San Diego County, California. The kid said he bought the motorcycle from a guy named "Skye" for a few hundred bucks. Nothing in the court record shows anything about using a computer to arrange the sale, so I don't see why they would impose all the draconian restrictions on him other than an attempt at a legal-system version of "You're grounded, kid."
The amusing bit is that somehow I missed hearing about the whole Officer Bubbles thing until he decided to sue, which brought him up in the news again. Had the little jackass just kept his mouth shut and taken his well-deserved lumps for arresting a girl for assault-with-a-deadly-bubble, I'd never have known about him. I'm sure there are many others out there in the same boat. So he's brought quite a bit more shame and embarrassment on himself with this latest stunt.
I agree, actually. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce doing jobs that require a college degree to get hired, but don't require one to actually do the job.
Do you REALLY need a college degree to work as an administrative assistant? Hardly.
Does a really good IT guy need a college degree? Not at all. In fact, college computer sci programs often lag behind the real world significantly, and there's nothing to be done about it. While the professor is getting his class schedule approved, some geek in a software firm somewhere is busy coming up with the next programming language that will leave whatever Prof is teaching in the dust. And besides, a really good IT guy has been passionate about computers since he was a kid. He doesn't need college to teach him about it, because he already knows it. And if he doesn't, he'd go out and learn it on his own whether there was a degree in it for him or not.
In fact, in most professions, you get your degree, and then get your first job, and only THEN do you start actually learning how to do the job.
Hell a large chunk of college graduates are in careers that have absolutely nothing to do with their degrees. Many if not most hiring managers want you to have a college degree because it proves you have a college degree, not because it proves you'll actually bring something valuable to the organization.
And that system means that a lot of people who have no business going to college are going to college, because if you don't have that sheepskin you're not going to get a decent job. That gave rise to comments I heard in college like "Well we're paying for the class, and so the professor OWES us a good grade."
If you don't want to go to college for the sake of learning, then it's better if you're not required to go at all, but unfortunately academia isn't set up that way. It's been sold to us as a ticket to higher wages. In some cases that's true, but in many cases you get people with college degrees who make crap for money (journalists, artists, most English majors, religion, etc), and then you get people who never bothered completing college and yet made a fortune - See: Bill Gates.
The flaw is in the assumption that paper math always necessarily represents physical reality.
I remember a teacher back in high school -mumble- years ago explaining that between any 2 given points is an infinite number of points that you must cross.
If we took this to represent actual physical reality then I'd never get anywhere because I'd have to cross an infinity of points just to get across the room, and we can't ever get to the end of an infinite string.
I view this as the same situation. 0.999... is a number that is very close to one, but can never reach one because it is an infinite string of 9's after the decimal. For all practical purposes it's 1, but in reality it's not quite there because it isn't a real number. In the real, physical world (possibly excluding exotics like black holes where reality breaks down anyway) there is no such thing as infinity. It's a concept, but not reality.
I don't think it's cops up their asses. I think it's the same old tired kneejerk "TERRIST!" reaction we've seen ever since 9/11. Any time someone wants to do something that's blatantly unethical or illegal (like, say, waterboarding people, or kidnapping them, chaining them to the floor of an airplane, flying them to Syria, and having them tortured with methods up to and including administering electric shocks to their genitals) (Yes, this actually happened, many times - research "extraordinary rendition") they just run to a judge who may not particularly like the cops, but who is terrified of the terrorists, and claim that what they're doing might prevent a terrorist attack.
Well. Yes. It might. Hell, nuking the whole planet would prevent them too, but no one's suggesting that. Why not?
And then after they've been doing the waterboarding or the extraordinary rendition or the illegal surveillance, they say "Well see, we haven't had any terrorist attacks and therefore it must be working!" which is a completely illogical train of thought. We haven't had any dragon attacks either, but that doesn't mean that the little boy 2 houses down from me who keeps waving a plastic sword around to drive the dragons away is actually having an effect.
