A lot of blogs allow posters to choose their name and then requires them to put in an e-mail address. The e-mail address isn't displayed publicly, but is used, in part, to drive other features of the blog (like e-mailing replies to comments). The IP addresses could be "tracked" by the site's log files. Never assume that you are 100% anonymous.
Oh yeah? Well, I have 5 "Virtual Brain" sessions running right now in my brain, each with 200,000 simulated neurons. It was cool at first, but I think the voices are getting to me....
But this time it's cool and new. Rest assured though that once Cloud Computing takes over, the computer industry will "invent" Local Cloud Computing were you do revolutionary things like install programs on your local system, keep your data locally, and actually buy copies of software. Then, once that's in place, we'll switch to Next Generation Cloud computing (or whatever we call it at the time). Rinse and repeat.
You know, I think we've all missed the obvious angle that could have taken out e-voting much, much sooner. You see, Diebold's machines are so insecure that they can be used to rig elections. Anyone could do it, even... terrorists! That's right. Al-Qaeda themselves might just be planning to get a few operatives set up to hack voting machines so that Osama Bin Laden can be elected our next president. We need to protect ourselves in the fight against terrorism so e-voting (especially using Diebold's voting machines) must be banned!!! (Now, if only I could toss in child pornographers in some way, we'd be assured that e-voting would never see the light of day ever again.) At the very least, we'd see Diebold's lobbying muscle pitted against the Terrorists! crowd's fear response. It would be an interesting show. I'll bring the popcorn.
Just like you are free to buy internet access from someone who hasn't made a similar arrangement.
That's assuming two things:
1. You know who has made similar arrangements. Apart from the occasional leak, the ISPs are likely to keep these deals as under wraps as possible.
2. You can find another broadband Internet provider. Most people in the US have one, maybe two broadband options available to them. Where I am, my options are Time Warner Cable's Roadrunner or Verizon's DSL. (FIOS isn't available in my area yet.) If Time Warner makes a deal with the RIAA, I can go to Verizon. If Verizon turns out to have a deal as well, who can I jump ship to? Dial-Up/AOL is out of the question so I'm trapped in a "RIAA-reporting" system.
(For the record, I don't pirate movies/music or anything else for that matter. I do worry about being falsely reported though and having to either pay to defend myself against baseless charges or being pressured into settling to avoid those charges.)
I'm pretty religious and that's how I take it. That said, the "God is the architect" part has no place in a science class. Philosophy or religion class, sure, but not science class. Just like the "evolution is the process" really has no place in a religion class and probably not in a philosophy class either. ("Social Darwinism" doesn't count since it's not really evolution but someone taking evolution's concepts and misapplying them to another field entirely.)
As another poster said, please don't lump all Americans with those fundamentalism. Some of us, myself included, hate them and their influence on the American political system. Many of those groups would love to have the power to "save my soul" by forcing me to convert to their form of Christianity. (My soul is perfectly fine with my Jewish religion, thank you very much!)
All I was pointing out is that the statement that there was "no reason" to believe something was patently false. I think it is a very reasonable assumption that a 13 year old who knows she is doing something wrong might try to hide the evidence someplace where an adult would be unlikely to look. The hard part is determining whether that 13 year old IS doing something wrong without looking.
They had no reason to believe it was true either. All their "evidence" consisted of was one caught student saying "She gave it to me." That student could easily have been lying. The girl also had no record so she at least deserved the benefit of the doubt. But let's say they wanted to check into it. They search her belongings and locker. Fine. They don't find anything. At this point, they should have either given up - figuring that the caught student was lying - or called the police to conduct any further searches (while detaining the student). Not that the police would have done it, mind you. They'd (hopefully) laugh if a school called up and said "we have this good student who another student claims gave her prescription ibuprofen. We searched her stuff and couldn't find any. So could you come over and strip search her? We think she might have a hidden stash of drugs in her panties."
The officials involved in this need to be fired and never work with kids again.
