From what I understand? It's how they handle the numbers--a computer will use a decimal value, which produces issues of the significant digits sort when the decimal value is an approximate one, and this can make a difference. This is actually what floating points are all about, and they have known problems with accuracy.
Have a thought experiment: You are traveling from from Earth to Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light years away, and to keep the math relatively simple your ship travels at the speed of 4 light years per hour. Assuming that the nature of your FTL drive means you basically need to point it at the destination and run the engine for the correct amount of time (ignoring anything in the way), how far off course will you be if you have an error in the thousandths' place and do not realize it until 64 minutes later when your FTL drive shuts down? (For the purposes of this, a thousandth in either direction will do the trick, and you're only calculating deviation from the correct course so the correct heading is unimportant. Use 0 if that makes the math simpler.)
Calculation errors in courses increase with time/distance, and this was well-studied in many senses of the term back in the age of sail...not to mention every so often even now when an airplane has the problem I just outlined above. This is also why people are still learning the old-fashioned navigational techniques, because sometimes your navigational computer doesn't announce its failure to work properly by a nice honest crash-and-burn but by giving you wrong numbers--and you need to be able to both cope with it no longer working and to tell when it is giving you nonsense before you get into too much trouble.
And yes, this is actually a social change we can pretty much predict and guess with some accuracy should manned space travel outside the solar system become a major issue: It's only a scaling up of a problem which humanity has had before and solved before...repeatedly. (We like reinventing the wheel, here, it seems.)
Charlie Stross, of all people, should know that science fiction isn't and has never been, about the future. It's about today, told in a way that makes it easier for people to examine the hot button issues without getting too emotional. Or it's put escapism, and it just doesn't matter whether the details are right or wrong.
Really, mostly this has just served to ensure that regardless of how attractive I find the covers (front and back) for his books, I'm not going to spend time or money on them.
Plus, anybody who makes up a word like "enculturation" should be beaten with a stick.
If you read them later, it's interesting to see where the blind spots were. My grandfather had a bunch of 50's-era scifi books that I'd read while visiting. In one series they had faster than light spacecraft but would do all the calculations to go to light speed with slide rules.
Actually, I've heard that computers are merely faster, while slide rules are more accurate, which might actually make doing those calculations at least in part with slide rules (using a computer to set them up) a very good idea with FTL--accuracy probably will be more useful than speed, and you might also train people still to do the calculations by hand even when computers can handle much of it, much like how people still learn celestial navigation.
If your navigational computer going down doesn't strand you (a nightmare in and of itself), then being able to figure out which direction to point yourself and how long to run the engines so you can reach a place where it can be fixed is vital. And remember, its problem may not be that it's merely needing a reboot...
Earlier authors would often be set on Mars, Venus or the Moon, which all naturally had perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity. That doesn't mean the stories were in any way bad. Often they were written to provide some commentary on some aspect of the society of the time.
Actually, at the time people honestly believed that Mars, Venus and/or the Moon really did have perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity, so it's not really social commentary as much as it's what TV Tropes calls Science Marches On.
It's called 'social science fiction' and my experience is that it tends to anger people and be poorly written, though on the whole there isn't a complete overlap between the two and the first can be due primarily to the latter. It's one of those places where having an actual idea of how society and cultures actually work makes a huge difference, and the majority of writers seem to try backfilling from the culture they want the future to have regardless of how likely it is, in fact, to ever happen--the purpose, ultimately, is wish fulfillment and to try to push their own sociopolitical ideology, though it's not necessarily their authorial intent.
I'm really not sure how Charles Stoss might have failed to be aware of the genre's existence and its problems, though I can easily and cheerfully say that he's certainly wrong about the amount of culture shock a switch from 2014 to 1914 (or the other way around) would be. People don't change that much; the main changes would be in what technology is in use, and what things we consider appropriate in public. (For example, Western culture has lost a lot of the distinction between public and private behavior.)
More importantly, though, is that social science fiction tends to date itself quite swiftly, especially if the story is one of the wish fulfillment types and how the ideology works in practice has become better known. Then there's examples like 1890's Caesar's Column, which is set the 1980s...
Honestly, what might be more interesting is a science fiction novel exploring the possibility that things like the internet could result ultimately in the primary stream of culture not changing as much anymore, and the consequences of stabilization of the primary culture...
Oddly though, the Medical Examiner, who normally takes photos of the deceased, did not take photos of Brown. His/her reason? The battery was flat on his/her camera.
Sometimes these things happen, but it strikes me as a little strange that he/she didn't have a spare battery, spare camera, or even a camera phone... and presumably didn't ask if anyone else at the scene had one either. Thus leaving a _slight_ evidence gap... which someone far more suspicious than myself might suggest is the kind of gap you need if you want to [ahem] massage the facts after the event.
First off, the camera phone almost certainly would not be acceptable for the ME's use here--do you really want to imagine the results of any leaks of autopsy photos? This is also why borrowed cameras of any type are a no-go.
Secondly, the lack of a spare battery? On the whole, outside of big cities ME's offices are so poorly funded it ought to be notorious. Because of the security and privacy issues, it's got to be an office camera. Because of this, odds are depressingly good that many Medical Examiners' officers have only got one camera, which was probably either donated by somebody or bought cheap, and unless it either uses a standard sized battery or came one then there are no spare batteries.
The gap isn't desirable in the least, but neither is the risk of leaks. Funding MEs better, and taking steps to ensure this can't easily be a problem, is the ideal course here.
Someone did manage to find a working camera to get photos of Darren Wilson's injuries though. Wilson has said that he had been hit twice by Brown and was of the opinion that a third punch "could be fatal if he hit me right". IMHO his injuries don't look... well, they're practically invisible, let's be honest! That's not to say he wasn't in a compromised position and felt in fear of his life, but I'm not completely convinced he was in any danger of being punched to death.
Punching somebody to death is actually disturbingly easy to do by accident, and one of the reasons trained fighters can be wary of untrained people in the ring--part of the training is actually to ensure you know how to use appropriate force. Blunt force, it turns out, is a blunt force solution with all that implies.
Injuries caused by blunt force, meanwhile, tend to take a while to 'blossom'--and I've known people who showed absolutely no sign externally for over a day, even when it was a rather significant injury. This is why it's actually not that weird for somebody to have what looks like it ought to have been a painful bruise to get, without a clue how they got it--and why you should never take the lack of external bruising or swelling as proof against if somebody thinks they may have a broken bone. (My aunt ended up walking on a broken leg for a day precisely because my grandmother made that mistake.)
