Having been around Orthodox Jews a lot (my parents belonged to an Orthodox temple), I can say that a lot of Orthodox live in fear of mankind's desires. They think that the most pious rabbi, were he to walk into a room with a naked woman, would succumb to desire in an instant. (I prefer to believe the best of people and that people are, in general, powerful enough to resist their temptations.)
While I was dating my wife (but still living with my parents), my parents belonged to an Orthodox temple. My wife (then-girlfriend) came over for a visit and my mother had to drop something off at the rabbi's house. When he heard that we were alone together, he got very worried and told my mother to go back home immediately.
This, plus other sermons the rabbi delivered, make me think that the ultra-orthodox live in fear that they are so weak-willed that they will give into desire/sin/whatever once the tiniest of opportunities present themselves. Thus, they make rules to prevent people from coming anywhere close to temptation. And then make rules to keep people from coming close to the rule which protects against temptation (lest they break that original rule). And then make rules to protect the rules which protect the rules which protect against temptation. Add in an adherence to tradition, even if the original source of temptation is gone, and this explains much of why they seem to have so many rules which don't make sense.
(Disclaimer: I'm actually pretty religious, but I decide which religious rules make sense for me to follow and ignore the ones that I think make no sense whatsoever.)
Not forced, but one time I did stumble upon a porn site when I typed the name of a non-porn site in wrong. The entire event was made worse by 1) it being at a new job and 2) this happening after sites learned to use annoying pop-ups when the window was closed, but before anti-popup software went mainstream.
Of course, if I wanted to prevent something like this from happening to my kids, the solution would not be to force the entire Internet to conform to my beliefs. Instead, it would be a combination of filtering software to prevent me or my kids from going to said websites and educating my kids on what they should do if they stumbled upon such a site.
My question is always this: "Am I committing a crime by recording this?"
If the answer is "Yes, I am", then deleting the photos/videos is destroying evidence. If the answer is "No, I'm not", then they have no reason for deleting the photos/videos.
I've never seen the "big forks/spoons" study. I did see one where people were served stale popcorn in either big or small containers and were shown a movie. The big container people ate a lot more popcorn (even though it was stale) than the small container people. (Basically, if you give people more food, they'll eat more food. Even if the food isn't that great.)
Exactly. Services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime scare the cable companies. If you take the concept of those to their logical conclusion, you get a cable TV network. One where all of the episodes are streamed via TCP/IP (instead of via coax) whenever you request them and all past episodes are available "on demand." One where the "cable TV company" doesn't need to lay any fiber or cabling of any kind and, from launch, covers the entire United States.
Cable companies are shaking in their boots over this possibility so they figure they can kill Internet TV with caps and overages. If you watch TV online, you might go over the cap. If you do this often enough, that inexpensive IP Cable TV service won't be so inexpensive and Comcast and their ilk won't seem so pricey. (Or, at the very least, the existing cable companies can make some money off of the IP Cable companies.)
I called up my cable company and told them I was seriously thinking of canceling my service due to the costs being so high. I pointed out that new users get one rate and are quoted that they will save $X. I pointed out that the rate I pay is much more than $X more than the new user rate. They locked me into a much better rate for a year. Next year, I plan on calling back and threatening to leave (again) if they don't reduce my rates.
Meanwhile, I'll also be working out a system to not have to have cable TV. (Some combination of purchased & ripped DVDs on a media center, Netflix, our local library, and possibly Amazon Prime.)
The problem with this is that they are only counting public posts. If I post a hundred updates on Google+ and share them with my Friends circle, then none of those updates would be counted using this methodology. Even if I have a hundred friends and each of those friends reshares it to a hundred more friends. (Of course, short of Google releasing official numbers, it's hard to gauge how many people are actually using it.
That being said, I've all but abandoned my Google+ page for two reasons:
1) I blog and use social media under a pseudonym, not my real name. Google+ is requiring me to use my real name which makes me uncomfortable. First of all, I've worked hard to build name recognition under my pseudonym so people know me by that, not by my real name. Secondly, I don't want people being able to track down where I live based on my full real name. (I've had to deal with an online stalker so this is actually a concern.) Yes, I realize I'm posting using my real name here. Honestly, if I could change my username here without ditching this account and signing up for a new one, I would. (I used my real name for Slashdot years back when I wasn't as concerned about using my full, real name online.) Besides, I'm not saying what my blog/social media pseudonym is so the two can't be tied together.
