Honestly, I don't see Twitter as being the issue here. He gave the person access to the Twitter account under duress, but Twitter can't differentiate between duress and willingly. You could substitute pretty much anything for Twitter - even Slashdot. (Though, I doubt few hackers would go to such lengths to secure a low digit user ID.)
Paypal shouldn't have given that information out, but the last four digits of your credit card are hardly considered a huge secret. Of all the people involved, GoDaddy's the guiltiest as they shouldn't be relying on that information as a "super secret passcode". They might as well use the person's middle name as the passcode.
Except this same problem would exist for non-online credit card transactions. You go to a restaurant and pay your bill with a credit card. The waiter takes it into the back to charge it. One quick smartphone camera snap later and he has your entire credit card number. Two if he takes a photo of the back to get the 3 digit code there. Even if the waiter is honest, the credit card information can go into the company's databases which can then be hacked (e.g. Target, Michael's). Even if all this doesn't take place, the last four digits of your credit card number are printed on a piece of paper that can easily be misplaced/stolen and obtained by someone else.
Paypal's response should be "I'm sorry, but we can't give this information over the phone" or "You can see a list of cards you have linked to your account on our website." Possibly they could say "Ok, I can give you that information but first give me this Secret Passcode to prove that you are who you say you are." All of these would help actual customers in this situation while guarding against social engineering.
Are you suggesting somehow attaching rocket boosters to the Earth and sending the entire planet flying through space to find another world? If so, there are many problems with that plan. First of all, building rockets that big to move the Earth (but not shatter it to bits) would be a huge undertaking. Powering it would be another huge problem. However, let's assume we're built the boosters and figured out how to power them. We somehow overcome our orbit and blast the Earth out of our solar system. Here's a question: What is heating the Earth? Without the Sun, we'd quickly find the planet turning into an inhospitable ball of ice. I doubt we'd make it out of our solar system, much less to another inhabitable planet. You might be able to solve this by moving the Sun too, but once we get to the technological point where moving a star is easy, I doubt that traveling to another planet will be a challenge.
Making the TSA into real-life red shirts just makes sense. In the Star Trek world, Redshirts were allegedly for security, but did little more than get themselves killed. They were Star Trek's version of security theater! The TSA is our version of security theater. So at least make them useful and blast them into space. They can even have some nice, new, shiny, red spacesuits to wear.
There's whole books written about how Cheney alone was the most powerful vice-president in history.
I think this was the key. Bush Jr, by himself, was a weaker than average President. However, he had an administration that pushed the limits of Executive Branch power. Cheney et all wanted the President to be the supreme ruler unanswerable to anyone so that the Democrats couldn't stop them from doing what they wanted to do. Of course, the danger with this is that - if you get it - it is only a matter of time before "that other party" gains control of this seat of power and you are faced with the receiving end of the power*. Because, no matter what they say while campaigning, no politician is going to roll back Presidential powers. At best, they'll just expand them at a slower pace or in different areas than the other guy would.
* Thus my constant rule of determining whether a certain government official should have a certain power: How would you like it if the person occupying that position had the exact opposite political views that you do and used that power? If you'd oppose that, then you can't support the official (presumably from "your party") having that power at all.
True, but I'd add two caveats. First, too little rules can lead to kids engaging in patently dangerous activities. I'm not talking about potentially dangerous things like climbing trees, but doing things like bullying or hitting each other with objects. You need basic ground rules. The trick is setting those ground rules without them morphing into a "control every move you make" rules system.
Second, there are some kids that like organization. My son has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and Anxiety Disorder. He thrives on schedules and hates disorganized time. The more time he spends where he doesn't know what he is supposed to be doing, the more anxious he gets and the more likely he is to engage in behavior that will get him in trouble. (Sadly, too few people see this rising anxiety and just assume he's a trouble-maker despite a doctor's diagnosis and repeated talks with people about ways to spot his anxiety.) In his case, you almost can't schedule his day too much. Almost because being too specific on the schedule can lead to anxiety when the schedule needs to change on the fly. He doesn't handle this well either.
