The biggest difference interestingly is on the female side: 6.1 for android to 12.3 for iPhone. Males report 6.0 for Android to 10.0 for iPhone. And the number of people reporting having had same-sex partners is around 5% only.
But aren't the main results talking about an average number of sex partners? If that small 5% are averaging 6-15 different sex partners per year, it only takes a few years with an iPhone 3G for that small group to greatly skew the average total number of partners.
I don't get the moderation of this as "funny". I think it's a fair point. I would be willing to bet that, technologically, homosexual men are much more likely to be Early Adopters than heterosexual men of the same age/race/region. The iPhone and its apps are the portable equivalent of a 1998 AOL account. I would not at all be surprised that if you were able to remove all homosexual men from the survey, the difference in results would disappear.
There's also the other side of the situation to consider: a large part of the Blackberry market has been driven by corporate usage, rather than the free-living artists, musicians, graphic designers, videographers, members of academia, and the wealthy, who have been Apple's prime customers and are more likely to choose an iPhone..
We are now self-creating global databases with billions of entries and in return are getting... the ability to "poke" someone from your 10th grade Health class
We're getting a hell of a lot more back than that. We're getting the best web search and email services available, free of charge. We're getting a service that allows us to stay in touch with an extended group of friends and acquaintances easily, free of charge.
And what are we giving away in return? A bunch of inane data about our lives, which allows advertisers to perfectly fine tune and target the adverts which never make it past our ad-blockers anyway.
I can't pretend that I'm not the least bit concerned about the amount of data these companies are racking up. To a certain extent, I'm just playing devil's advocate to your comment. But these things are always a trade-off. Most of my friends are on Facebook. I'm not going to miss out on communicating with them just in case the next advert I see is for a band I despise a little less than usual
I hear you. One day about a year and a half ago I came to the sudden realization that I didn't seem to be reading and replying to personal email at the same level as from 1997-2007. After a couple days spent looking over my mail accounts chronologically, and thinking about the situation, I became convinced that the trend was real, and an explanation presented itself -- nobody is on email anymore because they're all on Facebook, and that's where they do most of their daily communicating. (And at this point in 2010 I would say that I've received less personal electronic mail than I did even under FIDOnet in the early 1990s.)
Picture sharing, email, IM, games, music... the unified social network website has reached a critical mass at which you will be forced to join if you don't want to be left out.
But long-term, I think it's a little leap-before-you-look to assume that the future uses of extremely detailed and cross-linked data will never progress beyond targeted banner ads. This also applies to the idea that the value of the data is determined during a one-time transaction and then out of your hands, like you would sell old reading material to a used bookstore. Data isn't an object that can be owned, it is information. That is, it is less like a good traded for money, and more like a collection of intellectual property used and re-used simultaneously by multiple interested parties while maintaining its worth due to being permanently linked to YOU, just like a painting or a performance. Therefore it would be far more economically consistent to, instead of giving up your data once in exchange for some shiny web trinkets, you were to allow it to be re-sold and disseminated broadly with the requirement that commercial use of your data result in royalties regularly deposited in your account.
I assure you that this is how pharmaceutical companies, market research firms, and industrial product development divisions view their accumulated information -- as property to be vigorously protected and only used by other parties on a fee-license basis.
Shouldn't we, the consumers, get our piece of the pie?
The funny thing about Facebook is that it is similar to television: You've been given the impression you're the customer, but you're actually the product being sold to the real customers - advertisers.
Facebook just takes it another step, because you're voluntarily giving them extensive data about who you are as an individual, as well as involuntarily (or unknowingly for most people) letting the technology create profiles of your browsing habits. If that weren't enough, there is the further twist - at least on TV there are professional artists and actors and creative types who are producing the content you enjoy. On Facebook, the content is created by you and your friends and given away for free to the website owners.
