Should I have the right to drive to the central PD HQ, take the elevator to the third floor where they plan/coordinate investigations of narcotics trafficking, and open up a camping chair in the middle of the floor and sit there all day listening to the logistics of their current operations? Why or why not?
Yeah -- but know what you're buying. If you're buying "a non-exclusive non-transferable license" then don't be surprised if they go after you for transferring it. And if you long for them to sell you the game as a thing for you to do whatever you want with, you're far from alone. But your wishing doesn't make it so, and when you show up at a Mexican restaurant wanting fried rice, it doesn't give you permission to trash their kitchen just because they don't serve what you want. Go somewhere else. Make it count. Don't just be either a) a raging pirate or b) a big-words guy who rants, raves, and then buys the game anyway. If you have any principles worth living for, you won't steal; you'll just stiff them by not buying their product, and by buying things that are offered at acceptable terms to you.
Agreed. The real short-sighted folks aren't the software companies driving their users crazy. Far worse are all the slashdot types saying "I'll just pirate this game instead", because their short-term benefit - getting to play the game - is completely negated by the long-term debit - creating and supporting the popularity and spread of games that have undesirable licensing agreements.
The reason we live in a Microsoft/Office/Exchange world today, is because years ago we bought one Win/95 or Office97 CD and piratically/illegally installed it on our home computer, and the church secretary's computer, and Aunt Susan's computer. The software industry looks at piracy as a marketing loss-leader until they have a sufficient slice of the market locked-in so that they can then suddenly go before Congress and be shocked -- shocked! -- to find out that people are pirating their products. Then they spring the trap of DRM and purchased legislation. Step 4) Profit!!!!
What this means is they are opposed to government-mandated or enforced affirmative action, but believe companies should be able hire and fire according to whatever standards they believe best. So if a muslim-owned business doesn't wish to hire alcoholic homosexuals, or a black-owned business wants to only provide employment for blacks, or a family-owned business wants to only hire their own children and grandchildren, that is perfectly acceptable. The same principle applies to other situations, such as university enrollment practices.
Ah, so the argument is that "blacks only" toilets and restaurants should be fine. Back to the bus with you (so long as the bus is not government owned).
The argument is that if the government forcibly obstructs your right to be secure in your person and property, and to associate your person with and transact business on your property with whosoever you choose, then you have very few rights at all, for you have already accepted that the government can compel you to associate with another person against your will, and to make your property serve another person. Once you've accepted such a government, then you've subjected everything that you are and everything that you have to the will of the majority. Be careful -- the ballot box giveth, and the ballot box taketh away.
One wants cradle-to-grave socialism where the government runs and administers every facet of your life. And the other wants to let their buddies running large corporations lobby for no-bid contracts to decide who gets to run and administer every facet of your life.
I never can tell with such people whether they deliberately lie, or simply don't listen. OWS wants even opportunity. Bush Jr. is explicitly against affirmative action. Nobody should ever get anything based on who their daddy was. Well, unless it's Bush Jr. getting into Yale with a poor record, in which case "legacy" (affirmative action for lazy white people) is perfectly acceptable. OWS recognizes the hypocrisy and such that the 1% uses to their advantage against the 99%. Nobody in the 99% should be eligible for "legacy" but everyone in the 1% should. As if the 1% needed even more handouts, or the 99% needed more hurdles. Yes, I'm explicitly stating that a qualified poor black person was rejected from Yale to let in a rich white person based on who his daddy was. When that's turned around, there's outrage, but when it's the poor black man being kept down, the 1% is fine with that.
I'm not sure where you're getting your notions of the extant positions relative to affirmative action, but from my perspective your attempted analogy between hiring practices and Yale's admissions practices is a failed analogy, because you seem to have overlooked a viewpoint with a large number of adherents. All the conservatives I know are firmly supportive of at-will labor markets, which means both employee and employer retain their right to freely enter into whatever contracts they find mutually agreeable, and such contracts can be terminated at-will by either party for any reason not previously constrained by the terms of the contract. What this means is they are opposed to government-mandated or enforced affirmative action, but believe companies should be able hire and fire according to whatever standards they believe best. So if a muslim-owned business doesn't wish to hire alcoholic homosexuals, or a black-owned business wants to only provide employment for blacks, or a family-owned business wants to only hire their own children and grandchildren, that is perfectly acceptable. The same principle applies to other situations, such as university enrollment practices.
