If it was posted they were homosexuals and they weren't, that'd be defamation. But it states their "homosexuality was revealed on wikipedia". Which leads me to believe they are in fact homosexual.
So how does revealing the truth equate to defamation?
Revealing something that a person considers private information and putting it in wikipedia or another format for the entire world to see should be legally wrong. If it isn't illegal today, it will be.
For example, my favorite color is green. That's a fact. I don't want some one to look me up in wikipedia and find out my sexual preferences or my favorite color or anything else that I consider private information. If "defamation" is the nearest existing law that they can use to slap them with, so be it. Wikipedia and those that actually did add/edit those articles should be held accountable for releasing private information. It doesn't matter if the information is true or not; it is the fact that the information was released to the world wide public and could be used in a negative manner against the person.
I have lots of fetishess that I like. The only person that is privy to that information is my wife. If my fetishes ever show up listed in wikipedia, then I'd have to sue them as well. It doesn't matter if the information is correct or not. What matters is that I didn't give my permission for the information to be released and is shouldn't be published.
I wish a judge would heavily fine Wikipedia for this. Wikipedia is not an ISP. An ISP has no idea what data is going through there bandwith. Wikipedia has editors and actually edits and removes lots of user generated content. It's a totally different thing! Wikipedia is trying to use an ISP get out of jail free card. The said thing is that it'll work.
I think it's more like 1 out of 100 of employees actually obey company IT policies. The more management or IT that you are the more that you are liable to freely break IT policies as well.
If you've gotta use weapons, make them conventional or there won't be much of a world left to argue over...yaknow?
But what if you were some place like Israel and just interested in nuking your neighbors and not the entire world? We've not experimented with the idea of purposely setting off nukes entirely around a country to prevent invasion or immigration.
Everyone I have heard espouse the "loving Earth/Gaia" bit lives a comfortable, relatively modern life. Mother Earth loves you plenty when you have electricity, running water and stores full of food.
Take that away and get real close to Mother Earth. I've been there: Mother Earth may still love you, but the bitch will try her best to kill you at every opportunity.
The bitch is trying to kill us annually with hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, floods, and diseases. She doesn't really love us; she hates us and has been trying to kill us off.
The idea that you can train someone to disassociate the "person" from the "target" is well known and well applied in the modern military. Especially in the modern American military where nighttime raids are carried out in pitch darkness with only moving infrared blips representing the fleeing victims of computer-guided missiles, such disassociation has reached a very high level.
By getting kids into games earlier, and especially into games which allow multiple "lives" with very little cost for respawn, we can teach them to better separate their feelings towards others from their actions.
I can see only good things for military planning and warmaking coming from this.
Now, if we can only figure out a cheap way to mass produce millions of human like remote controlled robots for each military role. We let the kids play with one, and when it dies, they respawn to another. Our entire human military could be based anywhere, we just need excellent encryption and bandwidth to control those death bots.;)
Why don't they just move all the non-notable articles into a Trivipedia? Wouldn't that make both overzealous editors and fancruft-fans etc happy?
In short, trivipedia would kill wikipedia because that's really wikipedia's really function. I normally don't care about what actor played what character, but if I need to wikipedia can usually tell me. Most of the TV show/movie stuff would/should be trivia. I don't care about it until I need it.
The notability claim is there for a reason, and it works, it stops ego listings.... Radio stations who get listed just because they exist? They're not notable. Open Source software? A bunch of it (including a couple of things I've worked on) has been marked non-notable and deleted.
There are some things that wikipedia is good for. There are some things that wikipedia should/could be good for but the stupid admins limit the users. What if I told you slashdot, digg, myspace, and google weren't notable? Sluggy Freelance, Megatokyo, and Schlock Mercenary are the 3 most popular longest running webcomics. Each webcomic has had problems staying notable enough for wikipedia. This would be like them deciding star trek, star wars, super man, and batman weren't notable and removing their articles. If wikipedia did that, they'd experience a quick death. What makes fans really angry at wikipedia is things that could or did have a complete article being removed by a wikipedia admin. There is alot of bad blood between the webcomics folk and wikipedia. Most of the webcomics folks use www.comixpedia.org because wikipedia admins have actively blocked their niche on wikipedia. Using your radio station example, this is like no radio stations being listed because wikipedia doesn't think the content should be on wikipedia. The things that will finally kill wikipedia are wikipedia's admin and better wikipedia like projects that do include niches that wikipedia doesn't like.
