I'd say it's "normal" if not rational to rebel in some way against the ever encroaching attempts at manipulation and control.
Like shopping in a different store?
I'd understand vandalizing a display you were forced to interact with, but essentials can be bought at the ubiquitous stores that litter any particular suburb, and many aren't even advanced enough to accept credit card payments. I really don't see a reason to enter a store you don't like, seek out the features that you don't like, and vandalize them.
I had one employer who thought taking us IT department to a paintball match would be fun
Sorry that your experience sucked. I just thought I'd say that we did this with my office once and it went great. I was on the opposite team from my manager, so we shot each other quite a bit. Also, a co-worker, on the same team as our manager, shot our manager in the back. We had a big laugh about it back at work and no official repercussions happened, but speaking of being treated like kindergarteners, though, I think that employee's mother was told about the incident.
What magical land did you come from? I've traveled to countries in all six of the warmer continents and except for a few places that had specific coping mechanisms, I saw everything you described above, including the no-money for a doctor problem.
The only other people I've heard talk like you came from very rich areas in the US-northeast and just hadn't seen the impoverished mingle with the rest of society. I suspect if you roam the darker alleys of your country's cities you'll see similar situations to what you've just described as unique US problems.
I saw people who were injured but afraid to call an ambulance because they couldn't afford it
I do admit that this is a huge problem here in the US that frequently affects me personally and I believe is worse here (at least for the middle classes) than in other parts of the world.
Bwahahaha, I guess you are modded insightful because it is the new funny? I actually lol-ed a little at your comment. Compared to many areas in Europe, yes, but compared to many of the better scoring nations, and especially the #1 scorer, Japan, which is well known for work-a-haulism (among other -ahaulisms), Americans definitely are not work-ahaulics.
A Just-In-Time education system may be a better approach... 4-year university approach is obsolete
It may be, but the nations that beat the US haven't thrown out the traditional approaches to education. Again, Japan, which I would think would be the poster child of "how not to teach" does exactly what you would like to correct by hammering in concepts really hard when the kids are young. So, I like your ideas but it does not really explain why Americans are falling behind here.
Some babies of rich people are going to have a lower incidence of certain cancers and fewer traits considered undesirable.
You know how everyone is always complaining that it seems that stupid ugly people are having all the babies? Well, that is not going to stop because a few rich people want to have some particular traits in their children.
Teenagers have been doing there part to make sure we have a 'diverse' gene pool and will certainly continue the practice despite distopian plans by their parents to create lines of breast cancer resistant children.
Criminal Security 101, yes, but unfortunately I don't know what university offers that course and people tend not to have a proper credentials in that particular area of the market.
However he did provide a number of suggestions to his users and sending stuff to friend's houses, etc were among them, so it is surprising that he didn't listen to his own site.
I've known (not many, not long) local 'criminals' and frequently they didn't realize when they crossed the line from shady stuff that a lawyer could easily get them out of, to really being a criminal. The justice department rarely sends you a note to let you know that you've crossed over from, "not worth our time to prosecute" to "bonuses to all agencies involved!" So I'd guess that Ulbricht didn't realize that he had passed the point of shady business to actually going to jail for a long time and losing all his bitcoins. He probably meant to encrypt and move everything over seas when he realized he was at that point.
What? I voted for 1 of the 100+ people responsible here, and the vote I cast for her was simply to prevent another guy who I think would have made the situation worse from getting in. Everyone else here is in the same boat, I and my countrymen have very little control over what happens at the federal level.
So I'll be generous and take 0.5% more of the blame for this than you. Since my voting efforts clearly failed to fix the situation, and I'm barely more influential than you, why don't you stop being so smug and come fix it?
Erm, yes it does. Law enforcement are as aware of the Internet as anything else. Perhaps they misallocate resources, and perhaps that's what you need to concentrate on fixing.