Your summary of the opposition to affirmative action as "Nobody should ever get anything based on who their daddy was", is grossly inaccurate, and therefore your attempt to paint anti-affirmative-action adherents as hypocrites has failed.
Co-inclusive with the right to put whatever drugs you choose into your body, and the right to end your own life when you choose, the right to have physical relations with whatever other consenting partners you choose, etc. would be the right to participate in human experimentation if you choose. By prohibiting widespread voluntary human experimentation, governments are depriving you of the right to sell your labor on the open market in exchange for wages.
My continual use of keyboards for the past 34 years of my life.
Probably the same thing any other doctor would say about people whose blood type gives them an inherently stronger immunity to smallpox infection. Not everyone gets every disease/syndrome even when exposed to the same pathogens/conditions.
I have been typing at a high KPM (sometimes for several hours a day) for 25 years going back to CLI days and using a mouse daily since the spread of the PC GUI. I also have a modest but ongoing interest in playing the piano. I have never had any RSI problems.
Then two years ago I got a touchscreen smartphone and absolutely can trace a very clear rise in vision focal distance issues and recurrent wrist/elbow strain in that time period. Nothing else in my life hobbies, living patterns, or activity levels has changed in the last two years. The vision issues I could perhaps either partially or wholly pass off as the inevitable age-related presbyopia, but the wrist/elbow strain is indepedent of the aging process, entirely unprecedented in my personal medical history, and does in fact decrease markedly if I go for several days not using the phone, even while continuing other potentially implicated activities such as weight training, sports leagues, bike riding, PC keyboarding, driving, and so forth.
It was interesting to read a comment above. I have experienced the same thing -- which is that sleeping with whichever hand is most affected inserted between pillow and mattress provides significant relief, kind of like the opposite of gout sufferers' extreme sensitivity to the slight pressure of their own bedsheets.
thought I'd heard Crawford had finally been arrested or gone off his meds and been permabanned or something?
I don't know, I think 2005 was when I was there last, but Craford posted here at/. last week, so he must not be in jail. CTS comes here and posts, as well. CTS is far less insane than he was back at K5.
That's almost sad to hear. I've been bouncing around the Internet long enough to have had a presence on BBS FIDO relays and usenet, and in all my days CTS was one of the most effective trolls I've ever seen. I generally remain very cool online, but he managed to get under my skin several times, perhaps because he was so very effective at skating on the absolute last micron of the razor edge between hyper-abusive troll and hyper-substantive debater. I don't even remember the exact issues or who was pro and who was con, but I remember particularly after 9/11 and into the Iraq invasion getting in multiple hellacious arguments with him about some political issues that seemed like vry srs bznss at the time.
I was a K5 mainliner addict all through the early years. Haven't been back in about 5 years, but I thought I'd heard Crawford had finally been arrested or gone off his meds and been permabanned or something? Is he still the spectre haunting the diary ghetto? And did Husi go anywhere interesting or just die out?
For quite a while K5 was everything that was great about the Web, then it became everything that was awful/inane about the Web. I think Ruston's social experiment succeeded wildly -- he proved that even very intelligent human beings when given control of their environment will just run it into the damn ground.
And yes, I count the K5ARP as one of the greatest online personae I've ever seen on any forum anywhere. I still occasionally find myself remembering lines like "You are fliend of China, prease to move here" and chuckling all over again.
In other words, isn't the act itself of placing the tracking device a kind of search, which would require a warrant?
It requires inspection of the car, yes. But searching the outside of your car isn't unreasonable search, so it's not relevant..
So then planting a tracking device on your person only requires "inspection" of your clothing. Is planting a tracking device on your person not unreasonable search? If not, then what legal barrier is there to prevent the government from simply planting tracking devices on all people?