Whenever I shop for a new cell phone, I always seem to throw the sales folks when I answer "What do you want your phone to do?" with "Make calls." They don't seem to know what to make of an answer that doesn't include: Take photos, take videos, play music, give me GPS directions, make me a sandwich, browse the web, send/receive text messages, or play videos.
As a victim of Identity Theft, I always hate those that ask you to "speak or say your Social Security Number." If I am going to give my SSN, it'll be pressed on the keypad, not spoken out loud where a dozen co-workers could hear and copy it down! Not that I don't trust them, but it's pretty easy to figure out a co-worker's birth date and you already know their name. Add in that spoken SSN and some random co-worker with an ax to grind could steal your identity (or sell it to someone else so the ID theft would be all but untraceable).
Are you talking about both the pilot and co-pilot taking ill and the flight attendant or a passenger having to land the plane? Because if that's what you're talking about it's never happened (outside of the movies). The Mythbusters researched this when they were doing their "tower crew talks a passenger through landing a plane myth."
When I vote, the volunteer looks up my name in a book. I sign next to my name and they write a number next to it. The machine (old fashioned push lever kind) is set to that number and I put in my vote. The vote itself is anonymous but there is the possibility of looking through the voter rolls (should a court order it) to see who voted which way. (For example, if there's a claim of people voting multiple times or other widespread voter fraud.)
The same could work for a "printed copy only" system. The election volunteer writes a number next to your name and sets the computer with that ID number. The ID number is encoded on your slip in some machine readable manner along with your vote. To anyone scanning the printed copy, you would be "State=NY, County=Albany, Precinct=5, Voter=439". After the election, the ID number/name book would be sealed and only a court order would allow it to be opened again. (And then only until the court was done with it at which time it would be resealed.)
In America, if your card is used fraudulently you are only liable (by Federal law) for the first $50 and even that is waived by all of the major credit card companies. Debit cards have no such protection enshrined in Federal law. Many banks have started to offer similar protections on their debit cards, but you would be dealing with bank policy as opposed to Federal law.
Yes, because buying things over the phone or in store will never result in a breach.
Oh, wait...
Those three stood out in my mind since we were affected by all of them. There are others, I'm sure. In the first two cases, our credit card information was compromised despite the fact that we shopped in-store and not online. In the third case, our information was compromised at the processor level, so it really didn't matter where we shopped. Face it, no matter where you shop, your information is in the hands of other companies and can/will get compromised. The only way to prevent this is to only shop using cash. (Something that is becoming an impossibility more and more.)
Since I froze my credit file, knowing my name, address, SSN and DOB won't help an ID thief. He'll also need to unfreeze each of my credit files and that's not something he'll find trivial to do. Could a determined ID thief work his way around it? Perhaps. But more likely, he'll find himself locked out of my identity and will move on to some other victim who didn't freeze their credit.
For the record, you can freeze your credit file online now at all 3 credit bureaus. There might be a fee depending on what state you live in. Here's a list of state laws and how to freeze your credit at each credit agency: http://www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/learn_more/003484indiv.html
As many, many, *MANY* others have said, CP80 just wouldn't work. I'm going to ignore any technical reasons for the moment. Let's just grant them that a system could easily be put in place to sign users up for "Community Ports" (filtered) or "Open Ports" (non-filtered). Ok, we have that system ready to go. Now what?
First of all, we need to determine what gets filtered. That seems easy. Cheryl Preston said we just need to filter the "material harmful to minors." Except, who decides what is harmful to minors? And minors of what age? Is nudity harmful to a minor? What if that minor is a 15 year old and the nudity was in the context of a safe-sex video? What if that nudity was an article in National Geographic? What about curse words. Surely any curse word should be filtered. So any forum that lets a member curse one time much pack up and move to the filtered side of the room. What about religious discussions? Would saying "God doesn't exist" be harmful to a minor? What about a page saying that Santa doesn't exist? That could be a bit traumatic for a 5 year old. We'd better filter any page that says anything negative about religion. Personally, my wife and I find Barney and Teletubbies to be harmful to minors (and adults). Could we lobby to have them filtered? (I think that last one might drum up more support for the plan.)
