Of course teens are allowed to hang out. I live in a medium sized town and Main Street is full of teenagers wondering about in groups... and playing with their smart phones at the same time
I live in a big metro area (Memphis, TN) and it doesn't seem to work that way here anymore, the author of TFA could be living in my neighborhood. The only time I ever see kids or teens outdoors is if the school bus has just dropped them off, and more often than not, there's a big line of cars waiting at the bus stop so that Precious Snowflake doesn't have to walk more than a block until their parents can usher them back home.
When I was a kid growing up in the 80s, on the weekends or during summer break, I'd wake up, eat breakfast, and be out the door and on my bike by 9AM. Lots of sleepovers back then, where the same thing would happen at whichever friend's house I happened to be staying over at (playing Atari or NES till the wee hours). I often wouldn't get home until it was almost dark. I'd be outside all day, riding my bike with my friends, exploring new roads or new trails through the woods.
We'd ride our bikes around into new subdivisions and pick up scrap lumber and nails and shit. We'd find a spot in the woods and start fires, because fire was cool. Someone would have brought a hatchet in their backpack and we'd chop down little trees and nail them around using the butt-end of the hatchet as a hammer, and make a treehouse. All of this on someone's property, someone who really didn't care as long as we weren't going to burn the woods down or something.
The 4th of July used to suck. The 5th of July was fucking awesome! A bunch of 12 year olds rolling around a few square miles, stopping to pick up all the accidentally overlooked firecrackers laying on the streets that still had a fuse. Then we'd go back in the woods and shoot them off.
Back then, nobody was worried that we'd be kidnapped, or molested, or cut up into pieces. And of course, none of that happened to any of us (and none of it happens, with any average of mention, today). We were kids out having fun. Try doing that today as a kid, and good fucking luck. Watch out for the Tasers.
That commitment might explain a little bit about why, unlike UPS and FedEx, the United States Postal Service hasn't really had much of a problem. They've had the last-mile problem down to a science for many, many decades. You might get your mail at 9:30PM instead of 11AM, but by god, it's going to be there.
BTW - those extra trucks are usually older, nearly worn out vehicles that have already paid for themselves, many times over. They are still roadworthy, they are paid off, they are still insured, they still pass inspection - why get rid of them? Keep a few around for whatever emergencies might happen. They've already been depreciated, so on the books they are valueless, and cost next to nothing.
Your point is well received, but unfortunately, it doesn't scale to aircraft. My understanding (I'm not in the parcel industry anymore, but used to be) is that air freight was the real bottleneck this holiday season. It's absolutely not economical to keep 15%, 10%, or even 5% of your air fleet's worth of old jets sitting around "on ice" while ensuring that they're airworthy, pass inspection, can be made active within 24 hours, etc. The stakes, and the costs, are much higher when it comes to air freight.
The services... they'll remember you as long as their owners can make money off them one way or another.
Fairly eternal, if you ask me. Acxiom and ChoicePoint will be out there forever. Sure, perhaps 20 years from now they'll have been bought out, consolidated, split into a few pieces due to anti-trust litigation, then renamed and consolidated again. But your records, my records, our information is not going to go away. They will always find a way to make money from us, even if it's just selling public records to ancestry.com for our future generations to figure out what a bunch of idiots we all were.
I'm not sure about Angelfire, but I was just shown a Tripod site today that's still up. I had no idea the tripod.com domain even resolved anymore. The page in question still has ancient (but revolutionary for the time) JavaScript slide-in ad boxes, and is almost a time capsule from 1997 or so.
Jon Postel. His name doesn't come up all that frequently but I still remember. Martin Manley. You remember that guy? I do, even if Yahoo pulled his website down.
Come on, the internet remembers forever. You die twice, once when you stop breathing, and once when the last person mentions your name.
When it's discovered that the NSA was installing apps on phones that collected calls+texts+social media you might then have a point.
The users are installing the apps (Facebook, etc.). The companies who run the apps are cooperating with NSA. If you haven't "discovered" that by now, well I'm not sure there's much hope left for you.
Not only that, but wasn't he already working for NSA (or Dell, as a contractor) when he "stole" the test and its answers? It's not like he used that information to somehow illicitly get his job, he was already working there. It doesn't even make sense to use that to smear him.