The current precedents are all about radio beacon tracking which the Supreme Court said was legal years ago. The decision is an extension of the idea that there is no expectation of privacy of where you drive a vehicle on public roads. Everyone can see you drive by.
Therefore - it is legal for the police to follow your car without a warrant
Therefore - it is legal to use a radio beacon to follow your car without a warrant, just makes it easier
Therefore - it is legal to use a GPS tracking beacon to follow your car too.
It is easy to see the logic of how we got to this point. But prior to the GPS tracker, it took a team of dedicated police officers to track an individual. Even with radio beacons, it was labor intensive. They didn't do it unless they thought it was going to be productive
With GPS trackers it can all be run by computer. Put the tracker on the vehicle and recovering it are the most field labor intensive part of it. A team of people can track multiple people. Police are doing it more, even if they don't expect anything to become of it, just because they can.
It is the automation of the process, therefore the expanding scope of it, that is the most worrisome.
I don't think that logic is necessarily easy to see. Sure, when I'm in public anyone could theoretically follow me anywhere. But do the police have a right to enter and search the physical contents of my car or person just because I'm in public? In other words, isn't the act itself of placing the tracking device a kind of search, which would require a warrant?
To ride your slope down to the next logical step, why shouldn't the police/FBI be able to surreptitiously place a tracking device in your clothes, in your wallet, etc.?
They have been fracking in Michigan for over 20 years and the only problems have been near home with poorly constructed wells. As for the contamination from drilling fluid, people need to realize that the same drilling fluid is used to drill your homes well. The material consists of pulverized dry clay, if it's a carcinogen then you shouldn't let your kids play in the sand box or with modeling clay. And yes I used to drill for a living at a geotechnical engineering company.
So the complicated proprietary mix of chemicals that drilling companies have spent millions of dollars on legal/lobbying efforts to keep secret, is actually just "pulverized dry clay"? And you just blurted out this proprietary secret on an Internet discussion forum?
I think this is where the Reader pauses to apply the believability test.
And I'd say your problem is that you're probably one of the hired "sponsors" that Soulskill was bragging about bringing to the site. Take your astroturf and fuck off.
You do understand how Slashdot UIDs are generated, right?
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that someone who registered his account in the last millennium is probably not part of a diabolical marketing campaign. Unless you're telling us you believe Microsoft was planning their weblog astroturf strategy for the Windows 8 release a decade ahead of time?
It's Microsoft we're talking about, not the Bene Gesserit.
No, more like a phrasal failure by the author. This dinosaur, if it existed as claimed, did not "roam North America".
It roamed northern Pangaea, including the two continental plates which would separate to become what we now know as North America and Asia.
Speaking of reading comprehension failure, you might want to follow your own link and read more than just the first paragraph. Pangaea (which was the supercontinent in existence during the relevant Cretaceous) consisted of the NORTHEAST edge of the North American plate mashed up against the SOUTHWEST edge of the Eurasian plate. West Asia wouldn't have been significantly farther from North America.
In any case, it is not a failure of comprehension for someone to have a problem with the phrase "roamed North America". There is a built-in vagueness of meaning there; a good science writer would anticipate this and provide alternate phrasing or appositive clarifiers.
Massive FAIL for a news site to post a video, then in the summary below the video use quotation marks to enclose words that the person in the video didn't say. Journalistic laziness and improper attribution are particularly ironic in an article about academic misconduct. But apparently the author, Alastair Good, just couldn't be arsed to record the professor's actual words. Which would be fine if the article were written in a paraphrase style, but it clearly has an entire paragraph written as a direct quote.
I'd prefer to give the author an F, but I made a deal with the Newsroom Editor -- if he comes clean about his lazy worthless cheating journalism skills, I'll give him 24 hours to re-write the article from scratch without it going on his permanent record.
Holy cow. Are you saying that a Texan can legally murder a trespassing graffiti artist?
"Graffiti artist" -- is that a fancy yankee term for "criminal who damages private property causing diminution of value"?
Damaging private property is a form of theft, because the value of your assets has been taken from you. People who practice such crimes are not artists, they are thieves.
Brown's assets will be seized and he has been sentenced to 8 months suspended, and 150 hours community service.