Why is the always the old guys that are about to die off that enact or get crap passed so that all the rest of us living have to do what they want! If anything, I'd like the vote to be removed from those that retire or above 70 as they are too old and out of date to make decisions for the future. Heck, those under 12 are more likely to make valid decisions for the future since they'll have to live in it.
P.S. exercises like this are important to release to the public as most folks simply do not have any guidance or have given any thought to preparing for such a possibility. What are you going to do when the zombies show up at your door?:-)
You must be joking... the roads are crawling with SUVs and other vehicles that consider 24MPG to be EXCELLENT gas mileage.
Heck, I have a hand me down family vehicle that I got for $2K. It gets usually 16-18 MPG and is a small car. My wife's Tarus can get 24 MPG, but only on the highway. I'm not sure what she gets in town. Show me cheap (below $8K) cars that get more than 35 MPG. I'd love it if my vehicle got 50-60 MPG, but some one would have to sell it to me for $2-3K. Can you show me cars like that? I occasionally look at new small cars. Heck even the newest Honda Civic was only showing as getting 25 mpg city/36 mpg highway starting at $15K according to their website. I was hoping that there exists some vehicles that get 40-50 MPG or 50-60 MPG, but I can't find them.
It'll take the government strong arming the vehicle makers to basically just not make or sell anything that gets less than what ever your magic number MPG is for me to eventually get higher MPG vehicle.
It is still illegal to use underage models. But 2257 imposed massive recordkeeping burdens on porn sites. Not just checking every model's ID, but all sorts of unnecessary things, like requiring being open certain hours for random, unannounced inspections of the records, requiring each site to maintain records (no outsourcing to companies much better able to handle it all), and so on. 2257 made it a felony to have even fairly minor errors in records. Not just "protecting the children", but criminal liability for not exactly following extremely detailed, excessively burdensome record keeping requirements.
I can be evil sometimes. This sparked the thought that I'd like them to be really evil to people/industries that I don't like and require them to records for inspections! What don't I like? I don't like the educational industry. Force "every" industry that hires or has as a consumer minors verify that none of their employees are sex offenders and have a special room/box to hold those records because that box could be audited at any time with zero notice and errors in the records would be felonies.
My wife's name was misspelled in our old telephone records. Make it a felony for any utility company to have incorrect or inaccurate records about its customers! I hate having my data shared and spread around by banks and credit card companies. Make it a 10-20 year felony for the employees within banks or credit card companies to share any of my data! (They need the same reporting requirements as well.) I don't like some software companies for various reasons. I guess I'd have to require the government to be able to audit all software code for any reason at any time. I'd also make bug reports, user complaints, drivers/patch updates and other misc things to be stored in the box that could be audited at any time.
I don't like patents. Make every company that uses or makes patents require to an auditable list of every patent that they use and make.
I haven't been evil to the government yet. Require some new department to store a copy of all the above requirements that they've audited with an internal goal of auditing 90% of listed companies per year.
I guess I have to be evil to various religious people as well. Once dead, I'd like God to make them audit their own lives and list every "sin" that they have ever commited. They get years in their version of hell for errors. They also have to audit two or three other people as well. Hmm, may be one person they view as a hero and another that they view as a villian and audit each of their lives with the same conditions for mistakes.;)
To be the most evil being ever, I'd grant everyone immortality and then require them all to keep records for most of their new life time.
Like everyone's been saying, our solution to these problems of dependence on the middle east & emissions is going to be a host of different solutions specific to different areas. I fear that the funding and attention will go into this and we'll have all our eggs in one basket... a basket owned by and controlled by the DoD.
Um, as a US citizen, I can't tell you how much safer it makes me feel that the DOD rather than the DOE might be developing/defending this. Every time that I turn around lately the DOD is on the bleeding edge of "green tech." They are the ones that really want to stomp on the middle east/various oil producing countries and forget about the regions entirely. They can't do that until they have long term domestic energy supplies.
