My son fell down and hit his head on the pavement. We took him to the ER (he turned out fine), but a few days later my wife came down with the flu. Should we have not taken our son to the ER so as to avoid sick people (despite a possible head injury)? In this case, exposure to the flu was near-inevitable.
In addition, the flu doesn't manifest right away. You can be infected by someone who seems perfectly healthy. They might have just coughed in their hands and touched something. You touch it too and, guess what, you've got flu! The flu vaccine, however, can reduce the chances that you'll actually come down with the flu and can prevent you from retransmitting the flu to others. This is especially true of the H1N1 vaccine which is just like the normal flu vaccine except that it targets a known wide-spread flu variant.
I haven't started any wars either. My coworkers have a nice, big monitor, but I've resisted the urge to invade their office and take it as the spoils of war. I also decided against invading the cafeteria when I was hungry. Why, I'm not starting wars almost continuously! Maybe I deserve a Nobel Peace Prize too. Seriously, who do you have to invade to get a Nobel Peace Prize around here?
Hello! I am from the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE committee and am informing you that you have won the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE! To collect your award and prize money, please reply with your name, address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, unladen swallow weight, mother's maiden name, bank account numbers, passwords to your online banking accounts, current bank balance, Slashdot account information, social networking username and passwords, and your e-mail addresses and passwords. We look forward to giving you what you deserve!
So he's not using online banking because some phisher sent him an e-mail and he almost fell for it? If he took some money out of an ATM and then someone tried to mug him, would he refuse to use ATMs from then on? If he saw a report of a bank robber killing someone during a robbery attempt, would he not go into a bank's branch to do his banking? Just because the phishing attempt occurred doesn't necessarily mean that his bank's online banking system is insecure.
I used to read the paper every day. I had a ritual: Comics first followed by editorials, national/world news and then local news.
Then I began reading my comics online. You can get all of the major newspaper comics for free online via comics.com or gocomics.com. Then, of course, there are tons of great Web Comics authors that don't appear in the papers. I'm definitely reading more comics now than I ever did during my paper reading days.
For editorials/opinions, nowadays, I end up going to blogs. By reading various blogs, I can get a wide range of opinions on a subject. Heck, even social networking sites like Twitter are good for this. Though the opinions might be only 140 characters long (or might be a link to a longer opinion), I get opinions from many more people than just my local newspaper's staff.
For national/world news and local news I browse Google News and some local blogs. Again, I get many more stories than my local paper would usually print.
In the end, the only thing I really keep my subscription for is the Sunday ads/coupons. I know I can get the ads online, but it winds up being easier to get them in one easy to flip through pile. And electronic coupons exist, but haven't overtaken newspaper coupons just yet.
We get our paper on Thursday through Sunday only because the paper gave us Thursdays and Fridays free. Otherwise, we'd be down to weekends only. (Sundays only didn't save that much money.) However, if we could buy a "weekly ads and coupons only" packet instead of having our paper subscription, we definitely would!
Why then I'll form a corporation to lobby my representative. There. Now I'll.... Odd. Suddenly, I'm in favor of corporations being treated like people.
If it came down smelling a day's worth of someone's sweat or poisonous gas, I would hope most people would choose the sweat smell. It might be unpleasant, but it won't kill you.
Not that I know of. As far as I know, being on the side of the road talking on the phone isn't against the law (unless you're in a no parking zone or something in which case being on the phone isn't the problem).
It's illegal where I live (New York) even though I've seen people obviously texting while they're driving. Many states, though, are having problems passing bans because some people think it is a "personal rights" issue. They fail to realize, however, that while you might have the right to take a chance with your life due to texting while driving, you don't have the right to take chances with other people's rights. If you cross the center line and plow into another car head on because you just *had* to reply to your friend's incoming text message, you could wind up killing people other than yourself. (There was a story on NPR where this exact thing happened. The twenty year old who was texting killed a parent and child and he survived.)
Personally, I think it is sad that we even need to ban it. It should be a common sense thing that you shouldn't be looking at your phone to compose a text while you're driving. If you really need to text, pull over, send the text, then start back up. If you really need to talk with the person, get a hands-free set and call them. (Yes, being engaged in a phone conversation is still distracting, but it is less distracting than looking away from the road for a few seconds to type and send a text message.