It also has the desirable effect of pushing people towards more efficient cars. If you want to buy a high pollution car that's your choice, within reason, but you can't expect the rest of us to subsidise the cost of your lifestyle choice.
The trade-off here is that those more efficient cars are made of less sturdy materials--some of them only are doing well in crash tests because they're only matched up against other lightweights, and not the cars they're most likely to crash into in reality, and I haven't seen a set of tests that include incliment road conditions and checks for the odds of crashes & survivability of any there.
If you really don't want to underwrite the 'lifestyle choice' of 'deciding to drive a safer car (at the unfortunate cost of lower MPG)' I suggest you consider funding the necessary materials science advances to both get the materials that have the strength of steel or better without the weight--and to get them to where even the low-end models can make good use of them. Then it really will be a lifestyle choice, as opposed to being forced to choose between one's safety and one's economic situation.
There is a group of people who see few women in high tech and think that there is a problem with that and that more women should be encouraged to join, the causes for few women should be discovered and possibly remedied, etc. Ie, the group sees this as a problem. However there is another group that sees few women in high tech and thinks "so what?" This other group is either apathetic, laissez-faire, denies that there is a problem, or just prefers the status quo.
There's a group who see few women in high tech and blame the men in high tech for driving them out. When some of those men foolishly object, they are berated for "mansplaining", "derailing" or told to "check their privilege". If they persist, they are told they are "part of the problem".
Don't forget the tendency to insist that no woman could possibly disagree with their explanation, even when the person is in point of fact a woman. This includes women who think that the causes for few women is simply that the majority of women look at the issues with the career others have mentioned--long hours, limited opportunities for advancement, lousy work/life balance, and the like--and decide that the job sucks, and that any remedy other than 'accept that women may well often want things this job does not offer' needs to approach the problem in a gender-neutral manner.
My experience with women in the STEM fields is that most do not opt against pursuing grad degrees because of misogyny: They know what they want in life, know what is involved in getting an MS and/or PhD, and are making an informed choice as to if the potential benefits are worth the personal costs.
The ones who opt against it did so because they felt that the time and effort to get a graduate degree would not ultimately pay off in manners they valued. The ones who go forward do so knowing what to expect.
I suspect it may well have been that he was interviewing significantly more than just five people a day, not a difficult thing to do if you are doing phone interviews and you know that a significant percentage of the interviews will be done very quickly due to determining that the person's not actually remotely qualified for the job despite their impressive resume. You can clear 12 people in an hour if, on average, you determined that part within five minutes, and if you work 7 hours (9-to-5, with an hour cumulative of breaks daily) then 60 days will cover it with a bit of margin for those fortunate days when somebody's phone interview actually runs longer than 5 minutes.
Its dumbasses like you that think "As long as you are voting for the lesser of two evils you are making a difference"
There is such a thing as a protest vote, "dumbass".
Showing up to vote is critically important. At the very least it ensures the authorities will have to do the dirty, dirty work of physically turning people away if they have been purged from the rolls.
There's also opting to vote tactically, for people who commit to ensuring write-ins are always an option...so you can simply start voting for, say, Snoopy for Senate, Popeye for the House, Donald Duck for Governor, or the Kermit/Fozzie Presidential ticket.
Start looking at how to adapt to climate change instead of some fantasy of avoiding it.
The way to adapt is by retiring the internal combustion engine.
Which they do by haranguing people for being too poor or aware of the concept of 'cost of ownership' & general logistics to buy electric cars, and proposing using taxes to...keep people who aren't rich enough to own an electric car from being able to afford to drive cars, and at least where I've been there's no sign that public transit will step up to fill the gap.
If the elite want to see the internal combustion engine gone, they can and should spend their own money on improving the infrastructure and underwriting the additional costs they're imposing.
Or they could just admit publicly that at least part of their problem is too many uppity peasants cluttering up their roads. Either will satisfy me, really.
People are prone to panic about these things--it goes back centuries, to when you didn't even really have government being an issue here. One of the major ways the Black Death spread is people fleeing it. What's changed is that we don't really use the fear productively--we aren't using it to go "Yes, you should be scared, this is the sort of thing quarantine exists for, let's bring it back."
The last time we had actual major-level quarantines going down was nearly 75 years ago, and the really nasty thing is that we have known pretty much the entire time that something like this was certain to happen. The questions have only been 'what' and 'when,' but people have been rather too gormless to listen, complaining about it being so antiquated & saying it's been just so long and antibiotics will work forever and vaccines are magical enough to have permanently banished those icky disease demons...and never listening when told that the Sword of Damocles will fall.
The worst part, in some ways, is that we do have the technology to make people a lot less likely to mind being stuck in a room for days on end. It's called 'the internet.'
You know, that mark you get as an extra when you pay to turn ads on/. off.
Interesting that you bring that up. I'm a long-time subscriber to Slashdot, but a few months ago, the subscription page stopped working for me. I simply cannot add money to my subscription. When I try to click the radio button for "Buy subscription for Pope Ratzo" nothing happens.
I've got Slashdot whitelisted in all of my blockers and Privacy Badger and Disonnect and I've tried it in Chrome and Firefox. It just does not work any more.
The system where you can earn ad-free still works, and is how I get it. My problem is less that I'd pay for ad-free and more that I'd noticed that my malware issues went away when I started running adblockers.
I actually have whitelisted a few places and adservs that make a point of making sure their ads will be safe--which also does in Flash ads because honestly it's probably easier to just ban them entirely than to vet them. I don't mind ads, I actually am a bit fond of the few that outright let me tell advertisers what to sell me on. If nothing else, it means I only see ads for things I actually do sort of want to know what the people selling me such think I want. (How they try to sell me it tells me a bit. For example, someplace trying to sell me on their computers because they're stylish probably doesn't want me looking too closely at the specs!)
When I hear folks talking about this, what I really hear is, "since one person doesn't need that much money to live, the government should take the difference and use it to make MY life better,"
Yeah, the only people who say that are truly crazy extreme egalitarians, not the majority of political and economic theorists.
Very few people talk about taking "the difference" and redistributing things until we're all equal. In such a situation, there's no incentive for anyone to work harder or do better than anyone else, and thus innovation fails. This is bad for everyone, but especially the poor, who tend to benefit the most from continued improvements in overall infrastructure, standard everyday access to things that lead to a better quality of life, etc.
