Well, my point was, "clever" is in the eyes of the beholder...
I'd add, that the whole usage of the word while adding negative connotations to it, such as: "Clever does not pay the bills," — is rather offensive. Unfortunately, it is wide-spread...
And typically it goes like this: I didn't think of that, the guy must be clever (a.k.a. smart-ass). Maybe, one actually has to be smart and clever to be offended by it...
it would be stupid of you to not to follow the existing conventions, regardless of how stupid they are.
This — following existing conventions regardless of how stupid they are — is exactly how groups of people (including corporations) stagnate and then die out...
[...] call for the thing to run on a broken compiler
Except, no such compiler exists (nor ever existed) and another one of the company's old-timers confirmed to me, that the guy, whose example the rest of the company were following, was, indeed, ignorant of this feature of calloc...
It didn't matter much in the great scheme of things — their code was so bad, they didn't even dare to compile it with -O... But, hey, it was consistent, so it paid the bills, right?
Simple, clever doesn't pay the bills, reliable and maintainable do.
Except that one's "clever" is another one's "perfectly normal". For example, a client I worked for, had a huge body of C-code, where they — following one of the company founders' coding practices — would bzero a just calloc-ed array. In hundreds of places throughout the code...
Was it clever of me to not do it, knowing that calloc returns zeroed-out memory (its only difference with malloc in these days of flat memory), or was it stupid of them to insist on doing it for the sake of "reliable and maintainable" code?
I don't see anthropogenic global warming as a condemnation of civilization.
That humans — especially the wealthy humans — are destroying the planet with their consumption is explicit in many "save the Earth" pieces, and implied in nearly all of them. I'm going to believe here, that you aren't feigning your ignorance of this wide-spread opinion and give you some examples...
This recent video attempts to instill guilt in people flying by showing bloodied polar bears falling from the sky. Each passenger, we are told, causes the amount of CO2, that's a weight of a polar bear. It is implied (with plausible deniability, of course, because the idiotic connection would only work on a weaker mind), that each passenger is thus responsible for a dead polar bear... Every time.
For another example, here is criticism of Ford's recent ad, that shows Ford's SUV among polar bears. The critic states, the ad "might upset a few people". Now, it might not be upsetting to you, but it is evidence, that large number of people consider SUVs a crime against nature.
Violent assholes from Earth Liberation Front will happily burn a business to stop it from "destroying the environment". The threat is not theoretical: "If you build it, we will burn it." The ideology has many sympathizers and represents the number one terrorist threat in the US.
More examples exist, of course... I hope, you will be able to find them yourself now.
Now I see why the deniers are so hot and bothered.
I don't think, it is fair to label us "deniers". The burden of proof ought to be on those, who want to make civilization change its ways. For over a decade, we were told "the science is settled" — that not only does global warming exist, there is a significant anthropogenic contribution to it, which ought to be stopped.
Thanks to this whistle-blower (or a hacker, or whoever), we learned, that the consensus in this case achieved in a Marxist manner: through elimination of dissent. We read these "scientists" discussing boycotts against peer-reviewed journals to prevent publishing works of "sceptics". All so that the foot-soldiers on forums such as this one could continue to claim, that "no peer-reviewed journal published anything by this guy, so he must be a fringe lunatic."
We also read, how frustrated they became, faced with the actually lowering temperatures, which their computer models failed to predict. Where I'm from, a scientific theory, that fails to predict what's observed in life, is discarded. But, I guess, these guys stood to lose too much government funding, so they "massaged" their data until they got the pre-determined result.
The answer to AGW will be a combination of adapting ourselves to inevitable changes
Every proposed answer to AGW (which might not even exist) involves large tax increases and increased government control over citizens' lives. The Big Brother watching is Ok, because it is for "a greener planet" (the modern era's "Greater Good" (TM)). Scratch any advocate of AGW, and you'll find a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath... That alone ought to turn a reasonable human being into a "denier".