So all they have to do is create a database infrastructure, then you and your friends come along and do almost all the Data Entry, and while you're doing it they're watching you and adding meta-data to their private database, then they can turn around and sell all the aggregate data to their customers. Profit!
At the peak of the show "Friends", Jennifer Aniston was getting paid a million dollars for pretending to be Rachel whatsherface for each 30 minute episode. The million dollars ultimately came from advertisers who bought airtime from the network.
We are now self-creating global databases with billions of entries and in return are getting... the ability to "poke" someone from your 10th grade Health class. Meanwhile, how much money is Google, Facebook, BlackPlanet, etc. making from both the ads already on their sites, and the immediate/future revenue from the data we are giving them?
Do you think your view is shared by the companies who provide the cable and the electricity to make your access possible? Is your view of owning the bandwidth really possible without a publicly-owned i.e. nationalized Internet infrastructure?
To try to analogize: Suppose you own one of those drive-through "wildlife" parks where parents pay for a bucket of feed their kids can throw out the window at llamas and ostriches. At the entrance gate, you grant access to families at a cost of $65/car. One day, you look out there and see some guy has set up a barricade on the street just outside your gate, and he is charging cars $30 to get through his barricade before they even get to your gate. But because the street is public property, it is designated as being for the free noncommercial use of everyone. So you call the police, who arrest him and charge him with fraud as you say in your post above.
Does this scenario change if the street outside your entrance gate is a Toll Road, and the controlling Tollway Authority has set up a booth which charges an exit fee to anyone wishing to patronize your park? Do your customers still have an unfettered right of access to your park, or does the Tollway Authority have the right to charge fees for use of the road they control? Suppose it cost them more to build the road to your park which is out in the countryside, or suppose your park is so popular and has to receive frequent tractor-trailer shipments of food, supplies, and animals, that constant maintenance must be done to keep the road usable for everyone who uses it, whether they are your customers or just passing by. If the Tollway Authority has the right to collect fees for usage of their infrastructure, wouldn't they also have the right to charge higher booth fees to customers exiting to your park, than they might charge to people exiting at a different location which demands less of their initial outlay or maintenance resources?
*Who owns the network infrastructure and the right to regulate the traffic on that owned infrastructure?
*What is (or what should be) the difference between public space/resources which are finite and tangible, such as City Hall, national parks, street rights-of-way, public roads, rivers, the air, etc., and resources which are practically intangible and theoretically infinite such as Network Access and Storage and Bandwidth?
*Which is the most important principle, private property ownership rights or the Public Good?
*It would appear that the USA is moving towards a belief that people have an individual right to healthcare, to access to healthcare. Do/should people in the USA have an individual right to Internet access?
*What would be the effect of formally declaring the Internet to be a public, communal resource? Would that essentially make the government everyone's single-payer ISP?
*If access/bandwidth are not public resources, what is the reason companies which own backbone infrastructure shouldn't be able to operate that infrastructure in whatever way they see fit?
C'mon guys, stay in your lane. You had almost no stories about this, and now you post this. How is health care reform a nerd topic?
Stick to Linux news. I fear the upcoming flamewars about to ensue. Or maybe that's what you really want.
Given the transient state of IT employment, I'd bet a much larger than average number of Slashdot readers are self-employed/contractors for whom employer-subsidized insurance is a rarity. This would be very interesting to those people.
This is the kind of scenario I found myself thinking about when reading the "US Unable to Win a Cyber War" post from a couple weeks back. That exercise seemed such a shallow attempt to drum up public fear so we would gladly support an expanding Snoopocracy and spend a few trillion dollars on emerging venture projects from the military contractors who already control half the government. Imagine -- the government prints eleventy trillion dollars at its ever-busy dollar factory to pay for doubling the size of every alphabet-soup information awareness agency; meanwhile, a few million God-fearing citizens are going to Wal-Mart and actually PURCHASING malware...