Yes, terrorists are out there and yes, we need to do everything we can to prevent them from pulling off another attack like that, but it has to be both logical and consistent with the laws of the land. To suddenly declare private property as public-property-for-the-purposes-of-government-spying goes against every founding principle of this country. To follow people around because of something they said in a political discussion on a message forum, or because they're not white enough, is un-American, unpatriotic, and anyone doing it or authorizing it should be jailed.
Exactly. I've been known to drop comments in political threads where I called the anti-terrorism push from the government "security theater," and pointed out all the things that they're preventing law abiding citizens from doing that a real terrorist would never do. They tell us to report people with cameras taking pictures of airplanes landing. Why? They're called aviation fans. A real terrorist doesn't need to see what a 747 looks like when it lands, so all this is is some government idiot who's decided it'll be fun to harass innocent people.
Now I'm wondering if such comments haven't gotten a tracking device installed on *my* car;)
They started out by being cheaper than any other big box electronics store. That's why CompUSA and Circuit City aren't around anymore. They're obviously going to be cheaper than the mom and pop store because they can buy in bulk and therefore reduce costs. Plus, the mom and pop store tends to hire employees who know what they're talking about. Best Buy hires people who think Pentium is a dirty magazine.
People in Western cultures tend to shop for the lowest price. Even if it means you have to go into a crap store with crap employees who dispense crap advice, by god you saved $15 on that plasma and you'll go back next time to save another measly amount. (interestingly, Japanese consumers tend to be the opposite. If you charge less for an item, they view it as lower quality and are less likely to want to buy it)
Best Buy had the lowest prices for years, and now that they have pretty much zero brick and mortar competition, they can start tacking on bullshit like this to make more money.
Not that they haven't always done so - when I worked for them back in high school the store manager used to try to get me to sell extended warranties on ram by telling customers to buy it because "you know if one of the bearings breaks, the ram's done and you'll have to buy a new one without the warranty." Such practices were common throughout the network of stores in my town. So deceptive business practices have been par for the course for these guys for decades. They prey on the gullible and attract the savvy with the low prices.
That's the pitch. Broken down it says "Our $30 service will make lots of improvements to your PS3."
What it doesn't tell you is that those improvements will be made anyway, the first time you hook the PS3 up to the network.
It's like charging someone for making the sun set at night. It's going to happen whether you pay me for it or not, so if I imply that you have to pay me to make it happen, it's unethical.
And then when you add in Best Buy's usual practice of being magically "out of stock" of the non-altered PS3's, it's doubly unethical because they're advertising PS3's at one price and then trying to force you to pay $30 more once you get to the store.
I'm not arguing with you, but why in hell would you pick a PS3 as a standalone DVD player? You can get one that's just as functional - more, really - for 50 bucks.
Why are we acting as though it will ever be possible to get a 100% perfect voting system? It won't be. Sure, paper ballots have flaws. Lots of them. And the system can be gamed - hell, my family's from Louisiana. I know all about the dead voting.
But all those problems exist in the digital voting systems as well. The dead can still vote. People can still vote early and often. Election workers can monkey with the cards that store the voting data. They can misread the final output. The voter can hit the wrong button, and so on. . .
But a guy sitting in a dark basement drinking Mountain Dew and eating Pop Tarts cannot possibly reprogram the paper to move the ink mark from one candidate to another during counting, and then back to the original candidate immediately thereafter. He can't program the paper to flip the positions of candidates only when you're using it, so that you're voting for Candidate A even though it looks like you're voting for Candidate B. There's all sorts of things that blackhats can't do to a paper ballot, and preventing them relies entirely on how good the (government-contracted lowest-bidder) e-security team is, and the hope that the people trying to tamper with the machines aren't very good at it.
Am I unusual in actually liking this arrangement? It used to be irritating to have to alt-tab between 2 documents over and over, or between directories. Now I can just stick 'em side by side and work much faster.
If it were a problem I'd do like others have suggested and flip my monitor on its side. Most if not all vidcard drivers support this nowadays.
You're thinking purely in marketing terms. What if the programmer just wants to see where phones that use his software are? Then you don't need to track, and you don't need who data.
Are you? If the information is anonymous, and only says "a mobile device was here at this time," then it has no way of knowing that the same mobile device is there every day at 5:30.
