require finger contact is a good thing... it keeps butt-dialing from happening. Well, as much, anyway...
As soon as they pass legislation like this, people will just move to using proxy servers. Proxy servers lists change hourly. And I do not expect this to survive a challenge in court -- it is a restriction of trade and commerce, and it will only be a matter of time before they shut down the wrong site, cost them millions, and are forced to pay restitution.
So let's be clear -- this isn't about piracy. It's about killing free speech. Because no sooner will they pass this, than they'll add a rider saying they can shut down sites which host "terrorist" material as well... and then Greenpeace, PETA, and a lot of other political undesireables will find themselves on the list.
How hard is it to use HTML and CSS the way they were meant to be used, and to provide alternative content? Sorry, not buying this one at all.
You assume that there's still anything on the internet that's being used the way it was meant to... Let's see, it was a network built by the military to continue to function even if it was nuked, and was designed to run over connections of only a few megabits, on computers that had 16 color monitors and major processing components which didn't blink so much as glow. Pretty much anything you point to that's more than a year old on the internet has been repurposed, modified, or screwed with to do something other than it was originally designed to do.
HTML and CSS are no different. I mean, I'm still waiting for the apology for the BLINK tag, which survives into HTML5 in the name of "backward compatibility". Guys, geocities is dead. We don't need the BLINK tag anymore.
They aren't erogenous. Guys just don't get off on nipple play unless they're on drugs or something. Maybe they just can't stand having to play with themselves for hours at a go on the off chance they'll get a happy for their efforts, I don't know... but the vast majority of men put their dick in their right hand and pull. I know this because I've caught them waaay too many times doing it. I will be well and truly shocked the day I walk in on a guy laid back in bed looking at pictures of naked girls... and have his hands down his shirt instead of his pants.
P.S. Lefties, I don't mean to leave you out. There's nothing wrong with fapping with your left hand, no matter what your dad said.
P.P.S. Mods -- have a sense of humor. Alternatively, don't mod this comment and instead get up, walk over to the bed, and prove me wrong. -_-
Actual reason for braile on drive up ATMs: it's cheaper to make one model of ATM buttons and have some that don't get fully used than to make two molds for ATM keys
That analogy just doesn't hold true on the internet. There are dozens of browsers, hundreds of protocols and underlying technologies that were designed to present information visually, often in a multimedia format. An ATM serves a single purpose -- even just the tiny section of the internet we call the web serves a nearly infinite number of purposes, and have so many competing technologies and layouts, ways of doing things, etc., that applying any kind of standard to it is largely a waste of time. The protocols that run the internet and the design decisions and processes that created them are organic, occasionally irrational (browser cookies come to mind), and surprise the hell out of anyone who's studied it in any detail that it works at all. Bottom line: It's gonna cost a lot of money.
"The Justice Department is considering making it clear that some personal, noncommercial content would not be affected.'"
And 'some' is where the whole thing falls apart. I see no such legislation saying that the government is willing to pay web designers (or their companies) a stipend for the labor required to make their site ADA compliant. And even if they did, the conversion/update costs would vary wildly from site to site, with some needing very little work and others requiring a complete overhaul. It is neither fair, nor reasonable, to expect any business to redesign their websites to be accessible to 5% of the population. And not to be callous, but from a business standpoint -- why would you try to market to a small portion of the population that lives on disability checks? They don't have much disposable income, so it is unlikely they'll be buying whatever you are selling.
And excemptions for personal or noncommercial content is questionable as well -- we've already had states try to force people to buy a business license for running a blog that (le gasp!) had a few advertisement banners by calling it a "commercial enterprise". The government is still (30 years on) completely retarded when it comes to understanding how the internet works. I mean, they still think pissing away billions on copyright law enforcement is doing some good.
If these people are serious about making the internet more accessible, they need to start by investing money at the head of the problem, not papering over its ass -- they need to get involved in standards committees, work with companies to produce protocols, technologies, and access methods that simplify the process of organizing and processing information that is usually presented visually in a non-visual way. And they're going to have to deal with a lot of resistance from advertisement companies and private industry that have thrived on bypassing standards, screwing things up, and being generally annoying in order to eek out a little extra profit.
