The best thing a consumer can do to counteract this consumer surveillance is to toss junk into the system. Here are a few suggestions: [snip insane list]
[RM101's mind boggles]
Dude, do you seriously have nothing better to do than spend this crazy amount of time feeding junk data into a supermarket computer? Go outside. Breathe the air.
I dunno, maybe you WILL lay on your death bed, not thinking of your wife, or children, but you'll be proud of how many hours you spent contaminating some database.
Man, you're making me tempted to pull out my 486/50Mhz (170 meg hard drive, I think?) IBM Thinkpad with the cool "Butterfly" keyboard and see if it still works.:D
I'm more fond of this quote: "They laughed at the Wright Brothers. Of course, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Blogs have not emerged from laughter, and never will be a serious competitor to professional news organizations (and this is from someone who mostly has utter contempt for professional news organizations)
You misunderstood what I said -- Bush won the election, but he didn't win it because of enthusiastic support, he won it because Kerry was so bad. If the Democrats had had any sort of competent candidate, Bush would have easily lost.
There will be much ranting and raving and cries of how stupid the American people are, but there are some very simple things at work here.
Bush didn't win, Kerry lost.
Kerry was a TERRIBLE candidate. He took both sides of every issue. He would tell people whatever they wanted to hear. When people can't get a sense of where a candidate stands on anything, the incumbent wins. Really, it's as simple as that. I don't think many people were enthusiastic Bush supporters, but most people couldn't stomach voting for Kerry.
Instead of asking why the American people voted for Bush, ask yourself why the Democrats couldn't come up with a better candidate than Kerry.
Dude, get a grip. That doesn't mean that people think that intelligence isn't important. But it's certainly the case that many intelligent people are utter morons when it comes to politics. There's more to being a good leader than having a good SAT score.
So what's your point? It sounds like she did exactly what she's supposed to do: Verify that only people who should be voting are voting. There was a descrepency in the records, so she tried to figure out what she should do.
Yes, I agree that it was an obvious mistake, but do you really want to pollsters "bending the rules" whenever problems come up? Exactly what rule should be used to "just let people vote"?
Bravo for the attendent trying to run a fair election.
I hate this idea of, "And no matter what you decide, if you can, just get out and vote tomorrow."
If you don't care and are uneducated, don't vote. Yes, I'm swimming against the tide. Don't vote. I would rather have 25% turnout of educated voters than 75% of people making random votes based on what their moron college roommate told them.
Correct me if I am wrong but isnt the presidents job to do what the people want ?
Absolutely freakin' not. The President's job is to represent the people, and make decisions based on information that the people are not privy to, or don't have time to full research.
We are supposed to have a democracy here.
No, we are supposed to be a Republic. We elect representatives to look at the issues and vote on them. True democracy is impossible, and is not what we want. The people don't have time to educate themselves on every issue, and are too easily swayed back and forth.
I for one do not want a goddamn dictator telling me what to do or how I should live my life. This is supposed to be a free country, so long as I dont force someone to do something against there freedom I shouldnt have someone doing that to me.
That's certainly the ideal view. But where the difficult comes in is defining what "forcing someone to do something" really means. For example, a lot of people think drugs should be legalized, since your only harming yourself. But that's not really true -- areas with heavy drug use also carry with it higher levels of crime. So drug legalization is a more complex issue; there are ramifications beyond simple "live and let live".
With stem cells, there are people who believe, legitimately, that life begins at conception, and therefore, it is unethical to experiment on something clearly human. This has absolutely nothing to do with religion, although many people use religion as their guiding principle. But it really comes down to human life. If we value human life, then human life has to be defined, and what that definition should be is arguable.
As for ethics, given how ethically challenged Bush is I hardly think he's making ANY decisions based on ethics. He simply panders to his base and advisors, rather than making any effort to think about what is good for the country.
Sheesh, I'm no fan of Bush, but at least TRY and get your facts straight. He took a lot of heat from his base for allowing ANY funding on the existing stem cell lines. The religious right (which who I assume you're referring to be the 'base') wanted an outright ban.
You may argue with Bush's decisions, but the one thing he doesn't do is stick his finger in the wind and do whatever the public tells him to do (a la Clinton).
Kerry knows that science is not something to be feared.
I'm so tired of hearing this. It's not about "fearing science", it's about ethics. Whatever your stand on the issue is, it is undeniable that experimentation on human embryos has significant ethical considerations.
Have to disagree with this
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Not to start a flamewar, but....
In the early days of Apple versus Microsoft we had a real culture war, command line versus GUI. Windows won. Which is bad because Mac is, IMHO, better.
The Mac may or may not be better; that's certaintly debatable. What's not debatable is that it's much, much, MUCH better that Microsoft won. If Apple had won, how long would we have been saddled with proprietary hardware with proprietary software? A LONG-ASS time, and Macs would have been far more expensive. The only reason that a Mac is "only" 50%-2x the price of a PC is because PCs are so cheap. Without PCs, we would be totally at Apple's mercy, and they don't exactly have a good track record of not gouging their customers.