They have a legal duty to inform owners (stockholders) and potential owners about any significant risks
Right up until they receive some sort of "National Security Letter" which supersedes any other legal duty they might have, and precludes them from telling anyone that they've even been served with such a thing. Your point "C" isn't, in my own opinion, some sort of blanket excuse.
Your paranoia does not extend to established business, which have the option to fight back but choose not to.
Oh how I pine for the day when I believed that shit. We were such a more innocent populace, weren't we? Go look up MKULTRA to start, and follow the Wikipedia links from there for a few hours. CEOs of companies, deans of universities, directors of hospitals, they were all in on it and that was the 1950s.
You think that sort of thing isn't going on now? The "option to fight back," oh good heavens, someone catch me before I pass out from laughter.
By removing the shielding to make it dangerous to others you start a 30 second clock on yourself.
A 30-second clock to receiving the LD50, not a 30-second clock to actual death. Radiation poisoning doesn't kill immediately, and even the symptoms (burns, etc.) don't show up that quickly. It would likely take several dozen hours before an individual actually died from such exposure, plenty of time to get off the train and go find a quick way to die.
I ain't scared of no dirty bomb, my house is sealed up with saran wrap and duct tape. The government warned me to do it years ago and I still haven't died, so it obviously works.
There was an option at one point to convert your AOL account to a free "bring your own access" option. When it was first introduced it was just a lower monthly fee, but once broadband had become ubiquitous in the US, you could nix the monthly fee altogether as long as you never dialed up. You had to seek out that particular billing plan, of course; they didn't just quit charging you because you stopped hitting their modem pool.
I did this conversion some years back (my account was already comped at the time, but I was future-proofing against their credit card shenanigans) and I haven't paid a penny to AOL since 1995 or so. My old AOL screen names are still valid @aol.com email addresses that I can use through their webmail interface, and it occasionally freaks people out to see "Member since: 1994" on my AIM profile. Last time I checked, I could even log on to whatever's left of the proprietary AOL service with their client software. That thing hasn't touched my own machines in years so I can't tell whether or not that still works.
I would imagine there's still some manner for paying users to convert their accounts this way, but they have to know about it in order to do it. If you know any AOL users, have them try the keyword "BILLING" and see what options come up.
elaborate and lucrative scheme to defraud online advertisers
So giant botnets, massively spreading keyloggers, etc. designed to defraud individuals are no big deal, but holy shit... Go after the advertisers' money and you're inviting the wrath of governments. Yep, I see how it works!
I think it must mean ending the enslavement of vegans by their non-carniverous masters. So what we need is a Maneatsbacon Proclamation, by Abraham Lincoln.
Except they HAVEN't done anything about the boner pills.
I really do have confidence that the commercials for boner pills have been scrutinized and approved by FDA. I haven't seen an ad for Vi[boner]ra in ages, but Ci[boner]is with that low bluesy guitar riff in the background is all over TV in the US. The pills work as advertised and are prescription-based (hahahah yeah I know). Plenty of "if you encounter symptoms such as difficulty breathing, or if you have trouble with your eyesight or hearing, stop taking [boner pills] and seek medical attention right away." And the seemingly requisite "Ask your doctor about [boner pills]."
23andme isn't offering to cure anything, they aren't offering to diagnose anything, and they aren't offering to treat anything. They're advertising a service where you spit in a cup, send it off, and get back some "okay, this shit might be going on in your family lineage" results. They're not telling you that you have sickle cell, or that you're going to die if you eat asparagus, or anything of the sort. But they are making medical-type claims regarding your DNA, such that perhaps your brain isn't receptive to flubber-baz antagonists, which might make you argue with your physician or stop taking such medication altogether, to your own detriment.
Works for me, but if your average Duck Dynasty fan picks one of these up, they might flip the fuck out at what they get back. "YOU SAYIN I GOTS NIGGER IN MAH BLOOD? ANN MAH DICK NEVER GONN' GET GOIN' AFTER AH DRINK BEERS? AHHH'MA CALL UP MY REPRASENTIVE! GET THIS SHIT BANT!"