2) There are no third party clients to post to Google+ or check the streams. If I want to tweet, I can use Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Seesmic or a dozen other clients. I can find the one that works the best for me. Some of these clients would also let me post to Facebook (if I had a FB account, which I don't). However, Google has yet to release a read-write API. They only have a read-only one. So if I want to post something to Twitter and Google+, I need to post it to Twitter and then go to Google+ to post it again.
Combine these two with limited social media time and my Google+ usage declines more and more.
One downside I could see is that authors wouldn't be able to get movie deals for their book series. Let's take Harry Potter as an example. The first book was released on June 30, 1997. This means that JK Rowling would have had until June 30, 2002 to get the first film made. The first film was actually released in 2001, which means that the deal to make it was likely struck in 1999. If the movie studios had the opportunity to just make Harry Potter without having to pay JK Rowling anything, they likely would have waited the three extra years. Perhaps there would be some incentive to sign with her to be the first one out, but then any studio would be able to release their own version a few years later.
Of course, I'm not a fan of the 90+ year copyrights we currently have. I actually think that the system we had at the founding of our country was just fine with one small tweak. You get 14 years of copyright protection for your works automatically (that's the small tweak, no initial registration required). Then, after 14 years, you get to renew it for another 14 years for a reasonable price. (A movie company would have been unlikely to tell JK Rowling that they'd rather wait until 2025 to make the first Harry Potter movie.)
This would generate revenue, allow works to pass into the public domain (thus spurring creative endeavors based off of those works), and allow orphaned works or non-revenue generating works to pass into the public domain quicker.
A few years back, I lost a lot of weight (about 80 pounds). One of the big things that helped was eating my meals on the small dinner plates instead of the big ones. This gave me the illusion of having more food than I really had. Try it sometime. Put the exact same amount of food on a big plate and on a little plate. Ask someone (who doesn't know they have the same amount) to tell you which plate has more food. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly), the illusion of eating a lot of food versus very little food makes you feel fuller. About the only exception we made to the small plate rule was when we had salads, but we didn't load these up with unhealthy dressings and the like. The bigger plates became vehicles to transport more veggies into us.
Losing 10 pounds in a week is actually pretty dangerous. Your best bet is to lose a smaller amount (1 or 2 pounds), but continue it for a long period of time. Over a year, that could work out to 52 to 104 pounds lost. Too many people want a quick fix, though. They hope to go from flabby to perfectly fit in 3 weeks and, when they fail, they give up completely. Or move onto the next fad diet. Or, worst of all, they actually force themselves to drop the weight through some highly unhealthy means ("I lost 30 pounds by only consuming watermelon juice!") and then they go off the diet and gain that weight back plus some more. I'd love for The Biggest Loser to do a series of reunion shows to see just where their contestants are now. I'd wager that most of them have gained back much, if not all, of their reality show weight loss.
Too many people seem to suffer from "If I Imagine It, The Terrorists Can Build It And Thus We Need To Protect Against It" Syndrome. Of course, the cynic in me thinks that this syndrome is encouraged by people who have a financial stake in protecting against the threat. In unrelated news, the terrorists might build a giant, robotic monster to stomp through New York City. Clearly, we need to head them off by building our own giant, robotic monsters to protect against those. Luckily, my company can build those if given a billion dollar contract. You don't want the terrorists to win, do you?
That's what my wife and I often do. Schedule a show for recording and then, about 10 minutes in, begin watching it. By the time we've caught up with Live TV, the show is over and we've only "watched" the commercials in super-fast forward mode. My DVR also helpfully returns to the show's return if I hit play after the commercials have ended and the show begins so I don't need to guess when that will be. If I see Sheldon and his play The Big Bang Theory starts playing from the end of the commercial break. (Yes, I will stop and watch a commercial if it catches my eye, but 99.99% of commercials out there don't interest me at all.)
I take it you've never been to Disney World. The rides they create aren't simple roller coasters. It's an entire experience involving lots of technology. At one time, it was all about animatronics that looked as real as possible. Now, it's more about computer projections either mixing with real life or being generated in real-time.
Actually, it made perfect sense to me that Disney would do something like this. I was just in Disney World and they have this new game that people can play. You get "spell cards" and walk up to a designated spot. Suddenly, a portal "appears" and you use the spell cards to fight Disney villains. There's an overarching story to this, but the relevant part is that these "portals" seem to appear out of spots that otherwise look normal.
Disney has also worked on costumed characters that can speak with the character's voice on the fly (not prerecorded sound bites) and move their eyes and mouth and have worked on touch-screen walls that look like honey is dripping down them (for the Winnie the Pooh ride). I could definitely see them using something like this in their theme parks.