Yes, to a degree, but no matter how well funded and technically capable law enforcement is, try going down to the local police station and get them to care that somebody set up a XSS attack on your web sight and the script in question seems to be located in eastern Europe, but you think the original attacker may be somewhere in south-east Asia and they've used some of your costumer accounts to send some spam email.
Anonymous reporting is easy....
Agreed, but I don't see why it should be a necessity. Though starting a bug report with "I am symbol that this internet needs; I am the darkness in the lines; I am internet batman!!!!" sounds really cool now that I think about it. Non-anonymous reporting is easier, and it should allow their security to get details they would not otherwise been able to get and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a thank you.
[bug bounties are] not really a significant method of fixing bugs in your product
They are a good method though. More often than not the handful of developers who put together some portion of your sight, no matter how security conscious they were, missed a couple things that the thousands of technical users might be able to see. I think you ought to try to reward (or at least not threaten) those that bring the ideas to your attention especially if the problem was big. I don't really see any other way to get that many security conscious eyes on your code with the intent of fixing it.
Unfortunately, neither the news nor most of Slashdot seems to care too much about the only cool part of the story. I was ready to go buy myself some night vision contacts, but I think I figured out how underwhelming these things are:
What I've managed to piece together from above comments (mostly guesses as well) is that they just block out all the normal wavelengths we see, save for deep red (almost infra-red but not quite). Since this makes the contact appear black (dark red), they put a fake iris in. You can find tutorials on how to build sunglasses or whatever to do this. My mom's tennis club passes around a pair of sunglasses that blocks most light not the color of a tennis ball and I think this works much the same way, but for deep red. I would imagine that getting the facilities to build contacts would be better spent on just buying the contacts if you just need one pair.
When his cohorts marked the cards with "infrared markings" their markings probably radiate or absorb just a little bit in the visible spectrum, but since this guy is only seeing that portion of spectrum and is in otherwise, to him, in a very dark room while everyone else would not know to ignore the noise of the rest of the visible spectrum. These would be like black-light markings you sometimes get marked with to get back into a club or something (though the other end of the spectrum), which become invisible when the rest of the spectrum is around, but instead of filtering over the bulb to reveal the mark, these lenses filtering over your eye so only you can see it.
TL;DR: the contacts appear to be legitimate, but they're rather underwhelming.
Birth control is a tiny fragment of the endocrine disruptors that are being dumped out there and estrogen is a chemical that's already present due to many natural processes. Hormones (Testosterone for older men, hormone replacement for older women, anti-depressants all hugely used by the US at least), are also only a small fraction of the problem. Agriculture causes all sorts of crap specifically designed to screw up wildlife that would otherwise attack crops, or to create the mutant animals that are so very tasty. Manufacturing waste...So yeah, it'd be kinda misogynistic to say that world's problems come from some women who want to regulate their cycles.
I'm not saying I'm innocent of all this stuff either; I don't only buy food from local farmers who are contaminating local run-off, I grow my own, and I love mutant cow meat, and most of my friends and family and pets are on some sort of environmentally unfriendly medications.
Considering how well that worked out, I can't imagine this initiative will fare much better.
I'm pretty sure how this will work: kids at school will be performing skits, writing their congressmen, and promising that they'll never be bad like those awful pirates. Then going home to bit-torrent themselves some free copies of their favorite TV shows and music.
*-- Vending machines that make you reach into your pocket and pull out money whenever you pass by them. Vending machine would need a huge magnetic field, to hit passersby a few feet away from it in that particular spot. Assuming it was able to target the magnetic field well enough not to simply illuminate everything in the targets brain at once (doubtful), then it will still destroy all of the targets credit cards, cell phones and anything else that might be invented to let you pay vending machines in the near future (all of the targets coins have just been ripped from pockets or are too hot to touch depending on the metals that make them up).
*-- Rich handicapped people buying time on poor people's bodies. First, I don't see the problem here. Second, a human body is a really poor platform to take over and at the moment, this is a really tricky way to do it.