You could just turn up the air conditioner. Of course, then if it gets too cold, you can crank up the heater. And if the heater's too strong, you could crank up the AC. Then maybe make some icy margaritas. Just don't hit the "fuel guzzler" and make pop-tarts at the same time!
Shoot. Meant to press "Preview" not "Submit." *slaps forehead*
"Bribe" and "Buy off" should have been crossed out. However, now that I've previewed & see that it doesn't work....
But the corporation can bribe...I mean buy off... I mean lobby government officials to get laws passed that favor their businesses at the expense of everyone else. In some cases, the business writes the entire bill themselves and gives it to their pet congress-critter who then introduces it as is all for a scratch behind the ear and a belly rub or two.
But the corporation can bribe buy off lobby government officials to get laws passed that favor their businesses at the expense of everyone else. In some cases, the business writes the entire bill themselves and gives it to their pet congress-critter who then introduces it as is all for a scratch behind the ear and a belly rub or two.
Honestly, I was still a kid when the Bush administration was frolicking around doing this, and I wondered why adults would let anyone do something so corrupt and insanely evil to them.
Because too many people's brains shut down when they hear the word "terrorist." Tell people that you're going to round up folks and ship them off to a prison where they'll sit for years without any trial and people will oppose it. Tell people that those folks are suspected terrorists and their brains shut down and they nod in agreement. With their brains shut down, they don't think about abuse of power at all.
Add in party loyalty and abuse of power allegations get answered with "But he's a respected member of Party X! Everyone in Party X is looking out for my interests. Not like those traitors in Party Y!" They don't stop to think that, even if the "Party X" member isn't abusing his power, he could easily be voted out of office and replaced by someone from Party Y. Then, of course, those same people will proclaim: "It's obvious that Party Y Politician is using powers that are unconstitutional! We've got to reign in this out of control government NOW! Toss the traitor out of office!!!" The fact that "their" party used the same powers doesn't matter. What matters is that the powers are only good when wielded by a member of "their" party (and then, sometimes only by an appropriately extreme right or left wing member of the party).
Personally, I view all powers that the government requests with two questions:
1. How can this be abused and are there mechanisms in place to prevent abuse?
2. How would this be used by a politician who I disagree with on the issues?
If I don't like the answers to either question, I can't support the granting of the powers, even if it would - in the short term - advance an issue I believe in.
Which makes it that much worse. It's one thing if an officer was taking a break and playing the guy's Wii Bowling. That would be wrong, but maybe not bad enough to seriously jeopardize the evidence (though there would still be questions about it in court). But to stop mid-evidence collection to bowl a round or two? Any half-way decent defense attorney is going to make this video Exhibit A.
Slacking off every once and a while is one thing. The police chief even admitted that most house searches have "downtime." Still, playing Wii Bowling for 9 hours is a bit excessive.
A food blogger posted a variation on a potato salad recipe that she liked. She attributed the original source even though the recipe was altered. The source of the original recipe (Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country) countered with a cease and desist notice claiming "no modifications allowed. Our recipes are tested up to 100 times for a reason (i.e. because they work)."
So let's say you get a really good pasta recipe from Cook's but you don't like the broccoli that's in it. You can't replace it with snow peas. After all, they tested their recipe and it is perfect so you can't improve upon it. Or if that "perfect" recipe calls for sausage and you're a vegetarian. No leaving that sausage out! Cook it the "Cook's perfect" way and like it! And Flying Spaghetti Monster help you if you post a variation on that pasta recipe, even if it is radically altered.
Here's a blog post about the incident: http://maurarose.livejournal.com/tag/cooks+country It looks like the original blog has gone invite only (possibly in part due to Cook's threatening to sue if they posted any modified recipes). I'm not sure what happened with the cease and desist notice.
Toss some chickpeas into this blender with some garlic, olive oil, lemon juice. Add in some tahini and some spices. Blend and we have... copyright infringement?!!