These weren't even the Rapiscan scanners (though my in-laws went through those). I took my shoes off and they (along with the pin underneath) passed through the X-Ray machine with my laptop, backpack, etc. If they didn't notice a chunk of metal on the bottom of my shoes, what else aren't they noticing?
I recently came home from Disney World. After we got back, I noticed something on the bottom of my shoe. Apparently, there was a Disney pin that had been on the ground at some point. I stepped on it, it got lodged in my shoe, and came with me all the way home. A metal pin with a sharp spike in it. In the bottom of my shoe. That went through the TSA x-ray machine. They didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with an oddly shaped piece of metal stuck in my shoe?
Granted, I don't think the pin is a dangerous object, but this should have at least required a "Sir, what's this on your shoe?" question or a "We just need to examine your shoes for a second."
Given that my backup is 800GB, that initial backup would take some time. In addition, that ~$100 per year could be saved and used every 2 years to get new hard drives. (So I could ensure that old hard drives don't cause data loss.)
I meant 800GB, but exhaustion got the better of me.
Years back, I used to back up on CD. When my backups starting spanning 5 CDs, I switched to DVDs. Then, when my backups were spanning 6 DVDs, I migrated to a hard drive-based backup.
You're right. I meant 800GB, not MB. (I blame too many nights of staying up late working.)
I do like using Google Drive (formally Google Documents) to store documents that I'll need quick access to from any computer (or from my smartphone) or that I would like to easily share out with other people.
I make two backups to two different USB drives. One stays in my house and one gets taken off-site. It's very unlikely that both will die/get stolen at the same time. If something happens to one, I can replace it and copy the data back over.
Cloud storage is nice if you don't have much to backup. If you have 5GB or less, go with cloud storage and local DVD or HDD backups. Otherwise, you're better off paying for a second external hard drive. (I don't know the going rate for a safe deposit vault to put the off-site backup in, but it's likely less than 1TB of cloud storage.)
Congratulations, Heartland Institute, your argument is now so depraved that you've reduced yourselves to holding up pictures of Hitler in a public forum while pantomiming your opponents.
Does this mean that Heartland Institute just Godwinned themselves?
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Having been around Orthodox Jews a lot (my parents belonged to an Orthodox temple), I can say that a lot of Orthodox live in fear of mankind's desires. They think that the most pious rabbi, were he to walk into a room with a naked woman, would succumb to desire in an instant. (I prefer to believe the best of people and that people are, in general, powerful enough to resist their temptations.)
While I was dating my wife (but still living with my parents), my parents belonged to an Orthodox temple. My wife (then-girlfriend) came over for a visit and my mother had to drop something off at the rabbi's house. When he heard that we were alone together, he got very worried and told my mother to go back home immediately.
This, plus other sermons the rabbi delivered, make me think that the ultra-orthodox live in fear that they are so weak-willed that they will give into desire/sin/whatever once the tiniest of opportunities present themselves. Thus, they make rules to prevent people from coming anywhere close to temptation. And then make rules to keep people from coming close to the rule which protects against temptation (lest they break that original rule). And then make rules to protect the rules which protect the rules which protect against temptation. Add in an adherence to tradition, even if the original source of temptation is gone, and this explains much of why they seem to have so many rules which don't make sense.
(Disclaimer: I'm actually pretty religious, but I decide which religious rules make sense for me to follow and ignore the ones that I think make no sense whatsoever.)
Not forced, but one time I did stumble upon a porn site when I typed the name of a non-porn site in wrong. The entire event was made worse by 1) it being at a new job and 2) this happening after sites learned to use annoying pop-ups when the window was closed, but before anti-popup software went mainstream.
Of course, if I wanted to prevent something like this from happening to my kids, the solution would not be to force the entire Internet to conform to my beliefs. Instead, it would be a combination of filtering software to prevent me or my kids from going to said websites and educating my kids on what they should do if they stumbled upon such a site.
My question is always this: "Am I committing a crime by recording this?"
If the answer is "Yes, I am", then deleting the photos/videos is destroying evidence.
If the answer is "No, I'm not", then they have no reason for deleting the photos/videos.
I've never seen the "big forks/spoons" study. I did see one where people were served stale popcorn in either big or small containers and were shown a movie. The big container people ate a lot more popcorn (even though it was stale) than the small container people. (Basically, if you give people more food, they'll eat more food. Even if the food isn't that great.)
Exactly. Services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime scare the cable companies. If you take the concept of those to their logical conclusion, you get a cable TV network. One where all of the episodes are streamed via TCP/IP (instead of via coax) whenever you request them and all past episodes are available "on demand." One where the "cable TV company" doesn't need to lay any fiber or cabling of any kind and, from launch, covers the entire United States.