That's why you don't want it sending "who" information.
Traveling at those velocities, it would be pretty difficult, not to mention inefficient, to change course every time a chunk of matter showed up in front of your ship. Far more efficient to either be able to absorb the impact, or move the object out of the way before you get there. Your idea is, of course, possible, but Occam's razor says it's more likely they'll just push the dust aside.
As far as resisting our own efforts to crush them, all they have to do is wait until we're out of ammunition and then drive their ship into whatever they want to destroy - - if it can survive impacts at c+, such a shield would make their ship a battering ram capable of light speed. The ship itself is the weapon.
How do you keep that secure in a public environment? If i type my password in a computer lab or at work, all anyone sees is a line of asterisks. If I have to hunt down a location on Google Earth, anyone and his dog can see where I clicked.
There are a few reasonable assumptions we can make here:
1) If one species develops faster-than-light travel, then that means it's possible, and so it is quite likely that more than one species will do it. 2) Eventually, those species will run across one another as they zoom around the galaxy. As with relations here on earth when one civilization suddenly stumbled upon another, those meetups are not likely to be immediate friendships. 3) Because of that, it's likely that interplanetary wars will break out, which means weapons capable of doing damage from orbit will be developed. 4) Even if a civilization develops intergalactic travel capabilities and never runs across another species until they for some reason decide to holiday on earth (rather unlikely), they're still going to have weapons that will cause us serious problems, as they're going to have to have ways of clearing interstellar debris out of their path. The space shuttle cracked a windshield when it ran into a postage stamp sized flake of paint while in orbit. And that's when it was traveling a mere 18,000mph. Light travels at 186,000 miles per *second.* If they hit so much as a dust mote they'd be vaporized unless they've developed technology to knock the dust out of their way (which could easily be used as a weapon), or shielding capable of withstanding the impact (in which case, their shield could withstand anything we shot at them).
So no matter what assumptive path you travel, you end up with the conclusion that any species that is so far advanced beyond our own as to achieve faster than light travel, even if 100% peaceful, has the capability to crush us, because if it didn't, it couldn't possibly survive its attempts to travel around the galaxy.
I think you're getting close to the reason this girl should get off, but you're not quite there yet.
The reason is that she was 14 when she did it. We as a society have determined, through laws, that people under the age of 18 are not adults, and are not wholly responsible for their actions. That's why we have a juvenile court system.
A 14 year old is not going to be a "reasonably prudent" person because by definition the 14 year old has not matured enough to acquire that prudence.
That said, I remember the environment 5 years ago regarding Kazaa. Very few claimed that it was "LEGAL" to download pirated music. Usually you saw them claiming it was "not wrong," and then they'd use a thin justification like "well the company still has their copy so I haven't stolen anything." Of course these excuses were just that - excuses so they could keep getting music for free without admitting that they were stealing.
Actually, the reasonably prudent test is meant as a protection against BS laws that no one could possibly figure out without being explicitly told.
For instance, if you're on the highway, doing 60mph after passing a sign that says 60mph, a "reasonably prudent" person would assume that the speed limit will be 60 until a new sign advises you of a change. So a town cannot drop the speed limit to 30, but refuse to put up a 30mph sign, and then park a cop at the speed change cite and get everyone for going 30 over.
A reasonably prudent person, upon seeing that someone has created a work and is selling it, will understand that obtaining it for free without the permission of the creator is problematic.
Not really. . . You seem to have latched on to an aside comment I made and missed my actual point entirely.
I never said it wasn't wrong to pirate music. I said the girl, whether she pirated music or not, has an absolute right to a fair trial. And the music industry is calling her "vexatious" for availing herself of that right.
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San Diego County, California. The kid said he bought the motorcycle from a guy named "Skye" for a few hundred bucks. Nothing in the court record shows anything about using a computer to arrange the sale, so I don't see why they would impose all the draconian restrictions on him other than an attempt at a legal-system version of "You're grounded, kid."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101020/04513511498/court-rejects-probation-rules-on-teen-that-ban-him-from-using-social-networks-or-instant-messaging-programs.shtml
Scroll down - you can see the appellate court decision at the bottom.