Although voluntary for now, starting 2017, Columbia University plans to have a compost bin in every dorm room. I sure hope, my daughter is not forced to live like that, when she goes to college, over junk science
Those lost cities have nothing to do with warming one way or the other. Hint: geological processes exist.
Exactly! You got it! So, when we talk about ancient history, we can calmly attribute things to geological processes, that we have no control over. But when dealing with our own times, we aren't going to skip a good opportunity to raise taxes and give more control to the government. Scratch almost every modern "environmentalist" and you'll find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath...
Nobody tried to argue that anthropogenic global warning traveled back in time to make it a desert.
Actually, you can be sure, there were people explaining the climate change and/or the rising sea levels, that flooded the entire cities, by the anger of the gods. You can also bet safely, that various priests back then suggested (and demanded) large sacrifices to appease the supernaturals.
Kinda like what Al Gore is doing now (warning, unsafe amounts of sarcasm at the link)...
Credentials for hacker involves electronic breaking and entering. Whistle-blowers had access to the data to begin with.
Oh, well, that's a fine distinction. But do you know, who acted in this case? An in- our an outsider? You don't know. And neither does the grandstanding Barbara Boxer — yet she wants a "criminal prosecution" nevertheless.
And stealing because it wasn't freely given.
Well, whenever *AA talk about theft of music or movies, the counterargument — from your very kind — is that it can not be called "theft", because nobody has lost anything material. What was downloaded was merely a copy. Fine hypocrites you are...
Like if I copied the US militaries designs for a missile...
Except, unlike military designs, all these things were supposed to be public domain, free for all to examine... So, could it be called "stolen", if it belonged to us all anyway?
Yes, one can tell, if one knows how to read IDL code. The correction has not been applied to the published results.
"Trust me, I can read the ancient runes, and I'm telling you, the city is doomed, unless we sacrifice ten newborns."
Seriously, with the exposed pattern of data-manipulation you can not be certain, the numbers weren't cooked in some less obvious fashion — there are plenty of hints to that in the revealed source-code:
It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
The scientific credibility of the entire CRU — and all research based on theirs — is irreparably damaged.
"Nature" is just fighting here for its own reputation and should not be listened to.
It doesn't help the debate when people like you give arguments like this, which is obviously ridiculous.
I think, you missed a good opportunity to show, what's so "ridiculous" about my argument. There really are lost cities there.
Also Sahara became a desert in only a few millenia (if not centuries) — also a drastic climate change, that can not be pinned on the evil industrialization.
If you think this comparison is valid you must also disagree with the fact the carbon emissions are correlated to the amount of fossil fuel being burned
And I must also disagree with the Earth being round...
Hint, the plot in the paper does not have this correction applied.
It doesn't? How do you know? Were you able to review their processes and reproduce their results yourself? From the beginning?
No, you can not. And nobody can, because they've destroyed their records years ago. Up until now, only "the fringe" wouldn't believe them. Now, with their attempts (successful or not) to manipulate and misrepresent some data exposed, we ought to question everything they've ever told us.
A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research.
The Humanity in general and the Western civilization in particular were on trial. We are accused of "destroying Gaia" and facing the punishment of huge fines and severe drop in the quality of life (such as living with worms composting our garbage).
So, guess what? When, suddenly, thanks to a whistle-blower (whom the prominent Illiberals in Congress want prosecuted, BTW), we learn of the massive prosecutorial misconduct (some of it, such as deleting files after receiving Freedom of Information requests, outright criminal), that affects a substantial amount of evidence against us, we move for the "court" to dismiss the entire case.
On that same blog you link to, there is an "Update":
Read the comments below. It's been pointed out to me that there's a later version of code in the archive in which similar correction code is not commented out. Details and link below.
This ignores some of the more obvious ways in which humans can change the atmosphere.