Projects like NoScript and AdBlocker are damned useful for this because they cut out the crap on a webpage and reduce what's there to what is important... rather than listening to "Breaking news -- A fire has broken out in... try out the new 2007 lexus... 2031 West 94th street, where a mother of three was... have you tried new Charmin Ultra?" You get the idea. The first step in accessibility is clutter elimination and reducing the design to its barest essentials; Because while we can browse through a page in a few seconds, when you have to LISTEN to the page being read to you instead of speed reading, now you're looking at minutes of time.
We have enough issues with lockdown, especially the fact that there are -zero- [1] Android phones shipping in the US that have the ability to support custom ROMs
Umm, dude -- they all have that ability. Whether it's been developed or not is another matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing they used the standard government decryption algorithm HWBUO (Hit With Brick Until Open)?
Just wait until California gets a divorce. It's the geologic celebrity moment we've all been waiting for. It'll probably keep the engagement ring too... I mean since she's wracked up so much debt and all...
The rationale, yes. But I think we could do better. Of course, discussing how would take many, many books... and it's early on a monday.
Money would be better spent making a few places secure for winter time emergencies. Unlike California, if we're without power or housing, we die.
if it is true, and flying is already safer than road travel, then why do we need all the security?
Money. After 9/11 the airlines were losing cash. They have a powerful lobby, so they petitioned Congress to bail them out (again). One of the side-effects of all this extra security is that the price of tickets has gone up, and the airlines can "blame" the government for this "inconvenience". Of course, if people stop using airlines entirely because of such measures, then they will hike the prices some more for the remainder, citing the need for "additional security", or they will request another bailout.
Regardless of what method you use to travel, the airlines (thanks to their powerful lobby) will be getting paid for it.
Because those families lack the sophistication and resources to leverage several thousand servers across 6 continents to buy not a couple, but many thousands, of tickets, and then resell them at significantly higher rates. Your family is not responsible for causing an artists attempt to make his/her concert accessible to people who could not afford to attend at market rates fail miserably. All those friends and family, in short, were not so greedy they caused a substantial shift in cost and availability in a large market that affected tens of thousands.
These guys, however, were.
They aren't code crackers. That's the NSA's job. The CIA assassinates people, and uses very expensive satellites to watch weenie-roasts in countries you can't pronounce, which are started with very large heavy metal cans and ended very suddenly with a bang and a cheer. They also made the CIA World Factbook... which in my humble opinion may be the only thing they've done for the internet that was useful.
So lay off on them being given a really complex soduku in their backyard and then being upset because they didn't have time to screw with it.
If there were some better alternative, I'd be interested in reading about it.
Whenever a system is policed only by itself, and accessible only to itself, the answer is simple, though difficult to gain acceptance:
Establishing oversight from a group outside the community in question, with the power to levy changes and punishment on it, and which by mandate must remain neutral and apart from outside political interests. It is preferable, though not always practical, for these to be elected positions.
First: For those of you who think avoiding jury duty is an option rather than a duty -- thanks for avoiding one of the simplest and most basic requests that our country makes of you in exchange for citizenship. You must be proud.
Second: If the request gets lost, it gets lost. It doesn't matter whether it's eaten by a computer, an angry mail processing machine, or the dog. Lost is lost. You'll get another summons.
You have a very persuasive argument, except you neglect one minor detail: You assume people will take the moral high ground when money is involved. They usually don't. Lawyers aren't any different than Joe Q. Public on the street, excepting that they dress better, make somewhat more money, and (hopefully) are somewhat better trained for their professional field than most.
Additionally, your argument loses a lot of its intellectual purity and moral superiority when you make the reductio ad absurdum argument in paragraph two. Your post would have gone better without that.
Lastly, there is no transparency in the legal system and you're being intellectually dishonest to state otherwise: The legal system is incredibly complex and largely unavailable to the poor. When you have a system that necessitates the use of lawyers and attorneys in every legal preceding, to the point that attempting to advance a case pro se is laughed at by every judge and legal professional -- what then can we honestly say about transparency in the system? If the system requires experts that are licensed through the state to interpret or apply its rules, then the system is not transparent. In fact, it is utterly impervious to external examination, and any protests against it are swiftly dismissed as "uneducated" or rogue. The system is self-contradictory: Practicing law without a license is a criminal offense, but yet ignorance from the law is no excuse for breaking it.
You can be rid of the bastions of knowledge and reason – lawyers – only at the peril of the concept of principle itself.