The amusing bit is that somehow I missed hearing about the whole Officer Bubbles thing until he decided to sue, which brought him up in the news again. Had the little jackass just kept his mouth shut and taken his well-deserved lumps for arresting a girl for assault-with-a-deadly-bubble, I'd never have known about him. I'm sure there are many others out there in the same boat. So he's brought quite a bit more shame and embarrassment on himself with this latest stunt.
I wonder if he'll sue.
I agree, actually. There are a lot of people out there in the workforce doing jobs that require a college degree to get hired, but don't require one to actually do the job.
Do you REALLY need a college degree to work as an administrative assistant? Hardly.
Does a really good IT guy need a college degree? Not at all. In fact, college computer sci programs often lag behind the real world significantly, and there's nothing to be done about it. While the professor is getting his class schedule approved, some geek in a software firm somewhere is busy coming up with the next programming language that will leave whatever Prof is teaching in the dust. And besides, a really good IT guy has been passionate about computers since he was a kid. He doesn't need college to teach him about it, because he already knows it. And if he doesn't, he'd go out and learn it on his own whether there was a degree in it for him or not.
In fact, in most professions, you get your degree, and then get your first job, and only THEN do you start actually learning how to do the job.
Hell a large chunk of college graduates are in careers that have absolutely nothing to do with their degrees. Many if not most hiring managers want you to have a college degree because it proves you have a college degree, not because it proves you'll actually bring something valuable to the organization.
And that system means that a lot of people who have no business going to college are going to college, because if you don't have that sheepskin you're not going to get a decent job. That gave rise to comments I heard in college like "Well we're paying for the class, and so the professor OWES us a good grade."
If you don't want to go to college for the sake of learning, then it's better if you're not required to go at all, but unfortunately academia isn't set up that way. It's been sold to us as a ticket to higher wages. In some cases that's true, but in many cases you get people with college degrees who make crap for money (journalists, artists, most English majors, religion, etc), and then you get people who never bothered completing college and yet made a fortune - See: Bill Gates.
Affirmative, Actually. An Active Alertness Alarm Almost Always Averts Accidents. Amazing!
The flaw is in the assumption that paper math always necessarily represents physical reality.
I remember a teacher back in high school -mumble- years ago explaining that between any 2 given points is an infinite number of points that you must cross.
If we took this to represent actual physical reality then I'd never get anywhere because I'd have to cross an infinity of points just to get across the room, and we can't ever get to the end of an infinite string.
I view this as the same situation. 0.999... is a number that is very close to one, but can never reach one because it is an infinite string of 9's after the decimal. For all practical purposes it's 1, but in reality it's not quite there because it isn't a real number. In the real, physical world (possibly excluding exotics like black holes where reality breaks down anyway) there is no such thing as infinity. It's a concept, but not reality.
Exactly. What's the point in preserving our country if we destroy what our country stands for?
That's where the part of the sentence that you left out in your quote comes in. . .
I feel much better now ;)
I don't think it's cops up their asses. I think it's the same old tired kneejerk "TERRIST!" reaction we've seen ever since 9/11. Any time someone wants to do something that's blatantly unethical or illegal (like, say, waterboarding people, or kidnapping them, chaining them to the floor of an airplane, flying them to Syria, and having them tortured with methods up to and including administering electric shocks to their genitals) (Yes, this actually happened, many times - research "extraordinary rendition") they just run to a judge who may not particularly like the cops, but who is terrified of the terrorists, and claim that what they're doing might prevent a terrorist attack.
Well. Yes. It might. Hell, nuking the whole planet would prevent them too, but no one's suggesting that. Why not?
And then after they've been doing the waterboarding or the extraordinary rendition or the illegal surveillance, they say "Well see, we haven't had any terrorist attacks and therefore it must be working!" which is a completely illogical train of thought. We haven't had any dragon attacks either, but that doesn't mean that the little boy 2 houses down from me who keeps waving a plastic sword around to drive the dragons away is actually having an effect.