No withholding funding from libraries that stock books somebody doesn't like. No pressure on printers, no self-censorship. IF the goverment wants to ban something, they got to come out and do it openly.
The US is very different, in theory every book is free, just that libraries that stock the wrong ones get no funding. An even greater evil exists in self-censorship. It allows the politicians to wash their hands off any anti-freedom policy while still having censorship.
Yes, in the US, the "government" other than the FCC rarely actually censors anything.;) (O.k. there are those pre-existing rules that prevent cussing and porn over the RF spectrum and most aren't even aware that self censor ship is occuring.) In the US, we have sub cultures of every flavor that have their private wars on some content. The religion folks don't like a ton of stuff, but they generally aim at school libraries where they can be very successful at keeping some content out of the schools. The anti-religion folks that don't want any religion in any some what government relating thing have been working at censoring religion. The greens are censoring anti-green content. Don't get me started on the global warming crowd. I think all sides in that conflict have decided to flood the world with content and use name calling against their opposites. Walmart does it simply by refusing to stock content that fits their guidelines.
We'd rather have this type of many sub group attempted censorship rather than any government censorship. Generally, subgroups step on each others toes. Take a look at Walmart's guide lines. They sell alot of adult R rated content in both video and in games; they also simply don't stock what the founders and the mainstream US generally don't like. The content for XXX adult stuff exists and can be bought, but you aren't going to find it at a Walmart. One of the big reason's anime is popular with the 17-20 crowd in the US is that some of it has alot of nudity but is only rated NC-17 because its a cartoon.;) We've all got weird values, but you learn to work around others that don't believe in your values.
Heck, we have Christian book stores and you can bet that they are self censored. You seem to view this as something that is wrong. I don't.
I am just stunned. I realize the majority of people here are probably monolingual and probably living in North America, but the majority of posts here seem to be along the lines of "Well it doesn't affect me, so who gives a f**k?" or "If they are dying out, they are just cruft". At least some people see the value in everyone having a common language - but thats the best argument for everyone to learn a SECOND language, not for us to just abandon all of the smaller languages out there.
If I learned a second language, it would never be one of the smaller languages. I'd learn either Spanish or Japanese. If people are going to spend the effort to learn other languages, and they have a choice in the matter, usually they'd pick secondary languages spoken in their region or a language with a lot of content that they are interested in expressed solely in one language. Why did I pick either Spanish or Japanese? There are many local Spanish speakers and a few Spanish only businesses in my town so that could be useful. I picked Japanese because I read manga and some of the Japanese to English translations seem off when read.
But no one else of consequence at MS is getting it right, and that's scary that a behemoth like MS can make such a blindingly obvious idiotic blunder. Perhaps corporations are inherently flawed systems in this way, susceptible to bad groupthink. They may wake up before they bleed too much. Sic transit gloria MS.
Every large system of humans is susceptible to bad group think including the slashdot/open source crowd. Come on open your eyes it happens in every field, government, business, religion and large family.
Even if that's the case, there are far better ways to handle a questioner who hogs the stage. Whoever was in charge of that event should have politely interrupted, loudly say "Sorry, we have no time for further questions," and cut the mic off. This was totally uncalled for. The University, a state institution, should get their asses sued off.
I just had the perfect idea for future debates. Ask a question within 30 seconds. If it isn't a valid question, you get shot with a taser. If the person debating evades the question or doesn't actually answer the question, that person gets hit. It would bring life and ratings back to US political debates.
Actually, now, as I am writing, I am reminded of the best at this, Terry Pratchett. You don't even have to read the books in order. He really is a genius at making every book completely self-contained, yet having them still sit in a larger story line. In many of his trilogies I have actually read the second or third before the first, and it made complete sense.
There are two author's that I have almost all their books: Terry Pratchett and Lois McMaster Bujold. Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles books (http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=lmbujold) aren't usually as funny as Terry Pratchett, but if you are into space opera scifi at all you can easily pick up any of the Miles books and be enjoyed without having to worry about entire back stories of characters. Oh, the books are much better if you have read them all and do know all the ins and outs of the backstories, but you can lend any book of the series to a friend and usually get them hooked.
