However, I suspect a store could circumvent that by simply posting notice of such a policy at the store entrance or cash register. At that point you're agreeing to the policy as a condition of entry or purchase.
No. You never have to agree to anything written on a sign. The store just assumes you agree, and unless you do something contrary to that, they never know otherwise. At the time they realize you do not agree to the conditions on the sign (such as when you refuse to show a receipt), the most they can do is insist that you leave the premises.
Hell, even if you signed a CONTRACT with the store saying they had a right to search, you could still refuse. Just because it is written in a contract does not mean they can hold you against your will or physically assault you. You have simply breached the contract by refusing to allow the search. This is not without its own sort of consequences, but the point is, NO agreement EVER gives another person the right to detain or search you. EVER.
Yes. The point is, nobody may insist that they be allowed to search your person or belongings, and then detain you if you refuse. Whether it is polite or reasonable to do so is quite beside the point. It would have been more polite and reasonable of you not to refer to the guy as a "professional asshole." Luckily for you, you have a legal right to do so, and you've just asserted that right.
Yeah, I'm with my family and I'm going to make an ass out of myself.
More like, I'm with my family and I choose to demonstrate that I have a spine and will assert my rights when I CHOOSE, and hopefully encourage others to do the same.
They guy got what he had coming to him.
What is coming to him is probably a big chunk of money. So at least you agree that that's appropriate.
From that description, it sounds like I never have to manually configure my settings -- unless of course, it couldn't detect my settings and fell back to a crappy generic driver and resolution. "I see stuff on the screen" does not mean the same thing as "It works."
But somehow, writing comments on Slashdot is considered equivalent to partaking in a high-brow, intellectual conversation so Slashdot is "good" while discussing pie recipes on some blog is considered yappy. Well, check this stupid article and the fucking morons posting their boring gender-stereotyping jokes that they probably learnt from a porno-mag.
And if you have a large gambling debt or are having a clandestine gay (or straight) affair unknown to your spouse, you are more likely to be motivated to sell some of your knowledge or reveal it to avoid damaging exposure.
Let's see... Suffer familial distress, or get my ass pounded in prison? I think I know which one I'd pick. (I leave it to your imagination.)
There are ALWAYS ways to blackmail someone. If NASA believes that these sorts of background checks really work, they've been breathing too much vacuum.
Do you actually think NASA has anything to do with it? They are a space agency which happens to be a part of the government. They do what they are ordered to do. If NASA was an independent group of engineers, I seriously doubt something like this would be happening.
If the low intellectual tone of some of the comments in this thread are anything to go by, I would say that there are virtually no women using Slashdot, and to be honest, I can see why...
Are you actually trying to argue that women are NOT more social than men? Yeah, the comments about yapping, gabbing, catty women are low-brow. That doesn't invalidate the basic point that women are more inclined to gossip. It's not sexist, it's truth. In other news, men have penises.
That said, the survey is so completely flawed that I'd hesitate to draw any conclusions at all, except that the surveyors have no idea how to properly conduct a survey.
I highly doubt it. Let me guess -- they conducted this survey ON THE INTERNET. So their sample is limited to exactly the same group of people who would probably know what a blog is. Somebody needs to re-take basic statistics...
I could be wrong -- I can't RTFA because it's Slashdotted.
Yeah, you really stuck it to "the man" by tripping up a community college student working part time for $8 and hour and no commision!
"The man?" The man is the person who keeps you down. Circuit City doesn't keep me down -- they're just a bunch of dumbasses who deserve to be fucked with. You choose to work for a bunch of immoral scumbags? You get screwed with.
Being a poor college kid is no excuse to swindle people because your criminal bosses have told you to do so. Grow a fucking spine, go work at Burger King -- it pays about as much, anyway.
10. When buying a PC you will be asked to have a backup DVD made for a charge of $30. This is done through an application found on all computers, sometimes hidden. You could do it yourself for free. Also, it was very common to sell this on Toshiba laptops. Little do the customers know, it's already in the box. So we would charge, and do nothing.