Yes, terrorists are out there and yes, we need to do everything we can to prevent them from pulling off another attack like that, but it has to be both logical and consistent with the laws of the land. To suddenly declare private property as public-property-for-the-purposes-of-government-spying goes against every founding principle of this country. To follow people around because of something they said in a political discussion on a message forum, or because they're not white enough, is un-American, unpatriotic, and anyone doing it or authorizing it should be jailed.
Exactly. I've been known to drop comments in political threads where I called the anti-terrorism push from the government "security theater," and pointed out all the things that they're preventing law abiding citizens from doing that a real terrorist would never do. They tell us to report people with cameras taking pictures of airplanes landing. Why? They're called aviation fans. A real terrorist doesn't need to see what a 747 looks like when it lands, so all this is is some government idiot who's decided it'll be fun to harass innocent people.
Now I'm wondering if such comments haven't gotten a tracking device installed on *my* car ;)
As long as we're picking nits, it's not new. It's just new to us. It's probably been around as long as, or longer than, we have.
I think you're right.
That said, my tax dollars put him up there in that space suit, and so I expect a cut of the settlement. ;)
How does Walmart stay in business?
Best Buy is the Walmart of electronics.
They started out by being cheaper than any other big box electronics store. That's why CompUSA and Circuit City aren't around anymore. They're obviously going to be cheaper than the mom and pop store because they can buy in bulk and therefore reduce costs. Plus, the mom and pop store tends to hire employees who know what they're talking about. Best Buy hires people who think Pentium is a dirty magazine.
People in Western cultures tend to shop for the lowest price. Even if it means you have to go into a crap store with crap employees who dispense crap advice, by god you saved $15 on that plasma and you'll go back next time to save another measly amount. (interestingly, Japanese consumers tend to be the opposite. If you charge less for an item, they view it as lower quality and are less likely to want to buy it)
Best Buy had the lowest prices for years, and now that they have pretty much zero brick and mortar competition, they can start tacking on bullshit like this to make more money.
Not that they haven't always done so - when I worked for them back in high school the store manager used to try to get me to sell extended warranties on ram by telling customers to buy it because "you know if one of the bearings breaks, the ram's done and you'll have to buy a new one without the warranty." Such practices were common throughout the network of stores in my town. So deceptive business practices have been par for the course for these guys for decades. They prey on the gullible and attract the savvy with the low prices.
It's unethical if you look at it from a disclosure standpoint.
http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u46173/best-buy-firmware_thumb.jpg
That's the pitch. Broken down it says "Our $30 service will make lots of improvements to your PS3."
What it doesn't tell you is that those improvements will be made anyway, the first time you hook the PS3 up to the network.
It's like charging someone for making the sun set at night. It's going to happen whether you pay me for it or not, so if I imply that you have to pay me to make it happen, it's unethical.
And then when you add in Best Buy's usual practice of being magically "out of stock" of the non-altered PS3's, it's doubly unethical because they're advertising PS3's at one price and then trying to force you to pay $30 more once you get to the store.
I'm not arguing with you, but why in hell would you pick a PS3 as a standalone DVD player? You can get one that's just as functional - more, really - for 50 bucks.
Why are we acting as though it will ever be possible to get a 100% perfect voting system? It won't be. Sure, paper ballots have flaws. Lots of them. And the system can be gamed - hell, my family's from Louisiana. I know all about the dead voting.
But all those problems exist in the digital voting systems as well. The dead can still vote. People can still vote early and often. Election workers can monkey with the cards that store the voting data. They can misread the final output. The voter can hit the wrong button, and so on. . .
But a guy sitting in a dark basement drinking Mountain Dew and eating Pop Tarts cannot possibly reprogram the paper to move the ink mark from one candidate to another during counting, and then back to the original candidate immediately thereafter. He can't program the paper to flip the positions of candidates only when you're using it, so that you're voting for Candidate A even though it looks like you're voting for Candidate B. There's all sorts of things that blackhats can't do to a paper ballot, and preventing them relies entirely on how good the (government-contracted lowest-bidder) e-security team is, and the hope that the people trying to tamper with the machines aren't very good at it.
Am I unusual in actually liking this arrangement? It used to be irritating to have to alt-tab between 2 documents over and over, or between directories. Now I can just stick 'em side by side and work much faster.
