A couple of years ago I was using a regular MS mouse with a laptop to avoid the touchpad. This was about three or four years old at the time, it was brand new with a P166 from a while back. The rollers were so encrusted with dirt and dust that they were uncleanable, I think they were actually rusted or something. In any case the mouseing experience was less than optimal. After a particularly frustrating time I finally exploded and threw the mouse at the nearest wall (it mustn't have been connected too securely because it certainly didn't remain anchored to the laptop). Needless to say it smashed into several pieces.
However, upon examination in a more sober mood I found that none of the pieces were actually broken and I slapped it all back together. But now the mouse worked even worse! Every movement would cause the pointer to go off in a random direction. It didn't last long and I ended up hurling it with as much force as I could muster at the wall again. This time it shattered into more pieces and no force upon this earth could resurrect it.
Thus I was relegated to the touch pad and all the horrors that lie therein. So every day I pray to the God of mice in thanks for the magnficent bounty wrought upon us by the Optical Mouse.
Of course you're right, you can take your own phone to any company and get a non-contract deal, or buy it outright. I was referring to those situations where you want to pay off a phone - I believe only Vodafone offer the ability to do that independant of what plan you are on.
Overall, though, I wish that the law required companies to provide sans-hardware contract-free service at comparable rates, and let the market fight it out. Because at that point, the competition would be almost all about service, and the companies that would survive would be the ones with the best service.
Exactly the reason I am with, and very loyal to, Vodafone Australia. They have completely decoupled the purchase of the phone from the provision of mobile service. I myself am on a $40-for-$60-worth-of-charges-per-month plan while independantly paying off a T610 for around $20 per month over 2 years ($AU of course). This lets them advertise something like "The $60 plan with phone X included" to keep up with the other companies linked plans but giving me the flexability to choose what I like. I could change plans, or go to pre-paid or could have bought a more/less expensive phone and neither choice would effect the other. This is why no matter how good the deals from Optus or Telstra sound sometimes I wouldn't go near them. That and their weird charges (peak/off-peak..sort of off-peak..free time..upside down time...what-time-is-it-time...) where you have to look at your watch every time you make a call. With Vodafone my plan is $0.44/min every day all day, simple!
Btw, although I may sound like it I don't work for Vodafone, I've just moved from phone company to phone company for quite some time and this is the first time I've been satisfied (both landline and mobile) and they have AMAZINGLY good customer service... it's a bit bizzare actually.
Plus that ranch dressing is just about the best thing I've ever tasted! I'm addicted, at least a bottle a fortnight...
On a much stupider note, cricket bowler Glenn McGrath has attempted his own line of salad dressings (or mayonnaises, can't remember). I strongly doubt they are in fact Glenn McGrath's own, and are in fact a cunning (or not so cunning) marketing ploy. I'm sure Paul Newman is safe.
Its missing such obvious features as component video out and mp3 playing! Although the latter is slated for a late upgrade, but even the most rudimentry DVD players have that, I can't imagine why they left it out. And why the incompatibilities with exotic controllers usable with PS2? Just who makes these sorts of decisions - it's so very frustrating. Could have been an amazing machine.
Of the movies I've seen, Cabin Fever takes the cake. It's easy to avoid obvious shit like School of Rock and Scary Movie, but against my better judgement I was duped into thinking Cabin Fever might have something going for it just because Peter Jackson said it was "bloody fantastic, and I do mean bloody". It may have been bloody, but it was the usual boring as batshit teen scripting that made me want to flee half way through. I can't believe that Peter Jackson betrayed me like that! And incase you don't know he is responsible for the best horror movie (slapstick) ever and the most disgusting (and hilarious) movie involving puppets. Not quite as well known as LoTR, but masterpieces nonetheless. Anyway I thought given these accomplishments his opinion would have been spot on, but how wrong I was!
Good quality product? Are you completely mad? What was the last good Hollywood movie? (LoTR doesn't count, made in NZ with only Hollywood $$) The amount of unmitigated shit that spews fourth from that swamp every year is sickening. And the people who pay to see it and support it despite the tons of quality being produced around the world should just get the labotomy over and done with. I read this thread to see if there was a sane person among us to respond to this article with a 'who the fuck cares!' and I come accross someone supporting the 'quality' from Hollywood? I have never been more amazed...