Obviously, we would need to appoint a group to decide what is harmful and what isn't. I'm sure Cheryl Preston and her organization would be happy to gather a team. With their discerning eye, they would be the final arbitrators of whether your site was good or an evil, child harming menace. Unfortunately for you, you fall in the latter category. Time to move, right? Except you happen to live in France and host your server in Belgium. No problem, CP80 has a plan. First a "customer" (read: a CP80 member with time on their hands) reports you to The Regulatory Agency. They tell you to take down the content or go to the filtered side. You don't comply. The Agency (stacked with CP80 members) rules you in violation and the "customer" can take you to court... except that the "customer" is trying to take you, a French citizen with a server in Belgium, to civil court in the USA. {Mr. Rodgers} Can you say Jurisdiction? I knew you could! {/Mr. Rodgers}
In the end, the entire plan rests on a false premise:
"permits browsing on an Internet with the same pornography protections as in the real world"
The Internet is completely different from the "real world." In the "real world", the person that I'm talking to is likely to be an American citizen or, at least, visiting America (and thus subject to its laws). In the Internet, the person I'm talking to might be from the US, but could also be from Europe, Australia, China, Russia, etc. This makes it easy to enforce country-specific rules in the "real world." If that person I'm talking to in the "real world" decides to strip down and perform a lewd gesture, they'll find themselves arrested under US law. If the Internet person does the same thing, their home country might permit it. No one country could enforce its laws on the entire world. Imagine how we'd feel if suddenly the Chinese government was able to say that all mentions of their government must be positive and anyone making any Tienanmen Square reference would be extradited to China and shot.
You just can't try to force the Internet to fit into the "real world" mold perfectly. Any attempts to do so will fail miserably.
Which is why I froze my credit file. Now no one (even me) can open any new lines of credit. If I want a new credit line (buying a new car, for example), I need to first place a temporary thaw on it. Credit agencies/credit card companies hate this because you don't get those "you've been pre-approved" letters and you can't sign up for a store credit card spur of the moment to save 10% off your purchase. Your credit file becomes worthless to them compared to the non-frozen files, access to which they can sell left and right.
They really said that. The representative from the fraud department actually told me that they couldn't give me the address that the ID thief changed the card to because I could go shoot the guy and they would be liable for having provided the address.
An ID Thief opened a Capital One account in my name. They had my name, address, SSN, and DOB, but got my mother's maiden name wrong. Capital One approved the card anyway. Then, when the thief immediately changed the address (from mine to another address), before even activating the card, it didn't raise any red flags in their systems. Then, when the thief tried to get a $5,000 cash advance on the card (still not activated), it didn't raise any red flags in their systems (though they denied the advance). Then, when I called them, they refused to give me any information on the theory that I could "go and shoot the guy and they would be liable." Instead, I had to have a police officer call a special "cops number." The police officer called that number and got a recording which apparently no one ever returned phone calls from. At every step of the way, Capital One seemed to be going out of its way to protect itself *from* me and my ID Theft investigation instead of caring about the fact that it was an accessory to ID theft. Needless to say, I won't ever do business with Capital One again.
I don't think many women flaunt their breasts when they breastfeed in public. That is to say that they don't rip off their shirts/bras and dance around for a bit before nursing their child. (Sorry to any teenagers/single geeks here if I've just killed a fantasy of yours.) Most women will lift up one side of their shirt, pop out just enough breast for the child to latch on to, and let the child nurse. Many times, they'll cover the entire deal with a light blanket of some kind. I've been at the table when my sister was nursing her child and I wasn't uncomfortable. (She was covered up and I, of course, looked at her face and not the baby.) I've seen other women nursing their children and it's not a big deal.
About the only time a woman would be right to chastise a man would be if:
1 - He's staring. Really, it's not right to stare at any time, especially if a woman's nursing her kid. Staring just makes you seem like a creep. And if you can't look somewhere else other than the little bit of exposed chest, well, maybe you are a creep.