FDA's issue is very narrow. 23andme is making marketing claims of a medical nature which have not been approved by the FDA. The advertisements do not adequately disclaim that 23andme cannot prove whatever their DNA tests might come up with. If they rebrand themselves as a novelty, or work with FDA to achieve de novo compliance (which is basically FDA saying "hey! let's start it all over and get you compliant! woo! yeah let's do it!"), they should be just fine. I hope. Because I do still want to get that shit done for my spit.
I figure that a product which makes claims about its ability to predict (note that they won't say diagnose) your potential for developing certain diseases later in life should fall under the FDA's purview. I've been interested in 23andme for a long time. The first time I heard about them, the test and resulting reports ran something like $500. I added it to my "wish list" way back then and nobody bit. It's apparently down to the $99 mark now and is being marketed on television in time for the holiday season.
I'm a fairly intelligent individual and I'd be absolutely sure to take anything they reported about my genetic profile with a grain of salt. However, the FDA exists to protect your average Joe out there, who believes those TV commercials that say taking Penalis will give you a raging boner, and that lady who was on "Las Vegas" really does have an amazing non-surgical facelift procedure that will remove 20 years from your face.
A lot of these products get away with using a very blatant disclaimer that "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" etc. I'm not entirely sure why 23andme can't just put that disclaimer in there as well, and be all good. But the fact is, FDA has been trying to work with them for several years to get them into whatever is considered to be FDA marketing compliance, and the company apparently hasn't cooperated.
If they'd not put commercials on TV, they probably wouldn't be in any trouble. I just checked their site and can't immediately find the old list of stuff that they said they'd test your DNA for (and there was a big list). Not saying they've taken it down, but I didn't see it with a quick glance.
All of that said, the 23andme spit-and-get-results thingy is still on my wish list.
Is your business going to be publicly traded, with public shareholders, and subject to SEC regulations? No? Then I don't think anybody (in the US, anyway) is talking about you. Even if they were, US minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Assuming 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, that's a whopping $15,080 per year. If you can't live off 100 times that amount, fuck you.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that "pardon" is the word we'd all like to see.
Of course teens are allowed to hang out. I live in a medium sized town and Main Street is full of teenagers wondering about in groups... and playing with their smart phones at the same time
I live in a big metro area (Memphis, TN) and it doesn't seem to work that way here anymore, the author of TFA could be living in my neighborhood. The only time I ever see kids or teens outdoors is if the school bus has just dropped them off, and more often than not, there's a big line of cars waiting at the bus stop so that Precious Snowflake doesn't have to walk more than a block until their parents can usher them back home.
When I was a kid growing up in the 80s, on the weekends or during summer break, I'd wake up, eat breakfast, and be out the door and on my bike by 9AM. Lots of sleepovers back then, where the same thing would happen at whichever friend's house I happened to be staying over at (playing Atari or NES till the wee hours). I often wouldn't get home until it was almost dark. I'd be outside all day, riding my bike with my friends, exploring new roads or new trails through the woods.
We'd ride our bikes around into new subdivisions and pick up scrap lumber and nails and shit. We'd find a spot in the woods and start fires, because fire was cool. Someone would have brought a hatchet in their backpack and we'd chop down little trees and nail them around using the butt-end of the hatchet as a hammer, and make a treehouse. All of this on someone's property, someone who really didn't care as long as we weren't going to burn the woods down or something.
The 4th of July used to suck. The 5th of July was fucking awesome! A bunch of 12 year olds rolling around a few square miles, stopping to pick up all the accidentally overlooked firecrackers laying on the streets that still had a fuse. Then we'd go back in the woods and shoot them off.
Back then, nobody was worried that we'd be kidnapped, or molested, or cut up into pieces. And of course, none of that happened to any of us (and none of it happens, with any average of mention, today). We were kids out having fun. Try doing that today as a kid, and good fucking luck. Watch out for the Tasers.
That commitment might explain a little bit about why, unlike UPS and FedEx, the United States Postal Service hasn't really had much of a problem. They've had the last-mile problem down to a science for many, many decades. You might get your mail at 9:30PM instead of 11AM, but by god, it's going to be there.
BTW - those extra trucks are usually older, nearly worn out vehicles that have already paid for themselves, many times over. They are still roadworthy, they are paid off, they are still insured, they still pass inspection - why get rid of them? Keep a few around for whatever emergencies might happen. They've already been depreciated, so on the books they are valueless, and cost next to nothing.