He supplied free energy to 1,500 members of the community. How much more service do you want?
Maybe they should give him credit for "time served" - I bet it took 150 hours to hook up all those power lines.
Quite the contrary -- it is your two comments on this same topic which are of questionable rationality. Unless maybe someone else is paying your bills? For most people, and particularly in the last 10 years, the list of "employers you'd want to work for" consists chiefly of those who are willing to, you know, employ you and send you a regular paycheck for the foreseeable future.
I have no idea why you are apparently working from the assumption that the job-hunting process involves sitting on the living room floor sorting the numerous large stacks of job offers into piles of "Employers I'd Want To Work For" and "Employers I Wouldn't Want To Work For".
That may be fine on the Neal Stephenson Snow Crash Libertarian Workers' Paradise of Slashdot, but real people have real families with real medical bills and real hunger, and when faced with a choice between selling their skills today for real money, food, and medication, versus the inedible and scant comfort of a moral victory at not choosing to work for "some kind of f-ing retard employer" while sitting at home scared to answer the phone because of the collection agencies... well, I don't know why you're so intent on excoriating the working folks who are trying to make ends meet in a tough economy that could sink even farther over the next ten years.
Luckily the detected difference is somewhere around.0001% so I don't think we'll be rewriting history even if their observation is confirmed.
You don't personally know any anti-science religious folks, do you? The post you're responding to hits the bullseye. The scientific review and conclusions drawn from the data will proceed over the next several months/years. But the meme that "they did a study and found that radioactive decay was affected by many different factors, therefore carbon dating can be tossed out and therefore the book of Genesis as written in my English translation must be accepted verbatim" will circulate via blog and email and word of mouth for a couple decades.
"An action that could easily have killed someone". Are you kidding me?
Should someone spend 10% of their life in prison for doing a "rolling stop" at a red light? Should a tractor-trailer driver who goes 9mph over the speed limit spend 22,000 consecutive days in a jail cell? Should someone who sets off a string of Black Cats on a dry 4th of July Day get 7 years of daily life with murderers and rapists and, even worse, crooked hedge fund managers?
But the reality is, you can't get those speeds in practice. By "you" I mean the set of all individuals paying for the service. Is it possible, given the current structure of their network, for all persons on the network to get that maximum speed? The issue isn't the speed of the technology (the routers and switches and modems) but rather the amount/speed of your transmissions across their network, which is what you're paying for. Just because the technology is capable of going that fast doesn't mean the specific service you're buying actually can go that fast. Because if it could go that fast for everyone using the system, it would. And if it doesn't go that fast for everyone, then there must be some reason why it doesn't. And that reason is why even though the theoretical limit is higher, you in fact can't get those speeds.
Exactly! Thank you for getting my point. When someone says "up to", what they are saying is "you won't get any better than this." It's not a promise of a minimum, it's the promise of a maximum. "You will not exceed this." That's all it really means.
And that's okay with you?
That doesn't make it any less deceptive. It just makes it deceptive AND semantically meaningless.
By your logic, it would be perfectly acceptable for them to sell you a contract promising "Up to 1.21Terabytes/second", and then deliver no more than 1Mbps in practice. According to you, all it really means is "You will not exceed 1.21Tbps".
That is absurd logic which requires a Cirque de Soleil contortionism of the English language.
If you'd said "100 years ago most deaths were not surprises" I'd have agreed; most people back then died of things like tuberculosis, influenza, etc.
The opposite case is made in a moving and educational article by Dr. Atul Gawande in the August 2, 2010, New Yorker, titled "Letting Go".
Some relevant excerpts:
For all but our most recent history, dying was typically a brief process. Whether the cause was childhood infection, difficult childbirth, heart attack, or pneumonia, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and death was often just a matter of days or weeks. Consider how our Presidents died before the modern era. George Washington developed a throat infection at home on December 13, 1799, that killed him by the next evening. John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson all succumbed to strokes, and died within two days. Rutherford Hayes had a heart attack and died three days later. Some deadly illnesses took a longer course: James Monroe and Andrew Jackson died from the months-long consumptive process of what appears to have been tuberculosis; Ulysses Grant's oral cancer took a year to kill him; and James Madison was bedridden for two years before dying of "old age." But, as the end-of-life researcher Joanne Lynn has observed, people usually experienced life-threatening illness the way they experienced bad weather--as something that struck with little warning--and you either got through it or you didn't.