80% of Australia's population live in about 10 cities on the coasts, yet I know we are not anywhere near the top due to, wait for it, bad pricing, bad marketing and bad regulators. What's so hard about admitting your country messed up?
To cut off this avenue one could simply place similar restrictions on any company which imports products to the country attempting to exert this control.
Now I don't support such restrictions to ensure 'we keep our jobs', I don't think 'we' have any more right to these jobs than 'they' overseas. However I do think laws of this kind should exist which limit the offshore operation to give equivalent fundamental rights to workers overseas as workers have here (Australia for me).
So this to me means - right to collective bargaining, no unfair or arbitary dismissal, no discrimination etc. And the biggie, enforcement of a minimum wage calculated by the standards of living of the country in which the operation exists. So no I don't think the operations in China should be forced to pay their workers AU$12/hr - but at least enough to suppport an average standard of living in China. Then let the Chinese workers collectively bargain their way up over time...
As was pointed out in the article, such restrictions on imports are fairly impossible to enforce with digital information, so this doesn't really apply to things like Software etc. But at least the exploitation practiced against workers in clothes/shoes/other semi-skilled factory sweatshops would cease.
I think this is fairly ethically consistant too. After all, how can we say that we guarantee such rights to our workers simply because they are born in Australia, but we don't have to worry about those born overseas - we'll just import the products and reap the benefits of their exploitation. If countries started doing this then effectively it wouldn't matter if China and other countries enacted their own worker protection legislation or not, because companies operating within their borders wouldn't have anyone to sell to if they didn't comply.
The reason behind this is pretty simple IMO, LEGO is not a countable noun. Just like water or soil. You don't say "I have one or two waters" you say "I have a little water or a lot of water". As a kid I would have said "I have heaps of lego" when boasting(which I probably did often". Of course LEGO is countable in that you can have one piece and two pieces, but there again it is pieces of lego, not legos. Actually, legos is just really stupid.
The fact that when someone points out that political involvement in the electoral process is a bad thing, you immediately shoot back 'another system does not exist' (paraphrased obviously) shows the immensity of the corruption in your system. Have you not heard of the idea that the public service is not political? The government can fund a body without influencing it politically. Transparancy and appropriate checks and balances are required to maintain this independance. To see how it's done have a look here.
I've just been looking at pricing for ADSL for myself, and I have been seeing far better than that, I think the prices have recently come down. I don't know where you live, but I expect the Eastern States would have even better than here in W.Aust. For 79.95 a month I'd be with optraweb who give unlimited (yes! unlimited!) usage at 256kb. Also a Static IP.
As I don't have that kind of cash I'm going to go with arachnet who offer 6GB per month for 66 dollars but no static IP.
For at least the last six months that I have been here in Singapore these little subnotebooks have been available and all over the campus I'm at. I find they are just too small, the screen, although it has the resolution, is a strain on the eyes because the text is so small. I'd rather a PDA myself, I don't think there is a gap between PDA and desktop-replacement-laptop that needs to be filled. Of course, I want one just cos they're so cute!
the company has a
department that does nothing other than seek
out violations and that this department has
gone after "many" individuals who have
allegedly infringed upon the trademark.
It must feel good to be such a productive member of society.
You're right. This happens regardless of the medium that's been reviewed, analyzed, folded, spindled or mutilated. The only person who will ever know what was meant was the creator of said piece of work.
The creator only knows what the piece of art means to them, it means somthing different to everybody and just because the creator is the *creator* doesn't mean their view is 'right':)
I know alot of people bitch(*) about how much other people read into works which, when you think about it, really were not 'meant' to have that much read into them. But after alot of this sort of protracted analysis in my literature course I have come to think of the intense analysing and abstracting of countless layers of allegory and metaphore to be a kind of mental excersise. It's not that we are doing these things because we think the author actually meant us to see such relations with their work, but because we can use that piece of art as a base upon which to superimpose countless other things and to through it see those other things in a different light or simply to mess about with our ideas a bit.