Your point is well received, but unfortunately, it doesn't scale to aircraft. My understanding (I'm not in the parcel industry anymore, but used to be) is that air freight was the real bottleneck this holiday season. It's absolutely not economical to keep 15%, 10%, or even 5% of your air fleet's worth of old jets sitting around "on ice" while ensuring that they're airworthy, pass inspection, can be made active within 24 hours, etc. The stakes, and the costs, are much higher when it comes to air freight.
The services... they'll remember you as long as their owners can make money off them one way or another.
Fairly eternal, if you ask me. Acxiom and ChoicePoint will be out there forever. Sure, perhaps 20 years from now they'll have been bought out, consolidated, split into a few pieces due to anti-trust litigation, then renamed and consolidated again. But your records, my records, our information is not going to go away. They will always find a way to make money from us, even if it's just selling public records to ancestry.com for our future generations to figure out what a bunch of idiots we all were.
Animated GIFs? Damn, young'n. ;)
I'm not sure about Angelfire, but I was just shown a Tripod site today that's still up. I had no idea the tripod.com domain even resolved anymore. The page in question still has ancient (but revolutionary for the time) JavaScript slide-in ad boxes, and is almost a time capsule from 1997 or so.
Jon Postel. His name doesn't come up all that frequently but I still remember. Martin Manley. You remember that guy? I do, even if Yahoo pulled his website down.
Come on, the internet remembers forever. You die twice, once when you stop breathing, and once when the last person mentions your name.
I didn't realize any members of Bush's communications department had slashdot accounts!
MickyTheIdiot, meet cold fjord. cold, Micky...
That isn't a Catch 22, that's just straight up what he's arguing.
When it's discovered that the NSA was installing apps on phones that collected calls+texts+social media you might then have a point.
The users are installing the apps (Facebook, etc.). The companies who run the apps are cooperating with NSA. If you haven't "discovered" that by now, well I'm not sure there's much hope left for you.
Not only that, but wasn't he already working for NSA (or Dell, as a contractor) when he "stole" the test and its answers? It's not like he used that information to somehow illicitly get his job, he was already working there. It doesn't even make sense to use that to smear him.
You've kind of scrambled the history there.
-- cold fjord in 45690965
They have a legal duty to inform owners (stockholders) and potential owners about any significant risks
Right up until they receive some sort of "National Security Letter" which supersedes any other legal duty they might have, and precludes them from telling anyone that they've even been served with such a thing. Your point "C" isn't, in my own opinion, some sort of blanket excuse.
Your paranoia does not extend to established business, which have the option to fight back but choose not to.
Oh how I pine for the day when I believed that shit. We were such a more innocent populace, weren't we? Go look up MKULTRA to start, and follow the Wikipedia links from there for a few hours. CEOs of companies, deans of universities, directors of hospitals, they were all in on it and that was the 1950s.
You think that sort of thing isn't going on now? The "option to fight back," oh good heavens, someone catch me before I pass out from laughter.
"Her Majesty's Bugger-Me-Arse Bin."
By removing the shielding to make it dangerous to others you start
a 30 second clock on yourself.
A 30-second clock to receiving the LD50, not a 30-second clock to actual death. Radiation poisoning doesn't kill immediately, and even the symptoms (burns, etc.) don't show up that quickly. It would likely take several dozen hours before an individual actually died from such exposure, plenty of time to get off the train and go find a quick way to die.
I ain't scared of no dirty bomb, my house is sealed up with saran wrap and duct tape. The government warned me to do it years ago and I still haven't died, so it obviously works.
Yeah! And maybe I'll get a blowjob from Natalie Portman, while eating a nice bowl of hot buttered cheese grits.
There was an option at one point to convert your AOL account to a free "bring your own access" option. When it was first introduced it was just a lower monthly fee, but once broadband had become ubiquitous in the US, you could nix the monthly fee altogether as long as you never dialed up. You had to seek out that particular billing plan, of course; they didn't just quit charging you because you stopped hitting their modem pool.
I did this conversion some years back (my account was already comped at the time, but I was future-proofing against their credit card shenanigans) and I haven't paid a penny to AOL since 1995 or so. My old AOL screen names are still valid @aol.com email addresses that I can use through their webmail interface, and it occasionally freaks people out to see "Member since: 1994" on my AIM profile. Last time I checked, I could even log on to whatever's left of the proprietary AOL service with their client software. That thing hasn't touched my own machines in years so I can't tell whether or not that still works.