It's like, the biggest social engineering "hack" ever. And like all social engineering attacks (you could almost include the 9/11 attacks in this genre), the devastation comes from how a meatspace method simply, directly, and sometimes nearly effortlessly sidesteps an enormous byzantine technological/physical infrastructure to exploit a human weakness no one saw because we were all so busy admiring the size and thickness of our huge new fortress walls and battlements.
Pluto I have some frightful news dear in the New York Times They've just reported you've been overthrown (aah ahh ahh) from your solar throne for good
Pluto they say that you can't handle your own gravity well how can you overcome your body force to clear the path for your own orbit
Now all the planets will gather around and have a thing for you They'll wrap their orbits warmly around you and send you off with love Chin up pluto the stars still want you and we down here do too you know what to do, just keep on keeping on
Pluto I have some frightful news dear in the New York Times They've just reported you've been overthrown (aah ahh ahh) from your solar throne for good
Correct, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy on the internet.
You do, however, have a reasonable expectation of anonymity. The courts' logic that you should NOT have anonymity based on having no reasonable expectation of privacy is what I disagree with.
Suppose you put on a ski mask and a tshirt that says "I wish to remain anonymous" and then go skateboarding in the park. If you fall and scrape your knee and go home to get a bandage, there is no preventing someone from observing your height/weight/eyecolor, following you to your driveway, or gathering a blood sample off the curb and determining your identity from the available information regardless of your superficial attempts at concealment.
You do not post on Slashdot to communicate with CmdrTaco. You post on Slashdot to engage in PUBLIC discussion with other members of the Public. If we could view stories and add comments, but our comments could only be seen by CT, there wouldn't be a million or so users at Slashdot.
What you do have when you post anonymously is a reasonable expectation of anonymity from other members of the Public. What you do not have is a reasonable expectation of anonymity from Slashdot's servers, administrators, owners, or officials of any jurisdiction that those servers, admins, and owners are subject to.
Please be advised that in certain instances, it may be necessary for SourceForge to disclose a userâ(TM)s personally identifiable information without a userâ(TM)s permission to government officials or otherwise as required by legal obligations. SourceForge may disclose such personally identifiable information when responding to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process, or to establish or exercise legal rights or defend against claims, including fraud or infringement investigations.... To prevent unauthorized access or disclosure, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the appropriate use of information, SourceForge implements physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information SourceForge collects. SourceForge uses encryption when collecting or transferring sensitive personally identifiable information. However, SourceForge does not guarantee that unauthorized third parties will never defeat measures taken to prevent improper use of personally identifiable information.
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People wrote anonymously on walls all the time before the printing press and made anonymous tracts after it. This isn't something new. The only thing that has changed is the medium.
Other things that aren't new: being prosecuted for vandalism, littering, and disturbing the peace. Nor is it new for journalists to go to jail for refusing to divulge sources. The only thing that has changed is the medium.
Huh? Why not pinpoint the birth of the McNugget instead as that makes about as much sense.
Getting rid of usury laws usually (or usury) means that people that couldn't get credit now can as they can be charged a higher rate of interest ask they are a riskier investment. What happened before this? Maybe they went to the local loan shark or maybe they just didn't get a loan.
But to say this has anything to do with a trend in standard of living is crazy. What do you think people have been doing with all those credit cards and double mortgages/home equity loans? They have not been investing, purchasing further appreciable assets, or getting advanced degrees to increase their salary by 30%. They are using that "free cash" to relieve a little bit of the pressure of their consumption pattern so they can position themselves to take on more debt by upping from a Civic to an SUV, from a 25" RCA to a 4' plasma, from a visa credit line of $5,000 to a CitiCard with no pre-set limit. All those urban yuppies are just flipping housing back and forth to each other, but eventually we do reach "Peak Debt", and prices will crash to regain some measure of reality.