(*) I'm not saying the post that I am replying to was, just incase you read that.
...in my dreams. Aol being slowly and painfully killed by Microsoft - the very company they sold out to for greed and thereby lobbed off several of Netscape's limbs. Will they see that if they hadn't sold out for the extra $$$ but had stayed with Netscape for the Greater Good, still making ridiculous profits, they would probably not have this problem? Probably not, but it still gives me a warm happy feeling.
and all films will be derivatives (derivation being a very postmodern concept
I wouldn't say that. For example 'Dr. Faustus' a 17th Century play by Christopher Marlowe was derived from several variations on an old German myth and some other interpretations of those myths. Heaps of Shakespeare was based on other stuff (Antony + Cleopatra has alot taken almost word for word from Plutarch's works). And all this about 'every possible storyline being taken' is a bit of nonesense in my mind. The only century in which art has not had many new and exciting experiments conducted is this one, and that is because it has just started. Everyone at every point in history thinks that there is somthing special about their particular point and that in 'these days' some point has been reached which has never been reached before, and the continuity of life proves them wrong*.
Rather than wasting time trying to prevent application of this technology (which will ultimately be futile), we should be trying to ensure that everyone has access to it.
Eugene Zamiatin's We was the first of the dystopian novels, before 1984 and Brave New World, and depicted a world in which all the walls were made of glass so everyone could see everyone else and what they were doing ALL the time. Obviously it is more of an illustrative metaphor than any reality to be afraid of, but what you advocate not fighting against IS a reality to be afraid of, and would bring about the same effect. Think about it really, and then wonder wheather you'd rather be dead or alive in such a world.
Ritz, a frequenter of Usenet groups where erotic images were traded as digital files, took the deluge of porn spam personally.
"My enjoyment was being interfered with," he says. "The spam got out of hand and I felt I had to take action."
An ordinary man. They took his porn. Now he wants revenge.
Another amazing pirating scam that in Taiwan is credit card fraud, which is more widespread in that country than any other. One can now get a fake credit card made there in under 3 minutes, and most people are afraid to use their legitimate credit cards for fear of the number being stolen by a planted clerk. BUT this organized crime *pales* in comparisson to these evil despicable, dastardly students, viciously PIRATING and infringing away in their dorms, we must stamp them out!
Also on widely available pirates, in Russia one can get any CD, and I mean any to the most obscure stuff, perfect copy with book and all on high quality paper, for around US$2 (less without the book). BUT those dastarly students, that's where the problems lie....
Both the "raters" and "ratees" are engaging in behavior so childish, so juvenile that it defies the imagination.
I agree with the 'shallow' part, it is. But I do not agree with the scornful way in which you describe the practice. The fact is, up to a certain age most people feel insecure about their looks and long for some impartial measure so that they can either run away and hide in a hole forever, or gain some self confidence. Obviously the former is not a good end to the matter, but honesty is what these people wish for and know they can't get from friends/family. I can sympathise and don't see it as some horrible depraved feature of our society, but a simple fact that comes of being human and 'looking for love'. I imagine (hope) that when one gets to a certain age, around 35 or 40 I'd say, and one gets comfortable with themselves and realises what insiginifcant things such measureas are, that they don't care about them. But do not heap scorn upon people who do just because you are fortunate enough not to care.
they are giving people a sort of bizarre power over these people
The power that a rater has over these people is *very* small with women, who usually have several thousand votes depending on the length of time their photo has been up, and quite small with men, who get several hundred. Granted, in the context in which you use the word power, this may not matter to the rater who in the way you portray him/her probably doesn't care about how insignificant their vote is, but just gets off on the fact that they are voting and possibly causing the ratee harm (mental).
However, I have used the site a number of times, just when I am bored and have nothing better to do, and felt no immense power. In fact, as when moderating on slashdot, I felt quite a bit of responsibility to rate fairly, and not, as a previous fanatical poster said 'for the women with the most cleavage showing'. I know that this feeling of responsibility is pretty ridiculous when you consider the frivilous nature of the site, but I felt it a little. I also felt quite alot of guilt when seeing a person who I deemed below average and rated them poorly, so much that I rarely go to the site anymore because I couldn't take the thought of theese people seeing their rating and feeling depressed etc.