At my house, all outgoing traffic passes through an OpenWRT firewall, which redirects all web traffic to my caching proxy. It logs all accesses. I get reports. If I see something "unusual", I bring my kids in and have them explain it. I TALK TO THEM. It's useless to try to mechanically block their access, but if they know that EVERYTHING they do IS monitored (and they do), they seem to act responsibly.
Technology is not a substitute for good parenting, but it can be a useful tool for it.
Do you have a how to do this for those that are IT lazy at home? My kids are 8 & 9 and their internet filter is sitting behind them every second that the computer is connected to the internet. If either of my kids wants porn, that just requires a determined search of the admin account's my documents and a folder or two on an external harddrive. They aren't at the age where they'd be curious about that, but there's plenty there waiting to be found. We are also a one computer family and would you look at porn in your parent's room when either of the parents are liable to walk in at any time? The only time that I recall looking at porn was in my room in a printed hide able form when parents weren't likely to come in. My 9 year old is asking for a laptop. One day, I'm going to buy 4. 2 for each of the kids and 2 for mom and dad. When that day comes, I need to know how to snoop over their shoulder electronically. I'd want key, mouse, & app loggers & capturing every sites or threads from the internet. I'm liable to be lazy with the home IT but that's cause right now I do the old fashioned real life filtering. Oh, if you really want to filter you're kid's online activity drop DSL, Cable, Fiber or Sat and go back to dial up.;) That's certainly filtered my online activities at that age and as an adult.
Something that bugs me is the number of people, liberal and conservative alike, that really believe that just having wealth proves you're more intelligent than the average person and deserve to be in a position of leadership. They don't take into account that some people are born more privledged than others and therefore have an easier path to wealth, that some people have fewer morals to get in their way, or that some people are just lucky.
Yeah, but Bill Gates would have to put a lot of effort into it if he wanted to be the next Bush or Clinton. Where as "any one" potentially could become the next Bill Gates. That's the dream that has kept the US ticking over. One of the big myths of getting mega rich though was that Bill Gates was already rich by most people's standards before MS hit it big. As I understand it, he started out with a few million and grew that into a company worth a few billion. Most of us would be really happy if we could turn our few thousand per year into just a few million. We like to believe that the rich are better, otherwise what's the point? Other than food and shelter why bother working to improve yourself or your family? It's the believe that the rich are better or at least have better toys that keeps us going.
To a hardware engineer a QA failure means that a lot of people complain about their iPhones that won't work. To an aeronautical engineer it means that a 747 just exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. You don't honestly think that the investment in safety is the same in each of these cases do you?
If I survived, I'd be pretty ticked if my iPhone exploded. I'd want iPhones not to explode and 747s not to explode. I wouldn't want my keyboard, mouse, or monitor to explode either. As a general rule, I don't want exploding going on outside of where combustion should be by design.
Now this clearly does not rise to the importance of fighting for suffrage and civil rights, but your boss would have dismissed those fights as well. He would have told Rosa Parks that she'd be right but she'd be dead! That or you are miss representing your boss's opinion...
Um, it's the same thing. This guy and his family had their civil rights violated by his unlawful arrest and their unlawful detention. It's exactly a civil right to fight for.
The biggest problem with our current administration is they have never been after the "terorists" as the call them their real agenda is findling the "enemy". For them the enemy is anyone who doesn't agree with them. That does include terrorists but it also includes many of their own people.
Problem as old as humanity. As long as we still have this problem, we will still be human. If you can "solve" or "get rid of" this problem, then you or your society isn't a good human one. Sooner or later we will build a god. O.k. Maybe not a god that can do everything, but a god that can watch or just record every one and every thing in our civilization. Then five seconds later we'd start using said god to find people that are doing things that we don't like and getting rid of them.
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If it was posted they were homosexuals and they weren't, that'd be defamation. But it states their "homosexuality was revealed on wikipedia". Which leads me to believe they are in fact homosexual.
So how does revealing the truth equate to defamation?