Actually, the vast majority seem to fail to establish any limits at all to it, letting the 'truly crazy extreme egalitarians' be the ones who actually say where things stop.
And then nobody really says anything to establish a different, more acceptable limit on redistribution, nor make it clear that those people are not part of the majority and you aren't at all for their plan.
Silence, here, implies agreement, and so it is absolutely necessary not to be.
The tax code is used and exploited for votes and social engineering.
It was created specifically for those purposes.
And this is precisely why income redistribution isn't a good idea unless voluntary, as the exact thing can be said for many government wealth redistribution efforts with the addition of it enabling the skimming off the top for themselves.
They will use the power to enforce a patronage system and expand their power, using the threat of taking money to extort bribes from the rich to create loopholes so they do not need to pay taxes & being able to scare the poor into voting for them because their opponent might possibly take away the government teat.
The best policy is to design the system with the assumption that those who will run it are corrupt, and thus provide as few opportunities for abuse as possible.
"If I leave my car running in a bad neighborhood and come back an hour later to find it gone, is it my fault?"
no, Mot in any way what so ever.
This BS is the result of decades of insurance companies victim blaming to get out of paying.
Actually, it's the result of decades of people wanting their car 'stolen' for the insurance payoff.
Interestingly, in some neighborhoods this actually will be highly effective at preventing the car from being stolen. While it is basically a virtual "Steal me!" sign, the street smart thieves are going to be figuring that whatever reason you want it stolen are, at utter best, just an insurance scam. At worst, the car is already hot and whomever set it up is hoping that somebody will take it and take the fall for the crime. (And yes, the latter's happened.) Either way, it's drastically failing the sniff test and the only real question is what kind of trap it is...
Thanks for posting that. I had the same thought. After writing at length about the dangers of making logical errors in argumentation, Haselton ends with this bizarre, irrational outburst. So, if a woman dresses modestly, she 1) is not a "real woman", 2) is "a moron", and 3) subscribes to some fringe, ultra right wing version of Christianity. Methinks he is violating "the rules of consistency and logic". Perhaps he thought this was a joke, but if so, it falls pretty flat given the tone of the rest of his essay.
Then, there's this nugget. Haselton claims that an objective cost/benefit analysis "is, in fact, the only rational defense of any action, ever." No. Doing something because it's the ethical or moral course of action can be perfectly rational, even if it would fail a straightforward cost/benefit analysis. I'd be suspicious of anyone who believes that the only way to make every decision is by approaching it strictly as an economics problem.
An objective cost/benefit analysis says that killing off the poor, the incurably ill, and disabled is not only justifiable but in fact failing to do so is not justifiable: the costs to society of keeping them around outweighs any (objective) benefits.
I certainly hope I don't have to explain how this is wrong from an ethical or moral perspective; I have no idea quite where to start with all that is wrong there.
Admittedly, I am taking Haselton's proposition there to its logical extreme, but as it is being proposed as the sole means for justifying actions, it is reasonable to require it remain acceptable even then. Let us err on the side of caution and humanity's rather depressing track record, when it comes to these kinds of things.
But, if you want something more realistic?
Let's say that the cost to a woman of dressing modestly is relatively low: she may have to spend a little more time and effort shopping to find the clothes she wants, but that's about it. The benefit? Well, for one, there's something many Muslim women have pointed out: Men respond differently. You have a vastly easier time getting men to take you seriously, and they're not thinking about how tight your orifices may or may not be & how easily they might get to find out.
More importantly, if a guy is put off by a woman opting to dress modestly because he thinks she might not want to even kiss him until this is a committed relationship, he certainly should not be expected to respect any of the other choices she makes & limits she sets.
So, cost? Possibly a bit more time and effort in obtaining clothes. Benefits? It does help her significantly in getting taken seriously as a human being, and quite possibly has the additional benefit of reducing the number of men flirting with her who have trouble with the apparently difficult concept that no means, surprisingly enough, no.
This one does manage to pass the 'fails to be objectionable' test, but notice that it ends somewhere vastly different from where he does...
Feral cats are cats that grew up in the wild, know how to hunt, and can survive. They never lived with humans, on the whole cannot become house pets, and are quite capable of surviving.
Stray cats are cats that used to be pets that, for various reasons, are not. Most cannot hunt on their own, as this is a learned behavior that is unlikely to happen with a cat that has always been a house pet, and should never be released out into the wild.
This is not a strict rule, but a very good rule of thumb; my family did have a cat that was quite able to hunt, but his mother had been a feral who had successfully transitioned into being a house pet who had made sure her kittens learned. (There were many live crickets released into the house by her for the purpose of hunting instruction of kittens, so it's not necessarily something you want to live through and is something you are likely to notice happening.) If you don't know the cat's origins and the cat is doing quite well as a house pet, assume that the cat doesn't know how to hunt.
The local group that deals with feral cats is pretty damn clear about the differences: TNR for life-time ferals, strays and kittens adopted out. In some areas, managed semi-feral cat colonies are used for rodent control--most commonly in the form of barn cats, who seem to think of humans as being large animals that generally don't hurt them but do annoyingly tend to scare off food.
Ignoring public officials, that seems a very American view on how to treat criminals.
If someone is caught for a petty crime 15 years ago, should it be returned against a search history now if they have never committed another offence?
The law as it stands in most of Europe doesn't delete the record of such a crime having happened, but does hide that information to encourage offenders to rehabilitate and become a non-criminal and regular member of society. Without the prospect of ever being able to live normally once an indiscretion has occurred, what would motivate an offender to stop offending? There's a sweet spot between the first crime and the third petty crime in which you could deter someone from that life of crime, but after that point and after a jail sentence you are unlikely to reform that person. But without the option of rehabilitation you are unlikely to reform *any* offender.
By that logic, it might actually be best to have a flat 'privacy until otherwise' requirement from the start--the public record is sealed as to names until the Nth petty offense or 1st major offense by the same person, unless the offender decides otherwise. (The police records can have names, but those shouldn't be accessible by the general public via Google, Bing, or the ilk ever.)
[...]
Once you accept that for some petty crimes (i.e. drunk and disorderly on a stag do that got out of hand, or something equally likely that it could entrap almost anyone) the search engine should reflect the sensible law that states this should be forgotten by almost everyone (not those in certain positions)... then where is the line drawn?
That sounds like more a reason to be able to request the indexed report be at least redacted, which is why I suggest a shield protecting the names of everybody: once it's on the internet, it's there forever. Getting search engines to delist it won't actually fix the problem.