The point is not, that humans don't change the atmosphere at all. It is that our (anthropogenic) contribution to the change is negligibly small — we also "contribute" to Continental Drift... The cooling of the last 10 years, that so frustrated the CRU alarmists (one of them writes in an e-mail: "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."), is now explained by the lower Sun activity — even when reminding the faithful readers, that "These changes are not enough to reverse global warming". Well, duh, "It is the Sun, stupid". Whatever we do here — and we didn't reduce our emissions (save for those few weeks in Bejing you observed) over the decade — the Sun will trump that many times over.
Oceans rising? Right... There are ancient cities on the sea floor off North Africa. Did Mediterranean rise because the humans were cooking too much 2000 years ago?
And now on the console (but especially Nintendo fanbois) and with Mac the users have been abused so long they have fscking Stockholm Syndrome or something and not only accept it they LIKE getting hosed by their vendor now.
I never owned a console (nor a Mac, for that matter), so your diagnosing me with a "Stockholm Syndrome" (and, no doubt, aiming to liberate me from it) is complete non-sense.
I'm just viewing this from the rights perspective. It is wrong for you, the judge, or whoever, to try to twist the creator's arm into some "new and improved" uses of their creations. If they can be persuaded — fine. If not — so be it... Throw the console out in protest, if you must, and read a book...
If this is done against the wishes of the console-maker, than you can claim, that they are "winning" too. However unreasonable their wishes may be, they ought to be respected, period. They created the product, they licensed their use to others (of whom nobody was unduly coerced into agreeing) on certain conditions.
You — or this judge — then coming around and saying, you know, we think, those conditions should be changed, and we are going to force you to change them, is just not how things ought to be done in a free society.
The owners of the 'Victorian internet' used their control of the telegraph to prop up monopolies, manipulate elections, facilitate insider trading, and censor criticism.
And the only way to counter that is to make all communications open to all... Yes, TFA's author probably didn't mean it. But this is the only conclusion from the article's write-up, that doesn't dismiss the entire piece as just a bad analogy...
Because as long as certain communications remain private, all those evil things listed will remain perfectly possible — easy, in fact... (And the baby seals will keep dying too...)
I don't understand why so many conservatives trust health insurance companies more than the government.
For the same reason, you trust Sprint (to have your GPS data) more than you trust the police.
To me they seem pretty much the same, except that health insurance companies have even less transparency.
For one, the insurance companies don't have access to your income figures and other financial information — but the government does. When the same government agency has full access to both datasets, I say, they know too much about us.
But, hey, if you don't care, you must be one of the few lucky ones with nothing to hide. Right?
That's why we need to act NOW to return the glaciers to the same state they were in 30,000 years ago.
The "NOW" has to be pictured with a multi-colored fist raised in anger against the oppressors.
While at it, the humanity also ought to rise against the evil Big Business (as opposite to the beloved "Mom and Pop" shops suffering from Wal-Mart), who contribute to the Continental Drift. Because every time a plane takes off on one continent and lands on another, the continents are pulled farther and farther away from the positions they were in before humanity appeared.
Please provide some details, math and/or science to back up your claim.
Simple... You'll be moving air. And by doing so you'll be subject to the same effects, as the clothes drying in the wind. You want to be warmed up through infra-red radiation as much as possible, with the minimum convection component, because convection moves air (hot rises up).
It also makes for uncomfortable differences in temperature between floor and ceiling — you may feel chill in your legs (or your toddler may be cold), but you'll breath noticeably hotter air.
And, finally, you feel hot when your furnace starts, and when the heat turns off (upon reaching the specified temperature), the temperature begins to drop fast. You want something with high inertia, because our bodies detect temperature changes and begin feeling "hot" or "cold", when the actual temperature may still be perfectly fine.
Forced air is very economical to install, because nothing ever leaks nor rusts and the same pathways used for cooling in summer can be used for heating in winter. And with integrated humidifier(s) and ceiling fans (to push hot air back down) it can be Ok. But if "money is no object", you want hot water (running at the lowest possible temperature — not steam!) running through either cast iron fixtures, or — even more expensive — the little pipes in your floor.