Debt is in the driver's seat of the economy. Has the dairy industry's production capacity [supply] shrunk to only 0.25% of its former self so that a gallon of milk is really worth 400% more than it was seven years ago, or is a our rising senior citizen population demanding 400% more calcium-enriched milk than ever before? With supply and demand pricing instead of inflationary debt pricing our leaders can't promise us an all-new Tundra CrewMax or Escalade in every garage, but perhaps a little more stability wouldn't be a bad price to pay for a few less shiny toys.
And my reply doesn't say that the author made that statment. Besides, you generally don't hear people say, "...therefore I am not responsible for my actions" either, but they drop the excuse in hopes that you'll dismiss their behavior when you realize how rough they've had it.
So it appears you agree with me that the author is not attempting to use the "abuse excuse" in this case, and that your comment is therefore only barely and tangentially relevant to the issue of bin Laden's motive(s).
Great! Now we're exporting our lame excuses for why we're not responsible for our own behavior....
Nowhere in the original comment does the author say "...therefore bin Laden is not guilty by reason of poor parental attachment".
It's not unreasonable to look at an important situation from every angle in order to achieve greater understanding. Know Thine Enemy is a standard rule of war. Whatever political axe you may have to grind against the idea that humans have motives which can be explored and explained is not applicable to this discussion.
...and made verbosely for a reason, though the moderators seem to apply ratings to individual comments before understanding the context of the whole thread, so the companion to my comment [which isn't as effective on its own] has already been modded down to 0 as "offtopic".
Only insofar as we are all making the attempt to reach the general standards set forth by previous usage. There's little understanding lost if the words approximate clearly defined patterns. However, you should be cautious in saying that because we usually can infer correct meaning from incorrect text, we can all then relax and speak freely, incorrectly.
one wonders if it will be worth recording if there is nothing at all to record.
Thank you, you've made my day. I can only pray that your fears come to pass, and one day television will be stripped of the extravagant sorcery which allows it to displace reality.
from the October 2004 Discover -- Amar Bose, scientist, entrepeneur, and owner of a 1.7billion-dollar company:
Q. When you started your company in 1964, was your intention to do research?
Yes. That's still the case. One hundred percent of our earnings are reinvested in the company, and a great deal of that goes to research.
Q. Did you have lean times because of that commitment?
Sure. There were a couple of times when we were within two weeks of being nonexistent. We passed narrowly over the fire.
Q. Couldn't you have survived by going public?
Yes, but that would have destroyed everything.
Q. You would rather have let the company die than go public?
Yes. There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of the formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public. Every one of those CEOs said: "
If only we had known the consequences, we never would have gone public. We are spending two-thirds of our time on image building to keep the stock price up." [emphasis mine]
If you're trying to escape society and live off the grid, do you really care?
Yes. The context of this discussion isn't "escaping society", but rather finding ways to escape an ever more deeply entangled society's instinct to move towards greater control of its individual components. The entire purpose of my entering this thread was not to encourage becoming a lawbreaker. I intended to draw attention to the fact that "love it or leave it" is no longer a viable option for Americans who wish to remain American. I apologize if a lack of clarity on my part contributed to your misunderstanding of the thread.
In my experience, this is so wrong. Most of the people I know are Republican. I can't think of more than one that goes to church (any church) more than three times a year.
I attended two state GOP conventions and one national GOP convention during the mid-late 1980s. I saw the takeover in action. It is real.
I am no longer directly affiliated with the Republican party, but I still have a decent grapevine through old friends and even older family. The incidental party affiliation of "most of the people [you] know" is entirely irrelevant to the matter of who formulates the planks in the party platform in exchange for delivering a highly dependable demographic bloc on election day. What James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, and the Wildmons say today will be blended with prettified supply-side economics and become the official GOP talking points six months from now.