Now the point of all this is that I hardly am getting off over some power am I? And I don't feel that I am some supremely abnormal specimen. Of course there are always the odd fucked-up-individual who will go in for that sort of thing, but that can't be helped.
the need to exert this power over strangers on the Internet suddenly becomes the need to exert this power over strangers in Real Life (meatspace.)
I find this assumption unfounded. Not only do I think that most people don't get this power trip by rating the people on the site, but even if they did, the difference between clicking a button and going out committing such acts as you suggest is significant.
Recent statistics have shown that the vast majority of rapists and child molesters have been addicted to Internet pornography.
I've always found this argument hilarious. Anyone ever read hustler or penthouse black label? They've been available for quite some time before the internet, I 'read' a few when I was thirteen and onwards, still haven't raped anyone, got off quite a few times though. Porn-->Rape would make a large majority of males rapists. It's a grand causation fallacy. If you found that a great percentage of rapists read the bible, would you say that religion leads to rape? No, and just because porn and rape both have the common factor of sex is no reason to link the two any more than the common factors of brutality in the bible and rape (read it, theres a shitload).
And please don't try to suggest that the rapes and murders of dozens if not hundreds of women and children are acceptable because the site uses Linux and Apache
Site causes people to feel power over others. People feel need to exert power in real world. Manifests itself as rape and molestation. Site then causes rape and molestation.
Frankly, I don't think a single one of those links is cogent. It is a very poor argument, very poor.
>>>
That is on it's way.... "Digital" satellite radio (by Sirus and XM) which is about to come out is subscription only...
Pay for radio? What the hell for? Who the hell actually listens to the radio except mindless pop loving teens? (I exclude here the one good radio station ever, but it is public radio anyway, they already ask for voulantary subscriptions). I assume that these subscription based satradio stations want to pull in as many people as possible which means marketing to the masses = pop, which you get on twelve other stations for free (plus those hilarious DJ's, Oh the jokes! Can they get any funnier?) Commercial radio has been dead for so long, the only place I hear it these days is when I go into a shopping center, and it reaffirms my hatred for it.
I can't think of anything which does less at the moment, but if anyone else can please do say. When you look at that document with its 28 pages hundreds of references and citations and absolute bullshit reasoning for what is and isn't offensive to everyone you have to wonder how many people and have toiled for how long over this? And what does it do? Nothing it has a negative effect, it is the opposite of creation. How can so many resources be poured into such a useless unnecessary operation? Imagine there was no censorship, what would you do when you heard somthing that offended you on the radio!...wait a second...you could...turn it off! Oh but of course you would be irreperably damaged because you heard a naughty word, real good upstanding citizens dont have thoughts or conversations like that.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of years ago I was using a regular MS mouse with a laptop to avoid the touchpad. This was about three or four years old at the time, it was brand new with a P166 from a while back. The rollers were so encrusted with dirt and dust that they were uncleanable, I think they were actually rusted or something. In any case the mouseing experience was less than optimal. After a particularly frustrating time I finally exploded and threw the mouse at the nearest wall (it mustn't have been connected too securely because it certainly didn't remain anchored to the laptop). Needless to say it smashed into several pieces.
However, upon examination in a more sober mood I found that none of the pieces were actually broken and I slapped it all back together. But now the mouse worked even worse! Every movement would cause the pointer to go off in a random direction. It didn't last long and I ended up hurling it with as much force as I could muster at the wall again. This time it shattered into more pieces and no force upon this earth could resurrect it.
Thus I was relegated to the touch pad and all the horrors that lie therein. So every day I pray to the God of mice in thanks for the magnficent bounty wrought upon us by the Optical Mouse.
Of course you're right, you can take your own phone to any company and get a non-contract deal, or buy it outright. I was referring to those situations where you want to pay off a phone - I believe only Vodafone offer the ability to do that independant of what plan you are on.