Of course, I recognize that he's the exception rather than the rule, but it just goes to show that you need to take the individual child's needs into consideration rather than assuming that one set of rules (or lack thereof) will fit all children.
One article I read phrased this as the NSA spying on Angry Birds use. Come to think of it, it makes sense! You are launching projectiles (birds) at "buildings" (the pigs' structures) to cause casualties (pigs). The black bird's even a bomb that blows himself up. The Angry Birds are terrorists!!!
Part of the problem is that people don't have the time or knowledge to fix complex electronics themselves. To give an example I'm facing, my HP G60 laptop has a glitching screen. If you don't position the screen "just so" the image flickers erratically to the point that you can't read what's on the screen. To the average user, this would be a "the laptop is dead, buy a new one" moment. I, knowing quite a bit more about computers than the average user, was able to isolate that the problem is likely the video cable. (It works perfectly if hooked up to an external monitor.)
You can buy a new cable for $10-15, but the trick is replacing it. I've done laptop repair before, but taking apart the screen is daunting even for me. My other option is find someone with the knowledge to fix this, but I don't know anyone in my area. (Taking it to Best Buy's Geek Squad is *not* an option!) So while I know that this is likely an inexpensive fix, I might wind up buying a new laptop. (The glitching one would be re-purposed as a media server so it wouldn't be a total waste.)
You've hit the nail on the head. There are some corporations (e.g. Pearson) that have been salivating over how much more money they could make from our educational system. The first step was to convince us that our current system was broken. The second step was to blame the teachers. The third step was to "convince" politicians (who have no educational background) that the business' solution of constant testing was the cure. They test in the beginning of the year and then they test at the end of the year and if the students don't do well enough, the teacher gets fired. No qualifiers such as said teacher's students are intelligent but don't do well on standardized tests. Or, since the test is very secret and not audited by a third party, that the test itself was flawed.
Of course, the corporations have a financial incentive for students to fail. Schools with failing students might buy more test prep books, sign up for teacher training sessions, administrator training sessions, or other goods/services the corporation provides. Schools with students doing well don't generate more corporate profits. In New York's first round of testing, only 31% of students passed.
Just to add insult to injury, New York has adopted a system called EngageNY which is essentially a script for the teacher to follow. It tells the teacher what to say, when, for how long, and in what manner. It literally is broken down into 10 minute segments instructing the teacher on just what to do during each. There is no leeway for teaching in a different manner that the teacher's students might understand better or for spending more/less time on subjects. Teachers are expected to teach according to the script. Of course, this makes teachers nothing but glorified actors who can be swapped out for other people at a moment's notice. (Think about every teacher who inspired you to learn and ask if that teacher was unconventional or sounded like they were robots reading a script.)
Should there be some form of performance metric? Sure. It needs to be very carefully set up though, and the child's own performance needs to be a part of it as well as the parents.
Sadly, in New York, they've implemented a "performance metric" in the form of standardized tests that only a select few are allowed to see. Teachers, parents, administrators, etc. can't see them. Students are only allowed to see them because they are taking the tests. Teachers do know what subjects are on the tests (even if they don't know the exact questions) and are given test preparation materials (but not with actual test questions). Since their jobs ride on test scores, they wind up only teaching what will be on the test: English and Math. Social studies, science, and the rest get folded into one of the two somehow or else ditched.
Furthermore, since this is part of Race To The Top requirements, but since the funding from Race To The Top doesn't cover all of the costs, our school districts are spending more money than they are getting by joining Race To The Top. This means, we're facing our school cutting art and music (elementary school level) to finance more test preparation.
Modded as funny, but sadly this is very insightful of how creationists think. They value consistency over everything. Therefore in their minds the constant message of "God Did It" is much firmer ground over the ever-changing explanations of science. The fact that these ever-changing explanations come as the result of new data or that the changes are often minor don't matter. The mere fact that science changes makes it unreliable and the fact that religion stays the same* makes it the one to count on.