Cable companies are shaking in their boots over this possibility so they figure they can kill Internet TV with caps and overages. If you watch TV online, you might go over the cap. If you do this often enough, that inexpensive IP Cable TV service won't be so inexpensive and Comcast and their ilk won't seem so pricey. (Or, at the very least, the existing cable companies can make some money off of the IP Cable companies.)
I called up my cable company and told them I was seriously thinking of canceling my service due to the costs being so high. I pointed out that new users get one rate and are quoted that they will save $X. I pointed out that the rate I pay is much more than $X more than the new user rate. They locked me into a much better rate for a year. Next year, I plan on calling back and threatening to leave (again) if they don't reduce my rates.
Meanwhile, I'll also be working out a system to not have to have cable TV. (Some combination of purchased & ripped DVDs on a media center, Netflix, our local library, and possibly Amazon Prime.)
The problem with this is that they are only counting public posts. If I post a hundred updates on Google+ and share them with my Friends circle, then none of those updates would be counted using this methodology. Even if I have a hundred friends and each of those friends reshares it to a hundred more friends. (Of course, short of Google releasing official numbers, it's hard to gauge how many people are actually using it.
That being said, I've all but abandoned my Google+ page for two reasons:
1) I blog and use social media under a pseudonym, not my real name. Google+ is requiring me to use my real name which makes me uncomfortable. First of all, I've worked hard to build name recognition under my pseudonym so people know me by that, not by my real name. Secondly, I don't want people being able to track down where I live based on my full real name. (I've had to deal with an online stalker so this is actually a concern.) Yes, I realize I'm posting using my real name here. Honestly, if I could change my username here without ditching this account and signing up for a new one, I would. (I used my real name for Slashdot years back when I wasn't as concerned about using my full, real name online.) Besides, I'm not saying what my blog/social media pseudonym is so the two can't be tied together.
2) There are no third party clients to post to Google+ or check the streams. If I want to tweet, I can use Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Seesmic or a dozen other clients. I can find the one that works the best for me. Some of these clients would also let me post to Facebook (if I had a FB account, which I don't). However, Google has yet to release a read-write API. They only have a read-only one. So if I want to post something to Twitter and Google+, I need to post it to Twitter and then go to Google+ to post it again.
Combine these two with limited social media time and my Google+ usage declines more and more.
One downside I could see is that authors wouldn't be able to get movie deals for their book series. Let's take Harry Potter as an example. The first book was released on June 30, 1997. This means that JK Rowling would have had until June 30, 2002 to get the first film made. The first film was actually released in 2001, which means that the deal to make it was likely struck in 1999. If the movie studios had the opportunity to just make Harry Potter without having to pay JK Rowling anything, they likely would have waited the three extra years. Perhaps there would be some incentive to sign with her to be the first one out, but then any studio would be able to release their own version a few years later.
Of course, I'm not a fan of the 90+ year copyrights we currently have. I actually think that the system we had at the founding of our country was just fine with one small tweak. You get 14 years of copyright protection for your works automatically (that's the small tweak, no initial registration required). Then, after 14 years, you get to renew it for another 14 years for a reasonable price. (A movie company would have been unlikely to tell JK Rowling that they'd rather wait until 2025 to make the first Harry Potter movie.)
This would generate revenue, allow works to pass into the public domain (thus spurring creative endeavors based off of those works), and allow orphaned works or non-revenue generating works to pass into the public domain quicker.
A few years back, I lost a lot of weight (about 80 pounds). One of the big things that helped was eating my meals on the small dinner plates instead of the big ones. This gave me the illusion of having more food than I really had. Try it sometime. Put the exact same amount of food on a big plate and on a little plate. Ask someone (who doesn't know they have the same amount) to tell you which plate has more food. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly), the illusion of eating a lot of food versus very little food makes you feel fuller. About the only exception we made to the small plate rule was when we had salads, but we didn't load these up with unhealthy dressings and the like. The bigger plates became vehicles to transport more veggies into us.
Losing 10 pounds in a week is actually pretty dangerous. Your best bet is to lose a smaller amount (1 or 2 pounds), but continue it for a long period of time. Over a year, that could work out to 52 to 104 pounds lost. Too many people want a quick fix, though. They hope to go from flabby to perfectly fit in 3 weeks and, when they fail, they give up completely. Or move onto the next fad diet. Or, worst of all, they actually force themselves to drop the weight through some highly unhealthy means ("I lost 30 pounds by only consuming watermelon juice!") and then they go off the diet and gain that weight back plus some more. I'd love for The Biggest Loser to do a series of reunion shows to see just where their contestants are now. I'd wager that most of them have gained back much, if not all, of their reality show weight loss.