*-- Rich people buying time on poor people's bodies, in order to do criminal things. This has always been a problem, at least in the future you can say: Whitey Bulgar shoved this mind control cap on my head, so it's not my fault. Instead of trying to convince the police that the gangsters made some non-specific threats that may have been about your dog if you didn't take their money. Once again, as long as the poor guy has a dog, I think an expensive helmet full of precisely located coils will be the least efficient way to control him.
*-- Police officers with a 'lay down with your hands behind your back' raygun. I misread this at first. See the vending machine problem, they have to get you on the ground first before they could slip the mind control helmet on you. and that is the one I'm worried about. The researchers say the receiver can't force you to do something against your will, but the article describes the receiver directly stimulating the motor cortex, causing the finger to move involuntarily. And other articles here have shown researchers who think they can stimulate the "moral part of the brain" or "the religious part of the brain." So, your will can become a very subjective measurement once you have some coils pressed against your skull. Given how we seem to treat criminals, prisoners, and people who are trying to get on an airplane these days, this could get scary really fast.
What if we take a few small vats of all these new micro-organisms we've discovered in the Antarctic? We can generate whatever little excess heat and power we can to keep them from completely freezing on the journey and then drop/drill them as deep as we can. Some model's think that maybe the surface ice there might be in places only 1km thick, right? I know, it's unlikely that life will take, but at least it wouldn't be that much more far fetched than a plate with some naked people on it, or a record for alien turntables.
I feel it's our duty as the only space capable species on the planet to help the whole life stuffs out and get it on to other planets.
I have yet to meet a gay couple that would have accepted a civil union, even if it was legally equal to marriage in every way.
Either you haven't met (m)any gay couples or maybe they won't talk to you about these issues anymore?
bullshit about the "separate but equal" issues
If the laws are separate, they can be updated independently. The civil union side could be left out of future updates to the marriage laws, or updated separately by biased measures similar to prop 8. What is so bad about letting all marriages between two consenting adults be covered under the same laws? Separate but equal never worked out in the past, no matter the context, why do we have to try it again here?
If you want to be married, be married. Marriage is about love, trust and commitment. It's not about inheritance rights, taxes and contracts.
Yeah, gays have been getting married far before they were legally allowed to do so, because marriage is about love. Having your marriage accepted with the legal rights it gives you is pretty nifty too, which is what they are pushing for.
Why must you demand that government call your relationship a "marriage" when the "rights" part can be achieved with using that exact word?
Why must _you_ get so hung up on that exact word? Maybe the word is as important to them as it is to you.
Their only HONEST response was they wanted to FORCE those bigoted Christians to recognize their marriage.
So, these Christians only respect the exact legalese the government uses to discuss rights for couples?
This is not about equal rights...This is about revenge and punishing those they hate; religious people.
What are you talking about? Who is punishing religious people? Is it the gay guy I met in college bible study?
the vast majority of gun owners that make the decision to carry a firearm (legally) are responsible people
Absolutely agreed, but you have to admit that there is a tiny minority who are scary as hell. And of course, many of those that make the decision to carry a firearm illegally are not responsible.
I live in a small town with immense natural beauty, but sometimes the public lands and meth dealers occupy the same locations and it's only through word of mouth, or a careful perusal of old news clippings that you learn: don't hang out at this public attraction, people get shot, don't be here if you are this race, don't go down there, it has a long history of pit-bull attics.
I don't know about this particular geo-tagging application, but something similar would be very exciting to me.
I was going to note this too, but also biology plays only so much much a role in looks. If raised with my activity levels on the junk I eat, I'm certain any clone I raised would be round and pimple scarred despite whatever preternatural beauty it may have been endowed with in the first place.
If you can't tell the difference between "Hot girls in bikinis" and the local swim team, then you need to go back to the basics of literacy and start learning concepts like author's intent and such.
I can tell the difference, because one has some ugly girls in it, but seriously, what about the user's intent? If the user can get the same desired effect from the photos on either website, what's the difference? As soon as we say "authors intent" then the 'hot girls in bikinis' guy can change his blog to "my ideal local swim team" with the same pictures.