* Of course, they completely ignore that religion too changes over time. They do this the same way they do everything else: By saying "religion stays the same" and then ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth.
This part is key. The religious right likes talking about Judeo Christian values, but I'm not fooled. Though I'm Jewish and theoretically are included in their "Judeo Christian values" what they really mean is "our flavor of Christianity." Let's say they got their fondest desire and the US became a theocracy where laws were set based on what they claimed the Bible said. Who would "they" be? Southern Baptists? Catholics? Protestants? The Westboro Baptist Church? What would happen wouldn't be a "peaceful, prosperous theocracy-based US", but a war among the various religions. Each would deride the others as being "the wrong path" and would jockey for political position. As the larger religions gained political power, they would use political tricks to keep the smaller religions from gaining strength. (Sort of like how Republicans/Democrats keep third parties out of power.)
What's worse would be that politics and religion would become mixed. Not only would religion tell the government what laws to pass, but the government would tell religions how to function. How long would the theocracy function before Islam was banned? What about Hinduism, Wicca, Buddism, and any other non-Judeo Christian religion? For that matter, how long before Jews were forced to accept Christ as their savior or else be jailed for violating the Souls in Heaven by Invoking Trinity Act?
The religious right scare me because of their stated goals. They scare me even more because they are so blind that they don't see that accomplishing their stated goals would lead to a hell, not a heaven.
In fact, that is an understatement. I was just doing some research into the number of terrorism related deaths, and I found that fewer than 25,000 people have died in (non-state) recorded terror attacks. That's less than 25,000 people dying of terrorism in all modern history.
In contrast, about the same number of people die in lightning strikes in one year (worldwide). About 150% as many people die in car accidents each year, in the US alone.
You know what this means? We need a War On Lightning! To win, we need to eliminate all forms of electricity so that lightning can't form. Electrons are now considered a weapon of mass destruction and possessing them can get you life in prison! Don't even ask what happens to you if you shuffle your socks against a carpet to build up a static charge.
It could be that life "began" on Earth a few times. Perhaps our form of DNA/RNA wasn't even the first, but was the most successful. This could be because of the general environmental conditions of the time or because our form of DNA/RNA is simply more efficient/reproduces better. In any case, our form of life replicated like crazy and the other forms of life could have been driven back to niches until they died out. Fossils are notoriously tricky when it comes to single-cellular life forms, so perhaps we simply don't have the fossil record to know about this happening. Maybe on another planet, which formed life under different situations, the chemical structure of life is different from the one we are based on.
Both of my boys have had febrile seizures and stopped breathing. This usually doesn't cause any problems, but is the scariest thing I've ever gone through. In the case of my youngest son, though, he turned grey, stopped breathing, and didn't start back on his own. Luckily, my mother-in-law was there and knew how to do rescue breaths on him until the paramedics arrived. He was hospitalized so they could figure out why he didn't start breathing again. He's had multiple febrile seizures since then and every time he gets a fever we give him medicine to get it under control quickly.
Did this kill him? No, but without the rescue breaths my mother-in-law administered this story could have had a much different ending.
I still think there's a future for labels, but it's a much reduced one. Instead of the label being the end-all-and-be-all for the band, it will be a glorified advertising agency that a band contracts with. All copyrights will remain with the band and the band will be able to leave for another label and retain their old music. The label will make money as the band makes money. Of course, they won't make nearly as much and this means many record label executives will lose jobs. Excuse me while I mourn their loss... ok, that's enough.
Don't you see? Any money you don't spend on new music from them is a lost sale. Those lost sales mean you must be pirating music instead because you wouldn't be using the money for food or something nonessential when you could use it to buy more music. Lost sales like that will cause the record executives to starve to death (after they go through their caviar stockpile). How dare you not open your wallets and empty the contents into the recording industry's bank accounts!
I've actually had some good customer service experiences on Twitter. Like any tool, though, it's how the company uses it. E-mail can be a horrible tool for customer service if the company ignores the e-mail for a week and then gives a form letter reply that answers nothing. Phone can be a horrible tool if you get automated menu hell that doesn't let you talk to a real person and get your issue resolved. Bad customer service is bad customer service no matter what tool is used.