Too many people seem to suffer from "If I Imagine It, The Terrorists Can Build It And Thus We Need To Protect Against It" Syndrome. Of course, the cynic in me thinks that this syndrome is encouraged by people who have a financial stake in protecting against the threat. In unrelated news, the terrorists might build a giant, robotic monster to stomp through New York City. Clearly, we need to head them off by building our own giant, robotic monsters to protect against those. Luckily, my company can build those if given a billion dollar contract. You don't want the terrorists to win, do you?
That's what my wife and I often do. Schedule a show for recording and then, about 10 minutes in, begin watching it. By the time we've caught up with Live TV, the show is over and we've only "watched" the commercials in super-fast forward mode. My DVR also helpfully returns to the show's return if I hit play after the commercials have ended and the show begins so I don't need to guess when that will be. If I see Sheldon and his play The Big Bang Theory starts playing from the end of the commercial break. (Yes, I will stop and watch a commercial if it catches my eye, but 99.99% of commercials out there don't interest me at all.)
But how else are we going to learn about the new episodes of Shovin' Buddies or Slowly Rotating Black Man?
I take it you've never been to Disney World. The rides they create aren't simple roller coasters. It's an entire experience involving lots of technology. At one time, it was all about animatronics that looked as real as possible. Now, it's more about computer projections either mixing with real life or being generated in real-time.
Actually, it made perfect sense to me that Disney would do something like this. I was just in Disney World and they have this new game that people can play. You get "spell cards" and walk up to a designated spot. Suddenly, a portal "appears" and you use the spell cards to fight Disney villains. There's an overarching story to this, but the relevant part is that these "portals" seem to appear out of spots that otherwise look normal.
Disney has also worked on costumed characters that can speak with the character's voice on the fly (not prerecorded sound bites) and move their eyes and mouth and have worked on touch-screen walls that look like honey is dripping down them (for the Winnie the Pooh ride). I could definitely see them using something like this in their theme parks.
Warning: May cause green skin, anger issues, and the desire to wear ripped purple pants.
These weren't even the Rapiscan scanners (though my in-laws went through those). I took my shoes off and they (along with the pin underneath) passed through the X-Ray machine with my laptop, backpack, etc. If they didn't notice a chunk of metal on the bottom of my shoes, what else aren't they noticing?
I recently came home from Disney World. After we got back, I noticed something on the bottom of my shoe. Apparently, there was a Disney pin that had been on the ground at some point. I stepped on it, it got lodged in my shoe, and came with me all the way home. A metal pin with a sharp spike in it. In the bottom of my shoe. That went through the TSA x-ray machine. They didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with an oddly shaped piece of metal stuck in my shoe?
Granted, I don't think the pin is a dangerous object, but this should have at least required a "Sir, what's this on your shoe?" question or a "We just need to examine your shoes for a second."
Clearly, if there were no pirates, it would have made much more. Like about (checks MPAA script and puts pinky to lip) ONE BILLION DOLLARS!
Those nasty pirates. Now the studio execs' money pile is just huge instead of obscenely huge. Won't someone think of the poor studio exec?
Given that my backup is 800GB, that initial backup would take some time. In addition, that ~$100 per year could be saved and used every 2 years to get new hard drives. (So I could ensure that old hard drives don't cause data loss.)
I meant 800GB, but exhaustion got the better of me.
Years back, I used to back up on CD. When my backups starting spanning 5 CDs, I switched to DVDs. Then, when my backups were spanning 6 DVDs, I migrated to a hard drive-based backup.
You're right. I meant 800GB, not MB. (I blame too many nights of staying up late working.)
I do like using Google Drive (formally Google Documents) to store documents that I'll need quick access to from any computer (or from my smartphone) or that I would like to easily share out with other people.
I make two backups to two different USB drives. One stays in my house and one gets taken off-site. It's very unlikely that both will die/get stolen at the same time. If something happens to one, I can replace it and copy the data back over.
Cloud storage is nice if you don't have much to backup. If you have 5GB or less, go with cloud storage and local DVD or HDD backups. Otherwise, you're better off paying for a second external hard drive. (I don't know the going rate for a safe deposit vault to put the off-site backup in, but it's likely less than 1TB of cloud storage.)
Does this mean that Heartland Institute just Godwinned themselves?