I know that its easy to tell pornography when you see it, but when your blog is pornographic or acceptable based on what Google employee is vetting the blogs that day, I can understand some frustration.
You can just ignore it, hide the person entirely, or comment on why you are unable to ignore their post and let them know you hate it.
"Like" is just shorthand for: "I read this and it pleased me." On message boards that this option is unavailable, you get 30 "I liked this!" "Great Post!" etc before you get to actual comments and I really wish every board would implement "Like" already.
On the other hand, hate could mean "I hate everything you post" "I hate that you didn't invite me" "I have a counterargument to this post" which you should really just type out instead of leaving them wondering why you clicked the Hate button.
True, thieves want whatever they can get, but right now, phones are the most valuable piece of property your typical pedestrian is carrying. Robbing someone is a pretty risky business and if you cut down the expected profit from $200 phone sale (I've never tried, but I assume that's what you get from a hot iPhone), to the $30 your average pedestrian carries, you'd get a lot more people turning to pan handling, drug dealing, or whatever they do when your out of other options.
I don't know any (admitted) thieves, but I do know a number of people who have been mugged. They don't tend to share the stories of the time they handed over their stuff, but everyone other person seems to have a story where they beat down a thug or the cops showed up just in time and got 'em, so I have to assume: thievery is a risky business, that wouldn't be attempted without reasonable expectation of payoff.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say it's "normal" if not rational to rebel in some way against the ever encroaching attempts at manipulation and control.
Like shopping in a different store?
I'd understand vandalizing a display you were forced to interact with, but essentials can be bought at the ubiquitous stores that litter any particular suburb, and many aren't even advanced enough to accept credit card payments. I really don't see a reason to enter a store you don't like, seek out the features that you don't like, and vandalize them.
I had one employer who thought taking us IT department to a paintball match would be fun
Sorry that your experience sucked. I just thought I'd say that we did this with my office once and it went great. I was on the opposite team from my manager, so we shot each other quite a bit. Also, a co-worker, on the same team as our manager, shot our manager in the back. We had a big laugh about it back at work and no official repercussions happened, but speaking of being treated like kindergarteners, though, I think that employee's mother was told about the incident.
What magical land did you come from? I've traveled to countries in all six of the warmer continents and except for a few places that had specific coping mechanisms, I saw everything you described above, including the no-money for a doctor problem.
The only other people I've heard talk like you came from very rich areas in the US-northeast and just hadn't seen the impoverished mingle with the rest of society. I suspect if you roam the darker alleys of your country's cities you'll see similar situations to what you've just described as unique US problems.
I saw people who were injured but afraid to call an ambulance because they couldn't afford it
I do admit that this is a huge problem here in the US that frequently affects me personally and I believe is worse here (at least for the middle classes) than in other parts of the world.
Americans are work-aholics relatively speaking
Bwahahaha, I guess you are modded insightful because it is the new funny? I actually lol-ed a little at your comment. Compared to many areas in Europe, yes, but compared to many of the better scoring nations, and especially the #1 scorer, Japan, which is well known for work-a-haulism (among other -ahaulisms), Americans definitely are not work-ahaulics.
A Just-In-Time education system may be a better approach... 4-year university approach is obsolete
It may be, but the nations that beat the US haven't thrown out the traditional approaches to education. Again, Japan, which I would think would be the poster child of "how not to teach" does exactly what you would like to correct by hammering in concepts really hard when the kids are young. So, I like your ideas but it does not really explain why Americans are falling behind here.
Good point, the article should have congratulated all the companies that were not caught cheating on android performance tests:
Microsoft, ...
Walmart,
Berkshire-Hathaway,
Lockheed Martin,
that "self employed" beggar across the street,
Burger King,
Ford Motor Company,
That could take awhile actually, lets just congratulate the company you're a fan-boy of then shall we?
Some babies of rich people are going to have a lower incidence of certain cancers and fewer traits considered undesirable.