You don't even need the hacking step. Say you've got a site that threatens to grow in popularity and upset the status quo. In this scenario, you are the one in power of the nation's web filter and thus have incentive to keep the status quo in place. You block the site for being "obscene" or some other generic term. A portion of the population will complain, of course, but most will just ignore it as it doesn't directly impact them at that moment. Then you just wait for the movement to splinter into new sites, block those, and repeat until the movement loses steam. Mission accomplished! You've suppressed a growing movement using nothing but your handy dandy national web filter.
All religions are equal. Some are just more equal than others.
This would be funny, but this is just how politicians like this think. They think that there should be freedom to follow whatever religion you want to follow, so long as the government is based on Christianity and anyone who interacts with the government follows Christianity's precepts. (Not just any version of Christianity, of course, but their own particular version. All those others aren't True Christianity but pale imitations.). In their version of history, the founding fathers were all Good And Proper Christians who founded this country as a Christian Nation. Being the generous souls that they were, they graciously allowed all those inferior religions to worship as they saw fit so long as they didn't interfere with the Christian Nation, but somewhere along the way we became a secular nation and we must return to our Christian roots to save the country. (This group's view, still, not my own.)
The view is so twisted that these politicians actually think they're doing a great service by ditching science in favor of the bible. As if our kids will effectively compete for future jobs by shunning all that science-stuff and thumping their bibles harder.
Actually, this is the real reason that North Korea wants nuclear weapons. They're trying to build a double black diamond slope. I hear it's going to be a killer.
So this rock moved when we weren't looking at it... Do you realize what this means? It's a Weeping Angel! Get that rover out of there now! (But don't look away. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead.)
The folks at NASA are remotely controlling a roving "SUV" on a planet millions of miles away from us in a scientific effort to learn more about the Universe and our surroundings. Does this impact day-to-day life *right now*? No, of course not. Is it incredibly cool and deserve a spot on Slashdot's home page? Definitely. Are your endeavors even close to this scale of technological achievement? (I'll be the first to admit that my own endeavors, while important to me, don't rise to the level of technical coolness that would make for an interesting Slashdot story.)
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I don't see Twitter as being the issue here. He gave the person access to the Twitter account under duress, but Twitter can't differentiate between duress and willingly. You could substitute pretty much anything for Twitter - even Slashdot. (Though, I doubt few hackers would go to such lengths to secure a low digit user ID.)
Paypal shouldn't have given that information out, but the last four digits of your credit card are hardly considered a huge secret. Of all the people involved, GoDaddy's the guiltiest as they shouldn't be relying on that information as a "super secret passcode". They might as well use the person's middle name as the passcode.
Except this same problem would exist for non-online credit card transactions. You go to a restaurant and pay your bill with a credit card. The waiter takes it into the back to charge it. One quick smartphone camera snap later and he has your entire credit card number. Two if he takes a photo of the back to get the 3 digit code there. Even if the waiter is honest, the credit card information can go into the company's databases which can then be hacked (e.g. Target, Michael's). Even if all this doesn't take place, the last four digits of your credit card number are printed on a piece of paper that can easily be misplaced/stolen and obtained by someone else.
Paypal's response should be "I'm sorry, but we can't give this information over the phone" or "You can see a list of cards you have linked to your account on our website." Possibly they could say "Ok, I can give you that information but first give me this Secret Passcode to prove that you are who you say you are." All of these would help actual customers in this situation while guarding against social engineering.
Are you suggesting somehow attaching rocket boosters to the Earth and sending the entire planet flying through space to find another world? If so, there are many problems with that plan. First of all, building rockets that big to move the Earth (but not shatter it to bits) would be a huge undertaking. Powering it would be another huge problem. However, let's assume we're built the boosters and figured out how to power them. We somehow overcome our orbit and blast the Earth out of our solar system. Here's a question: What is heating the Earth? Without the Sun, we'd quickly find the planet turning into an inhospitable ball of ice. I doubt we'd make it out of our solar system, much less to another inhabitable planet. You might be able to solve this by moving the Sun too, but once we get to the technological point where moving a star is easy, I doubt that traveling to another planet will be a challenge.