2 - He confronts her and tells her to cover up and/or take it to the bathroom. In this case, the man is just an idiot. Feeding your child in the bathroom is gross. Think about some of the public restrooms you've seen and ask yourself if you'd want to eat your lunch in there. I've even heard men claiming that the only reason women breastfeed is to get a sexual thrill and a woman's breast should only be a guy's plaything. (I'd be willing to bet good money that the guy who said that doesn't have a woman to "play" with.)
I think that's ridiculous also. A woman can wear a string bikini with only the barest square of cloth covering her nipple and she's ok. But should that tiny square move over an inch or so and suddenly it is the end of the civilized world and children in a five mile radius are scarred for life. I was watching a "History of Sex" program on the History Channel one day and they mentioned that it was once thought that the mere sight of a woman's leg would drive a man into a fit of uncontrollable lust. In fact, men were thought to be so weak that a table's leg would remind them of a woman's leg and they would go into fits. Table skirts were invented to hide the table legs and protect men from the embarrassment of being caught humping a table leg. (Seriously, were men back then that weak-willed?!!)
I think if women were allowed to go topless whereever men are allowed to go topless: In the short term, there would be a lot of stupid, drooling teenagers and heart attacks among religious conservatives. In the long term, the female breast would become like a woman's leg. An object of attraction, but not considered solely a "sex object."
Certainly, tiny wardrobe malfunctions shouldn't cause national uproar and millions of dollars in fines.
It doesn't matter if the woman's breasts are perfect (a rarity on a real woman's real breasts and usually a sign of a boob job) or, as you put it, "flabby, dangly, purple-veined monstrosities." Either way, the woman has the right to feed her baby anywhere she happens to be. If that means giving her baby a bottle of milk or a breast filled with milk, it doesn't matter. If your eyes are so fragile that you will suffer irreparable damage seeing a small portion of a real woman's breast being used to feed a baby, then there's a really simple solution: Look away! No one is forcing you to stare at the woman feeding her child.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of blogs allow posters to choose their name and then requires them to put in an e-mail address. The e-mail address isn't displayed publicly, but is used, in part, to drive other features of the blog (like e-mailing replies to comments). The IP addresses could be "tracked" by the site's log files. Never assume that you are 100% anonymous.
Oh yeah? Well, I have 5 "Virtual Brain" sessions running right now in my brain, each with 200,000 simulated neurons. It was cool at first, but I think the voices are getting to me....
But this time it's cool and new. Rest assured though that once Cloud Computing takes over, the computer industry will "invent" Local Cloud Computing were you do revolutionary things like install programs on your local system, keep your data locally, and actually buy copies of software. Then, once that's in place, we'll switch to Next Generation Cloud computing (or whatever we call it at the time). Rinse and repeat.
You know, I think we've all missed the obvious angle that could have taken out e-voting much, much sooner. You see, Diebold's machines are so insecure that they can be used to rig elections. Anyone could do it, even... terrorists! That's right. Al-Qaeda themselves might just be planning to get a few operatives set up to hack voting machines so that Osama Bin Laden can be elected our next president. We need to protect ourselves in the fight against terrorism so e-voting (especially using Diebold's voting machines) must be banned!!! (Now, if only I could toss in child pornographers in some way, we'd be assured that e-voting would never see the light of day ever again.) At the very least, we'd see Diebold's lobbying muscle pitted against the Terrorists! crowd's fear response. It would be an interesting show. I'll bring the popcorn.
That's assuming two things:
1. You know who has made similar arrangements. Apart from the occasional leak, the ISPs are likely to keep these deals as under wraps as possible.
2. You can find another broadband Internet provider. Most people in the US have one, maybe two broadband options available to them. Where I am, my options are Time Warner Cable's Roadrunner or Verizon's DSL. (FIOS isn't available in my area yet.) If Time Warner makes a deal with the RIAA, I can go to Verizon. If Verizon turns out to have a deal as well, who can I jump ship to? Dial-Up/AOL is out of the question so I'm trapped in a "RIAA-reporting" system.
(For the record, I don't pirate movies/music or anything else for that matter. I do worry about being falsely reported though and having to either pay to defend myself against baseless charges or being pressured into settling to avoid those charges.)