This conclusion is fallacious. There are systems of justice for which lawyers and attorneys are forbidden from entry, and serve only their original role as counselors: Unable to act in any way on behalf of their clients or to have any direct influence over legal proceedings. These systems do not simply cease to function without oxford-educated people in expensive suits, and these systems generally avoid overly dense and burdensome legal texts because the participants are unable to interpret or use them in any meaningful capacity.
Lawyers should be optional, not a requirement, in the judicial process. Our system has become broken when it requires people charging several hundred or thousand dollars an hour to act as an "advocate" for their clients, and in the process creating a closed system for which money funnels in, and justice is an occasional byproduct of it, happening as much by coincidence as by design.
As we saw with anti-terrorism spending, what's deemed critical and what truly is hasn't exactly ever been the same.
So what happens when I'm in a car accident, bleeding to death, and reach for my cell phone and find out it doesn't work because some paper pusher decided I had to be *out* of the car to use my phone... Do I just die, content in the knowledge that it really was for the best?
It is just as bad, it's just not the same kind of bad. China is very public about their activities, whereas western nations prefer smear campaigns, false charges, and complex bureaucratic procedures to blunt the minds of their critics and dampen or perhaps entirely dissipate, protest of its policies. Just because China does in public what other countries do in private does not make the other countries worse.
The United States has the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any first world country, and a larger execution rate than China despite having a far lower population.
So you feel that political activism and a personal online life are mutually exclusive?
Yes, actually.
If you are a political activist in any country (not just China), don't post things publicly that are unrelated to your cause. Don't post things electronically that are or could be considered illegal, or be used as blackmail material. Remember that you are not representing yourself anymore, you are representing your cause. Everything you say and do will be put under a microscope, and the internet never forgets and never forgives mistakes.
Now that that's out of the way: China, you suck.
If the dead voted, they would be able to own property.
The dead do vote, predominantly in Chicago, where every few years they re-elect a man without a soul. Some say he raises the dead by means of a dark magic and that voting places are haunted in Chicago. But those who study the dark arts know that he actually has a soul blade that he uses to control the undead voters, and when he loses an election, he will be claimed by the dark powers.
Look, if I want something cold and unforgiving shoved in my nethers, I'll go see my gyno.
It just has to be enough to provide a reliable contact patch.
Okay, you're not from around here so let me explain Minnesota winter to you:
Imagine drinking battery acid. That is what every breath feels like in January. Now add to that about 6 layers of clothing, so thick that if separated from your person could fill roughly the same space as you. You look like the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man from Ghostbusters. And you know what? It still feels like someone is pouring crushed ice down your back. If you have a dick, it is shriveled up and clinging to the inside of your pants leg and looks like a stack of dimes. Tits, if you have them, are so painfully sharpened they could cut glass.
Now, do you really thing a reliable contact patch is what an all-weather phone needs? Please! In January, my car's happy little voice that greets me in the morning sounds like it got fed the wrong way through a tape player. The GPS speaks in tongues for the first 20 minutes of the trip.
Touch-sensitive phones have limits. Specifically, anywhere north of southern Illinois.
I live in Minnesota. Pity me. That said... You can't use your phone with the gloves we wear up here. You can't even smoke a cigarette in proper winter gloves. The rest of the time take the gloves off! Maybe if they build a phone with a 17" touch screen then I'll consider using it with gloves... but by that point, it won't fit in my pocket, my purse, etc. These people need to think about the human interface a little bit more. Capacitance screens that require finger contact is a good thing... it keeps butt-dialing from happening. Well, as much, anyway...
As soon as they pass legislation like this, people will just move to using proxy servers. Proxy servers lists change hourly. And I do not expect this to survive a challenge in court -- it is a restriction of trade and commerce, and it will only be a matter of time before they shut down the wrong site, cost them millions, and are forced to pay restitution.
So let's be clear -- this isn't about piracy. It's about killing free speech. Because no sooner will they pass this, than they'll add a rider saying they can shut down sites which host "terrorist" material as well... and then Greenpeace, PETA, and a lot of other political undesireables will find themselves on the list.
GO AMERICA!
How hard is it to use HTML and CSS the way they were meant to be used, and to provide alternative content? Sorry, not buying this one at all.