Making the TSA into real-life red shirts just makes sense. In the Star Trek world, Redshirts were allegedly for security, but did little more than get themselves killed. They were Star Trek's version of security theater! The TSA is our version of security theater. So at least make them useful and blast them into space. They can even have some nice, new, shiny, red spacesuits to wear.
I think this was the key. Bush Jr, by himself, was a weaker than average President. However, he had an administration that pushed the limits of Executive Branch power. Cheney et all wanted the President to be the supreme ruler unanswerable to anyone so that the Democrats couldn't stop them from doing what they wanted to do. Of course, the danger with this is that - if you get it - it is only a matter of time before "that other party" gains control of this seat of power and you are faced with the receiving end of the power*. Because, no matter what they say while campaigning, no politician is going to roll back Presidential powers. At best, they'll just expand them at a slower pace or in different areas than the other guy would.
* Thus my constant rule of determining whether a certain government official should have a certain power: How would you like it if the person occupying that position had the exact opposite political views that you do and used that power? If you'd oppose that, then you can't support the official (presumably from "your party") having that power at all.
True, but I'd add two caveats. First, too little rules can lead to kids engaging in patently dangerous activities. I'm not talking about potentially dangerous things like climbing trees, but doing things like bullying or hitting each other with objects. You need basic ground rules. The trick is setting those ground rules without them morphing into a "control every move you make" rules system.
Second, there are some kids that like organization. My son has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and Anxiety Disorder. He thrives on schedules and hates disorganized time. The more time he spends where he doesn't know what he is supposed to be doing, the more anxious he gets and the more likely he is to engage in behavior that will get him in trouble. (Sadly, too few people see this rising anxiety and just assume he's a trouble-maker despite a doctor's diagnosis and repeated talks with people about ways to spot his anxiety.) In his case, you almost can't schedule his day too much. Almost because being too specific on the schedule can lead to anxiety when the schedule needs to change on the fly. He doesn't handle this well either.
Of course, I recognize that he's the exception rather than the rule, but it just goes to show that you need to take the individual child's needs into consideration rather than assuming that one set of rules (or lack thereof) will fit all children.
One article I read phrased this as the NSA spying on Angry Birds use. Come to think of it, it makes sense! You are launching projectiles (birds) at "buildings" (the pigs' structures) to cause casualties (pigs). The black bird's even a bomb that blows himself up. The Angry Birds are terrorists!!!
Part of the problem is that people don't have the time or knowledge to fix complex electronics themselves. To give an example I'm facing, my HP G60 laptop has a glitching screen. If you don't position the screen "just so" the image flickers erratically to the point that you can't read what's on the screen. To the average user, this would be a "the laptop is dead, buy a new one" moment. I, knowing quite a bit more about computers than the average user, was able to isolate that the problem is likely the video cable. (It works perfectly if hooked up to an external monitor.)
You can buy a new cable for $10-15, but the trick is replacing it. I've done laptop repair before, but taking apart the screen is daunting even for me. My other option is find someone with the knowledge to fix this, but I don't know anyone in my area. (Taking it to Best Buy's Geek Squad is *not* an option!) So while I know that this is likely an inexpensive fix, I might wind up buying a new laptop. (The glitching one would be re-purposed as a media server so it wouldn't be a total waste.)
You've hit the nail on the head. There are some corporations (e.g. Pearson) that have been salivating over how much more money they could make from our educational system. The first step was to convince us that our current system was broken. The second step was to blame the teachers. The third step was to "convince" politicians (who have no educational background) that the business' solution of constant testing was the cure. They test in the beginning of the year and then they test at the end of the year and if the students don't do well enough, the teacher gets fired. No qualifiers such as said teacher's students are intelligent but don't do well on standardized tests. Or, since the test is very secret and not audited by a third party, that the test itself was flawed.