I'd think, the 1st Amendment ought to protect their speech, at least... Maybe, wasting the judge's time is contempt, but I am very-very-very worried about people getting fined for expressing their legal opinions — they didn't curse the judge or refuse to rise up. Simply ruling against them is one thing, fining them for even bringing the matter up is a "chilling message".
What the hell does your health insurance rant have to do with the subject at hand?
The subject at hand outrages Illiberal slashdotters because the government's law enforcers find it "too easy" to get GPS-data about their suspects (the subset of suspects, who are also Sprint customers) from Sprint. The "health insurance rant" is related to that, because people with self-consistent beliefs ought to be even more outraged, by the government's attempts to learn about each citizen's (suspected of anything or not) health care, linked precisely to their financial information.
That's what links the two topics fairly closely. I hope, I was able to address your concern.
You sir, can take your tinfoil hat and leave and we'll not shed a tear... Go form your own country or find one that you like better. You don't even have to wait until 2010.
Didn't you promise to leave for Canada in 2004? What happened — the door slammed you too hard on your way out?..
There's also the concept of freedom of association to consider. Congress can't compel me by force of law to associate with anybody, including a health insurance company.
The monstrosity has to be stopped now (make that a "Now!!!" — with the Illiberal-beloved raised fist). Don't wait for it to be struck by Supreme Court, for it may never happen... Roosevelt — the earlier opponent of "letting a good crisis go to waste" — had to fight Supreme Court for his "New Deal", and prevailed...
And how exactly do you install the iBart application using Konqueror so that it reports that it's running on iPhone 3.1?
I don't need to install iBart (whatever that is) — or any other "foo" — to tell the world, I'm using it... The browser's UserAgent string was the only thing, that led the site in TFA to conclude, they had a visit from iPhone-3.1...
That statement bans child porn (which is likely illegal in their service areas anyway) and racism.
Ok, child porn is already illegal, but racism is not. For a business to ban it is wrong, if only because one's "racism" is another's "dissent". This is far more important, actually, than any limits on porn, because as long as we can discuss banned material, we are free to change the banning laws. This is what sets us apart from China's tyranny — we may not be able to view child porn, but we can argue, whether such prohibitions should be in place. Chinese, on the other hand, can not even discuss relative merits of alternative forms of government.
By banning "racism" and "bigotry" we get much closer to the same tyranny: notice, how most critics of our current President are claimed by at least some of his supporters to be "racists". To avoid "controversy" and to please the Administration (who can really hurt them through FCC), Verizon may decide to disconnect such racists — perhaps even "sending a technicians to guide you"...
But my — and that Drew's from Verizon — reading of the AUP is not limited to "child" porn. Any transmission that is "obscene" or "sexually explicit" is against the policy, even if it depicts happily screwing adults. Will using a curse-word make your e-mails "obscene" (even if not "sexually explicit")? You betcha!..
I live in NC and pretty much every porn site on the Internet is illegal to visit
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my point was, "clever" is in the eyes of the beholder...
I'd add, that the whole usage of the word while adding negative connotations to it, such as: "Clever does not pay the bills," — is rather offensive. Unfortunately, it is wide-spread...
And typically it goes like this: I didn't think of that, the guy must be clever (a.k.a. smart-ass). Maybe, one actually has to be smart and clever to be offended by it...
This — following existing conventions regardless of how stupid they are — is exactly how groups of people (including corporations) stagnate and then die out...
Except, no such compiler exists (nor ever existed) and another one of the company's old-timers confirmed to me, that the guy, whose example the rest of the company were following, was, indeed, ignorant of this feature of calloc...
It didn't matter much in the great scheme of things — their code was so bad, they didn't even dare to compile it with -O... But, hey, it was consistent, so it paid the bills, right?
Except that one's "clever" is another one's "perfectly normal". For example, a client I worked for, had a huge body of C-code, where they — following one of the company founders' coding practices — would bzero a just calloc-ed array. In hundreds of places throughout the code...
Was it clever of me to not do it, knowing that calloc returns zeroed-out memory (its only difference with malloc in these days of flat memory), or was it stupid of them to insist on doing it for the sake of "reliable and maintainable" code?