I would imagine there's still some manner for paying users to convert their accounts this way, but they have to know about it in order to do it. If you know any AOL users, have them try the keyword "BILLING" and see what options come up.
So giant botnets, massively spreading keyloggers, etc. designed to defraud individuals are no big deal, but holy shit... Go after the advertisers' money and you're inviting the wrath of governments. Yep, I see how it works!
I think it must mean ending the enslavement of vegans by their non-carniverous masters. So what we need is a Maneatsbacon Proclamation, by Abraham Lincoln.
Except they HAVEN't done anything about the boner pills.
I really do have confidence that the commercials for boner pills have been scrutinized and approved by FDA. I haven't seen an ad for Vi[boner]ra in ages, but Ci[boner]is with that low bluesy guitar riff in the background is all over TV in the US. The pills work as advertised and are prescription-based (hahahah yeah I know). Plenty of "if you encounter symptoms such as difficulty breathing, or if you have trouble with your eyesight or hearing, stop taking [boner pills] and seek medical attention right away." And the seemingly requisite "Ask your doctor about [boner pills]."
23andme isn't offering to cure anything, they aren't offering to diagnose anything, and they aren't offering to treat anything. They're advertising a service where you spit in a cup, send it off, and get back some "okay, this shit might be going on in your family lineage" results. They're not telling you that you have sickle cell, or that you're going to die if you eat asparagus, or anything of the sort. But they are making medical-type claims regarding your DNA, such that perhaps your brain isn't receptive to flubber-baz antagonists, which might make you argue with your physician or stop taking such medication altogether, to your own detriment.
Works for me, but if your average Duck Dynasty fan picks one of these up, they might flip the fuck out at what they get back. "YOU SAYIN I GOTS NIGGER IN MAH BLOOD? ANN MAH DICK NEVER GONN' GET GOIN' AFTER AH DRINK BEERS? AHHH'MA CALL UP MY REPRASENTIVE! GET THIS SHIT BANT!"
FDA's issue is very narrow. 23andme is making marketing claims of a medical nature which have not been approved by the FDA. The advertisements do not adequately disclaim that 23andme cannot prove whatever their DNA tests might come up with. If they rebrand themselves as a novelty, or work with FDA to achieve de novo compliance (which is basically FDA saying "hey! let's start it all over and get you compliant! woo! yeah let's do it!"), they should be just fine. I hope. Because I do still want to get that shit done for my spit.
I figure that a product which makes claims about its ability to predict (note that they won't say diagnose) your potential for developing certain diseases later in life should fall under the FDA's purview. I've been interested in 23andme for a long time. The first time I heard about them, the test and resulting reports ran something like $500. I added it to my "wish list" way back then and nobody bit. It's apparently down to the $99 mark now and is being marketed on television in time for the holiday season.
I'm a fairly intelligent individual and I'd be absolutely sure to take anything they reported about my genetic profile with a grain of salt. However, the FDA exists to protect your average Joe out there, who believes those TV commercials that say taking Penalis will give you a raging boner, and that lady who was on "Las Vegas" really does have an amazing non-surgical facelift procedure that will remove 20 years from your face.
A lot of these products get away with using a very blatant disclaimer that "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" etc. I'm not entirely sure why 23andme can't just put that disclaimer in there as well, and be all good. But the fact is, FDA has been trying to work with them for several years to get them into whatever is considered to be FDA marketing compliance, and the company apparently hasn't cooperated.
If they'd not put commercials on TV, they probably wouldn't be in any trouble. I just checked their site and can't immediately find the old list of stuff that they said they'd test your DNA for (and there was a big list). Not saying they've taken it down, but I didn't see it with a quick glance.
All of that said, the 23andme spit-and-get-results thingy is still on my wish list.
Is your business going to be publicly traded, with public shareholders, and subject to SEC regulations? No? Then I don't think anybody (in the US, anyway) is talking about you. Even if they were, US minimum wage is $7.25/hr. Assuming 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, that's a whopping $15,080 per year. If you can't live off 100 times that amount, fuck you.