You know how everyone is always complaining that it seems that stupid ugly people are having all the babies? Well, that is not going to stop because a few rich people want to have some particular traits in their children.
Teenagers have been doing there part to make sure we have a 'diverse' gene pool and will certainly continue the practice despite distopian plans by their parents to create lines of breast cancer resistant children.
seems to me that's all 'security 101' stuff, no?
Criminal Security 101, yes, but unfortunately I don't know what university offers that course and people tend not to have a proper credentials in that particular area of the market.
However he did provide a number of suggestions to his users and sending stuff to friend's houses, etc were among them, so it is surprising that he didn't listen to his own site.
I've known (not many, not long) local 'criminals' and frequently they didn't realize when they crossed the line from shady stuff that a lawyer could easily get them out of, to really being a criminal. The justice department rarely sends you a note to let you know that you've crossed over from, "not worth our time to prosecute" to "bonuses to all agencies involved!" So I'd guess that Ulbricht didn't realize that he had passed the point of shady business to actually going to jail for a long time and losing all his bitcoins. He probably meant to encrypt and move everything over seas when he realized he was at that point.
I think 99% suck, so....wow! I must be pretty good!
What? I voted for 1 of the 100+ people responsible here, and the vote I cast for her was simply to prevent another guy who I think would have made the situation worse from getting in. Everyone else here is in the same boat, I and my countrymen have very little control over what happens at the federal level.
So I'll be generous and take 0.5% more of the blame for this than you. Since my voting efforts clearly failed to fix the situation, and I'm barely more influential than you, why don't you stop being so smug and come fix it?
The internet doesn't have cops
Erm, yes it does. Law enforcement are as aware of the Internet as anything else. Perhaps they misallocate resources, and perhaps that's what you need to concentrate on fixing.
Yes, to a degree, but no matter how well funded and technically capable law enforcement is, try going down to the local police station and get them to care that somebody set up a XSS attack on your web sight and the script in question seems to be located in eastern Europe, but you think the original attacker may be somewhere in south-east Asia and they've used some of your costumer accounts to send some spam email.
Anonymous reporting is easy....
Agreed, but I don't see why it should be a necessity. Though starting a bug report with "I am symbol that this internet needs; I am the darkness in the lines; I am internet batman!!!!" sounds really cool now that I think about it. Non-anonymous reporting is easier, and it should allow their security to get details they would not otherwise been able to get and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a thank you.
[bug bounties are] not really a significant method of fixing bugs in your product
They are a good method though. More often than not the handful of developers who put together some portion of your sight, no matter how security conscious they were, missed a couple things that the thousands of technical users might be able to see. I think you ought to try to reward (or at least not threaten) those that bring the ideas to your attention especially if the problem was big. I don't really see any other way to get that many security conscious eyes on your code with the intent of fixing it.
Unfortunately, neither the news nor most of Slashdot seems to care too much about the only cool part of the story. I was ready to go buy myself some night vision contacts, but I think I figured out how underwhelming these things are:
What I've managed to piece together from above comments (mostly guesses as well) is that they just block out all the normal wavelengths we see, save for deep red (almost infra-red but not quite). Since this makes the contact appear black (dark red), they put a fake iris in. You can find tutorials on how to build sunglasses or whatever to do this. My mom's tennis club passes around a pair of sunglasses that blocks most light not the color of a tennis ball and I think this works much the same way, but for deep red. I would imagine that getting the facilities to build contacts would be better spent on just buying the contacts if you just need one pair.
When his cohorts marked the cards with "infrared markings" their markings probably radiate or absorb just a little bit in the visible spectrum, but since this guy is only seeing that portion of spectrum and is in otherwise, to him, in a very dark room while everyone else would not know to ignore the noise of the rest of the visible spectrum. These would be like black-light markings you sometimes get marked with to get back into a club or something (though the other end of the spectrum), which become invisible when the rest of the spectrum is around, but instead of filtering over the bulb to reveal the mark, these lenses filtering over your eye so only you can see it.