I'm pretty religious and that's how I take it. That said, the "God is the architect" part has no place in a science class. Philosophy or religion class, sure, but not science class. Just like the "evolution is the process" really has no place in a religion class and probably not in a philosophy class either. ("Social Darwinism" doesn't count since it's not really evolution but someone taking evolution's concepts and misapplying them to another field entirely.)
As another poster said, please don't lump all Americans with those fundamentalism. Some of us, myself included, hate them and their influence on the American political system. Many of those groups would love to have the power to "save my soul" by forcing me to convert to their form of Christianity. (My soul is perfectly fine with my Jewish religion, thank you very much!)
They had no reason to believe it was true either. All their "evidence" consisted of was one caught student saying "She gave it to me." That student could easily have been lying. The girl also had no record so she at least deserved the benefit of the doubt. But let's say they wanted to check into it. They search her belongings and locker. Fine. They don't find anything. At this point, they should have either given up - figuring that the caught student was lying - or called the police to conduct any further searches (while detaining the student). Not that the police would have done it, mind you. They'd (hopefully) laugh if a school called up and said "we have this good student who another student claims gave her prescription ibuprofen. We searched her stuff and couldn't find any. So could you come over and strip search her? We think she might have a hidden stash of drugs in her panties."
The officials involved in this need to be fired and never work with kids again.
Whenever I shop for a new cell phone, I always seem to throw the sales folks when I answer "What do you want your phone to do?" with "Make calls." They don't seem to know what to make of an answer that doesn't include: Take photos, take videos, play music, give me GPS directions, make me a sandwich, browse the web, send/receive text messages, or play videos.
As a victim of Identity Theft, I always hate those that ask you to "speak or say your Social Security Number." If I am going to give my SSN, it'll be pressed on the keypad, not spoken out loud where a dozen co-workers could hear and copy it down! Not that I don't trust them, but it's pretty easy to figure out a co-worker's birth date and you already know their name. Add in that spoken SSN and some random co-worker with an ax to grind could steal your identity (or sell it to someone else so the ID theft would be all but untraceable).
Are you talking about both the pilot and co-pilot taking ill and the flight attendant or a passenger having to land the plane? Because if that's what you're talking about it's never happened (outside of the movies). The Mythbusters researched this when they were doing their "tower crew talks a passenger through landing a plane myth."
When I vote, the volunteer looks up my name in a book. I sign next to my name and they write a number next to it. The machine (old fashioned push lever kind) is set to that number and I put in my vote. The vote itself is anonymous but there is the possibility of looking through the voter rolls (should a court order it) to see who voted which way. (For example, if there's a claim of people voting multiple times or other widespread voter fraud.)
The same could work for a "printed copy only" system. The election volunteer writes a number next to your name and sets the computer with that ID number. The ID number is encoded on your slip in some machine readable manner along with your vote. To anyone scanning the printed copy, you would be "State=NY, County=Albany, Precinct=5, Voter=439". After the election, the ID number/name book would be sealed and only a court order would allow it to be opened again. (And then only until the court was done with it at which time it would be resealed.)
In America, if your card is used fraudulently you are only liable (by Federal law) for the first $50 and even that is waived by all of the major credit card companies. Debit cards have no such protection enshrined in Federal law. Many banks have started to offer similar protections on their debit cards, but you would be dealing with bank policy as opposed to Federal law.
Yes, because buying things over the phone or in store will never result in a breach.
Oh, wait...
Those three stood out in my mind since we were affected by all of them. There are others, I'm sure. In the first two cases, our credit card information was compromised despite the fact that we shopped in-store and not online. In the third case, our information was compromised at the processor level, so it really didn't matter where we shopped. Face it, no matter where you shop, your information is in the hands of other companies and can/will get compromised. The only way to prevent this is to only shop using cash. (Something that is becoming an impossibility more and more.)
Since I froze my credit file, knowing my name, address, SSN and DOB won't help an ID thief. He'll also need to unfreeze each of my credit files and that's not something he'll find trivial to do. Could a determined ID thief work his way around it? Perhaps. But more likely, he'll find himself locked out of my identity and will move on to some other victim who didn't freeze their credit.