That humans — especially the wealthy humans — are destroying the planet with their consumption is explicit in many "save the Earth" pieces, and implied in nearly all of them. I'm going to believe here, that you aren't feigning your ignorance of this wide-spread opinion and give you some examples...
This recent video attempts to instill guilt in people flying by showing bloodied polar bears falling from the sky. Each passenger, we are told, causes the amount of CO2, that's a weight of a polar bear. It is implied (with plausible deniability, of course, because the idiotic connection would only work on a weaker mind), that each passenger is thus responsible for a dead polar bear... Every time.
For another example, here is criticism of Ford's recent ad, that shows Ford's SUV among polar bears. The critic states, the ad "might upset a few people". Now, it might not be upsetting to you, but it is evidence, that large number of people consider SUVs a crime against nature.
Violent assholes from Earth Liberation Front will happily burn a business to stop it from "destroying the environment". The threat is not theoretical: "If you build it, we will burn it." The ideology has many sympathizers and represents the number one terrorist threat in the US.
More examples exist, of course... I hope, you will be able to find them yourself now.
I don't think, it is fair to label us "deniers". The burden of proof ought to be on those, who want to make civilization change its ways. For over a decade, we were told "the science is settled" — that not only does global warming exist, there is a significant anthropogenic contribution to it, which ought to be stopped.
Thanks to this whistle-blower (or a hacker, or whoever), we learned, that the consensus in this case achieved in a Marxist manner: through elimination of dissent. We read these "scientists" discussing boycotts against peer-reviewed journals to prevent publishing works of "sceptics". All so that the foot-soldiers on forums such as this one could continue to claim, that "no peer-reviewed journal published anything by this guy, so he must be a fringe lunatic."
We also read, how frustrated they became, faced with the actually lowering temperatures, which their computer models failed to predict. Where I'm from, a scientific theory, that fails to predict what's observed in life, is discarded. But, I guess, these guys stood to lose too much government funding, so they "massaged" their data until they got the pre-determined result.
Every proposed answer to AGW (which might not even exist) involves large tax increases and increased government control over citizens' lives. The Big Brother watching is Ok, because it is for "a greener planet" (the modern era's "Greater Good" (TM)). Scratch any advocate of AGW, and you'll find a Che Guevara T-shirt underneath... That alone ought to turn a reasonable human being into a "denier".
Although voluntary for now, starting 2017, Columbia University plans to have a compost bin in every dorm room. I sure hope, my daughter is not forced to live like that, when she goes to college, over junk science
Exactly! You got it! So, when we talk about ancient history, we can calmly attribute things to geological processes, that we have no control over. But when dealing with our own times, we aren't going to skip a good opportunity to raise taxes and give more control to the government. Scratch almost every modern "environmentalist" and you'll find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath...
Actually, you can be sure, there were people explaining the climate change and/or the rising sea levels, that flooded the entire cities, by the anger of the gods. You can also bet safely, that various priests back then suggested (and demanded) large sacrifices to appease the supernaturals.
Kinda like what Al Gore is doing now (warning, unsafe amounts of sarcasm at the link)...
Oh, well, that's a fine distinction. But do you know, who acted in this case? An in- our an outsider? You don't know. And neither does the grandstanding Barbara Boxer — yet she wants a "criminal prosecution" nevertheless.
Well, whenever *AA talk about theft of music or movies, the counterargument — from your very kind — is that it can not be called "theft", because nobody has lost anything material. What was downloaded was merely a copy. Fine hypocrites you are...
Except, unlike military designs, all these things were supposed to be public domain, free for all to examine... So, could it be called "stolen", if it belonged to us all anyway?
"Trust me, I can read the ancient runes, and I'm telling you, the city is doomed, unless we sacrifice ten newborns."
Seriously, with the exposed pattern of data-manipulation you can not be certain, the numbers weren't cooked in some less obvious fashion — there are plenty of hints to that in the revealed source-code:
The scientific credibility of the entire CRU — and all research based on theirs — is irreparably damaged.