At one extreme murderers should not be forgotten, nor convicted rapists... but at the other end speeding offences, drunk and disorderly, shoplifting, those shouldn't upend a life. Somewhere between those points is the fuzzy line where stuff on one side should be forgotten, other stuff remembered.
Couldn't the same logic apply to stuff where names ought to be named, and ought not? Protecting people's privacy from an earlier point would make this line a lot less fuzzy, and a right to privacy ought to exist just as much as a right to be forgotten.
[...]
Then of course... where to start with public officials. Those who wish the world to be a better place and work towards it don't deserve a lack of privacy. They certainly need to be transparent in their roles and to sustain trust in their position, but these are different things. A fuzzy line appears once more, intrusions on the identity of the children of a public official is too much, they never voluntarily agreed to give up a level of privacy, and yet no questioning of the financial situation of an official is too little as their trust should be earned and not presumed.
In both cases, either extreme (no privacy nor right to be forgotten, full privacy and past deleted) is clearly wrong.
Some of this is very much a modern problem, as people feel quite entitled to intrude or authorizing the intrusion upon others' privacy. The right to be forgotten is useful, but it may overall be more practical to enforce first the right to privacy as a proactive right to be forgotten; with how social media works, a reactive right to be forgotten may simply no longer be possible.
Once it hits someplace like Tumblr, the only way it's going to manage to be forgotten is if somebody manages to pressure the service into removing all of the reblogs as well as the original post.
The rule by its very nature requires individuals reporting violators for its enforcement--as you noted, there's really no other viable option. More importantly, the rule by its simple existence has a chilling effect because if you don't want to use your real name (such people who for various reasons have professional names or are transitioning) you're stuck, and there's always the risk that somebody will maliciously report you as not using your real name regardless of if you actually are which seems rather likely to cause trouble.
But then, I have not once accused FB of being run by competent people who actually think things out. They seem to really have done more to try to promote the very things they claim the real name rule was supposed to protect against, too, given that if they really meant it they'd have made a basic policy switch: "From now on, any information is private unless you choose to share it."
The real name policy stinks of being a pure PR "We Are Doing Something About This Problem!" BS on their part so they don't have to do something like (oh horrors!) admit people might have good reasons for wanting privacy. Remember FB's overall attitude towards that? (Ever seen how many results you get when you google "Facebook privacy concerns"?)
One of the best ways to get rid of this sort of thing is to force it to the point where it's no longer possible to continue to pretend the manure does not smell like sh*t. Something like your proposed situation of a large group of people enlisted to make reports would, in fact, stand a decent chance of doing the trick. The easiest, most likely to succeed 'out' is to end the rule because then you can cheerfully say that you're not ignoring the reports--it's just that the rule would have to still exist for it to be broken, so the reports are meaningless.
The problem is not this guy nor Facebook's rules, but that the rules were enforced in a biased manner. This will always be a problem with only enforcing a rule after a report, because unpopular groups or individuals will be reported more often than the majority.
Actually, that would mean that the problem is Facebook's rules, as they are vulnerable to this...and, in fact, if you wanted to motivate them to change the rules obnoxious mass biased reporting to make it hard for Facebook to deflect blame from the fact that their policy created this situation would do the trick. Actually, I'd not be terribly surprised if they're actually just claiming it was one person so they can do just that...
Simply ask for permission without disclosing the nature of the study or the objectives. This is how scientist do it (of necessity) when they get a bunch of subjects in a room for a test. The subjects perform their tasks without knowing what the actual study is, hence there's little or no bias.
To be more exact: merely watching somebody who is in an environment where being watched doesn't require permission. The moment you start manipulating their environment in ways like Facebook did, or observing them in places that are supposed to be private, you need permission. You are however not obligated to tell them before the fact the true nature of the experiment, if they ask after (or if you're just observing a public space, while) you give an honest answer, and it's always going to go past the review board better if it's opt-in.
In many ways, though, I'm not sure Facebook even has an internal ethical review board, which is actually quite necessary if you want to experiment on live subjects.
IANAL, but following somebody 'from one website to the next' sounds like it crosses the line from cyber bullying into stalking.
What are you gonna do, sue them? You have thousands of dollars sitting around to give to an attorney as a retainer so you can sue some guy on the internet?
I also was looking at it from the perspective of owning the site, or at least being legally responsible for it. It seems only one of the places explicitly protects you from liability, which suggests that it would be possible to sue the service itself for its role. Being able to say that the moment the victim complained to you, you checked your records and with the other site(s) & since your ToS say it's a reason for account termination you did so? Is a CYA measure.
Also, it'd be utterly stupid to tell the person who is making the complaint the name: ask for evidence, ask for the account name here, ask for the account name and other site. Tell them only what the result is: "It is not the same person" or "It is the same person and their account has been terminated for violating ToS." Only people who would be told are law enforcement with warrant & other sites. It might even be possible to use a hash exchange to do the check to see if it's the same person, so the real name doesn't need to be used unless all parties already know it and you can reduce it completely to "Law enforcement with proper warrant" who can get the real name.
As for suing anybody? Well, notice what I mentioned about the service providers' rears being not covered...
Actually, one of the nastier persistent problems is this one called 'failure to enforce laws already on the books.' Notice you almost never see a politician suggest the solution is to actually start doing that.
There's been some very nasty cases where CPS has jumped the gun, and basically the evidence is worse than 'the child made it up' as the child now has false memories induced by overzealous investigators, and a few children who actually really did make it up...and those? You do need to investigate as usually it's either displaced or a problem best treated quickly.
They tend to grow up to become compulsive liars and go into disreputable careers, like politics.
Google, it seems, is convinced my phone is being used somewhere in Brazil going by the version of their site they keep redirecting me to. Apparently I moved from Florida to Mexico to there? Except I've never been any of those places.
Just because they have my IP doesn't mean it does much.
Cyber bullying is the reason I don't want my real name attached to everything so a bully can follow me from one website to the next.
Yep. I could see having a real-name-hidden-always policy (with no option to reveal, and a complete inverse of Facebook's policies of refusing to respect your desire for privacy & silent changes so you are better of sharing as little info with them as possible) for when somebody says that they think they have a bully doing that, simply so there's a chance to confirm it is the same person. (And if it's not clearly a name, you're still down a bully.)