Exactly the reason I am with, and very loyal to, Vodafone Australia. They have completely decoupled the purchase of the phone from the provision of mobile service. I myself am on a $40-for-$60-worth-of-charges-per-month plan while independantly paying off a T610 for around $20 per month over 2 years ($AU of course). This lets them advertise something like "The $60 plan with phone X included" to keep up with the other companies linked plans but giving me the flexability to choose what I like. I could change plans, or go to pre-paid or could have bought a more/less expensive phone and neither choice would effect the other. This is why no matter how good the deals from Optus or Telstra sound sometimes I wouldn't go near them. That and their weird charges (peak/off-peak..sort of off-peak..free time..upside down time...what-time-is-it-time...) where you have to look at your watch every time you make a call. With Vodafone my plan is $0.44/min every day all day, simple!
Btw, although I may sound like it I don't work for Vodafone, I've just moved from phone company to phone company for quite some time and this is the first time I've been satisfied (both landline and mobile) and they have AMAZINGLY good customer service... it's a bit bizzare actually.
Plus that ranch dressing is just about the best thing I've ever tasted! I'm addicted, at least a bottle a fortnight...
On a much stupider note, cricket bowler Glenn McGrath has attempted his own line of salad dressings (or mayonnaises, can't remember). I strongly doubt they are in fact Glenn McGrath's own, and are in fact a cunning (or not so cunning) marketing ploy. I'm sure Paul Newman is safe.
Its missing such obvious features as component video out and mp3 playing! Although the latter is slated for a late upgrade, but even the most rudimentry DVD players have that, I can't imagine why they left it out. And why the incompatibilities with exotic controllers usable with PS2? Just who makes these sorts of decisions - it's so very frustrating. Could have been an amazing machine.
Of the movies I've seen, Cabin Fever takes the cake. It's easy to avoid obvious shit like School of Rock and Scary Movie, but against my better judgement I was duped into thinking Cabin Fever might have something going for it just because Peter Jackson said it was "bloody fantastic, and I do mean bloody". It may have been bloody, but it was the usual boring as batshit teen scripting that made me want to flee half way through. I can't believe that Peter Jackson betrayed me like that! And incase you don't know he is responsible for the best horror movie (slapstick) ever and the most disgusting (and hilarious) movie involving puppets. Not quite as well known as LoTR, but masterpieces nonetheless. Anyway I thought given these accomplishments his opinion would have been spot on, but how wrong I was!
Good quality product? Are you completely mad? What was the last good Hollywood movie? (LoTR doesn't count, made in NZ with only Hollywood $$) The amount of unmitigated shit that spews fourth from that swamp every year is sickening. And the people who pay to see it and support it despite the tons of quality being produced around the world should just get the labotomy over and done with. I read this thread to see if there was a sane person among us to respond to this article with a 'who the fuck cares!' and I come accross someone supporting the 'quality' from Hollywood? I have never been more amazed...
Much as I wish it weren't so, MSFT's market cap. is 275 billion versus IBM's 155. MSFT is quite large.
80% of Australia's population live in about 10 cities on the coasts, yet I know we are not anywhere near the top due to, wait for it, bad pricing, bad marketing and bad regulators. What's so hard about admitting your country messed up?
Now I don't support such restrictions to ensure 'we keep our jobs', I don't think 'we' have any more right to these jobs than 'they' overseas. However I do think laws of this kind should exist which limit the offshore operation to give equivalent fundamental rights to workers overseas as workers have here (Australia for me).
So this to me means - right to collective bargaining, no unfair or arbitary dismissal, no discrimination etc. And the biggie, enforcement of a minimum wage calculated by the standards of living of the country in which the operation exists. So no I don't think the operations in China should be forced to pay their workers AU$12/hr - but at least enough to suppport an average standard of living in China. Then let the Chinese workers collectively bargain their way up over time...
As was pointed out in the article, such restrictions on imports are fairly impossible to enforce with digital information, so this doesn't really apply to things like Software etc. But at least the exploitation practiced against workers in clothes/shoes/other semi-skilled factory sweatshops would cease.
I think this is fairly ethically consistant too. After all, how can we say that we guarantee such rights to our workers simply because they are born in Australia, but we don't have to worry about those born overseas - we'll just import the products and reap the benefits of their exploitation. If countries started doing this then effectively it wouldn't matter if China and other countries enacted their own worker protection legislation or not, because companies operating within their borders wouldn't have anyone to sell to if they didn't comply.