The older Republicans were more moderate and accepted this as an expedient trade-off; the establishment only pushed the issues just enough to guarantee electoral victory. The reason George W. Bush arouses such instinctive loathing from "the Left" and such devotion from "the Right" is that he is simply the first of what will be many more generations who believe their own hype. Their party maturation began in the middle of the bargaining process between the plutocrats and theocrats, and therefore they do not maintain an acute awareness of the situation as a calculated political convenience. They have imbued their economic policies have the righteous conviction of morality, and thus they find it natural to make national policy serve their moral ends. We have been witnessing the modern birth of a religious tradition which combines spirituality with economics.
And is their posession/use of the land legal? The point is that it is becoming increasingly impossible to go anywhere uncontrolled or do anything which is unregulated. Your original love-it-or-leave-it" hyperbolic suggestion is impossible to do legally, so we are stuck with fighting for our rights in the cities.
Incidentally, doesn't "Montana Outback Militia" sound like a new SUV from General Motors?
If you are so troubled by this, move to the mountains and hunt your own food.
Please send me the GPS dimensions of the lands in America which is neither privately owned and thus off-limits to me, nor incorporated under any governmental body such as a state or national park and thus off-limits to me as a permanent residence; then tell me which of these areas don't have regulations which restrict or outright prohibit me from fishing, shooting deer/fowl, and changing the local terrain as necessary for my domicile kthx.
If the Louisiana state government/bureaucracy wasn't so ridiculously corrupt, they could have kept their laws and paid for their own maintenance. The problem in modern times is that no states have the right combination of procedural integrity, fiscal discipline, and political clout necessary to keep the hook out of their lip.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest difference interestingly is on the female side: 6.1 for android to 12.3 for iPhone. Males report 6.0 for Android to 10.0 for iPhone. And the number of people reporting having had same-sex partners is around 5% only.
But aren't the main results talking about an average number of sex partners? If that small 5% are averaging 6-15 different sex partners per year, it only takes a few years with an iPhone 3G for that small group to greatly skew the average total number of partners.
I don't get the moderation of this as "funny". I think it's a fair point. I would be willing to bet that, technologically, homosexual men are much more likely to be Early Adopters than heterosexual men of the same age/race/region. The iPhone and its apps are the portable equivalent of a 1998 AOL account. I would not at all be surprised that if you were able to remove all homosexual men from the survey, the difference in results would disappear.
There's also the other side of the situation to consider: a large part of the Blackberry market has been driven by corporate usage, rather than the free-living artists, musicians, graphic designers, videographers, members of academia, and the wealthy, who have been Apple's prime customers and are more likely to choose an iPhone..
We are now self-creating global databases with billions of entries and in return are getting... the ability to "poke" someone from your 10th grade Health class
We're getting a hell of a lot more back than that. We're getting the best web search and email services available, free of charge. We're getting a service that allows us to stay in touch with an extended group of friends and acquaintances easily, free of charge.
And what are we giving away in return? A bunch of inane data about our lives, which allows advertisers to perfectly fine tune and target the adverts which never make it past our ad-blockers anyway.
I can't pretend that I'm not the least bit concerned about the amount of data these companies are racking up. To a certain extent, I'm just playing devil's advocate to your comment. But these things are always a trade-off. Most of my friends are on Facebook. I'm not going to miss out on communicating with them just in case the next advert I see is for a band I despise a little less than usual
I hear you. One day about a year and a half ago I came to the sudden realization that I didn't seem to be reading and replying to personal email at the same level as from 1997-2007. After a couple days spent looking over my mail accounts chronologically, and thinking about the situation, I became convinced that the trend was real, and an explanation presented itself -- nobody is on email anymore because they're all on Facebook, and that's where they do most of their daily communicating. (And at this point in 2010 I would say that I've received less personal electronic mail than I did even under FIDOnet in the early 1990s.)
Picture sharing, email, IM, games, music... the unified social network website has reached a critical mass at which you will be forced to join if you don't want to be left out.