I remember writing back in the pre-computer days. (For me, early 1980's.) I hated it. First of all, I'm left handed so I'd always wind up with smeared ink on the page and on my hand. Secondly, my pen could never keep up with my brain. So I'd have to slow down thinking to put it all on the page. Third, if I wanted to move a word, sentence, or paragraph, I needed to cross out (messily) the offending sections and rewrite them. Alternatively, I would need to make some kind of note to myself (e.g. arrows) and then rewrite the entire page. In short, writing a paper was a horrendous experience.
Then I got my first computer. All of a sudden, I had no ink stains, I could type much faster (and this was back in my "hunt and peck" days), and moving words/sentences/paragraphs was a breeze.
But it looks pretty similar to other instances of my signature, and a handwriting expert could verify that, while pointing out how a forgery is different.
My signatures tend to look very different from one another depending on many factors (how rushed I am, how tired I am, etc). The biggest change I saw was when we closed on our house. I must have signed my name about a hundred times. And no, I'm not exaggerating. The first signature said "Jason Levine" quite clearly. The last signature said something like "J__o_ L__i__e." If you took my first and last signatures and compared them, most people would think that they were written by different people.
And even if handwriting experts could verify that my signatures were all done by me, how many handwriting experts are employed as bank tellers (processing the checks I sign) or as grocery store clerks (glancing for a millisecond at the signed receipt). And don't even get me started on those electronic signature tablets that turn my name into "J[illegible scribble] L[illegible scribble]."
Ok, I'm not a fan of this RIAA "Music Rules" program, but where did the article say that making a personal use copy and then playing it when a friend came over was illegal? I looked at the article and the teacher's PDF but didn't see anything about that case. There was the case where someone burned a CD copy and gave it to a friend, but that would be copyright infringement.
And, just to muddy the waters more, I've "bought" many songs from Amie Street or Amazon MP3 at a price point of $0. In the former case, they were songs with low sales (songs start out free and rise in price as people buy them). In the latter case, they were one day promotions where select songs were given away for free (to tempt you into buying non-free songs, obviously). I guess I'm a "songlifter."
Slashdot Mirror
My son fell down and hit his head on the pavement. We took him to the ER (he turned out fine), but a few days later my wife came down with the flu. Should we have not taken our son to the ER so as to avoid sick people (despite a possible head injury)? In this case, exposure to the flu was near-inevitable.
In addition, the flu doesn't manifest right away. You can be infected by someone who seems perfectly healthy. They might have just coughed in their hands and touched something. You touch it too and, guess what, you've got flu! The flu vaccine, however, can reduce the chances that you'll actually come down with the flu and can prevent you from retransmitting the flu to others. This is especially true of the H1N1 vaccine which is just like the normal flu vaccine except that it targets a known wide-spread flu variant.
I haven't started any wars either. My coworkers have a nice, big monitor, but I've resisted the urge to invade their office and take it as the spoils of war. I also decided against invading the cafeteria when I was hungry. Why, I'm not starting wars almost continuously! Maybe I deserve a Nobel Peace Prize too. Seriously, who do you have to invade to get a Nobel Peace Prize around here?
Hello! I am from the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE committee and am informing you that you have won the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE! To collect your award and prize money, please reply with your name, address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, unladen swallow weight, mother's maiden name, bank account numbers, passwords to your online banking accounts, current bank balance, Slashdot account information, social networking username and passwords, and your e-mail addresses and passwords. We look forward to giving you what you deserve!
So he's not using online banking because some phisher sent him an e-mail and he almost fell for it? If he took some money out of an ATM and then someone tried to mug him, would he refuse to use ATMs from then on? If he saw a report of a bank robber killing someone during a robbery attempt, would he not go into a bank's branch to do his banking? Just because the phishing attempt occurred doesn't necessarily mean that his bank's online banking system is insecure.
I used to read the paper every day. I had a ritual: Comics first followed by editorials, national/world news and then local news.
Then I began reading my comics online. You can get all of the major newspaper comics for free online via comics.com or gocomics.com. Then, of course, there are tons of great Web Comics authors that don't appear in the papers. I'm definitely reading more comics now than I ever did during my paper reading days.