IANAL, but following somebody 'from one website to the next' sounds like it crosses the line from cyber bullying into stalking.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand? It's how they handle the numbers--a computer will use a decimal value, which produces issues of the significant digits sort when the decimal value is an approximate one, and this can make a difference. This is actually what floating points are all about, and they have known problems with accuracy.
Have a thought experiment: You are traveling from from Earth to Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light years away, and to keep the math relatively simple your ship travels at the speed of 4 light years per hour. Assuming that the nature of your FTL drive means you basically need to point it at the destination and run the engine for the correct amount of time (ignoring anything in the way), how far off course will you be if you have an error in the thousandths' place and do not realize it until 64 minutes later when your FTL drive shuts down? (For the purposes of this, a thousandth in either direction will do the trick, and you're only calculating deviation from the correct course so the correct heading is unimportant. Use 0 if that makes the math simpler.)
Calculation errors in courses increase with time/distance, and this was well-studied in many senses of the term back in the age of sail...not to mention every so often even now when an airplane has the problem I just outlined above. This is also why people are still learning the old-fashioned navigational techniques, because sometimes your navigational computer doesn't announce its failure to work properly by a nice honest crash-and-burn but by giving you wrong numbers--and you need to be able to both cope with it no longer working and to tell when it is giving you nonsense before you get into too much trouble.
And yes, this is actually a social change we can pretty much predict and guess with some accuracy should manned space travel outside the solar system become a major issue: It's only a scaling up of a problem which humanity has had before and solved before...repeatedly. (We like reinventing the wheel, here, it seems.)
Charlie Stross, of all people, should know that science fiction isn't and has never been, about the future. It's about today, told in a way that makes it easier for people to examine the hot button issues without getting too emotional. Or it's put escapism, and it just doesn't matter whether the details are right or wrong.
Really, mostly this has just served to ensure that regardless of how attractive I find the covers (front and back) for his books, I'm not going to spend time or money on them.
Plus, anybody who makes up a word like "enculturation" should be beaten with a stick.
It's actually from social science with the meaning "the process by which an individual adopts the behaviour patterns of the culture in which he or she is immersed." Typically it applies only to when you're gaining your native culture, with acculturation used for later cultures. (There are differences between the two.)
That said, I'm not sure I'm not sure Mr Stross knows what the word means, which is actually kind of ironic given his complaint here...
If you read them later, it's interesting to see where the blind spots were. My grandfather had a bunch of 50's-era scifi books that I'd read while visiting. In one series they had faster than light spacecraft but would do all the calculations to go to light speed with slide rules.
Actually, I've heard that computers are merely faster, while slide rules are more accurate, which might actually make doing those calculations at least in part with slide rules (using a computer to set them up) a very good idea with FTL--accuracy probably will be more useful than speed, and you might also train people still to do the calculations by hand even when computers can handle much of it, much like how people still learn celestial navigation.
If your navigational computer going down doesn't strand you (a nightmare in and of itself), then being able to figure out which direction to point yourself and how long to run the engines so you can reach a place where it can be fixed is vital. And remember, its problem may not be that it's merely needing a reboot...
Earlier authors would often be set on Mars, Venus or the Moon, which all naturally had perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity. That doesn't mean the stories were in any way bad. Often they were written to provide some commentary on some aspect of the society of the time.
Actually, at the time people honestly believed that Mars, Venus and/or the Moon really did have perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity, so it's not really social commentary as much as it's what TV Tropes calls Science Marches On.
It's called 'social science fiction' and my experience is that it tends to anger people and be poorly written, though on the whole there isn't a complete overlap between the two and the first can be due primarily to the latter. It's one of those places where having an actual idea of how society and cultures actually work makes a huge difference, and the majority of writers seem to try backfilling from the culture they want the future to have regardless of how likely it is, in fact, to ever happen--the purpose, ultimately, is wish fulfillment and to try to push their own sociopolitical ideology, though it's not necessarily their authorial intent.
I'm really not sure how Charles Stoss might have failed to be aware of the genre's existence and its problems, though I can easily and cheerfully say that he's certainly wrong about the amount of culture shock a switch from 2014 to 1914 (or the other way around) would be. People don't change that much; the main changes would be in what technology is in use, and what things we consider appropriate in public. (For example, Western culture has lost a lot of the distinction between public and private behavior.)
More importantly, though, is that social science fiction tends to date itself quite swiftly, especially if the story is one of the wish fulfillment types and how the ideology works in practice has become better known. Then there's examples like 1890's Caesar's Column, which is set the 1980s...
Honestly, what might be more interesting is a science fiction novel exploring the possibility that things like the internet could result ultimately in the primary stream of culture not changing as much anymore, and the consequences of stabilization of the primary culture...
Oddly though, the Medical Examiner, who normally takes photos of the deceased, did not take photos of Brown. His/her reason? The battery was flat on his/her camera.
Sometimes these things happen, but it strikes me as a little strange that he/she didn't have a spare battery, spare camera, or even a camera phone... and presumably didn't ask if anyone else at the scene had one either. Thus leaving a _slight_ evidence gap... which someone far more suspicious than myself might suggest is the kind of gap you need if you want to [ahem] massage the facts after the event.
First off, the camera phone almost certainly would not be acceptable for the ME's use here--do you really want to imagine the results of any leaks of autopsy photos? This is also why borrowed cameras of any type are a no-go.
Secondly, the lack of a spare battery? On the whole, outside of big cities ME's offices are so poorly funded it ought to be notorious. Because of the security and privacy issues, it's got to be an office camera. Because of this, odds are depressingly good that many Medical Examiners' officers have only got one camera, which was probably either donated by somebody or bought cheap, and unless it either uses a standard sized battery or came one then there are no spare batteries.
The gap isn't desirable in the least, but neither is the risk of leaks. Funding MEs better, and taking steps to ensure this can't easily be a problem, is the ideal course here.
Someone did manage to find a working camera to get photos of Darren Wilson's injuries though. Wilson has said that he had been hit twice by Brown and was of the opinion that a third punch "could be fatal if he hit me right". IMHO his injuries don't look... well, they're practically invisible, let's be honest! That's not to say he wasn't in a compromised position and felt in fear of his life, but I'm not completely convinced he was in any danger of being punched to death.
Punching somebody to death is actually disturbingly easy to do by accident, and one of the reasons trained fighters can be wary of untrained people in the ring--part of the training is actually to ensure you know how to use appropriate force. Blunt force, it turns out, is a blunt force solution with all that implies.