But long-term, I think it's a little leap-before-you-look to assume that the future uses of extremely detailed and cross-linked data will never progress beyond targeted banner ads. This also applies to the idea that the value of the data is determined during a one-time transaction and then out of your hands, like you would sell old reading material to a used bookstore. Data isn't an object that can be owned, it is information. That is, it is less like a good traded for money, and more like a collection of intellectual property used and re-used simultaneously by multiple interested parties while maintaining its worth due to being permanently linked to YOU, just like a painting or a performance. Therefore it would be far more economically consistent to, instead of giving up your data once in exchange for some shiny web trinkets, you were to allow it to be re-sold and disseminated broadly with the requirement that commercial use of your data result in royalties regularly deposited in your account.
I assure you that this is how pharmaceutical companies, market research firms, and industrial product development divisions view their accumulated information -- as property to be vigorously protected and only used by other parties on a fee-license basis.
Shouldn't we, the consumers, get our piece of the pie?
The funny thing about Facebook is that it is similar to television: You've been given the impression you're the customer, but you're actually the product being sold to the real customers - advertisers.
Facebook just takes it another step, because you're voluntarily giving them extensive data about who you are as an individual, as well as involuntarily (or unknowingly for most people) letting the technology create profiles of your browsing habits. If that weren't enough, there is the further twist - at least on TV there are professional artists and actors and creative types who are producing the content you enjoy. On Facebook, the content is created by you and your friends and given away for free to the website owners.
So all they have to do is create a database infrastructure, then you and your friends come along and do almost all the Data Entry, and while you're doing it they're watching you and adding meta-data to their private database, then they can turn around and sell all the aggregate data to their customers. Profit!
At the peak of the show "Friends", Jennifer Aniston was getting paid a million dollars for pretending to be Rachel whatsherface for each 30 minute episode. The million dollars ultimately came from advertisers who bought airtime from the network.
We are now self-creating global databases with billions of entries and in return are getting... the ability to "poke" someone from your 10th grade Health class. Meanwhile, how much money is Google, Facebook, BlackPlanet, etc. making from both the ads already on their sites, and the immediate/future revenue from the data we are giving them?
Interesting. Thank you for replying.
Do you think your view is shared by the companies who provide the cable and the electricity to make your access possible?
Is your view of owning the bandwidth really possible without a publicly-owned i.e. nationalized Internet infrastructure?
To try to analogize:
Suppose you own one of those drive-through "wildlife" parks where parents pay for a bucket of feed their kids can throw out the window at llamas and ostriches. At the entrance gate, you grant access to families at a cost of $65/car. One day, you look out there and see some guy has set up a barricade on the street just outside your gate, and he is charging cars $30 to get through his barricade before they even get to your gate. But because the street is public property, it is designated as being for the free noncommercial use of everyone. So you call the police, who arrest him and charge him with fraud as you say in your post above.
Does this scenario change if the street outside your entrance gate is a Toll Road, and the controlling Tollway Authority has set up a booth which charges an exit fee to anyone wishing to patronize your park? Do your customers still have an unfettered right of access to your park, or does the Tollway Authority have the right to charge fees for use of the road they control? Suppose it cost them more to build the road to your park which is out in the countryside, or suppose your park is so popular and has to receive frequent tractor-trailer shipments of food, supplies, and animals, that constant maintenance must be done to keep the road usable for everyone who uses it, whether they are your customers or just passing by. If the Tollway Authority has the right to collect fees for usage of their infrastructure, wouldn't they also have the right to charge higher booth fees to customers exiting to your park, than they might charge to people exiting at a different location which demands less of their initial outlay or maintenance resources?
*Who owns the network infrastructure and the right to regulate the traffic on that owned infrastructure?
*What is (or what should be) the difference between public space/resources which are finite and tangible, such as City Hall, national parks, street rights-of-way, public roads, rivers, the air, etc., and resources which are practically intangible and theoretically infinite such as Network Access and Storage and Bandwidth?
*Which is the most important principle, private property ownership rights or the Public Good?
*It would appear that the USA is moving towards a belief that people have an individual right to healthcare, to access to healthcare. Do/should people in the USA have an individual right to Internet access?