"Nature" is just fighting here for its own reputation and should not be listened to.
Crickets chirping. Trains passing in the distance... No indignant protests against the use of term "stealing" regarding data...
Anyway, please, explain the credentials, that you used to determine, he is a hacker "stealing", rather than a whistle-blower exposing? Thank you.
I think, you missed a good opportunity to show, what's so "ridiculous" about my argument. There really are lost cities there.
Also Sahara became a desert in only a few millenia (if not centuries) — also a drastic climate change, that can not be pinned on the evil industrialization.
And I must also disagree with the Earth being round...
Is that what you did, professor?
It doesn't? How do you know? Were you able to review their processes and reproduce their results yourself? From the beginning?
No, you can not. And nobody can, because they've destroyed their records years ago. Up until now, only "the fringe" wouldn't believe them. Now, with their attempts (successful or not) to manipulate and misrepresent some data exposed, we ought to question everything they've ever told us.
The Humanity in general and the Western civilization in particular were on trial. We are accused of "destroying Gaia" and facing the punishment of huge fines and severe drop in the quality of life (such as living with worms composting our garbage).
So, guess what? When, suddenly, thanks to a whistle-blower (whom the prominent Illiberals in Congress want prosecuted, BTW), we learn of the massive prosecutorial misconduct (some of it, such as deleting files after receiving Freedom of Information requests, outright criminal), that affects a substantial amount of evidence against us, we move for the "court" to dismiss the entire case.
Those "millions of man hours" are now tainted.
On that same blog you link to, there is an "Update": Read the comments below. It's been pointed out to me that there's a later version of code in the archive in which similar correction code is not commented out. Details and link below.
The point is not, that humans don't change the atmosphere at all. It is that our (anthropogenic) contribution to the change is negligibly small — we also "contribute" to Continental Drift... The cooling of the last 10 years, that so frustrated the CRU alarmists (one of them writes in an e-mail: "The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."), is now explained by the lower Sun activity — even when reminding the faithful readers, that "These changes are not enough to reverse global warming". Well, duh, "It is the Sun, stupid". Whatever we do here — and we didn't reduce our emissions (save for those few weeks in Bejing you observed) over the decade — the Sun will trump that many times over.
Oceans rising? Right... There are ancient cities on the sea floor off North Africa. Did Mediterranean rise because the humans were cooking too much 2000 years ago?
I never owned a console (nor a Mac, for that matter), so your diagnosing me with a "Stockholm Syndrome" (and, no doubt, aiming to liberate me from it) is complete non-sense.
I'm just viewing this from the rights perspective. It is wrong for you, the judge, or whoever, to try to twist the creator's arm into some "new and improved" uses of their creations. If they can be persuaded — fine. If not — so be it... Throw the console out in protest, if you must, and read a book...
If this is done against the wishes of the console-maker, than you can claim, that they are "winning" too. However unreasonable their wishes may be, they ought to be respected, period. They created the product, they licensed their use to others (of whom nobody was unduly coerced into agreeing) on certain conditions.
You — or this judge — then coming around and saying, you know, we think, those conditions should be changed, and we are going to force you to change them, is just not how things ought to be done in a free society.
And the only way to counter that is to make all communications open to all... Yes, TFA's author probably didn't mean it. But this is the only conclusion from the article's write-up, that doesn't dismiss the entire piece as just a bad analogy...
Because as long as certain communications remain private, all those evil things listed will remain perfectly possible — easy, in fact... (And the baby seals will keep dying too...)
For the same reason, you trust Sprint (to have your GPS data) more than you trust the police.
For one, the insurance companies don't have access to your income figures and other financial information — but the government does. When the same government agency has full access to both datasets, I say, they know too much about us.
But, hey, if you don't care, you must be one of the few lucky ones with nothing to hide. Right?
I hereby denounce this article — and the pseudo-statistics in it — as racist!