That goes beyond sleaze. Double-charging for a product already purchased is fraud. People should go to jail.
Somehow, I get the feeling from the content of this post, that you've never done this, but wish you had. Especially for a high-ticket item that you can't, in reality, afford.
It's happened twice. Once with an ink jet printer worth about $100, once with a cheap LCD television worth about 10 times that. With the LCD, I really did intend to play this prank -- luckily, it worked. So yeah, technically that's "half the time":-)
But if you're seriously worried that somehow an old link will come back to haunt you, remember that things like records of domain ownership changes, your dated journal entries, cached copies of the web, etc. would all clearly show what happened. All this concern about some nightmare scenario seems way overblown.
I'm not concerned about a "nightmare scenario" -- I'm attacking the fundamental CONCEPT that a person is somehow responsible for the content of a site they link to. It's no different than telling somebody to go down to the corner of 5th and Garden Street -- there's a great Thai restaurant there -- but when they arrive, it's actually been replaced with an illegal dog fighting ring. No sir, not my responsibility, even in principle.
Every time I check out of one of these places -- which is not often at all -- I'm invariably offered some kind of extended warranty. When I initially refuse, the cashier usually says something like "You'd really be wise to buy it, these things break all the time."
I respond, "So what you're saying is, this product is a piece of shit and I shouldn't buy it. Check." The look on the cashier's face is always priceless. For a big-ticket item, it's also great to see the sales associate foaming at the mouth because the dumbshit cashier just tanked a sale.
And yeah, I walk right out without buying it. Half the time I never intended to anyway. Hours of amusement, kids!
Yeah, but the legal system isn't actually blind, they do actually look at context. If your link is surrounded by text that says stuff like "My wife and I just had our baby and we found the cutest site! Check it out at www.cutebabies.com. Be sure to check out page 3 where you can find pictures of our little Jessica-Amber -- it's under the Oh-no-she-didn't! category!", then I bet the judge, hell even the cops will probably think "WTF? Does this guy know what's on that site?" and LJ will simply ask you to remove the link and threaten you with suspension or cancellation if you don't. And, given the scenario you described, I bet you'd be more than happy to take down a link like that.
"Take down" a link that's been hard-archived on a million places on the web? Not even possible. How am I supposed to go erase the links from Google cache and any other site that archives web content? For that matter, what if LJ doesn't allow me to redact my posts? Why the hell should I be threatened with "suspension or cancellation" because some OTHER SITE on the Internet changes?
As in, "strike something out." Erase it, overwrite it, remove it. To an English speaker, the verbiage makes sense. Who are we to guess at what aspects of our language are clear or unclear to foreign speakers? If we over-explain, we end up patronizing you. If we under-explain, we get complaints. What do you want?
How do you get from here to there? As far as I can tell, his philosophy is more or less, "The universe got along fine without me for billions of years, and will do the same after I'm gone." (which is basically my own position). He didn't say anything about being special or nothingness preceding or following his existence; he merely observed that he's not afraid of death because he was, in effect, in that same state before.
I'm not making a comment on the fellow's ego. It just stimulates me to think. If there's nothing special about me, then there is nothing special about the "nothingness" which both precedes and follows me. And yet, I exist, as a conscious being. This leads me to believe that what "follows me" in this life is not an eternity of nothingness, but more consciousness. Not my own, since "I" no longer exist, but consciousness, first person existence, none the less. My point is, by believing that our lives are followed by nothingness, we defy the basic statistics of the universe.
You can be responsible for the content you link to by being accountable to your government (yeah, I'm no fan either, but there they are) if you violate a law. If you point people to a site where they can hook up with other men who like diddling kiddies and providing a link like that is illegal in your country, then I think it's reasonable for LiveJournal to say that they'll close your account if they're required to under those circumstances and that they'll probably provide your identity to your government as well if they're required to.