For editorials/opinions, nowadays, I end up going to blogs. By reading various blogs, I can get a wide range of opinions on a subject. Heck, even social networking sites like Twitter are good for this. Though the opinions might be only 140 characters long (or might be a link to a longer opinion), I get opinions from many more people than just my local newspaper's staff.
For national/world news and local news I browse Google News and some local blogs. Again, I get many more stories than my local paper would usually print.
In the end, the only thing I really keep my subscription for is the Sunday ads/coupons. I know I can get the ads online, but it winds up being easier to get them in one easy to flip through pile. And electronic coupons exist, but haven't overtaken newspaper coupons just yet.
We get our paper on Thursday through Sunday only because the paper gave us Thursdays and Fridays free. Otherwise, we'd be down to weekends only. (Sundays only didn't save that much money.) However, if we could buy a "weekly ads and coupons only" packet instead of having our paper subscription, we definitely would!
With great power comes great responsibility unless you incorporate?
Uncle Ben meets Corporate America!
Why then I'll form a corporation to lobby my representative. There. Now I'll.... Odd. Suddenly, I'm in favor of corporations being treated like people.
If it came down smelling a day's worth of someone's sweat or poisonous gas, I would hope most people would choose the sweat smell. It might be unpleasant, but it won't kill you.
Not that I know of. As far as I know, being on the side of the road talking on the phone isn't against the law (unless you're in a no parking zone or something in which case being on the phone isn't the problem).
It's illegal where I live (New York) even though I've seen people obviously texting while they're driving. Many states, though, are having problems passing bans because some people think it is a "personal rights" issue. They fail to realize, however, that while you might have the right to take a chance with your life due to texting while driving, you don't have the right to take chances with other people's rights. If you cross the center line and plow into another car head on because you just *had* to reply to your friend's incoming text message, you could wind up killing people other than yourself. (There was a story on NPR where this exact thing happened. The twenty year old who was texting killed a parent and child and he survived.)
Personally, I think it is sad that we even need to ban it. It should be a common sense thing that you shouldn't be looking at your phone to compose a text while you're driving. If you really need to text, pull over, send the text, then start back up. If you really need to talk with the person, get a hands-free set and call them. (Yes, being engaged in a phone conversation is still distracting, but it is less distracting than looking away from the road for a few seconds to type and send a text message.
You could just turn up the air conditioner. Of course, then if it gets too cold, you can crank up the heater. And if the heater's too strong, you could crank up the AC. Then maybe make some icy margaritas. Just don't hit the "fuel guzzler" and make pop-tarts at the same time!
Shoot. Meant to press "Preview" not "Submit." *slaps forehead*
"Bribe" and "Buy off" should have been crossed out. However, now that I've previewed & see that it doesn't work....
But the corporation can bribe...I mean buy off... I mean lobby government officials to get laws passed that favor their businesses at the expense of everyone else. In some cases, the business writes the entire bill themselves and gives it to their pet congress-critter who then introduces it as is all for a scratch behind the ear and a belly rub or two.
But the corporation can bribe buy off lobby government officials to get laws passed that favor their businesses at the expense of everyone else. In some cases, the business writes the entire bill themselves and gives it to their pet congress-critter who then introduces it as is all for a scratch behind the ear and a belly rub or two.
We've obviously got to ban these anti-capitalistic libraries for sharing out books freely which results in many lost sales for book publishers!
Meh. I still prefer Summon Bigger Fish.
They should get a time lens to make the news travel faster.
Because too many people's brains shut down when they hear the word "terrorist." Tell people that you're going to round up folks and ship them off to a prison where they'll sit for years without any trial and people will oppose it. Tell people that those folks are suspected terrorists and their brains shut down and they nod in agreement. With their brains shut down, they don't think about abuse of power at all.
Add in party loyalty and abuse of power allegations get answered with "But he's a respected member of Party X! Everyone in Party X is looking out for my interests. Not like those traitors in Party Y!" They don't stop to think that, even if the "Party X" member isn't abusing his power, he could easily be voted out of office and replaced by someone from Party Y. Then, of course, those same people will proclaim: "It's obvious that Party Y Politician is using powers that are unconstitutional! We've got to reign in this out of control government NOW! Toss the traitor out of office!!!" The fact that "their" party used the same powers doesn't matter. What matters is that the powers are only good when wielded by a member of "their" party (and then, sometimes only by an appropriately extreme right or left wing member of the party).