Gebyy zl nff!..
The "NOW" has to be pictured with a multi-colored fist raised in anger against the oppressors.
While at it, the humanity also ought to rise against the evil Big Business (as opposite to the beloved "Mom and Pop" shops suffering from Wal-Mart), who contribute to the Continental Drift. Because every time a plane takes off on one continent and lands on another, the continents are pulled farther and farther away from the positions they were in before humanity appeared.
Simple... You'll be moving air. And by doing so you'll be subject to the same effects, as the clothes drying in the wind. You want to be warmed up through infra-red radiation as much as possible, with the minimum convection component, because convection moves air (hot rises up).
It also makes for uncomfortable differences in temperature between floor and ceiling — you may feel chill in your legs (or your toddler may be cold), but you'll breath noticeably hotter air.
And, finally, you feel hot when your furnace starts, and when the heat turns off (upon reaching the specified temperature), the temperature begins to drop fast. You want something with high inertia, because our bodies detect temperature changes and begin feeling "hot" or "cold", when the actual temperature may still be perfectly fine.
Forced air is very economical to install, because nothing ever leaks nor rusts and the same pathways used for cooling in summer can be used for heating in winter. And with integrated humidifier(s) and ceiling fans (to push hot air back down) it can be Ok. But if "money is no object", you want hot water (running at the lowest possible temperature — not steam!) running through either cast iron fixtures, or — even more expensive — the little pipes in your floor.
I'd think, the 1st Amendment ought to protect their speech, at least... Maybe, wasting the judge's time is contempt, but I am very-very-very worried about people getting fined for expressing their legal opinions — they didn't curse the judge or refuse to rise up. Simply ruling against them is one thing, fining them for even bringing the matter up is a "chilling message".
The subject at hand outrages Illiberal slashdotters because the government's law enforcers find it "too easy" to get GPS-data about their suspects (the subset of suspects, who are also Sprint customers) from Sprint. The "health insurance rant" is related to that, because people with self-consistent beliefs ought to be even more outraged, by the government's attempts to learn about each citizen's (suspected of anything or not) health care, linked precisely to their financial information.
That's what links the two topics fairly closely. I hope, I was able to address your concern.
Didn't you promise to leave for Canada in 2004? What happened — the door slammed you too hard on your way out?..
You'll be arguing these fine legal points in courts, until the judges get bored with it and begin fining you for contempt as they already do to people, who argue, that the entire Income Tax is unconstitutional.
The monstrosity has to be stopped now (make that a "Now!!!" — with the Illiberal-beloved raised fist). Don't wait for it to be struck by Supreme Court, for it may never happen... Roosevelt — the earlier opponent of "letting a good crisis go to waste" — had to fight Supreme Court for his "New Deal", and prevailed...
I don't need to install iBart (whatever that is) — or any other "foo" — to tell the world, I'm using it... The browser's UserAgent string was the only thing, that led the site in TFA to conclude, they had a visit from iPhone-3.1...
Ok, child porn is already illegal, but racism is not. For a business to ban it is wrong, if only because one's "racism" is another's "dissent". This is far more important, actually, than any limits on porn, because as long as we can discuss banned material, we are free to change the banning laws. This is what sets us apart from China's tyranny — we may not be able to view child porn, but we can argue, whether such prohibitions should be in place. Chinese, on the other hand, can not even discuss relative merits of alternative forms of government.
By banning "racism" and "bigotry" we get much closer to the same tyranny: notice, how most critics of our current President are claimed by at least some of his supporters to be "racists". To avoid "controversy" and to please the Administration (who can really hurt them through FCC), Verizon may decide to disconnect such racists — perhaps even "sending a technicians to guide you"...
But my — and that Drew's from Verizon — reading of the AUP is not limited to "child" porn. Any transmission that is "obscene" or "sexually explicit" is against the policy, even if it depicts happily screwing adults. Will using a curse-word make your e-mails "obscene" (even if not "sexually explicit")? You betcha!..
That's government for you...