But this misses the fundamental point -- the Internet can change at any time. What if I link to a site: http://www.cutebabies.com/ which is full of pictures of newborns for new parents to gawk at. Suppose the registration on this domain expires, and it's replaced with a site full of child porn -- babies engaging in sex, or whatever. If I'm responsible for that, then... I'm not going to link to anything.
Irrelevant to the story, perhaps. But I was responding to a user comment, which claimed that we should all be responsible for the content we link to. Clearly, that's not feasible, as it would destroy the web.
You should be responsible for sites you link to, you're the one sending your readers there.
How can a person be responsible for a site they link to? The content of that site could change at any time. If I was held legally responsible for the content of every site I link to, I'd never link to ANYTHING. It could change at any moment -- what if it becomes child porn? To hold people responsible for the content of the sites they link to would fundamentally destroy the web. Nobody would link to anything.
I'm not afraid of death. I have been dead for billions of years before I was born.
A bit off topic, but I wanted to respond to this. Think about it. Before you existed, there were billions of years of nothing. And presumably, after you die, another eternity of nothing. So basically the world looks like this:
Notice that "flyingfsck" is special in this scenario -- he (she?) is the one who comes into being, and then dies. I ask you, what the heck is so special about YOU? Why is it YOU who flashes into existence for a brief few years and then disappears?
The answer is, there's nothing special at all about you. Which means the whole idea that your existence was preceded by "nothingness" and followed by "nothingless" must be inherently flawed. Just something to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I suspect a store could circumvent that by simply posting notice of such a policy at the store entrance or cash register. At that point you're agreeing to the policy as a condition of entry or purchase.
No. You never have to agree to anything written on a sign. The store just assumes you agree, and unless you do something contrary to that, they never know otherwise. At the time they realize you do not agree to the conditions on the sign (such as when you refuse to show a receipt), the most they can do is insist that you leave the premises.
Hell, even if you signed a CONTRACT with the store saying they had a right to search, you could still refuse. Just because it is written in a contract does not mean they can hold you against your will or physically assault you. You have simply breached the contract by refusing to allow the search. This is not without its own sort of consequences, but the point is, NO agreement EVER gives another person the right to detain or search you. EVER.
Why? WTF? To prove some point?
Yes. The point is, nobody may insist that they be allowed to search your person or belongings, and then detain you if you refuse. Whether it is polite or reasonable to do so is quite beside the point. It would have been more polite and reasonable of you not to refer to the guy as a "professional asshole." Luckily for you, you have a legal right to do so, and you've just asserted that right.
Yeah, I'm with my family and I'm going to make an ass out of myself.
More like, I'm with my family and I choose to demonstrate that I have a spine and will assert my rights when I CHOOSE, and hopefully encourage others to do the same.
They guy got what he had coming to him.
What is coming to him is probably a big chunk of money. So at least you agree that that's appropriate.
Okay... So what's sitting on the topmost shelf of the rightmost cabinet on the east side of the wall of my garage?
From that description, it sounds like I never have to manually configure my settings -- unless of course, it couldn't detect my settings and fell back to a crappy generic driver and resolution. "I see stuff on the screen" does not mean the same thing as "It works."
Sincerely, a former Trek fan.
I agree with the sentiment. But what is a "former Trek fan?" Surely you're still a fan of all the old episodes?
But somehow, writing comments on Slashdot is considered equivalent to partaking in a high-brow, intellectual conversation so Slashdot is "good" while discussing pie recipes on some blog is considered yappy. Well, check this stupid article and the fucking morons posting their boring gender-stereotyping jokes that they probably learnt from a porno-mag.
You're a grizzled old hag, aren't you?
And if you have a large gambling debt or are having a clandestine gay (or straight) affair unknown to your spouse, you are more likely to be motivated to sell some of your knowledge or reveal it to avoid damaging exposure.