You assume that there's still anything on the internet that's being used the way it was meant to... Let's see, it was a network built by the military to continue to function even if it was nuked, and was designed to run over connections of only a few megabits, on computers that had 16 color monitors and major processing components which didn't blink so much as glow. Pretty much anything you point to that's more than a year old on the internet has been repurposed, modified, or screwed with to do something other than it was originally designed to do.
HTML and CSS are no different. I mean, I'm still waiting for the apology for the BLINK tag, which survives into HTML5 in the name of "backward compatibility". Guys, geocities is dead. We don't need the BLINK tag anymore.
/offtopic
who says my male, erogenous nipples go unused?
They aren't erogenous. Guys just don't get off on nipple play unless they're on drugs or something. Maybe they just can't stand having to play with themselves for hours at a go on the off chance they'll get a happy for their efforts, I don't know... but the vast majority of men put their dick in their right hand and pull. I know this because I've caught them waaay too many times doing it. I will be well and truly shocked the day I walk in on a guy laid back in bed looking at pictures of naked girls... and have his hands down his shirt instead of his pants.
P.S. Lefties, I don't mean to leave you out. There's nothing wrong with fapping with your left hand, no matter what your dad said.
P.P.S. Mods -- have a sense of humor. Alternatively, don't mod this comment and instead get up, walk over to the bed, and prove me wrong. -_-
Actual reason for braile on drive up ATMs: it's cheaper to make one model of ATM buttons and have some that don't get fully used than to make two molds for ATM keys
That analogy just doesn't hold true on the internet. There are dozens of browsers, hundreds of protocols and underlying technologies that were designed to present information visually, often in a multimedia format. An ATM serves a single purpose -- even just the tiny section of the internet we call the web serves a nearly infinite number of purposes, and have so many competing technologies and layouts, ways of doing things, etc., that applying any kind of standard to it is largely a waste of time. The protocols that run the internet and the design decisions and processes that created them are organic, occasionally irrational (browser cookies come to mind), and surprise the hell out of anyone who's studied it in any detail that it works at all. Bottom line: It's gonna cost a lot of money.
"The Justice Department is considering making it clear that some personal, noncommercial content would not be affected.'"
And 'some' is where the whole thing falls apart. I see no such legislation saying that the government is willing to pay web designers (or their companies) a stipend for the labor required to make their site ADA compliant. And even if they did, the conversion/update costs would vary wildly from site to site, with some needing very little work and others requiring a complete overhaul. It is neither fair, nor reasonable, to expect any business to redesign their websites to be accessible to 5% of the population. And not to be callous, but from a business standpoint -- why would you try to market to a small portion of the population that lives on disability checks? They don't have much disposable income, so it is unlikely they'll be buying whatever you are selling.
And excemptions for personal or noncommercial content is questionable as well -- we've already had states try to force people to buy a business license for running a blog that (le gasp!) had a few advertisement banners by calling it a "commercial enterprise". The government is still (30 years on) completely retarded when it comes to understanding how the internet works. I mean, they still think pissing away billions on copyright law enforcement is doing some good.
If these people are serious about making the internet more accessible, they need to start by investing money at the head of the problem, not papering over its ass -- they need to get involved in standards committees, work with companies to produce protocols, technologies, and access methods that simplify the process of organizing and processing information that is usually presented visually in a non-visual way. And they're going to have to deal with a lot of resistance from advertisement companies and private industry that have thrived on bypassing standards, screwing things up, and being generally annoying in order to eek out a little extra profit.
Projects like NoScript and AdBlocker are damned useful for this because they cut out the crap on a webpage and reduce what's there to what is important ... rather than listening to "Breaking news -- A fire has broken out in... try out the new 2007 lexus... 2031 West 94th street, where a mother of three was ... have you tried new Charmin Ultra?" You get the idea. The first step in accessibility is clutter elimination and reducing the design to its barest essentials; Because while we can browse through a page in a few seconds, when you have to LISTEN to the page being read to you instead of speed reading, now you're looking at minutes of time.
Just a thought...
All is hear is the studios screaming at me that they don't want my money every time I open my wallet.
Oh, they want your money. They just want it again, and again, and again.
We have enough issues with lockdown, especially the fact that there are -zero- [1] Android phones shipping in the US that have the ability to support custom ROMs
Umm, dude -- they all have that ability. Whether it's been developed or not is another matter.