Revealing something that a person considers private information and putting it in wikipedia or another format for the entire world to see should be legally wrong. If it isn't illegal today, it will be.
For example, my favorite color is green. That's a fact. I don't want some one to look me up in wikipedia and find out my sexual preferences or my favorite color or anything else that I consider private information. If "defamation" is the nearest existing law that they can use to slap them with, so be it. Wikipedia and those that actually did add/edit those articles should be held accountable for releasing private information. It doesn't matter if the information is true or not; it is the fact that the information was released to the world wide public and could be used in a negative manner against the person.
I have lots of fetishess that I like. The only person that is privy to that information is my wife. If my fetishes ever show up listed in wikipedia, then I'd have to sue them as well. It doesn't matter if the information is correct or not. What matters is that I didn't give my permission for the information to be released and is shouldn't be published.
I wish a judge would heavily fine Wikipedia for this. Wikipedia is not an ISP. An ISP has no idea what data is going through there bandwith. Wikipedia has editors and actually edits and removes lots of user generated content. It's a totally different thing! Wikipedia is trying to use an ISP get out of jail free card. The said thing is that it'll work.
Is a war against an emotion... Anything which can cause fear is therefore subject to the war. In that way it's the perfect war for politicians.
So can we have most politicians, reporters, and lawyers arrested since they "scare the hell out of me" more than "terrorism" ever has.
I think it's more like 1 out of 100 of employees actually obey company IT policies. The more management or IT that you are the more that you are liable to freely break IT policies as well.
If you've gotta use weapons, make them conventional or there won't be much of a world left to argue over...yaknow?
But what if you were some place like Israel and just interested in nuking your neighbors and not the entire world? We've not experimented with the idea of purposely setting off nukes entirely around a country to prevent invasion or immigration.
Everyone I have heard espouse the "loving Earth/Gaia" bit lives a comfortable, relatively modern life. Mother Earth loves you plenty when you have electricity, running water and stores full of food.
Take that away and get real close to Mother Earth. I've been there: Mother Earth may still love you, but the bitch will try her best to kill you at every opportunity.
The bitch is trying to kill us annually with hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, floods, and diseases. She doesn't really love us; she hates us and has been trying to kill us off.
The idea that you can train someone to disassociate the "person" from the "target" is well known and well applied in the modern military. Especially in the modern American military where nighttime raids are carried out in pitch darkness with only moving infrared blips representing the fleeing victims of computer-guided missiles, such disassociation has reached a very high level.
;)
By getting kids into games earlier, and especially into games which allow multiple "lives" with very little cost for respawn, we can teach them to better separate their feelings towards others from their actions.
I can see only good things for military planning and warmaking coming from this.
Now, if we can only figure out a cheap way to mass produce millions of human like remote controlled robots for each military role. We let the kids play with one, and when it dies, they respawn to another. Our entire human military could be based anywhere, we just need excellent encryption and bandwidth to control those death bots.
Why don't they just move all the non-notable articles into a Trivipedia? Wouldn't that make both overzealous editors and fancruft-fans etc happy?
In short, trivipedia would kill wikipedia because that's really wikipedia's really function. I normally don't care about what actor played what character, but if I need to wikipedia can usually tell me. Most of the TV show/movie stuff would/should be trivia. I don't care about it until I need it.
The notability claim is there for a reason, and it works, it stops ego listings. ... Radio stations who get listed just because they exist? They're not notable. Open Source software? A bunch of it (including a couple of things I've worked on) has been marked non-notable and deleted.
There are some things that wikipedia is good for. There are some things that wikipedia should/could be good for but the stupid admins limit the users. What if I told you slashdot, digg, myspace, and google weren't notable? Sluggy Freelance, Megatokyo, and Schlock Mercenary are the 3 most popular longest running webcomics. Each webcomic has had problems staying notable enough for wikipedia. This would be like them deciding star trek, star wars, super man, and batman weren't notable and removing their articles. If wikipedia did that, they'd experience a quick death. What makes fans really angry at wikipedia is things that could or did have a complete article being removed by a wikipedia admin. There is alot of bad blood between the webcomics folk and wikipedia. Most of the webcomics folks use www.comixpedia.org because wikipedia admins have actively blocked their niche on wikipedia. Using your radio station example, this is like no radio stations being listed because wikipedia doesn't think the content should be on wikipedia. The things that will finally kill wikipedia are wikipedia's admin and better wikipedia like projects that do include niches that wikipedia doesn't like.