If it were a problem I'd do like others have suggested and flip my monitor on its side. Most if not all vidcard drivers support this nowadays.
You're thinking purely in marketing terms. What if the programmer just wants to see where phones that use his software are? Then you don't need to track, and you don't need who data.
Are you? If the information is anonymous, and only says "a mobile device was here at this time," then it has no way of knowing that the same mobile device is there every day at 5:30.
That's why you don't want it sending "who" information.
Traveling at those velocities, it would be pretty difficult, not to mention inefficient, to change course every time a chunk of matter showed up in front of your ship. Far more efficient to either be able to absorb the impact, or move the object out of the way before you get there. Your idea is, of course, possible, but Occam's razor says it's more likely they'll just push the dust aside.
As far as resisting our own efforts to crush them, all they have to do is wait until we're out of ammunition and then drive their ship into whatever they want to destroy - - if it can survive impacts at c+, such a shield would make their ship a battering ram capable of light speed. The ship itself is the weapon.
How do you keep that secure in a public environment? If i type my password in a computer lab or at work, all anyone sees is a line of asterisks. If I have to hunt down a location on Google Earth, anyone and his dog can see where I clicked.
There are a few reasonable assumptions we can make here:
1) If one species develops faster-than-light travel, then that means it's possible, and so it is quite likely that more than one species will do it.
2) Eventually, those species will run across one another as they zoom around the galaxy. As with relations here on earth when one civilization suddenly stumbled upon another, those meetups are not likely to be immediate friendships.
3) Because of that, it's likely that interplanetary wars will break out, which means weapons capable of doing damage from orbit will be developed.
4) Even if a civilization develops intergalactic travel capabilities and never runs across another species until they for some reason decide to holiday on earth (rather unlikely), they're still going to have weapons that will cause us serious problems, as they're going to have to have ways of clearing interstellar debris out of their path. The space shuttle cracked a windshield when it ran into a postage stamp sized flake of paint while in orbit. And that's when it was traveling a mere 18,000mph. Light travels at 186,000 miles per *second.* If they hit so much as a dust mote they'd be vaporized unless they've developed technology to knock the dust out of their way (which could easily be used as a weapon), or shielding capable of withstanding the impact (in which case, their shield could withstand anything we shot at them).
So no matter what assumptive path you travel, you end up with the conclusion that any species that is so far advanced beyond our own as to achieve faster than light travel, even if 100% peaceful, has the capability to crush us, because if it didn't, it couldn't possibly survive its attempts to travel around the galaxy.
I think you're getting close to the reason this girl should get off, but you're not quite there yet.
The reason is that she was 14 when she did it. We as a society have determined, through laws, that people under the age of 18 are not adults, and are not wholly responsible for their actions. That's why we have a juvenile court system.
A 14 year old is not going to be a "reasonably prudent" person because by definition the 14 year old has not matured enough to acquire that prudence.
That said, I remember the environment 5 years ago regarding Kazaa. Very few claimed that it was "LEGAL" to download pirated music. Usually you saw them claiming it was "not wrong," and then they'd use a thin justification like "well the company still has their copy so I haven't stolen anything." Of course these excuses were just that - excuses so they could keep getting music for free without admitting that they were stealing.
Actually, the reasonably prudent test is meant as a protection against BS laws that no one could possibly figure out without being explicitly told.
For instance, if you're on the highway, doing 60mph after passing a sign that says 60mph, a "reasonably prudent" person would assume that the speed limit will be 60 until a new sign advises you of a change. So a town cannot drop the speed limit to 30, but refuse to put up a 30mph sign, and then park a cop at the speed change cite and get everyone for going 30 over.
A reasonably prudent person, upon seeing that someone has created a work and is selling it, will understand that obtaining it for free without the permission of the creator is problematic.
Not really. . . You seem to have latched on to an aside comment I made and missed my actual point entirely.
I never said it wasn't wrong to pirate music. I said the girl, whether she pirated music or not, has an absolute right to a fair trial. And the music industry is calling her "vexatious" for availing herself of that right.