Injuries caused by blunt force, meanwhile, tend to take a while to 'blossom'--and I've known people who showed absolutely no sign externally for over a day, even when it was a rather significant injury. This is why it's actually not that weird for somebody to have what looks like it ought to have been a painful bruise to get, without a clue how they got it--and why you should never take the lack of external bruising or swelling as proof against if somebody thinks they may have a broken bone. (My aunt ended up walking on a broken leg for a day precisely because my grandmother made that mistake.)
It also has the desirable effect of pushing people towards more efficient cars. If you want to buy a high pollution car that's your choice, within reason, but you can't expect the rest of us to subsidise the cost of your lifestyle choice.
The trade-off here is that those more efficient cars are made of less sturdy materials--some of them only are doing well in crash tests because they're only matched up against other lightweights, and not the cars they're most likely to crash into in reality, and I haven't seen a set of tests that include incliment road conditions and checks for the odds of crashes & survivability of any there.
If you really don't want to underwrite the 'lifestyle choice' of 'deciding to drive a safer car (at the unfortunate cost of lower MPG)' I suggest you consider funding the necessary materials science advances to both get the materials that have the strength of steel or better without the weight--and to get them to where even the low-end models can make good use of them. Then it really will be a lifestyle choice, as opposed to being forced to choose between one's safety and one's economic situation.
There's a group who see few women in high tech and blame the men in high tech for driving them out. When some of those men foolishly object, they are berated for "mansplaining", "derailing" or told to "check their privilege". If they persist, they are told they are "part of the problem".
Don't forget the tendency to insist that no woman could possibly disagree with their explanation, even when the person is in point of fact a woman. This includes women who think that the causes for few women is simply that the majority of women look at the issues with the career others have mentioned--long hours, limited opportunities for advancement, lousy work/life balance, and the like--and decide that the job sucks, and that any remedy other than 'accept that women may well often want things this job does not offer' needs to approach the problem in a gender-neutral manner.
My experience with women in the STEM fields is that most do not opt against pursuing grad degrees because of misogyny: They know what they want in life, know what is involved in getting an MS and/or PhD, and are making an informed choice as to if the potential benefits are worth the personal costs.
The ones who opt against it did so because they felt that the time and effort to get a graduate degree would not ultimately pay off in manners they valued. The ones who go forward do so knowing what to expect.
I suspect it may well have been that he was interviewing significantly more than just five people a day, not a difficult thing to do if you are doing phone interviews and you know that a significant percentage of the interviews will be done very quickly due to determining that the person's not actually remotely qualified for the job despite their impressive resume. You can clear 12 people in an hour if, on average, you determined that part within five minutes, and if you work 7 hours (9-to-5, with an hour cumulative of breaks daily) then 60 days will cover it with a bit of margin for those fortunate days when somebody's phone interview actually runs longer than 5 minutes.
Its dumbasses like you that think "As long as you are voting for the lesser of two evils you are making a difference"
There is such a thing as a protest vote, "dumbass".
Showing up to vote is critically important. At the very least it ensures the authorities will have to do the dirty, dirty work of physically turning people away if they have been purged from the rolls.
There's also opting to vote tactically, for people who commit to ensuring write-ins are always an option...so you can simply start voting for, say, Snoopy for Senate, Popeye for the House, Donald Duck for Governor, or the Kermit/Fozzie Presidential ticket.
Who knows, they might even win.
Start looking at how to adapt to climate change instead of some fantasy of avoiding it.
The way to adapt is by retiring the internal combustion engine.
Which they do by haranguing people for being too poor or aware of the concept of 'cost of ownership' & general logistics to buy electric cars, and proposing using taxes to...keep people who aren't rich enough to own an electric car from being able to afford to drive cars, and at least where I've been there's no sign that public transit will step up to fill the gap.
If the elite want to see the internal combustion engine gone, they can and should spend their own money on improving the infrastructure and underwriting the additional costs they're imposing.
Or they could just admit publicly that at least part of their problem is too many uppity peasants cluttering up their roads. Either will satisfy me, really.
People are prone to panic about these things--it goes back centuries, to when you didn't even really have government being an issue here. One of the major ways the Black Death spread is people fleeing it. What's changed is that we don't really use the fear productively--we aren't using it to go "Yes, you should be scared, this is the sort of thing quarantine exists for, let's bring it back."
The last time we had actual major-level quarantines going down was nearly 75 years ago, and the really nasty thing is that we have known pretty much the entire time that something like this was certain to happen. The questions have only been 'what' and 'when,' but people have been rather too gormless to listen, complaining about it being so antiquated & saying it's been just so long and antibiotics will work forever and vaccines are magical enough to have permanently banished those icky disease demons...and never listening when told that the Sword of Damocles will fall.
The worst part, in some ways, is that we do have the technology to make people a lot less likely to mind being stuck in a room for days on end. It's called 'the internet.'
Interesting that you bring that up. I'm a long-time subscriber to Slashdot, but a few months ago, the subscription page stopped working for me. I simply cannot add money to my subscription. When I try to click the radio button for "Buy subscription for Pope Ratzo" nothing happens.
I've got Slashdot whitelisted in all of my blockers and Privacy Badger and Disonnect and I've tried it in Chrome and Firefox. It just does not work any more.
The system where you can earn ad-free still works, and is how I get it. My problem is less that I'd pay for ad-free and more that I'd noticed that my malware issues went away when I started running adblockers.
I actually have whitelisted a few places and adservs that make a point of making sure their ads will be safe--which also does in Flash ads because honestly it's probably easier to just ban them entirely than to vet them. I don't mind ads, I actually am a bit fond of the few that outright let me tell advertisers what to sell me on. If nothing else, it means I only see ads for things I actually do sort of want to know what the people selling me such think I want. (How they try to sell me it tells me a bit. For example, someplace trying to sell me on their computers because they're stylish probably doesn't want me looking too closely at the specs!)
When I hear folks talking about this, what I really hear is, "since one person doesn't need that much money to live, the government should take the difference and use it to make MY life better,"
Yeah, the only people who say that are truly crazy extreme egalitarians, not the majority of political and economic theorists.
Very few people talk about taking "the difference" and redistributing things until we're all equal. In such a situation, there's no incentive for anyone to work harder or do better than anyone else, and thus innovation fails. This is bad for everyone, but especially the poor, who tend to benefit the most from continued improvements in overall infrastructure, standard everyday access to things that lead to a better quality of life, etc.
Actually, the vast majority seem to fail to establish any limits at all to it, letting the 'truly crazy extreme egalitarians' be the ones who actually say where things stop.