Why is the always the old guys that are about to die off that enact or get crap passed so that all the rest of us living have to do what they want! If anything, I'd like the vote to be removed from those that retire or above 70 as they are too old and out of date to make decisions for the future. Heck, those under 12 are more likely to make valid decisions for the future since they'll have to live in it.
P.S. exercises like this are important to release to the public as most folks simply do not have any guidance or have given any thought to preparing for such a possibility. What are you going to do when the zombies show up at your door? :-)
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=1054
Answer, turn them away at the door for smelling really bad.
You must be joking... the roads are crawling with SUVs and other vehicles that consider 24MPG to be EXCELLENT gas mileage.
Heck, I have a hand me down family vehicle that I got for $2K. It gets usually 16-18 MPG and is a small car. My wife's Tarus can get 24 MPG, but only on the highway. I'm not sure what she gets in town. Show me cheap (below $8K) cars that get more than 35 MPG. I'd love it if my vehicle got 50-60 MPG, but some one would have to sell it to me for $2-3K. Can you show me cars like that? I occasionally look at new small cars. Heck even the newest Honda Civic was only showing as getting 25 mpg city/36 mpg highway starting at $15K according to their website. I was hoping that there exists some vehicles that get 40-50 MPG or 50-60 MPG, but I can't find them.
It'll take the government strong arming the vehicle makers to basically just not make or sell anything that gets less than what ever your magic number MPG is for me to eventually get higher MPG vehicle.
It is still illegal to use underage models. But 2257 imposed massive recordkeeping burdens on porn sites. Not just checking every model's ID, but all sorts of unnecessary things, like requiring being open certain hours for random, unannounced inspections of the records, requiring each site to maintain records (no outsourcing to companies much better able to handle it all), and so on. 2257 made it a felony to have even fairly minor errors in records. Not just "protecting the children", but criminal liability for not exactly following extremely detailed, excessively burdensome record keeping requirements.
;)
I can be evil sometimes. This sparked the thought that I'd like them to be really evil to people/industries that I don't like and require them to records for inspections! What don't I like? I don't like the educational industry. Force "every" industry that hires or has as a consumer minors verify that none of their employees are sex offenders and have a special room/box to hold those records because that box could be audited at any time with zero notice and errors in the records would be felonies.
My wife's name was misspelled in our old telephone records. Make it a felony for any utility company to have incorrect or inaccurate records about its customers!
I hate having my data shared and spread around by banks and credit card companies. Make it a 10-20 year felony for the employees within banks or credit card companies to share any of my data! (They need the same reporting requirements as well.) I don't like some software companies for various reasons. I guess I'd have to require the government to be able to audit all software code for any reason at any time. I'd also make bug reports, user complaints, drivers/patch updates and other misc things to be stored in the box that could be audited at any time.
I don't like patents. Make every company that uses or makes patents require to an auditable list of every patent that they use and make.
I haven't been evil to the government yet. Require some new department to store a copy of all the above requirements that they've audited with an internal goal of auditing 90% of listed companies per year.
I guess I have to be evil to various religious people as well. Once dead, I'd like God to make them audit their own lives and list every "sin" that they have ever commited. They get years in their version of hell for errors. They also have to audit two or three other people as well. Hmm, may be one person they view as a hero and another that they view as a villian and audit each of their lives with the same conditions for mistakes.
To be the most evil being ever, I'd grant everyone immortality and then require them all to keep records for most of their new life time.
Like everyone's been saying, our solution to these problems of dependence on the middle east & emissions is going to be a host of different solutions specific to different areas. I fear that the funding and attention will go into this and we'll have all our eggs in one basket ... a basket owned by and controlled by the DoD.