*What would be the effect of formally declaring the Internet to be a public, communal resource? Would that essentially make the government everyone's single-payer ISP?
*If access/bandwidth are not public resources, what is the reason companies which own backbone infrastructure shouldn't be able to operate that infrastructure in whatever way they see fit?
C'mon guys, stay in your lane. You had almost no stories about this, and now you post this. How is health care reform a nerd topic?
Stick to Linux news. I fear the upcoming flamewars about to ensue. Or maybe that's what you really want.
Given the transient state of IT employment, I'd bet a much larger than average number of Slashdot readers are self-employed/contractors for whom employer-subsidized insurance is a rarity. This would be very interesting to those people.
This is the kind of scenario I found myself thinking about when reading the "US Unable to Win a Cyber War" post from a couple weeks back. That exercise seemed such a shallow attempt to drum up public fear so we would gladly support an expanding Snoopocracy and spend a few trillion dollars on emerging venture projects from the military contractors who already control half the government. Imagine -- the government prints eleventy trillion dollars at its ever-busy dollar factory to pay for doubling the size of every alphabet-soup information awareness agency; meanwhile, a few million God-fearing citizens are going to Wal-Mart and actually PURCHASING malware...
It's like, the biggest social engineering "hack" ever. And like all social engineering attacks (you could almost include the 9/11 attacks in this genre), the devastation comes from how a meatspace method simply, directly, and sometimes nearly effortlessly sidesteps an enormous byzantine technological/physical infrastructure to exploit a human weakness no one saw because we were all so busy admiring the size and thickness of our huge new fortress walls and battlements.
I rather think that Ms. Phair would have enjoyed this song by Clare and the Reasons.
Correct, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy on the internet.
You do, however, have a reasonable expectation of anonymity. The courts' logic that you should NOT have anonymity based on having no reasonable expectation of privacy is what I disagree with.
Suppose you put on a ski mask and a tshirt that says "I wish to remain anonymous" and then go skateboarding in the park. If you fall and scrape your knee and go home to get a bandage, there is no preventing someone from observing your height/weight/eyecolor, following you to your driveway, or gathering a blood sample off the curb and determining your identity from the available information regardless of your superficial attempts at concealment.
You do not post on Slashdot to communicate with CmdrTaco. You post on Slashdot to engage in PUBLIC discussion with other members of the Public. If we could view stories and add comments, but our comments could only be seen by CT, there wouldn't be a million or so users at Slashdot.
What you do have when you post anonymously is a reasonable expectation of anonymity from other members of the Public. What you do not have is a reasonable expectation of anonymity from Slashdot's servers, administrators, owners, or officials of any jurisdiction that those servers, admins, and owners are subject to.
From http://web.sourceforge.com/privacy-statement
People wrote anonymously on walls all the time before the printing press and made anonymous tracts after it. This isn't something new. The only thing that has changed is the medium.
Other things that aren't new: being prosecuted for vandalism, littering, and disturbing the peace. Nor is it new for journalists to go to jail for refusing to divulge sources. The only thing that has changed is the medium.
There is no Right To Anonymous Speech.
Debt is in the driver's seat of the economy. Has the dairy industry's production capacity [supply] shrunk to only 0.25% of its former self so that a gallon of milk is really worth 400% more than it was seven years ago, or is a our rising senior citizen population demanding 400% more calcium-enriched milk than ever before? With supply and demand pricing instead of inflationary debt pricing our leaders can't promise us an all-new Tundra CrewMax or Escalade in every garage, but perhaps a little more stability wouldn't be a bad price to pay for a few less shiny toys.
And my reply doesn't say that the author made that statment. Besides, you generally don't hear people say, "...therefore I am not responsible for my actions" either, but they drop the excuse in hopes that you'll dismiss their behavior when you realize how rough they've had it.