And then nobody really says anything to establish a different, more acceptable limit on redistribution, nor make it clear that those people are not part of the majority and you aren't at all for their plan.
Silence, here, implies agreement, and so it is absolutely necessary not to be.
The tax code is used and exploited for votes and social engineering.
It was created specifically for those purposes.
And this is precisely why income redistribution isn't a good idea unless voluntary, as the exact thing can be said for many government wealth redistribution efforts with the addition of it enabling the skimming off the top for themselves.
They will use the power to enforce a patronage system and expand their power, using the threat of taking money to extort bribes from the rich to create loopholes so they do not need to pay taxes & being able to scare the poor into voting for them because their opponent might possibly take away the government teat.
The best policy is to design the system with the assumption that those who will run it are corrupt, and thus provide as few opportunities for abuse as possible.
"If I leave my car running in a bad neighborhood and come back an hour later to find it gone, is it my fault?" no, Mot in any way what so ever. This BS is the result of decades of insurance companies victim blaming to get out of paying.
Actually, it's the result of decades of people wanting their car 'stolen' for the insurance payoff.
Interestingly, in some neighborhoods this actually will be highly effective at preventing the car from being stolen. While it is basically a virtual "Steal me!" sign, the street smart thieves are going to be figuring that whatever reason you want it stolen are, at utter best, just an insurance scam. At worst, the car is already hot and whomever set it up is hoping that somebody will take it and take the fall for the crime. (And yes, the latter's happened.) Either way, it's drastically failing the sniff test and the only real question is what kind of trap it is...
Thanks for posting that. I had the same thought. After writing at length about the dangers of making logical errors in argumentation, Haselton ends with this bizarre, irrational outburst. So, if a woman dresses modestly, she 1) is not a "real woman", 2) is "a moron", and 3) subscribes to some fringe, ultra right wing version of Christianity. Methinks he is violating "the rules of consistency and logic". Perhaps he thought this was a joke, but if so, it falls pretty flat given the tone of the rest of his essay.
Then, there's this nugget. Haselton claims that an objective cost/benefit analysis "is, in fact, the only rational defense of any action, ever." No. Doing something because it's the ethical or moral course of action can be perfectly rational, even if it would fail a straightforward cost/benefit analysis. I'd be suspicious of anyone who believes that the only way to make every decision is by approaching it strictly as an economics problem.
An objective cost/benefit analysis says that killing off the poor, the incurably ill, and disabled is not only justifiable but in fact failing to do so is not justifiable: the costs to society of keeping them around outweighs any (objective) benefits.
I certainly hope I don't have to explain how this is wrong from an ethical or moral perspective; I have no idea quite where to start with all that is wrong there.
Admittedly, I am taking Haselton's proposition there to its logical extreme, but as it is being proposed as the sole means for justifying actions, it is reasonable to require it remain acceptable even then. Let us err on the side of caution and humanity's rather depressing track record, when it comes to these kinds of things.
But, if you want something more realistic?
Let's say that the cost to a woman of dressing modestly is relatively low: she may have to spend a little more time and effort shopping to find the clothes she wants, but that's about it. The benefit? Well, for one, there's something many Muslim women have pointed out: Men respond differently. You have a vastly easier time getting men to take you seriously, and they're not thinking about how tight your orifices may or may not be & how easily they might get to find out.
More importantly, if a guy is put off by a woman opting to dress modestly because he thinks she might not want to even kiss him until this is a committed relationship, he certainly should not be expected to respect any of the other choices she makes & limits she sets.
So, cost? Possibly a bit more time and effort in obtaining clothes. Benefits? It does help her significantly in getting taken seriously as a human being, and quite possibly has the additional benefit of reducing the number of men flirting with her who have trouble with the apparently difficult concept that no means, surprisingly enough, no.
This one does manage to pass the 'fails to be objectionable' test, but notice that it ends somewhere vastly different from where he does...
Feral cats are cats that grew up in the wild, know how to hunt, and can survive. They never lived with humans, on the whole cannot become house pets, and are quite capable of surviving.
Stray cats are cats that used to be pets that, for various reasons, are not. Most cannot hunt on their own, as this is a learned behavior that is unlikely to happen with a cat that has always been a house pet, and should never be released out into the wild.
This is not a strict rule, but a very good rule of thumb; my family did have a cat that was quite able to hunt, but his mother had been a feral who had successfully transitioned into being a house pet who had made sure her kittens learned. (There were many live crickets released into the house by her for the purpose of hunting instruction of kittens, so it's not necessarily something you want to live through and is something you are likely to notice happening.) If you don't know the cat's origins and the cat is doing quite well as a house pet, assume that the cat doesn't know how to hunt.
The local group that deals with feral cats is pretty damn clear about the differences: TNR for life-time ferals, strays and kittens adopted out. In some areas, managed semi-feral cat colonies are used for rodent control--most commonly in the form of barn cats, who seem to think of humans as being large animals that generally don't hurt them but do annoyingly tend to scare off food.
Ignoring public officials, that seems a very American view on how to treat criminals.
If someone is caught for a petty crime 15 years ago, should it be returned against a search history now if they have never committed another offence?
The law as it stands in most of Europe doesn't delete the record of such a crime having happened, but does hide that information to encourage offenders to rehabilitate and become a non-criminal and regular member of society. Without the prospect of ever being able to live normally once an indiscretion has occurred, what would motivate an offender to stop offending? There's a sweet spot between the first crime and the third petty crime in which you could deter someone from that life of crime, but after that point and after a jail sentence you are unlikely to reform that person. But without the option of rehabilitation you are unlikely to reform *any* offender.
By that logic, it might actually be best to have a flat 'privacy until otherwise' requirement from the start--the public record is sealed as to names until the Nth petty offense or 1st major offense by the same person, unless the offender decides otherwise. (The police records can have names, but those shouldn't be accessible by the general public via Google, Bing, or the ilk ever.)
[...]
Once you accept that for some petty crimes (i.e. drunk and disorderly on a stag do that got out of hand, or something equally likely that it could entrap almost anyone) the search engine should reflect the sensible law that states this should be forgotten by almost everyone (not those in certain positions)... then where is the line drawn?
That sounds like more a reason to be able to request the indexed report be at least redacted, which is why I suggest a shield protecting the names of everybody: once it's on the internet, it's there forever. Getting search engines to delist it won't actually fix the problem.