Let's see... Suffer familial distress, or get my ass pounded in prison? I think I know which one I'd pick. (I leave it to your imagination.)
There are ALWAYS ways to blackmail someone. If NASA believes that these sorts of background checks really work, they've been breathing too much vacuum.
Do you actually think NASA has anything to do with it? They are a space agency which happens to be a part of the government. They do what they are ordered to do. If NASA was an independent group of engineers, I seriously doubt something like this would be happening.
Since when did "failure" equate to "fraud?" I'd like to see some real evidence that he's been purposefully defrauding investors...
If the low intellectual tone of some of the comments in this thread are anything to go by, I would say that there are virtually no women using Slashdot, and to be honest, I can see why...
Are you actually trying to argue that women are NOT more social than men? Yeah, the comments about yapping, gabbing, catty women are low-brow. That doesn't invalidate the basic point that women are more inclined to gossip. It's not sexist, it's truth. In other news, men have penises.
That said, the survey is so completely flawed that I'd hesitate to draw any conclusions at all, except that the surveyors have no idea how to properly conduct a survey.
I highly doubt it. Let me guess -- they conducted this survey ON THE INTERNET. So their sample is limited to exactly the same group of people who would probably know what a blog is. Somebody needs to re-take basic statistics...
I could be wrong -- I can't RTFA because it's Slashdotted.
Yeah, you really stuck it to "the man" by tripping up a community college student working part time for $8 and hour and no commision!
"The man?" The man is the person who keeps you down. Circuit City doesn't keep me down -- they're just a bunch of dumbasses who deserve to be fucked with. You choose to work for a bunch of immoral scumbags? You get screwed with.
Being a poor college kid is no excuse to swindle people because your criminal bosses have told you to do so. Grow a fucking spine, go work at Burger King -- it pays about as much, anyway.
10. When buying a PC you will be asked to have a backup DVD made for a charge of $30. This is done through an application found on all computers, sometimes hidden. You could do it yourself for free. Also, it was very common to sell this on Toshiba laptops. Little do the customers know, it's already in the box. So we would charge, and do nothing.
That goes beyond sleaze. Double-charging for a product already purchased is fraud. People should go to jail.
Somehow, I get the feeling from the content of this post, that you've never done this, but wish you had. Especially for a high-ticket item that you can't, in reality, afford.
It's happened twice. Once with an ink jet printer worth about $100, once with a cheap LCD television worth about 10 times that. With the LCD, I really did intend to play this prank -- luckily, it worked. So yeah, technically that's "half the time" :-)
But hey, I got my +5 Funny, right?
But if you're seriously worried that somehow an old link will come back to haunt you, remember that things like records of domain ownership changes, your dated journal entries, cached copies of the web, etc. would all clearly show what happened. All this concern about some nightmare scenario seems way overblown.
I'm not concerned about a "nightmare scenario" -- I'm attacking the fundamental CONCEPT that a person is somehow responsible for the content of a site they link to. It's no different than telling somebody to go down to the corner of 5th and Garden Street -- there's a great Thai restaurant there -- but when they arrive, it's actually been replaced with an illegal dog fighting ring. No sir, not my responsibility, even in principle.
Every time I check out of one of these places -- which is not often at all -- I'm invariably offered some kind of extended warranty. When I initially refuse, the cashier usually says something like "You'd really be wise to buy it, these things break all the time."
I respond, "So what you're saying is, this product is a piece of shit and I shouldn't buy it. Check." The look on the cashier's face is always priceless. For a big-ticket item, it's also great to see the sales associate foaming at the mouth because the dumbshit cashier just tanked a sale.
And yeah, I walk right out without buying it. Half the time I never intended to anyway. Hours of amusement, kids!
This issue isn't about you being responsible for your links existence in history, it's about you being responsible for the present.
Why am I responsible for ANYTHING? If you're going to hold me responsible, I'm not going to link. Period.