Microsoft may have its flaws, and they may charge too much for their software (although, I could argue that you get a lot of technology for a measly $129 retail), but at least they never tried to come out with a "Microsoft PC" with proprietary hardware.
What's amazing is that Apple is still too stupid to realize that the money is in the software, not the hardware. It's really mindblowing when you think about it.
If Apple had won, then they WOULD have been a petal-to-the-metal monopoly that would have had to be broken up.
It's a classic case of "I may despise what you say, but I'll fight to the death to protect your right to say it"
No. This is not about censorship. No one is saying Stern doesn't have a right to say what he wants to say. There is no right to a platform for someone's speech.
It's exactly as if some vagrant was shouting obscenities on a street corner. A policeman has the right to get rid of the vagrant, because he's a public nuisance.
No, college refers exclusively to undgraduate schools. University tends to be used for graduate schools, but may occasionally be used for undergraduate as well. No offense, but it's not he who has an apparent deficieny in the English langauge.
Um, no offense, but no, you're wrong. Do a Google for "Graduate College" and you will find numerous counter examples ("Graduate College of Business" is a common one).
Whoop-de-doo. Hopefully you don't actually think this means that they're important. Any idiot can get shut down -- say, if I post your name, address, pictures, and make up some fake criminal records to warn people that you're a child molester. That'd get shut down real quick, and I have a feeling you wouldn't be crying about "censorship".
Without more information about why any given site is shut down, we know nothing.
It was a place for teenagers with too much anger and not enough wisdom, knowledge and/or experience to spout off leftist anarchy politics.
The question is why any government would care, since (effectively) no one reads it anyway. The theory is that someone was going to publish some names/addresses of people.
Sorry, but you're just being silly. The reason the Wright Brothers was a landmark event was because it was "controlled, powered" flight. It was scalable.
A true comparison would be for someone to build a catapult to vault someone through the air and then say, "We have flight! Making it powered and controllable is just around the corner!"
SpaceShipOne is not a scalable technology, it's good for suborbital and nothing else.
In fact, I know that a Slashdot staffer did it. I went from +2 to -1 in about 30 seconds, all with "overrated" moderations. I highly doubt that three separate moderators all did overrated within 30 seconds.
Who the hell marked me down so fast? I am highly suspicious that a Slashdot staffer did it. If so, you suck. This was a legitimate opinion, and you marked me down because you didn't like it.
Sorry, but SpaceShipOne was a stunt, nothing more. I respect the engineering involved, but this is not space travel. I don't care that some faceless person somewhere defined an arbitrary point as "space". Space travel is CONTROLLED space travel, minimally an orbital insertion.
Unfortunately, Rutan's technology is not applicable to orbital space travel, as near as I can tell, so I'm not sure that this does anything for space tourism, except as a something for the press to report (which may be worth something, but I tend to doubt that it means much).
The question is how many people are going to be fooled that this is really space travel.
As a "research scientist", presumably you had at least one class in statistics and know that your personal experiences are irrelevent.
Of course Stern has some small percentage of listeners that are professionals. But that's not the issue, is it? Do you really think that the majority of his listeners are?
If you enjoy him, great, more power to you. We all need a bit of entertainment. But don't try and tell me that his humor is anywhere on the same planet as sophistication.
Slashdot Mirror
[RM101's mind boggles]
Dude, do you seriously have nothing better to do than spend this crazy amount of time feeding junk data into a supermarket computer? Go outside. Breathe the air.
I dunno, maybe you WILL lay on your death bed, not thinking of your wife, or children, but you'll be proud of how many hours you spent contaminating some database.
Man, you're making me tempted to pull out my 486/50Mhz (170 meg hard drive, I think?) IBM Thinkpad with the cool "Butterfly" keyboard and see if it still works. :D
Blogs have not emerged from laughter, and never will be a serious competitor to professional news organizations (and this is from someone who mostly has utter contempt for professional news organizations)
You misunderstood what I said -- Bush won the election, but he didn't win it because of enthusiastic support, he won it because Kerry was so bad. If the Democrats had had any sort of competent candidate, Bush would have easily lost.
Bush didn't win, Kerry lost.
Kerry was a TERRIBLE candidate. He took both sides of every issue. He would tell people whatever they wanted to hear. When people can't get a sense of where a candidate stands on anything, the incumbent wins. Really, it's as simple as that. I don't think many people were enthusiastic Bush supporters, but most people couldn't stomach voting for Kerry.
Instead of asking why the American people voted for Bush, ask yourself why the Democrats couldn't come up with a better candidate than Kerry.
Dude, get a grip. That doesn't mean that people think that intelligence isn't important. But it's certainly the case that many intelligent people are utter morons when it comes to politics. There's more to being a good leader than having a good SAT score.
Yes, I agree that it was an obvious mistake, but do you really want to pollsters "bending the rules" whenever problems come up? Exactly what rule should be used to "just let people vote"?
Bravo for the attendent trying to run a fair election.
If you don't care and are uneducated, don't vote. Yes, I'm swimming against the tide. Don't vote. I would rather have 25% turnout of educated voters than 75% of people making random votes based on what their moron college roommate told them.
If you don't care, then don't vote. Please.