Of course, the corporations have a financial incentive for students to fail. Schools with failing students might buy more test prep books, sign up for teacher training sessions, administrator training sessions, or other goods/services the corporation provides. Schools with students doing well don't generate more corporate profits. In New York's first round of testing, only 31% of students passed.
Just to add insult to injury, New York has adopted a system called EngageNY which is essentially a script for the teacher to follow. It tells the teacher what to say, when, for how long, and in what manner. It literally is broken down into 10 minute segments instructing the teacher on just what to do during each. There is no leeway for teaching in a different manner that the teacher's students might understand better or for spending more/less time on subjects. Teachers are expected to teach according to the script. Of course, this makes teachers nothing but glorified actors who can be swapped out for other people at a moment's notice. (Think about every teacher who inspired you to learn and ask if that teacher was unconventional or sounded like they were robots reading a script.)
Sadly, in New York, they've implemented a "performance metric" in the form of standardized tests that only a select few are allowed to see. Teachers, parents, administrators, etc. can't see them. Students are only allowed to see them because they are taking the tests. Teachers do know what subjects are on the tests (even if they don't know the exact questions) and are given test preparation materials (but not with actual test questions). Since their jobs ride on test scores, they wind up only teaching what will be on the test: English and Math. Social studies, science, and the rest get folded into one of the two somehow or else ditched.
Furthermore, since this is part of Race To The Top requirements, but since the funding from Race To The Top doesn't cover all of the costs, our school districts are spending more money than they are getting by joining Race To The Top. This means, we're facing our school cutting art and music (elementary school level) to finance more test preparation.
Modded as funny, but sadly this is very insightful of how creationists think. They value consistency over everything. Therefore in their minds the constant message of "God Did It" is much firmer ground over the ever-changing explanations of science. The fact that these ever-changing explanations come as the result of new data or that the changes are often minor don't matter. The mere fact that science changes makes it unreliable and the fact that religion stays the same* makes it the one to count on.
* Of course, they completely ignore that religion too changes over time. They do this the same way they do everything else: By saying "religion stays the same" and then ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
This part is key. The religious right likes talking about Judeo Christian values, but I'm not fooled. Though I'm Jewish and theoretically are included in their "Judeo Christian values" what they really mean is "our flavor of Christianity." Let's say they got their fondest desire and the US became a theocracy where laws were set based on what they claimed the Bible said. Who would "they" be? Southern Baptists? Catholics? Protestants? The Westboro Baptist Church? What would happen wouldn't be a "peaceful, prosperous theocracy-based US", but a war among the various religions. Each would deride the others as being "the wrong path" and would jockey for political position. As the larger religions gained political power, they would use political tricks to keep the smaller religions from gaining strength. (Sort of like how Republicans/Democrats keep third parties out of power.)
What's worse would be that politics and religion would become mixed. Not only would religion tell the government what laws to pass, but the government would tell religions how to function. How long would the theocracy function before Islam was banned? What about Hinduism, Wicca, Buddism, and any other non-Judeo Christian religion? For that matter, how long before Jews were forced to accept Christ as their savior or else be jailed for violating the Souls in Heaven by Invoking Trinity Act?
The religious right scare me because of their stated goals. They scare me even more because they are so blind that they don't see that accomplishing their stated goals would lead to a hell, not a heaven.
You know what this means? We need a War On Lightning! To win, we need to eliminate all forms of electricity so that lightning can't form. Electrons are now considered a weapon of mass destruction and possessing them can get you life in prison! Don't even ask what happens to you if you shuffle your socks against a carpet to build up a static charge.
It could be that life "began" on Earth a few times. Perhaps our form of DNA/RNA wasn't even the first, but was the most successful. This could be because of the general environmental conditions of the time or because our form of DNA/RNA is simply more efficient/reproduces better. In any case, our form of life replicated like crazy and the other forms of life could have been driven back to niches until they died out. Fossils are notoriously tricky when it comes to single-cellular life forms, so perhaps we simply don't have the fossil record to know about this happening. Maybe on another planet, which formed life under different situations, the chemical structure of life is different from the one we are based on.
http://xkcd.com/605/
Only extrapolate in the opposite direction.