So it appears you agree with me that the author is not attempting to use the "abuse excuse" in this case, and that your comment is therefore only barely and tangentially relevant to the issue of bin Laden's motive(s).
Great! Now we're exporting our lame excuses for why we're not responsible for our own behavior....
Nowhere in the original comment does the author say "...therefore bin Laden is not guilty by reason of poor parental attachment".
It's not unreasonable to look at an important situation from every angle in order to achieve greater understanding. Know Thine Enemy is a standard rule of war. Whatever political axe you may have to grind against the idea that humans have motives which can be explored and explained is not applicable to this discussion.
Only insofar as we are all making the attempt to reach the general standards set forth by previous usage. There's little understanding lost if the words approximate clearly defined patterns. However, you should be cautious in saying that because we usually can infer correct meaning from incorrect text, we can all then relax and speak freely, incorrectly.
Solely that triemos conformitate gonorrheal standards so zero incorrect as long as a tempting maid approximates claritin.
"Nothing succeeds like success... but then again, nothing fails like success either".
Why does it appear exceptionally difficult for IT companies to navigate the dangers that come with success?
Thank you, you've made my day. I can only pray that your fears come to pass, and one day television will be stripped of the extravagant sorcery which allows it to displace reality.
Q. When you started your company in 1964, was your intention to do research?
Q. Did you have lean times because of that commitment?
Q. Couldn't you have survived by going public?
Q. You would rather have let the company die than go public?
Yes. The context of this discussion isn't "escaping society", but rather finding ways to escape an ever more deeply entangled society's instinct to move towards greater control of its individual components. The entire purpose of my entering this thread was not to encourage becoming a lawbreaker. I intended to draw attention to the fact that "love it or leave it" is no longer a viable option for Americans who wish to remain American. I apologize if a lack of clarity on my part contributed to your misunderstanding of the thread.
I attended two state GOP conventions and one national GOP convention during the mid-late 1980s. I saw the takeover in action. It is real.
I am no longer directly affiliated with the Republican party, but I still have a decent grapevine through old friends and even older family. The incidental party affiliation of "most of the people [you] know" is entirely irrelevant to the matter of who formulates the planks in the party platform in exchange for delivering a highly dependable demographic bloc on election day. What James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, and the Wildmons say today will be blended with prettified supply-side economics and become the official GOP talking points six months from now.
The older Republicans were more moderate and accepted this as an expedient trade-off; the establishment only pushed the issues just enough to guarantee electoral victory. The reason George W. Bush arouses such instinctive loathing from "the Left" and such devotion from "the Right" is that he is simply the first of what will be many more generations who believe their own hype. Their party maturation began in the middle of the bargaining process between the plutocrats and theocrats, and therefore they do not maintain an acute awareness of the situation as a calculated political convenience. They have imbued their economic policies have the righteous conviction of morality, and thus they find it natural to make national policy serve their moral ends. We have been witnessing the modern birth of a religious tradition which combines spirituality with economics.
He who has an ear, let him hear.
And is their posession/use of the land legal? The point is that it is becoming increasingly impossible to go anywhere uncontrolled or do anything which is unregulated. Your original love-it-or-leave-it" hyperbolic suggestion is impossible to do legally, so we are stuck with fighting for our rights in the cities.
Incidentally, doesn't "Montana Outback Militia" sound like a new SUV from General Motors?
Please send me the GPS dimensions of the lands in America which is neither privately owned and thus off-limits to me, nor incorporated under any governmental body such as a state or national park and thus off-limits to me as a permanent residence; then tell me which of these areas don't have regulations which restrict or outright prohibit me from fishing, shooting deer/fowl, and changing the local terrain as necessary for my domicile kthx.
If the Louisiana state government/bureaucracy wasn't so ridiculously corrupt, they could have kept their laws and paid for their own maintenance. The problem in modern times is that no states have the right combination of procedural integrity, fiscal discipline, and political clout necessary to keep the hook out of their lip.