These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition--advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn't. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty--with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence. Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are? Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly?
Slashdot Mirror
Should I have the right to drive to the central PD HQ, take the elevator to the third floor where they plan/coordinate investigations of narcotics trafficking, and open up a camping chair in the middle of the floor and sit there all day listening to the logistics of their current operations? Why or why not?
Yeah -- but know what you're buying. If you're buying "a non-exclusive non-transferable license" then don't be surprised if they go after you for transferring it. And if you long for them to sell you the game as a thing for you to do whatever you want with, you're far from alone. But your wishing doesn't make it so, and when you show up at a Mexican restaurant wanting fried rice, it doesn't give you permission to trash their kitchen just because they don't serve what you want. Go somewhere else. Make it count. Don't just be either a) a raging pirate or b) a big-words guy who rants, raves, and then buys the game anyway. If you have any principles worth living for, you won't steal; you'll just stiff them by not buying their product, and by buying things that are offered at acceptable terms to you.
Agreed. The real short-sighted folks aren't the software companies driving their users crazy. Far worse are all the slashdot types saying "I'll just pirate this game instead", because their short-term benefit - getting to play the game - is completely negated by the long-term debit - creating and supporting the popularity and spread of games that have undesirable licensing agreements.
The reason we live in a Microsoft/Office/Exchange world today, is because years ago we bought one Win/95 or Office97 CD and piratically/illegally installed it on our home computer, and the church secretary's computer, and Aunt Susan's computer. The software industry looks at piracy as a marketing loss-leader until they have a sufficient slice of the market locked-in so that they can then suddenly go before Congress and be shocked -- shocked! -- to find out that people are pirating their products. Then they spring the trap of DRM and purchased legislation. Step 4) Profit!!!!
What this means is they are opposed to government-mandated or enforced affirmative action, but believe companies should be able hire and fire according to whatever standards they believe best. So if a muslim-owned business doesn't wish to hire alcoholic homosexuals, or a black-owned business wants to only provide employment for blacks, or a family-owned business wants to only hire their own children and grandchildren, that is perfectly acceptable. The same principle applies to other situations, such as university enrollment practices.
Ah, so the argument is that "blacks only" toilets and restaurants should be fine. Back to the bus with you (so long as the bus is not government owned).
The argument is that if the government forcibly obstructs your right to be secure in your person and property, and to associate your person with and transact business on your property with whosoever you choose, then you have very few rights at all, for you have already accepted that the government can compel you to associate with another person against your will, and to make your property serve another person. Once you've accepted such a government, then you've subjected everything that you are and everything that you have to the will of the majority. Be careful -- the ballot box giveth, and the ballot box taketh away.
One wants cradle-to-grave socialism where the government runs and administers every facet of your life. And the other wants to let their buddies running large corporations lobby for no-bid contracts to decide who gets to run and administer every facet of your life.
I never can tell with such people whether they deliberately lie, or simply don't listen. OWS wants even opportunity. Bush Jr. is explicitly against affirmative action. Nobody should ever get anything based on who their daddy was. Well, unless it's Bush Jr. getting into Yale with a poor record, in which case "legacy" (affirmative action for lazy white people) is perfectly acceptable. OWS recognizes the hypocrisy and such that the 1% uses to their advantage against the 99%. Nobody in the 99% should be eligible for "legacy" but everyone in the 1% should. As if the 1% needed even more handouts, or the 99% needed more hurdles. Yes, I'm explicitly stating that a qualified poor black person was rejected from Yale to let in a rich white person based on who his daddy was. When that's turned around, there's outrage, but when it's the poor black man being kept down, the 1% is fine with that.