Yeah, but the legal system isn't actually blind, they do actually look at context. If your link is surrounded by text that says stuff like "My wife and I just had our baby and we found the cutest site! Check it out at www.cutebabies.com. Be sure to check out page 3 where you can find pictures of our little Jessica-Amber -- it's under the Oh-no-she-didn't! category!", then I bet the judge, hell even the cops will probably think "WTF? Does this guy know what's on that site?" and LJ will simply ask you to remove the link and threaten you with suspension or cancellation if you don't. And, given the scenario you described, I bet you'd be more than happy to take down a link like that.
"Take down" a link that's been hard-archived on a million places on the web? Not even possible. How am I supposed to go erase the links from Google cache and any other site that archives web content? For that matter, what if LJ doesn't allow me to redact my posts? Why the hell should I be threatened with "suspension or cancellation" because some OTHER SITE on the Internet changes?
As in, "strike something out." Erase it, overwrite it, remove it. To an English speaker, the verbiage makes sense. Who are we to guess at what aspects of our language are clear or unclear to foreign speakers? If we over-explain, we end up patronizing you. If we under-explain, we get complaints. What do you want?
How do you get from here to there? As far as I can tell, his philosophy is more or less, "The universe got along fine without me for billions of years, and will do the same after I'm gone." (which is basically my own position). He didn't say anything about being special or nothingness preceding or following his existence; he merely observed that he's not afraid of death because he was, in effect, in that same state before.
I'm not making a comment on the fellow's ego. It just stimulates me to think. If there's nothing special about me, then there is nothing special about the "nothingness" which both precedes and follows me. And yet, I exist, as a conscious being. This leads me to believe that what "follows me" in this life is not an eternity of nothingness, but more consciousness. Not my own, since "I" no longer exist, but consciousness, first person existence, none the less. My point is, by believing that our lives are followed by nothingness, we defy the basic statistics of the universe.
You can be responsible for the content you link to by being accountable to your government (yeah, I'm no fan either, but there they are) if you violate a law. If you point people to a site where they can hook up with other men who like diddling kiddies and providing a link like that is illegal in your country, then I think it's reasonable for LiveJournal to say that they'll close your account if they're required to under those circumstances and that they'll probably provide your identity to your government as well if they're required to.
But this misses the fundamental point -- the Internet can change at any time. What if I link to a site: http://www.cutebabies.com/ which is full of pictures of newborns for new parents to gawk at. Suppose the registration on this domain expires, and it's replaced with a site full of child porn -- babies engaging in sex, or whatever. If I'm responsible for that, then... I'm not going to link to anything.
Your point is valid but irrelevant.
Irrelevant to the story, perhaps. But I was responding to a user comment, which claimed that we should all be responsible for the content we link to. Clearly, that's not feasible, as it would destroy the web.
You should be responsible for sites you link to, you're the one sending your readers there.
How can a person be responsible for a site they link to? The content of that site could change at any time. If I was held legally responsible for the content of every site I link to, I'd never link to ANYTHING. It could change at any moment -- what if it becomes child porn? To hold people responsible for the content of the sites they link to would fundamentally destroy the web. Nobody would link to anything.
I think the difference is how freedom is best preserved.
Freedom is best preserved by ignoring these "license" things and simply doing what you want. What could be freer than that?
I'm not afraid of death. I have been dead for billions of years before I was born.
A bit off topic, but I wanted to respond to this. Think about it. Before you existed, there were billions of years of nothing. And presumably, after you die, another eternity of nothing. So basically the world looks like this:
Nothing... Nothing... Nothing... flyingfsck exists... Nothing... Nothing... Nothing.
Notice that "flyingfsck" is special in this scenario -- he (she?) is the one who comes into being, and then dies. I ask you, what the heck is so special about YOU? Why is it YOU who flashes into existence for a brief few years and then disappears?
The answer is, there's nothing special at all about you. Which means the whole idea that your existence was preceded by "nothingness" and followed by "nothingless" must be inherently flawed. Just something to think about.