For the record, you can freeze your credit file online now at all 3 credit bureaus. There might be a fee depending on what state you live in. Here's a list of state laws and how to freeze your credit at each credit agency: http://www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/learn_more/003484indiv.html
As many, many, *MANY* others have said, CP80 just wouldn't work. I'm going to ignore any technical reasons for the moment. Let's just grant them that a system could easily be put in place to sign users up for "Community Ports" (filtered) or "Open Ports" (non-filtered). Ok, we have that system ready to go. Now what?
First of all, we need to determine what gets filtered. That seems easy. Cheryl Preston said we just need to filter the "material harmful to minors." Except, who decides what is harmful to minors? And minors of what age? Is nudity harmful to a minor? What if that minor is a 15 year old and the nudity was in the context of a safe-sex video? What if that nudity was an article in National Geographic? What about curse words. Surely any curse word should be filtered. So any forum that lets a member curse one time much pack up and move to the filtered side of the room. What about religious discussions? Would saying "God doesn't exist" be harmful to a minor? What about a page saying that Santa doesn't exist? That could be a bit traumatic for a 5 year old. We'd better filter any page that says anything negative about religion. Personally, my wife and I find Barney and Teletubbies to be harmful to minors (and adults). Could we lobby to have them filtered? (I think that last one might drum up more support for the plan.)
Obviously, we would need to appoint a group to decide what is harmful and what isn't. I'm sure Cheryl Preston and her organization would be happy to gather a team. With their discerning eye, they would be the final arbitrators of whether your site was good or an evil, child harming menace. Unfortunately for you, you fall in the latter category. Time to move, right? Except you happen to live in France and host your server in Belgium. No problem, CP80 has a plan. First a "customer" (read: a CP80 member with time on their hands) reports you to The Regulatory Agency. They tell you to take down the content or go to the filtered side. You don't comply. The Agency (stacked with CP80 members) rules you in violation and the "customer" can take you to court... except that the "customer" is trying to take you, a French citizen with a server in Belgium, to civil court in the USA. {Mr. Rodgers} Can you say Jurisdiction? I knew you could! {/Mr. Rodgers}
In the end, the entire plan rests on a false premise:
The Internet is completely different from the "real world." In the "real world", the person that I'm talking to is likely to be an American citizen or, at least, visiting America (and thus subject to its laws). In the Internet, the person I'm talking to might be from the US, but could also be from Europe, Australia, China, Russia, etc. This makes it easy to enforce country-specific rules in the "real world." If that person I'm talking to in the "real world" decides to strip down and perform a lewd gesture, they'll find themselves arrested under US law. If the Internet person does the same thing, their home country might permit it. No one country could enforce its laws on the entire world. Imagine how we'd feel if suddenly the Chinese government was able to say that all mentions of their government must be positive and anyone making any Tienanmen Square reference would be extradited to China and shot.
You just can't try to force the Internet to fit into the "real world" mold perfectly. Any attempts to do so will fail miserably.
Which is why I froze my credit file. Now no one (even me) can open any new lines of credit. If I want a new credit line (buying a new car, for example), I need to first place a temporary thaw on it. Credit agencies/credit card companies hate this because you don't get those "you've been pre-approved" letters and you can't sign up for a store credit card spur of the moment to save 10% off your purchase. Your credit file becomes worthless to them compared to the non-frozen files, access to which they can sell left and right.
They really said that. The representative from the fraud department actually told me that they couldn't give me the address that the ID thief changed the card to because I could go shoot the guy and they would be liable for having provided the address.