TL;DR: the contacts appear to be legitimate, but they're rather underwhelming.
Birth control is a tiny fragment of the endocrine disruptors that are being dumped out there and estrogen is a chemical that's already present due to many natural processes. Hormones (Testosterone for older men, hormone replacement for older women, anti-depressants all hugely used by the US at least), are also only a small fraction of the problem. Agriculture causes all sorts of crap specifically designed to screw up wildlife that would otherwise attack crops, or to create the mutant animals that are so very tasty. Manufacturing waste...So yeah, it'd be kinda misogynistic to say that world's problems come from some women who want to regulate their cycles.
I'm not saying I'm innocent of all this stuff either; I don't only buy food from local farmers who are contaminating local run-off, I grow my own, and I love mutant cow meat, and most of my friends and family and pets are on some sort of environmentally unfriendly medications.
A whole week goes by and no-one can answer that; I'd say there is 120% chance no one else here understands this either.
DARE was bad enough
Considering how well that worked out, I can't imagine this initiative will fare much better.
I'm pretty sure how this will work: kids at school will be performing skits, writing their congressmen, and promising that they'll never be bad like those awful pirates. Then going home to bit-torrent themselves some free copies of their favorite TV shows and music.
*-- Vending machines that make you reach into your pocket and pull out money whenever you pass by them.
Vending machine would need a huge magnetic field, to hit passersby a few feet away from it in that particular spot. Assuming it was able to target the magnetic field well enough not to simply illuminate everything in the targets brain at once (doubtful), then it will still destroy all of the targets credit cards, cell phones and anything else that might be invented to let you pay vending machines in the near future (all of the targets coins have just been ripped from pockets or are too hot to touch depending on the metals that make them up).
*-- Rich handicapped people buying time on poor people's bodies.
First, I don't see the problem here. Second, a human body is a really poor platform to take over and at the moment, this is a really tricky way to do it.
*-- Rich people buying time on poor people's bodies, in order to do criminal things.
This has always been a problem, at least in the future you can say: Whitey Bulgar shoved this mind control cap on my head, so it's not my fault. Instead of trying to convince the police that the gangsters made some non-specific threats that may have been about your dog if you didn't take their money. Once again, as long as the poor guy has a dog, I think an expensive helmet full of precisely located coils will be the least efficient way to control him.
*-- Police officers with a 'lay down with your hands behind your back' raygun.
I misread this at first. See the vending machine problem, they have to get you on the ground first before they could slip the mind control helmet on you.
and that is the one I'm worried about. The researchers say the receiver can't force you to do something against your will, but the article describes the receiver directly stimulating the motor cortex, causing the finger to move involuntarily. And other articles here have shown researchers who think they can stimulate the "moral part of the brain" or "the religious part of the brain." So, your will can become a very subjective measurement once you have some coils pressed against your skull. Given how we seem to treat criminals, prisoners, and people who are trying to get on an airplane these days, this could get scary really fast.
Yep, you've enumerated another symptom from the disease of aging, but soon we'll be able to make you stupid as 20year old with only a few injections!
What if we take a few small vats of all these new micro-organisms we've discovered in the Antarctic? We can generate whatever little excess heat and power we can to keep them from completely freezing on the journey and then drop/drill them as deep as we can. Some model's think that maybe the surface ice there might be in places only 1km thick, right? I know, it's unlikely that life will take, but at least it wouldn't be that much more far fetched than a plate with some naked people on it, or a record for alien turntables.
I feel it's our duty as the only space capable species on the planet to help the whole life stuffs out and get it on to other planets.
I have yet to meet a gay couple that would have accepted a civil union, even if it was legally equal to marriage in every way.
Either you haven't met (m)any gay couples or maybe they won't talk to you about these issues anymore?
bullshit about the "separate but equal" issues
If the laws are separate, they can be updated independently. The civil union side could be left out of future updates to the marriage laws, or updated separately by biased measures similar to prop 8. What is so bad about letting all marriages between two consenting adults be covered under the same laws? Separate but equal never worked out in the past, no matter the context, why do we have to try it again here?