The reason behind this is pretty simple IMO, LEGO is not a countable noun. Just like water or soil. You don't say "I have one or two waters" you say "I have a little water or a lot of water". As a kid I would have said "I have heaps of lego" when boasting(which I probably did often". Of course LEGO is countable in that you can have one piece and two pieces, but there again it is pieces of lego, not legos. Actually, legos is just really stupid.
The fact that when someone points out that political involvement in the electoral process is a bad thing, you immediately shoot back 'another system does not exist' (paraphrased obviously) shows the immensity of the corruption in your system. Have you not heard of the idea that the public service is not political? The government can fund a body without influencing it politically. Transparancy and appropriate checks and balances are required to maintain this independance. To see how it's done have a look here.
As I don't have that kind of cash I'm going to go with arachnet who offer 6GB per month for 66 dollars but no static IP.
For at least the last six months that I have been here in Singapore these little subnotebooks have been available and all over the campus I'm at. I find they are just too small, the screen, although it has the resolution, is a strain on the eyes because the text is so small. I'd rather a PDA myself, I don't think there is a gap between PDA and desktop-replacement-laptop that needs to be filled. Of course, I want one just cos they're so cute!
It must feel good to be such a productive member of society.
The creator only knows what the piece of art means to them, it means somthing different to everybody and just because the creator is the *creator* doesn't mean their view is 'right':)
I know alot of people bitch(*) about how much other people read into works which, when you think about it, really were not 'meant' to have that much read into them. But after alot of this sort of protracted analysis in my literature course I have come to think of the intense analysing and abstracting of countless layers of allegory and metaphore to be a kind of mental excersise. It's not that we are doing these things because we think the author actually meant us to see such relations with their work, but because we can use that piece of art as a base upon which to superimpose countless other things and to through it see those other things in a different light or simply to mess about with our ideas a bit.
(*) I'm not saying the post that I am replying to was, just incase you read that.
...in my dreams. Aol being slowly and painfully killed by Microsoft - the very company they sold out to for greed and thereby lobbed off several of Netscape's limbs. Will they see that if they hadn't sold out for the extra $$$ but had stayed with Netscape for the Greater Good, still making ridiculous profits, they would probably not have this problem? Probably not, but it still gives me a warm happy feeling.
Steve Wozniak - Apple 1 and ][
I wouldn't say that. For example 'Dr. Faustus' a 17th Century play by Christopher Marlowe was derived from several variations on an old German myth and some other interpretations of those myths. Heaps of Shakespeare was based on other stuff (Antony + Cleopatra has alot taken almost word for word from Plutarch's works). And all this about 'every possible storyline being taken' is a bit of nonesense in my mind. The only century in which art has not had many new and exciting experiments conducted is this one, and that is because it has just started. Everyone at every point in history thinks that there is somthing special about their particular point and that in 'these days' some point has been reached which has never been reached before, and the continuity of life proves them wrong*.
*grossly paraphrased from Tolstoy
Eugene Zamiatin's We was the first of the dystopian novels, before 1984 and Brave New World, and depicted a world in which all the walls were made of glass so everyone could see everyone else and what they were doing ALL the time. Obviously it is more of an illustrative metaphor than any reality to be afraid of, but what you advocate not fighting against IS a reality to be afraid of, and would bring about the same effect. Think about it really, and then wonder wheather you'd rather be dead or alive in such a world.
An ordinary man. They took his porn. Now he wants revenge.
Also on widely available pirates, in Russia one can get any CD, and I mean any to the most obscure stuff, perfect copy with book and all on high quality paper, for around US$2 (less without the book). BUT those dastarly students, that's where the problems lie....
You're an old fuddy-duddy.
Both the "raters" and "ratees" are engaging in behavior so childish, so juvenile that it defies the imagination.