Personally, I view all powers that the government requests with two questions:
1. How can this be abused and are there mechanisms in place to prevent abuse?
2. How would this be used by a politician who I disagree with on the issues?
If I don't like the answers to either question, I can't support the granting of the powers, even if it would - in the short term - advance an issue I believe in.
Which makes it that much worse. It's one thing if an officer was taking a break and playing the guy's Wii Bowling. That would be wrong, but maybe not bad enough to seriously jeopardize the evidence (though there would still be questions about it in court). But to stop mid-evidence collection to bowl a round or two? Any half-way decent defense attorney is going to make this video Exhibit A.
Slacking off every once and a while is one thing. The police chief even admitted that most house searches have "downtime." Still, playing Wii Bowling for 9 hours is a bit excessive.
A food blogger posted a variation on a potato salad recipe that she liked. She attributed the original source even though the recipe was altered. The source of the original recipe (Cook's Illustrated/Cook's Country) countered with a cease and desist notice claiming "no modifications allowed. Our recipes are tested up to 100 times for a reason (i.e. because they work)."
So let's say you get a really good pasta recipe from Cook's but you don't like the broccoli that's in it. You can't replace it with snow peas. After all, they tested their recipe and it is perfect so you can't improve upon it. Or if that "perfect" recipe calls for sausage and you're a vegetarian. No leaving that sausage out! Cook it the "Cook's perfect" way and like it! And Flying Spaghetti Monster help you if you post a variation on that pasta recipe, even if it is radically altered.
Here's a blog post about the incident: http://maurarose.livejournal.com/tag/cooks+country It looks like the original blog has gone invite only (possibly in part due to Cook's threatening to sue if they posted any modified recipes). I'm not sure what happened with the cease and desist notice.
Toss some chickpeas into this blender with some garlic, olive oil, lemon juice. Add in some tahini and some spices. Blend and we have... copyright infringement?!!
I remember writing back in the pre-computer days. (For me, early 1980's.) I hated it. First of all, I'm left handed so I'd always wind up with smeared ink on the page and on my hand. Secondly, my pen could never keep up with my brain. So I'd have to slow down thinking to put it all on the page. Third, if I wanted to move a word, sentence, or paragraph, I needed to cross out (messily) the offending sections and rewrite them. Alternatively, I would need to make some kind of note to myself (e.g. arrows) and then rewrite the entire page. In short, writing a paper was a horrendous experience.
Then I got my first computer. All of a sudden, I had no ink stains, I could type much faster (and this was back in my "hunt and peck" days), and moving words/sentences/paragraphs was a breeze.
My signatures tend to look very different from one another depending on many factors (how rushed I am, how tired I am, etc). The biggest change I saw was when we closed on our house. I must have signed my name about a hundred times. And no, I'm not exaggerating. The first signature said "Jason Levine" quite clearly. The last signature said something like "J__o_ L__i__e." If you took my first and last signatures and compared them, most people would think that they were written by different people.
And even if handwriting experts could verify that my signatures were all done by me, how many handwriting experts are employed as bank tellers (processing the checks I sign) or as grocery store clerks (glancing for a millisecond at the signed receipt). And don't even get me started on those electronic signature tablets that turn my name into "J[illegible scribble] L[illegible scribble]."
Ok, I'm not a fan of this RIAA "Music Rules" program, but where did the article say that making a personal use copy and then playing it when a friend came over was illegal? I looked at the article and the teacher's PDF but didn't see anything about that case. There was the case where someone burned a CD copy and gave it to a friend, but that would be copyright infringement.
And, just to muddy the waters more, I've "bought" many songs from Amie Street or Amazon MP3 at a price point of $0. In the former case, they were songs with low sales (songs start out free and rise in price as people buy them). In the latter case, they were one day promotions where select songs were given away for free (to tempt you into buying non-free songs, obviously). I guess I'm a "songlifter."