I'm not sure where you're getting your notions of the extant positions relative to affirmative action, but from my perspective your attempted analogy between hiring practices and Yale's admissions practices is a failed analogy, because you seem to have overlooked a viewpoint with a large number of adherents. All the conservatives I know are firmly supportive of at-will labor markets, which means both employee and employer retain their right to freely enter into whatever contracts they find mutually agreeable, and such contracts can be terminated at-will by either party for any reason not previously constrained by the terms of the contract. What this means is they are opposed to government-mandated or enforced affirmative action, but believe companies should be able hire and fire according to whatever standards they believe best. So if a muslim-owned business doesn't wish to hire alcoholic homosexuals, or a black-owned business wants to only provide employment for blacks, or a family-owned business wants to only hire their own children and grandchildren, that is perfectly acceptable. The same principle applies to other situations, such as university enrollment practices.
Your summary of the opposition to affirmative action as "Nobody should ever get anything based on who their daddy was", is grossly inaccurate, and therefore your attempt to paint anti-affirmative-action adherents as hypocrites has failed.
Co-inclusive with the right to put whatever drugs you choose into your body, and the right to end your own life when you choose, the right to have physical relations with whatever other consenting partners you choose, etc. would be the right to participate in human experimentation if you choose. By prohibiting widespread voluntary human experimentation, governments are depriving you of the right to sell your labor on the open market in exchange for wages.
My continual use of keyboards for the past 34 years of my life.
Probably the same thing any other doctor would say about people whose blood type gives them an inherently stronger immunity to smallpox infection. Not everyone gets every disease/syndrome even when exposed to the same pathogens/conditions.
I have been typing at a high KPM (sometimes for several hours a day) for 25 years going back to CLI days and using a mouse daily since the spread of the PC GUI. I also have a modest but ongoing interest in playing the piano. I have never had any RSI problems.
Then two years ago I got a touchscreen smartphone and absolutely can trace a very clear rise in vision focal distance issues and recurrent wrist/elbow strain in that time period. Nothing else in my life hobbies, living patterns, or activity levels has changed in the last two years. The vision issues I could perhaps either partially or wholly pass off as the inevitable age-related presbyopia, but the wrist/elbow strain is indepedent of the aging process, entirely unprecedented in my personal medical history, and does in fact decrease markedly if I go for several days not using the phone, even while continuing other potentially implicated activities such as weight training, sports leagues, bike riding, PC keyboarding, driving, and so forth. It was interesting to read a comment above. I have experienced the same thing -- which is that sleeping with whichever hand is most affected inserted between pillow and mattress provides significant relief, kind of like the opposite of gout sufferers' extreme sensitivity to the slight pressure of their own bedsheets.
thought I'd heard Crawford had finally been arrested or gone off his meds and been permabanned or something?
I don't know, I think 2005 was when I was there last, but Craford posted here at /. last week, so he must not be in jail. CTS comes here and posts, as well. CTS is far less insane than he was back at K5.
That's almost sad to hear. I've been bouncing around the Internet long enough to have had a presence on BBS FIDO relays and usenet, and in all my days CTS was one of the most effective trolls I've ever seen. I generally remain very cool online, but he managed to get under my skin several times, perhaps because he was so very effective at skating on the absolute last micron of the razor edge between hyper-abusive troll and hyper-substantive debater. I don't even remember the exact issues or who was pro and who was con, but I remember particularly after 9/11 and into the Iraq invasion getting in multiple hellacious arguments with him about some political issues that seemed like vry srs bznss at the time.
I was a K5 mainliner addict all through the early years. Haven't been back in about 5 years, but I thought I'd heard Crawford had finally been arrested or gone off his meds and been permabanned or something? Is he still the spectre haunting the diary ghetto? And did Husi go anywhere interesting or just die out?
For quite a while K5 was everything that was great about the Web, then it became everything that was awful/inane about the Web. I think Ruston's social experiment succeeded wildly -- he proved that even very intelligent human beings when given control of their environment will just run it into the damn ground.
And yes, I count the K5ARP as one of the greatest online personae I've ever seen on any forum anywhere. I still occasionally find myself remembering lines like "You are fliend of China, prease to move here" and chuckling all over again.