Both of my boys have had febrile seizures and stopped breathing. This usually doesn't cause any problems, but is the scariest thing I've ever gone through. In the case of my youngest son, though, he turned grey, stopped breathing, and didn't start back on his own. Luckily, my mother-in-law was there and knew how to do rescue breaths on him until the paramedics arrived. He was hospitalized so they could figure out why he didn't start breathing again. He's had multiple febrile seizures since then and every time he gets a fever we give him medicine to get it under control quickly.
Did this kill him? No, but without the rescue breaths my mother-in-law administered this story could have had a much different ending.
I still think there's a future for labels, but it's a much reduced one. Instead of the label being the end-all-and-be-all for the band, it will be a glorified advertising agency that a band contracts with. All copyrights will remain with the band and the band will be able to leave for another label and retain their old music. The label will make money as the band makes money. Of course, they won't make nearly as much and this means many record label executives will lose jobs. Excuse me while I mourn their loss... ok, that's enough.
Don't you see? Any money you don't spend on new music from them is a lost sale. Those lost sales mean you must be pirating music instead because you wouldn't be using the money for food or something nonessential when you could use it to buy more music. Lost sales like that will cause the record executives to starve to death (after they go through their caviar stockpile). How dare you not open your wallets and empty the contents into the recording industry's bank accounts!
I've actually had some good customer service experiences on Twitter. Like any tool, though, it's how the company uses it. E-mail can be a horrible tool for customer service if the company ignores the e-mail for a week and then gives a form letter reply that answers nothing. Phone can be a horrible tool if you get automated menu hell that doesn't let you talk to a real person and get your issue resolved. Bad customer service is bad customer service no matter what tool is used.
You don't even need the hacking step. Say you've got a site that threatens to grow in popularity and upset the status quo. In this scenario, you are the one in power of the nation's web filter and thus have incentive to keep the status quo in place. You block the site for being "obscene" or some other generic term. A portion of the population will complain, of course, but most will just ignore it as it doesn't directly impact them at that moment. Then you just wait for the movement to splinter into new sites, block those, and repeat until the movement loses steam. Mission accomplished! You've suppressed a growing movement using nothing but your handy dandy national web filter.
All religions are equal. Some are just more equal than others.
This would be funny, but this is just how politicians like this think. They think that there should be freedom to follow whatever religion you want to follow, so long as the government is based on Christianity and anyone who interacts with the government follows Christianity's precepts. (Not just any version of Christianity, of course, but their own particular version. All those others aren't True Christianity but pale imitations.). In their version of history, the founding fathers were all Good And Proper Christians who founded this country as a Christian Nation. Being the generous souls that they were, they graciously allowed all those inferior religions to worship as they saw fit so long as they didn't interfere with the Christian Nation, but somewhere along the way we became a secular nation and we must return to our Christian roots to save the country. (This group's view, still, not my own.)
The view is so twisted that these politicians actually think they're doing a great service by ditching science in favor of the bible. As if our kids will effectively compete for future jobs by shunning all that science-stuff and thumping their bibles harder.
Actually, this is the real reason that North Korea wants nuclear weapons. They're trying to build a double black diamond slope. I hear it's going to be a killer.
So this rock moved when we weren't looking at it... Do you realize what this means? It's a Weeping Angel! Get that rover out of there now! (But don't look away. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead.)
The folks at NASA are remotely controlling a roving "SUV" on a planet millions of miles away from us in a scientific effort to learn more about the Universe and our surroundings. Does this impact day-to-day life *right now*? No, of course not. Is it incredibly cool and deserve a spot on Slashdot's home page? Definitely. Are your endeavors even close to this scale of technological achievement? (I'll be the first to admit that my own endeavors, while important to me, don't rise to the level of technical coolness that would make for an interesting Slashdot story.)