I agree with the 'shallow' part, it is. But I do not agree with the scornful way in which you describe the practice. The fact is, up to a certain age most people feel insecure about their looks and long for some impartial measure so that they can either run away and hide in a hole forever, or gain some self confidence. Obviously the former is not a good end to the matter, but honesty is what these people wish for and know they can't get from friends/family. I can sympathise and don't see it as some horrible depraved feature of our society, but a simple fact that comes of being human and 'looking for love'. I imagine (hope) that when one gets to a certain age, around 35 or 40 I'd say, and one gets comfortable with themselves and realises what insiginifcant things such measureas are, that they don't care about them. But do not heap scorn upon people who do just because you are fortunate enough not to care.
they are giving people a sort of bizarre power over these people
The power that a rater has over these people is *very* small with women, who usually have several thousand votes depending on the length of time their photo has been up, and quite small with men, who get several hundred. Granted, in the context in which you use the word power, this may not matter to the rater who in the way you portray him/her probably doesn't care about how insignificant their vote is, but just gets off on the fact that they are voting and possibly causing the ratee harm (mental).
However, I have used the site a number of times, just when I am bored and have nothing better to do, and felt no immense power. In fact, as when moderating on slashdot, I felt quite a bit of responsibility to rate fairly, and not, as a previous fanatical poster said 'for the women with the most cleavage showing'. I know that this feeling of responsibility is pretty ridiculous when you consider the frivilous nature of the site, but I felt it a little. I also felt quite alot of guilt when seeing a person who I deemed below average and rated them poorly, so much that I rarely go to the site anymore because I couldn't take the thought of theese people seeing their rating and feeling depressed etc.
Now the point of all this is that I hardly am getting off over some power am I? And I don't feel that I am some supremely abnormal specimen. Of course there are always the odd fucked-up-individual who will go in for that sort of thing, but that can't be helped.
the need to exert this power over strangers on the Internet suddenly becomes the need to exert this power over strangers in Real Life (meatspace.)
I find this assumption unfounded. Not only do I think that most people don't get this power trip by rating the people on the site, but even if they did, the difference between clicking a button and going out committing such acts as you suggest is significant.
Recent statistics have shown that the vast majority of rapists and child molesters have been addicted to Internet pornography.
I've always found this argument hilarious. Anyone ever read hustler or penthouse black label? They've been available for quite some time before the internet, I 'read' a few when I was thirteen and onwards, still haven't raped anyone, got off quite a few times though. Porn-->Rape would make a large majority of males rapists. It's a grand causation fallacy. If you found that a great percentage of rapists read the bible, would you say that religion leads to rape? No, and just because porn and rape both have the common factor of sex is no reason to link the two any more than the common factors of brutality in the bible and rape (read it, theres a shitload).
And please don't try to suggest that the rapes and murders of dozens if not hundreds of women and children are acceptable because the site uses Linux and Apache
Site causes people to feel power over others. People feel need to exert power in real world. Manifests itself as rape and molestation. Site then causes rape and molestation.
Frankly, I don't think a single one of those links is cogent. It is a very poor argument, very poor.
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That is on it's way.... "Digital" satellite radio (by Sirus and XM) which is about to come out is subscription only...
Pay for radio? What the hell for? Who the hell actually listens to the radio except mindless pop loving teens? (I exclude here the one good radio station ever, but it is public radio anyway, they already ask for voulantary subscriptions). I assume that these subscription based satradio stations want to pull in as many people as possible which means marketing to the masses = pop, which you get on twelve other stations for free (plus those hilarious DJ's, Oh the jokes! Can they get any funnier?) Commercial radio has been dead for so long, the only place I hear it these days is when I go into a shopping center, and it reaffirms my hatred for it.
I can't think of anything which does less at the moment, but if anyone else can please do say. When you look at that document with its 28 pages hundreds of references and citations and absolute bullshit reasoning for what is and isn't offensive to everyone you have to wonder how many people and have toiled for how long over this? And what does it do? Nothing it has a negative effect, it is the opposite of creation. How can so many resources be poured into such a useless unnecessary operation? Imagine there was no censorship, what would you do when you heard somthing that offended you on the radio! ...wait a second...you could...turn it off! Oh but of course you would be irreperably damaged because you heard a naughty word, real good upstanding citizens dont have thoughts or conversations like that.