If you want to be married, be married. Marriage is about love, trust and commitment. It's not about inheritance rights, taxes and contracts.
Yeah, gays have been getting married far before they were legally allowed to do so, because marriage is about love. Having your marriage accepted with the legal rights it gives you is pretty nifty too, which is what they are pushing for.
Why must you demand that government call your relationship a "marriage" when the "rights" part can be achieved with using that exact word?
Why must _you_ get so hung up on that exact word? Maybe the word is as important to them as it is to you.
Their only HONEST response was they wanted to FORCE those bigoted Christians to recognize their marriage.
So, these Christians only respect the exact legalese the government uses to discuss rights for couples?
This is not about equal rights...This is about revenge and punishing those they hate; religious people.
What are you talking about? Who is punishing religious people? Is it the gay guy I met in college bible study?
the vast majority of gun owners that make the decision to carry a firearm (legally) are responsible people
Absolutely agreed, but you have to admit that there is a tiny minority who are scary as hell. And of course, many of those that make the decision to carry a firearm illegally are not responsible.
I live in a small town with immense natural beauty, but sometimes the public lands and meth dealers occupy the same locations and it's only through word of mouth, or a careful perusal of old news clippings that you learn: don't hang out at this public attraction, people get shot, don't be here if you are this race, don't go down there, it has a long history of pit-bull attics.
I don't know about this particular geo-tagging application, but something similar would be very exciting to me.
I was going to note this too, but also biology plays only so much much a role in looks. If raised with my activity levels on the junk I eat, I'm certain any clone I raised would be round and pimple scarred despite whatever preternatural beauty it may have been endowed with in the first place.
If you can't tell the difference between "Hot girls in bikinis" and the local swim team, then you need to go back to the basics of literacy and start learning concepts like author's intent and such.
I can tell the difference, because one has some ugly girls in it, but seriously, what about the user's intent? If the user can get the same desired effect from the photos on either website, what's the difference? As soon as we say "authors intent" then the 'hot girls in bikinis' guy can change his blog to "my ideal local swim team" with the same pictures.
I know that its easy to tell pornography when you see it, but when your blog is pornographic or acceptable based on what Google employee is vetting the blogs that day, I can understand some frustration.
"Who is paying him to say this?"
Any of a dozen U.S. companies?
"Patent trolls cost U.S. companies $29 billion in 2011 alone"
Of course even the summery points out: "low quality patents to be re-examined," so probably only mega-corps are immune from this.
It was most likely the outcome of a mostly arbitrary and random process that required a lot of luck.
You can just ignore it, hide the person entirely, or comment on why you are unable to ignore their post and let them know you hate it.
"Like" is just shorthand for: "I read this and it pleased me." On message boards that this option is unavailable, you get 30 "I liked this!" "Great Post!" etc before you get to actual comments and I really wish every board would implement "Like" already.
On the other hand, hate could mean "I hate everything you post" "I hate that you didn't invite me" "I have a counterargument to this post" which you should really just type out instead of leaving them wondering why you clicked the Hate button.
P.S. I hate your post.
True, thieves want whatever they can get, but right now, phones are the most valuable piece of property your typical pedestrian is carrying. Robbing someone is a pretty risky business and if you cut down the expected profit from $200 phone sale (I've never tried, but I assume that's what you get from a hot iPhone), to the $30 your average pedestrian carries, you'd get a lot more people turning to pan handling, drug dealing, or whatever they do when your out of other options.
I don't know any (admitted) thieves, but I do know a number of people who have been mugged. They don't tend to share the stories of the time they handed over their stuff, but everyone other person seems to have a story where they beat down a thug or the cops showed up just in time and got 'em, so I have to assume: thievery is a risky business, that wouldn't be attempted without reasonable expectation of payoff.