An ID Thief opened a Capital One account in my name. They had my name, address, SSN, and DOB, but got my mother's maiden name wrong. Capital One approved the card anyway. Then, when the thief immediately changed the address (from mine to another address), before even activating the card, it didn't raise any red flags in their systems. Then, when the thief tried to get a $5,000 cash advance on the card (still not activated), it didn't raise any red flags in their systems (though they denied the advance). Then, when I called them, they refused to give me any information on the theory that I could "go and shoot the guy and they would be liable." Instead, I had to have a police officer call a special "cops number." The police officer called that number and got a recording which apparently no one ever returned phone calls from. At every step of the way, Capital One seemed to be going out of its way to protect itself *from* me and my ID Theft investigation instead of caring about the fact that it was an accessory to ID theft. Needless to say, I won't ever do business with Capital One again.
If your 85 year old mother still wants to nurse you, sure. Of course, by that age it gets a little creepy.
I don't think many women flaunt their breasts when they breastfeed in public. That is to say that they don't rip off their shirts/bras and dance around for a bit before nursing their child. (Sorry to any teenagers/single geeks here if I've just killed a fantasy of yours.) Most women will lift up one side of their shirt, pop out just enough breast for the child to latch on to, and let the child nurse. Many times, they'll cover the entire deal with a light blanket of some kind. I've been at the table when my sister was nursing her child and I wasn't uncomfortable. (She was covered up and I, of course, looked at her face and not the baby.) I've seen other women nursing their children and it's not a big deal.
About the only time a woman would be right to chastise a man would be if:
1 - He's staring. Really, it's not right to stare at any time, especially if a woman's nursing her kid. Staring just makes you seem like a creep. And if you can't look somewhere else other than the little bit of exposed chest, well, maybe you are a creep.
2 - He confronts her and tells her to cover up and/or take it to the bathroom. In this case, the man is just an idiot. Feeding your child in the bathroom is gross. Think about some of the public restrooms you've seen and ask yourself if you'd want to eat your lunch in there. I've even heard men claiming that the only reason women breastfeed is to get a sexual thrill and a woman's breast should only be a guy's plaything. (I'd be willing to bet good money that the guy who said that doesn't have a woman to "play" with.)
I think that's ridiculous also. A woman can wear a string bikini with only the barest square of cloth covering her nipple and she's ok. But should that tiny square move over an inch or so and suddenly it is the end of the civilized world and children in a five mile radius are scarred for life. I was watching a "History of Sex" program on the History Channel one day and they mentioned that it was once thought that the mere sight of a woman's leg would drive a man into a fit of uncontrollable lust. In fact, men were thought to be so weak that a table's leg would remind them of a woman's leg and they would go into fits. Table skirts were invented to hide the table legs and protect men from the embarrassment of being caught humping a table leg. (Seriously, were men back then that weak-willed?!!)
I think if women were allowed to go topless whereever men are allowed to go topless: In the short term, there would be a lot of stupid, drooling teenagers and heart attacks among religious conservatives. In the long term, the female breast would become like a woman's leg. An object of attraction, but not considered solely a "sex object."
Certainly, tiny wardrobe malfunctions shouldn't cause national uproar and millions of dollars in fines.
It doesn't matter if the woman's breasts are perfect (a rarity on a real woman's real breasts and usually a sign of a boob job) or, as you put it, "flabby, dangly, purple-veined monstrosities." Either way, the woman has the right to feed her baby anywhere she happens to be. If that means giving her baby a bottle of milk or a breast filled with milk, it doesn't matter. If your eyes are so fragile that you will suffer irreparable damage seeing a small portion of a real woman's breast being used to feed a baby, then there's a really simple solution: Look away! No one is forcing you to stare at the woman feeding her child.
Spacebatman? "I'm Batman. And I can breathe in space." http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20050131.html
http://www.pvponline.com/2008/06/30/interlude-the-adventures-of-lolbat/ was only the first appearance of the LOLBat.
Here's his second appearance:
http://www.pvponline.com/2008/08/25/interlude-the-lolbat-returns/
http://www.pvponline.com/2008/08/26/dark-forces-gather/
http://www.pvponline.com/2008/08/27/the-lolbat-strikes/
http://www.pvponline.com/2008/08/28/epix-battle/
http://www.pvponline.com/2008/08/29/epic-win/
And, of course, his secret origin:
http://www.pvponline.com/2009/03/11/secret-origin-of-the-lolbat/
ORLY!