Um, as a US citizen, I can't tell you how much safer it makes me feel that the DOD rather than the DOE might be developing/defending this. Every time that I turn around lately the DOD is on the bleeding edge of "green tech." They are the ones that really want to stomp on the middle east/various oil producing countries and forget about the regions entirely. They can't do that until they have long term domestic energy supplies.
No withholding funding from libraries that stock books somebody doesn't like. No pressure on printers, no self-censorship. IF the goverment wants to ban something, they got to come out and do it openly.
;) (O.k. there are those pre-existing rules that prevent cussing and porn over the RF spectrum and most aren't even aware that self censor ship is occuring.) In the US, we have sub cultures of every flavor that have their private wars on some content. The religion folks don't like a ton of stuff, but they generally aim at school libraries where they can be very successful at keeping some content out of the schools. The anti-religion folks that don't want any religion in any some what government relating thing have been working at censoring religion. The greens are censoring anti-green content. Don't get me started on the global warming crowd. I think all sides in that conflict have decided to flood the world with content and use name calling against their opposites. Walmart does it simply by refusing to stock content that fits their guidelines.
;) We've all got weird values, but you learn to work around others that don't believe in your values.
The US is very different, in theory every book is free, just that libraries that stock the wrong ones get no funding. An even greater evil exists in self-censorship. It allows the politicians to wash their hands off any anti-freedom policy while still having censorship.
Yes, in the US, the "government" other than the FCC rarely actually censors anything.
We'd rather have this type of many sub group attempted censorship rather than any government censorship. Generally, subgroups step on each others toes. Take a look at Walmart's guide lines. They sell alot of adult R rated content in both video and in games; they also simply don't stock what the founders and the mainstream US generally don't like. The content for XXX adult stuff exists and can be bought, but you aren't going to find it at a Walmart. One of the big reason's anime is popular with the 17-20 crowd in the US is that some of it has alot of nudity but is only rated NC-17 because its a cartoon.
Heck, we have Christian book stores and you can bet that they are self censored. You seem to view this as something that is wrong. I don't.
I am just stunned. I realize the majority of people here are probably monolingual and probably living in North America, but the majority of posts here seem to be along the lines of "Well it doesn't affect me, so who gives a f**k?" or "If they are dying out, they are just cruft". At least some people see the value in everyone having a common language - but thats the best argument for everyone to learn a SECOND language, not for us to just abandon all of the smaller languages out there.
If I learned a second language, it would never be one of the smaller languages. I'd learn either Spanish or Japanese. If people are going to spend the effort to learn other languages, and they have a choice in the matter, usually they'd pick secondary languages spoken in their region or a language with a lot of content that they are interested in expressed solely in one language. Why did I pick either Spanish or Japanese? There are many local Spanish speakers and a few Spanish only businesses in my town so that could be useful. I picked Japanese because I read manga and some of the Japanese to English translations seem off when read.
But no one else of consequence at MS is getting it right, and that's scary that a behemoth like MS can make such a blindingly obvious idiotic blunder. Perhaps corporations are inherently flawed systems in this way, susceptible to bad groupthink. They may wake up before they bleed too much. Sic transit gloria MS.
Every large system of humans is susceptible to bad group think including the slashdot/open source crowd. Come on open your eyes it happens in every field, government, business, religion and large family.
Gotta find something to wake me up... I read that as Germans taken into space may come back deadlier.
Even if that's the case, there are far better ways to handle a questioner who hogs the stage. Whoever was in charge of that event should have politely interrupted, loudly say "Sorry, we have no time for further questions," and cut the mic off. This was totally uncalled for. The University, a state institution, should get their asses sued off.
I just had the perfect idea for future debates. Ask a question within 30 seconds. If it isn't a valid question, you get shot with a taser. If the person debating evades the question or doesn't actually answer the question, that person gets hit. It would bring life and ratings back to US political debates.
Actually, now, as I am writing, I am reminded of the best at this, Terry Pratchett. You don't even have to read the books in order. He really is a genius at making every book completely self-contained, yet having them still sit in a larger story line. In many of his trilogies I have actually read the second or third before the first, and it made complete sense.