It requires inspection of the car, yes. But searching the outside of your car isn't unreasonable search, so it's not relevant..
So then planting a tracking device on your person only requires "inspection" of your clothing. Is planting a tracking device on your person not unreasonable search? If not, then what legal barrier is there to prevent the government from simply planting tracking devices on all people?
The current precedents are all about radio beacon tracking which the Supreme Court said was legal years ago. The decision is an extension of the idea that there is no expectation of privacy of where you drive a vehicle on public roads. Everyone can see you drive by.
Therefore - it is legal for the police to follow your car without a warrant
Therefore - it is legal to use a radio beacon to follow your car without a warrant, just makes it easier
Therefore - it is legal to use a GPS tracking beacon to follow your car too.
It is easy to see the logic of how we got to this point. But prior to the GPS tracker, it took a team of dedicated police officers to track an individual. Even with radio beacons, it was labor intensive. They didn't do it unless they thought it was going to be productive
With GPS trackers it can all be run by computer. Put the tracker on the vehicle and recovering it are the most field labor intensive part of it. A team of people can track multiple people. Police are doing it more, even if they don't expect anything to become of it, just because they can.
It is the automation of the process, therefore the expanding scope of it, that is the most worrisome.
I don't think that logic is necessarily easy to see. Sure, when I'm in public anyone could theoretically follow me anywhere. But do the police have a right to enter and search the physical contents of my car or person just because I'm in public? In other words, isn't the act itself of placing the tracking device a kind of search, which would require a warrant?
To ride your slope down to the next logical step, why shouldn't the police/FBI be able to surreptitiously place a tracking device in your clothes, in your wallet, etc.?
They have been fracking in Michigan for over 20 years and the only problems have been near home with poorly constructed wells. As for the contamination from drilling fluid, people need to realize that the same drilling fluid is used to drill your homes well. The material consists of pulverized dry clay, if it's a carcinogen then you shouldn't let your kids play in the sand box or with modeling clay. And yes I used to drill for a living at a geotechnical engineering company.
So the complicated proprietary mix of chemicals that drilling companies have spent millions of dollars on legal/lobbying efforts to keep secret, is actually just "pulverized dry clay"? And you just blurted out this proprietary secret on an Internet discussion forum?
I think this is where the Reader pauses to apply the believability test.
And I'd say your problem is that you're probably one of the hired "sponsors" that Soulskill was bragging about bringing to the site. Take your astroturf and fuck off.
You do understand how Slashdot UIDs are generated, right?
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that someone who registered his account in the last millennium is probably not part of a diabolical marketing campaign. Unless you're telling us you believe Microsoft was planning their weblog astroturf strategy for the Windows 8 release a decade ahead of time?
It's Microsoft we're talking about, not the Bene Gesserit.
The gigantic creature roamed North America and east Asia
Reading comprehension failure? Also, try this.
No, more like a phrasal failure by the author. This dinosaur, if it existed as claimed, did not "roam North America".
It roamed northern Pangaea, including the two continental plates which would separate to become what we now know as North America and Asia.
Speaking of reading comprehension failure, you might want to follow your own link and read more than just the first paragraph. Pangaea (which was the supercontinent in existence during the relevant Cretaceous) consisted of the NORTHEAST edge of the North American plate mashed up against the SOUTHWEST edge of the Eurasian plate. West Asia wouldn't have been significantly farther from North America.
In any case, it is not a failure of comprehension for someone to have a problem with the phrase "roamed North America". There is a built-in vagueness of meaning there; a good science writer would anticipate this and provide alternate phrasing or appositive clarifiers.
Massive FAIL for a news site to post a video, then in the summary below the video use quotation marks to enclose words that the person in the video didn't say. Journalistic laziness and improper attribution are particularly ironic in an article about academic misconduct. But apparently the author, Alastair Good, just couldn't be arsed to record the professor's actual words. Which would be fine if the article were written in a paraphrase style, but it clearly has an entire paragraph written as a direct quote.
I'd prefer to give the author an F, but I made a deal with the Newsroom Editor -- if he comes clean about his lazy worthless cheating journalism skills, I'll give him 24 hours to re-write the article from scratch without it going on his permanent record.