At one extreme murderers should not be forgotten, nor convicted rapists... but at the other end speeding offences, drunk and disorderly, shoplifting, those shouldn't upend a life. Somewhere between those points is the fuzzy line where stuff on one side should be forgotten, other stuff remembered.
Couldn't the same logic apply to stuff where names ought to be named, and ought not? Protecting people's privacy from an earlier point would make this line a lot less fuzzy, and a right to privacy ought to exist just as much as a right to be forgotten.
[...]
Then of course... where to start with public officials. Those who wish the world to be a better place and work towards it don't deserve a lack of privacy. They certainly need to be transparent in their roles and to sustain trust in their position, but these are different things. A fuzzy line appears once more, intrusions on the identity of the children of a public official is too much, they never voluntarily agreed to give up a level of privacy, and yet no questioning of the financial situation of an official is too little as their trust should be earned and not presumed.
In both cases, either extreme (no privacy nor right to be forgotten, full privacy and past deleted) is clearly wrong.
Some of this is very much a modern problem, as people feel quite entitled to intrude or authorizing the intrusion upon others' privacy. The right to be forgotten is useful, but it may overall be more practical to enforce first the right to privacy as a proactive right to be forgotten; with how social media works, a reactive right to be forgotten may simply no longer be possible.
Once it hits someplace like Tumblr, the only way it's going to manage to be forgotten is if somebody manages to pressure the service into removing all of the reblogs as well as the original post.
The rule by its very nature requires individuals reporting violators for its enforcement--as you noted, there's really no other viable option. More importantly, the rule by its simple existence has a chilling effect because if you don't want to use your real name (such people who for various reasons have professional names or are transitioning) you're stuck, and there's always the risk that somebody will maliciously report you as not using your real name regardless of if you actually are which seems rather likely to cause trouble.
But then, I have not once accused FB of being run by competent people who actually think things out. They seem to really have done more to try to promote the very things they claim the real name rule was supposed to protect against, too, given that if they really meant it they'd have made a basic policy switch: "From now on, any information is private unless you choose to share it."
The real name policy stinks of being a pure PR "We Are Doing Something About This Problem!" BS on their part so they don't have to do something like (oh horrors!) admit people might have good reasons for wanting privacy. Remember FB's overall attitude towards that? (Ever seen how many results you get when you google "Facebook privacy concerns"?)
One of the best ways to get rid of this sort of thing is to force it to the point where it's no longer possible to continue to pretend the manure does not smell like sh*t. Something like your proposed situation of a large group of people enlisted to make reports would, in fact, stand a decent chance of doing the trick. The easiest, most likely to succeed 'out' is to end the rule because then you can cheerfully say that you're not ignoring the reports--it's just that the rule would have to still exist for it to be broken, so the reports are meaningless.
The problem is not this guy nor Facebook's rules, but that the rules were enforced in a biased manner. This will always be a problem with only enforcing a rule after a report, because unpopular groups or individuals will be reported more often than the majority.
Actually, that would mean that the problem is Facebook's rules, as they are vulnerable to this...and, in fact, if you wanted to motivate them to change the rules obnoxious mass biased reporting to make it hard for Facebook to deflect blame from the fact that their policy created this situation would do the trick. Actually, I'd not be terribly surprised if they're actually just claiming it was one person so they can do just that...
Simply ask for permission without disclosing the nature of the study or the objectives. This is how scientist do it (of necessity) when they get a bunch of subjects in a room for a test. The subjects perform their tasks without knowing what the actual study is, hence there's little or no bias.
To be more exact: merely watching somebody who is in an environment where being watched doesn't require permission. The moment you start manipulating their environment in ways like Facebook did, or observing them in places that are supposed to be private, you need permission. You are however not obligated to tell them before the fact the true nature of the experiment, if they ask after (or if you're just observing a public space, while) you give an honest answer, and it's always going to go past the review board better if it's opt-in.
In many ways, though, I'm not sure Facebook even has an internal ethical review board, which is actually quite necessary if you want to experiment on live subjects.
IANAL, but following somebody 'from one website to the next' sounds like it crosses the line from cyber bullying into stalking.
What are you gonna do, sue them? You have thousands of dollars sitting around to give to an attorney as a retainer so you can sue some guy on the internet?
There is thing thing called cyberstalking legislation. I may not be a lawyer, but I do make some effort to know what isn't legal.
I also was looking at it from the perspective of owning the site, or at least being legally responsible for it. It seems only one of the places explicitly protects you from liability, which suggests that it would be possible to sue the service itself for its role. Being able to say that the moment the victim complained to you, you checked your records and with the other site(s) & since your ToS say it's a reason for account termination you did so? Is a CYA measure.
Also, it'd be utterly stupid to tell the person who is making the complaint the name: ask for evidence, ask for the account name here, ask for the account name and other site. Tell them only what the result is: "It is not the same person" or "It is the same person and their account has been terminated for violating ToS." Only people who would be told are law enforcement with warrant & other sites. It might even be possible to use a hash exchange to do the check to see if it's the same person, so the real name doesn't need to be used unless all parties already know it and you can reduce it completely to "Law enforcement with proper warrant" who can get the real name.
As for suing anybody? Well, notice what I mentioned about the service providers' rears being not covered...
Actually, one of the nastier persistent problems is this one called 'failure to enforce laws already on the books.' Notice you almost never see a politician suggest the solution is to actually start doing that. There's been some very nasty cases where CPS has jumped the gun, and basically the evidence is worse than 'the child made it up' as the child now has false memories induced by overzealous investigators, and a few children who actually really did make it up...and those? You do need to investigate as usually it's either displaced or a problem best treated quickly. They tend to grow up to become compulsive liars and go into disreputable careers, like politics.
Google, it seems, is convinced my phone is being used somewhere in Brazil going by the version of their site they keep redirecting me to. Apparently I moved from Florida to Mexico to there? Except I've never been any of those places.
Just because they have my IP doesn't mean it does much.
Cyber bullying is the reason I don't want my real name attached to everything so a bully can follow me from one website to the next.
Yep. I could see having a real-name-hidden-always policy (with no option to reveal, and a complete inverse of Facebook's policies of refusing to respect your desire for privacy & silent changes so you are better of sharing as little info with them as possible) for when somebody says that they think they have a bully doing that, simply so there's a chance to confirm it is the same person. (And if it's not clearly a name, you're still down a bully.)
IANAL, but following somebody 'from one website to the next' sounds like it crosses the line from cyber bullying into stalking.