Absolutely freakin' not. The President's job is to represent the people, and make decisions based on information that the people are not privy to, or don't have time to full research.
We are supposed to have a democracy here.
No, we are supposed to be a Republic. We elect representatives to look at the issues and vote on them. True democracy is impossible, and is not what we want. The people don't have time to educate themselves on every issue, and are too easily swayed back and forth.
I for one do not want a goddamn dictator telling me what to do or how I should live my life. This is supposed to be a free country, so long as I dont force someone to do something against there freedom I shouldnt have someone doing that to me.
That's certainly the ideal view. But where the difficult comes in is defining what "forcing someone to do something" really means. For example, a lot of people think drugs should be legalized, since your only harming yourself. But that's not really true -- areas with heavy drug use also carry with it higher levels of crime. So drug legalization is a more complex issue; there are ramifications beyond simple "live and let live".
With stem cells, there are people who believe, legitimately, that life begins at conception, and therefore, it is unethical to experiment on something clearly human. This has absolutely nothing to do with religion, although many people use religion as their guiding principle. But it really comes down to human life. If we value human life, then human life has to be defined, and what that definition should be is arguable.
Sheesh, I'm no fan of Bush, but at least TRY and get your facts straight. He took a lot of heat from his base for allowing ANY funding on the existing stem cell lines. The religious right (which who I assume you're referring to be the 'base') wanted an outright ban.
You may argue with Bush's decisions, but the one thing he doesn't do is stick his finger in the wind and do whatever the public tells him to do (a la Clinton).
I'm so tired of hearing this. It's not about "fearing science", it's about ethics. Whatever your stand on the issue is, it is undeniable that experimentation on human embryos has significant ethical considerations.
Not to start a flamewar, but....
In the early days of Apple versus Microsoft we had a real culture war, command line versus GUI. Windows won. Which is bad because Mac is, IMHO, better.
The Mac may or may not be better; that's certaintly debatable. What's not debatable is that it's much, much, MUCH better that Microsoft won. If Apple had won, how long would we have been saddled with proprietary hardware with proprietary software? A LONG-ASS time, and Macs would have been far more expensive. The only reason that a Mac is "only" 50%-2x the price of a PC is because PCs are so cheap. Without PCs, we would be totally at Apple's mercy, and they don't exactly have a good track record of not gouging their customers.
Microsoft may have its flaws, and they may charge too much for their software (although, I could argue that you get a lot of technology for a measly $129 retail), but at least they never tried to come out with a "Microsoft PC" with proprietary hardware.
What's amazing is that Apple is still too stupid to realize that the money is in the software, not the hardware. It's really mindblowing when you think about it. If Apple had won, then they WOULD have been a petal-to-the-metal monopoly that would have had to be broken up.
It's a classic case of "I may despise what you say, but I'll fight to the death to protect your right to say it"
No. This is not about censorship. No one is saying Stern doesn't have a right to say what he wants to say. There is no right to a platform for someone's speech.
It's exactly as if some vagrant was shouting obscenities on a street corner. A policeman has the right to get rid of the vagrant, because he's a public nuisance.
Stern is a public nuisance on the airwaves.
Don't tell them why they suck for liking IE, tell them why it's not a waste of their valuable time downloading Firefox.
I should say that I use IE all the time and see no real benefit to wasting my time downloading Firefox, and I'm sympathetic to their cause. :)
Um, no offense, but no, you're wrong. Do a Google for "Graduate College" and you will find numerous counter examples ("Graduate College of Business" is a common one).
Without more information about why any given site is shut down, we know nothing.
The question is why any government would care, since (effectively) no one reads it anyway. The theory is that someone was going to publish some names/addresses of people.
A true comparison would be for someone to build a catapult to vault someone through the air and then say, "We have flight! Making it powered and controllable is just around the corner!"
SpaceShipOne is not a scalable technology, it's good for suborbital and nothing else.
Come on, staffer. Fess up that you did it.
Who the hell marked me down so fast? I am highly suspicious that a Slashdot staffer did it. If so, you suck. This was a legitimate opinion, and you marked me down because you didn't like it.
Nope. Ain't gonna happen. The planetary environmentalists will shut it down. Mark my words.
Unfortunately, Rutan's technology is not applicable to orbital space travel, as near as I can tell, so I'm not sure that this does anything for space tourism, except as a something for the press to report (which may be worth something, but I tend to doubt that it means much).
The question is how many people are going to be fooled that this is really space travel.
I didn't question your value as a citzen, only your taste. :)
Of course Stern has some small percentage of listeners that are professionals. But that's not the issue, is it? Do you really think that the majority of his listeners are?
If you enjoy him, great, more power to you. We all need a bit of entertainment. But don't try and tell me that his humor is anywhere on the same planet as sophistication.
No, I think he just has taste.
And the millions who make Stern #1 in almost every market across the US, they must be stupid blue collar shitheads, right?
Do you seriously think that the vast majority of Stern listeners are part of the higher end of the scale in intelligence?
Maybe there is some craving among the professionals of the world for his brand of low-brow humor, but I doubt it.
I mean, really, Stern is pretty damn stupid for anyone who isn't sexually repressed.