There are two author's that I have almost all their books: Terry Pratchett and Lois McMaster Bujold. Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles books (http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=lmbujold) aren't usually as funny as Terry Pratchett, but if you are into space opera scifi at all you can easily pick up any of the Miles books and be enjoyed without having to worry about entire back stories of characters. Oh, the books are much better if you have read them all and do know all the ins and outs of the backstories, but you can lend any book of the series to a friend and usually get them hooked.
At my house, all outgoing traffic passes through an OpenWRT firewall, which redirects all web traffic to my caching proxy. It logs all accesses. I get reports. If I see something "unusual", I bring my kids in and have them explain it. I TALK TO THEM. It's useless to try to mechanically block their access, but if they know that EVERYTHING they do IS monitored (and they do), they seem to act responsibly.
;) That's certainly filtered my online activities at that age and as an adult.
Technology is not a substitute for good parenting, but it can be a useful tool for it.
Do you have a how to do this for those that are IT lazy at home? My kids are 8 & 9 and their internet filter is sitting behind them every second that the computer is connected to the internet. If either of my kids wants porn, that just requires a determined search of the admin account's my documents and a folder or two on an external harddrive. They aren't at the age where they'd be curious about that, but there's plenty there waiting to be found. We are also a one computer family and would you look at porn in your parent's room when either of the parents are liable to walk in at any time? The only time that I recall looking at porn was in my room in a printed hide able form when parents weren't likely to come in. My 9 year old is asking for a laptop. One day, I'm going to buy 4. 2 for each of the kids and 2 for mom and dad. When that day comes, I need to know how to snoop over their shoulder electronically. I'd want key, mouse, & app loggers & capturing every sites or threads from the internet. I'm liable to be lazy with the home IT but that's cause right now I do the old fashioned real life filtering. Oh, if you really want to filter you're kid's online activity drop DSL, Cable, Fiber or Sat and go back to dial up.
Something that bugs me is the number of people, liberal and conservative alike, that really believe that just having wealth proves you're more intelligent than the average person and deserve to be in a position of leadership. They don't take into account that some people are born more privledged than others and therefore have an easier path to wealth, that some people have fewer morals to get in their way, or that some people are just lucky.
Yeah, but Bill Gates would have to put a lot of effort into it if he wanted to be the next Bush or Clinton. Where as "any one" potentially could become the next Bill Gates. That's the dream that has kept the US ticking over. One of the big myths of getting mega rich though was that Bill Gates was already rich by most people's standards before MS hit it big. As I understand it, he started out with a few million and grew that into a company worth a few billion. Most of us would be really happy if we could turn our few thousand per year into just a few million. We like to believe that the rich are better, otherwise what's the point? Other than food and shelter why bother working to improve yourself or your family? It's the believe that the rich are better or at least have better toys that keeps us going.
To a hardware engineer a QA failure means that a lot of people complain about their iPhones that won't work. To an aeronautical engineer it means that a 747 just exploded over the Atlantic Ocean. You don't honestly think that the investment in safety is the same in each of these cases do you?
If I survived, I'd be pretty ticked if my iPhone exploded. I'd want iPhones not to explode and 747s not to explode. I wouldn't want my keyboard, mouse, or monitor to explode either. As a general rule, I don't want exploding going on outside of where combustion should be by design.
Now this clearly does not rise to the importance of fighting for suffrage and civil rights, but your boss would have dismissed those fights as well. He would have told Rosa Parks that she'd be right but she'd be dead! That or you are miss representing your boss's opinion...
Um, it's the same thing. This guy and his family had their civil rights violated by his unlawful arrest and their unlawful detention. It's exactly a civil right to fight for.
New question: Are coffee, salmon, and moccha foods or colors?
Neither.
The biggest problem with our current administration is they have never been after the "terorists" as the call them their real agenda is findling the "enemy". For them the enemy is anyone who doesn't agree with them. That does include terrorists but it also includes many of their own people.
Problem as old as humanity. As long as we still have this problem, we will still be human. If you can "solve" or "get rid of" this problem, then you or your society isn't a good human one. Sooner or later we will build a god. O.k. Maybe not a god that can do everything, but a god that can watch or just record every one and every thing in our civilization. Then five seconds later we'd start using said god to find people that are doing things that we don't like and getting rid of them.