Holy cow. Are you saying that a Texan can legally murder a trespassing graffiti artist?
"Graffiti artist" -- is that a fancy yankee term for "criminal who damages private property causing diminution of value"?
Damaging private property is a form of theft, because the value of your assets has been taken from you. People who practice such crimes are not artists, they are thieves.
He supplied free energy to 1,500 members of the community. How much more service do you want? Maybe they should give him credit for "time served" - I bet it took 150 hours to hook up all those power lines.
Fair enough. [handshake]
Quite the contrary -- it is your two comments on this same topic which are of questionable rationality. Unless maybe someone else is paying your bills? For most people, and particularly in the last 10 years, the list of "employers you'd want to work for" consists chiefly of those who are willing to, you know, employ you and send you a regular paycheck for the foreseeable future.
I have no idea why you are apparently working from the assumption that the job-hunting process involves sitting on the living room floor sorting the numerous large stacks of job offers into piles of "Employers I'd Want To Work For" and "Employers I Wouldn't Want To Work For".
That may be fine on the Neal Stephenson Snow Crash Libertarian Workers' Paradise of Slashdot, but real people have real families with real medical bills and real hunger, and when faced with a choice between selling their skills today for real money, food, and medication, versus the inedible and scant comfort of a moral victory at not choosing to work for "some kind of f-ing retard employer" while sitting at home scared to answer the phone because of the collection agencies... well, I don't know why you're so intent on excoriating the working folks who are trying to make ends meet in a tough economy that could sink even farther over the next ten years.
Luckily the detected difference is somewhere around .0001% so I don't think we'll be rewriting history even if their observation is confirmed.
You don't personally know any anti-science religious folks, do you? The post you're responding to hits the bullseye. The scientific review and conclusions drawn from the data will proceed over the next several months/years. But the meme that "they did a study and found that radioactive decay was affected by many different factors, therefore carbon dating can be tossed out and therefore the book of Genesis as written in my English translation must be accepted verbatim" will circulate via blog and email and word of mouth for a couple decades.
"An action that could easily have killed someone".
Are you kidding me?
Should someone spend 10% of their life in prison for doing a "rolling stop" at a red light?
Should a tractor-trailer driver who goes 9mph over the speed limit spend 22,000 consecutive days in a jail cell?
Should someone who sets off a string of Black Cats on a dry 4th of July Day get 7 years of daily life with murderers and rapists and, even worse, crooked hedge fund managers?
But the reality is, you can't get those speeds in practice. By "you" I mean the set of all individuals paying for the service. Is it possible, given the current structure of their network, for all persons on the network to get that maximum speed? The issue isn't the speed of the technology (the routers and switches and modems) but rather the amount/speed of your transmissions across their network, which is what you're paying for. Just because the technology is capable of going that fast doesn't mean the specific service you're buying actually can go that fast. Because if it could go that fast for everyone using the system, it would. And if it doesn't go that fast for everyone, then there must be some reason why it doesn't. And that reason is why even though the theoretical limit is higher, you in fact can't get those speeds.
Or even a Cirque du Soleil contortion... ugh. ;-D
I fail at the Canandianese language.
Exactly! Thank you for getting my point. When someone says "up to", what they are saying is "you won't get any better than this." It's not a promise of a minimum, it's the promise of a maximum. "You will not exceed this." That's all it really means.
And that's okay with you?
That doesn't make it any less deceptive. It just makes it deceptive AND semantically meaningless.
By your logic, it would be perfectly acceptable for them to sell you a contract promising "Up to 1.21Terabytes/second", and then deliver no more than 1Mbps in practice. According to you, all it really means is "You will not exceed 1.21Tbps".
That is absurd logic which requires a Cirque de Soleil contortionism of the English language.
If you'd said "100 years ago most deaths were not surprises" I'd have agreed; most people back then died of things like tuberculosis, influenza, etc.
The opposite case is made in a moving and educational article by Dr. Atul Gawande in the August 2, 2010, New Yorker, titled "Letting Go".
Some relevant excerpts: