Hence my comment about alcoholism being considered a disease these days. There is a large group of people out there who are striving to alleviate the burden of being responsible, and they have essentially made it impossible to (legally, and increasingly socially) differentiate between self-inflicted, environmentally-inflicted, and naturally-inflicted conditions.
Seriously, this is why we have terms like "Internet Addict." It's not a joke, these things actually have very certain implications when it counts, such as when your boss tries to fire you for wasting the whole day futzing around on the net. (Just picking a specific example out of the air, here.)
Ah, but alcoholism is considered a disease, didn't you hear? Now if you drink yourself to the brink of death every chance you get, it's not your fault! I'm surprised smoking hasn't been given the same treatment.
Still, though, people don't decide to be born with a condition that may or may not manifest itself later. Do you want your insurance company to turn you down or charge you more because you're likely to develop Parkinson's? Like the GP said:
Health insurance, for the most part, isn't covering the stupid mistakes you make.
Are you prepared to make financial victims out of everyone who has a condition they did not choose to have simply because some select few individuals made poor decisions?
I may have mis-interpreted your statement, but it appears that you feel the following way:
Some people make poor/risky life-style choices
Other people (yourself) are forced to pay for those choices
The solution is to make everyone financially responsible for their own conditions, self-inflicted or otherwise.
So I have to ask, if that's the case and the above solution were to be implemented, what would be the point of health insurance?
Honestly, I had no idea there were roomba-style lawnmowers until I decided to be an ass about it and went looking for them...I mean, it made sense, but I was a little surprised someone had actually followed through.:P
I think the lesson here is that we need new, updated day-to-day-drudgery type tasks to use in these sorts of statements. Something a little more modern and relevant. Like, "Now if only I had a robot to farm my gold for me!" Oh, wait. Right.
Seriously? It wouldn't even take $1000 to up the quality of that image by at least an order of magnitude. We're talking $10 bucks and I bet they could've gotten some nice drop-shadow, and maybe a lens flare. Someone care to submit this image to the Something Awful forums?:P
As epic as that image is, I'm guessing one of the C*O's kids found an old copy of, say, Specular Infini-D in a bargain bin somewhere. "Yeah, my kid can do CG!"
Not to rag on Infini-D, of course. I used to enjoy it quite a bit. In 8th grade. Early '90s. Sweeeeeet.
They might not have anything to do with geo-location of IP addresses, but you can bet your ass they're used to indicate locality. Not initially, but it seems like every friggin' corporate site out there requires you to set your location upon first visit. Really annoying, but that's how they do it. It's totally possible that this user f'ed it up somewhere, or in several places, and that information either persists in the form of a cookie (or two) or has, through some arcane (and possibly illicit) process, propagated to other sites, or at the very least to any sub-sites. How this information would migrate from, say, Yahoo to Nvidia, well...like I said in another post, I didn't actually expect cookies to be at fault here. But it's a hell of a lot easier to clear a few cookies than it is to track down some obscure agency who may or may not have mis-represented your location.
On the other hand, submitting an article to/. is pretty easy, so I guess there's that...
Sorry, I didn't necessarily mean blame the user himself, but rather that the problem is often on the user's end...i.e. client-side. And regardless of who sets them, cookies are *definitely* a client-side property.
Also, I held out very little hope that checking for stale cookies would solve the issue, but it is always a possibility. I guess what I was really getting at is that before you go wandering the world in search of obscure solutions, try the simple and easy ones first, i.e. "Is it plugged in?"
So along those lines, I would like to propose an alternate question to the submitter in lieu of my cookies question: "Is your computer plugged in?"
Not to point out the obvious, but my first instinct is always "blame the user." Have you tried clearing out any cookies relevant to the offending sites?
What. The. Fuck. "There is now law that says you must be allowed..." What the hell is that? Since when were activites implicitly blacklisted and then only allowed once added to a whitelist? This is not how the system works, and if you believe otherwise, you're practically *asking* to be fucked by the system. Laws are there to tell you what you *can't* do--and, in some special, alphabet-soup-agencies-which-are-only-allowed-to-exist-during-a-time-of-war-such-as-the-inane-war-on-drugs (i.e. FBI, CIA, EPA, etc.) cases, tell you *how* you can do it--and that is all. If there is no law stating you can *not* do something, then you *can* do it. Not the other way around.
There are laws stating you can *not* steal someone's property. This amusement park business is a slightly weirder case, as you agree to certain terms upon entering the park. HOWEVER, you can agree to a contract all you want, but when it comes to a court of law--and this may sound obvious, but it often seems to be confusing to some people--only the valid parts are valid. That is, if I sign a contract saying that you will let me onto your property for $100, but you can kill me while I'm there, everything but the murder is valid. That last clause is clearly invalid.
In this case, I have a hunch that whatever the courts might say about it, it won't ever come to that. It's very easy to make up some trivial case where surrendering the device is absolutely not an option. And claiming that you didn't know you were agreeing to some clause in a contract has proven to be remarkably successful in the courts.[citation needed] So some people will present perfectly valid reasons why the rule is inane, and the "special allowances" will propagate down the chain of validity inside of a week. This "test" will fail miserably, and nothing will come of it.
Back to the original cause of my response, though: Seriously. What the fuck. No law that says you must be allowed? AUGH! You're killing me here. And even if it *were* required that there be laws *allowing* you to do things, examine the Constitution. It *very explicitly* states that if there is no federal law stating you *can't*, and no state law stating you *can't*, THEN YOU CAN.
Sounds interesting. How about a link to more details? I always enjoy reading stories about that stuff, but all you did was give me a teaser. Now I want the feature presentation.:)
Hence the difference between CAN and NECESSARILY DOES. Or were you agreeing with me? It's too early, and reading the Slashdot forums and the Something Awful forums at the same time is immensely confusing.:P
It's not a win-win. If they argue the second way, that they effectively broke the C&D, then this case (and perhaps a few others) are thrown out...IN MASS. Not elsewhere. There are 49 other states they can POTENTIALLY do business in, and that sucks for the rest of us.
Customer: yes. Copyright-infringing individual: no. Say I run an open WAP and a NAT, and I *don't* log who uses it. All access to network resources through my WAP is under the disclaimer that you are responsible for your own actions, not me. It probably wouldn't help me in court, on account of I can't afford $10000/hr lawyers, but at least I feel good about myself.:P
I disagree that you can use one to identify a location. I can be anywhere in the world and, according to my IP, it will appear to you I'm in Fairbanks AK, due to this handy little VPN I use. Granted, I have to have been granted access to the VPN, but the fact remains that IP addresses do not NECESSARILY denote location, either. It's the same problem with claiming an IP denotes an individual. An IP address CAN tell you those things, but it does not NECESSARILY tell you those things. A rectangle CAN be a square, but it is not NECESSARILY a square.
FYI, it's "The War on Terror," not "The War on Terrorism." Your version would be a war against an act, which is potentially, under some circumstances, plausible. What we actually have is a war against an emotion, which can never, ever, ever succeed.
I'm just waiting for "The War on Debt," which will be the worlds first true perpetual motion machine.
In all fairness, the one hanging over the steering wheel of the car isn't that crazy. Realize that, in 2015, cars will drive themselves. I read just the other day that the technology to do so is just around the corner. So, using a laptop like that is actually a really great idea. Also, the cars will fly. That's coming soon, too.
The difference between genetic code and any human-invented language is the following: have you ever tried to debug a genome? It's friggin' ridiculous. No documentation at all.
I would think you'd want those invented BY the weekend, rather than OVER the weekend. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure you'll miss work Monday, although I suppose that may happen either way, depending on how well they design the utility corridor and whether or not there are any back-doors. Mind the easter eggs! (Hint: those aren't eggs at all. And yes, they're attached to a tranny case. You ordered the wrong model!)
-G
Re:Of Course IE will fail, ACID test is biased...
on
Acid3 Test Released
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Comment on your analogy:
I think the mere fact that American Gladiators is considered tv-worthy indicates that we, as a nation, have failed. Also, sorry about your brother. That was really brutal when they knocked him into the pool.
Stranger to these parts? Dude, did you notice his user id? 3800. Yes, three-thousand-eight-hundred. He's been around these parts since before you were born. Which, I suppose, may actually be "strange"...as in, he's stranger than everyone who's ID is > 3800, but less strange than 3799 other people. Still!
Now, maybe I'm mis-remembering here, but I seem to remember hearing about this little doo-dad called "Internet 2." You know, for scientists and certain authorized parties and such.
But yeah, we definitely need to get to work on that "Internet 3." Screw Web 2.0, I'm already on Internet 3!
Slashdot Mirror
Hence my comment about alcoholism being considered a disease these days. There is a large group of people out there who are striving to alleviate the burden of being responsible, and they have essentially made it impossible to (legally, and increasingly socially) differentiate between self-inflicted, environmentally-inflicted, and naturally-inflicted conditions.
Seriously, this is why we have terms like "Internet Addict." It's not a joke, these things actually have very certain implications when it counts, such as when your boss tries to fire you for wasting the whole day futzing around on the net. (Just picking a specific example out of the air, here.)
Ah, but alcoholism is considered a disease, didn't you hear? Now if you drink yourself to the brink of death every chance you get, it's not your fault! I'm surprised smoking hasn't been given the same treatment.
Still, though, people don't decide to be born with a condition that may or may not manifest itself later. Do you want your insurance company to turn you down or charge you more because you're likely to develop Parkinson's? Like the GP said:
Health insurance, for the most part, isn't covering the stupid mistakes you make.
Are you prepared to make financial victims out of everyone who has a condition they did not choose to have simply because some select few individuals made poor decisions?
I may have mis-interpreted your statement, but it appears that you feel the following way:
So I have to ask, if that's the case and the above solution were to be implemented, what would be the point of health insurance?
-G
You can walk to the store and work. You can't perform an appendectomy on yourself.
Interestingly, a little searching found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-surgery
Take a look at the first bullet under the heading "Abdominal."
So there you have it...*shudders*
-G
Honestly, I had no idea there were roomba-style lawnmowers until I decided to be an ass about it and went looking for them...I mean, it made sense, but I was a little surprised someone had actually followed through. :P
I think the lesson here is that we need new, updated day-to-day-drudgery type tasks to use in these sorts of statements. Something a little more modern and relevant. Like, "Now if only I had a robot to farm my gold for me!" Oh, wait. Right.
-G
Now if people would just make bot software to do my dishes and mow my lawn...
You mean, like, some sort of...dish washing machine? And maybe some sort of automatic, robotic lawn-mower?
I mean, seriously, did you even try googling these things? :P
-G
Seriously? It wouldn't even take $1000 to up the quality of that image by at least an order of magnitude. We're talking $10 bucks and I bet they could've gotten some nice drop-shadow, and maybe a lens flare. Someone care to submit this image to the Something Awful forums? :P
As epic as that image is, I'm guessing one of the C*O's kids found an old copy of, say, Specular Infini-D in a bargain bin somewhere. "Yeah, my kid can do CG!"
Not to rag on Infini-D, of course. I used to enjoy it quite a bit. In 8th grade. Early '90s. Sweeeeeet.
-G
They might not have anything to do with geo-location of IP addresses, but you can bet your ass they're used to indicate locality. Not initially, but it seems like every friggin' corporate site out there requires you to set your location upon first visit. Really annoying, but that's how they do it. It's totally possible that this user f'ed it up somewhere, or in several places, and that information either persists in the form of a cookie (or two) or has, through some arcane (and possibly illicit) process, propagated to other sites, or at the very least to any sub-sites. How this information would migrate from, say, Yahoo to Nvidia, well...like I said in another post, I didn't actually expect cookies to be at fault here. But it's a hell of a lot easier to clear a few cookies than it is to track down some obscure agency who may or may not have mis-represented your location.
/. is pretty easy, so I guess there's that...
On the other hand, submitting an article to
-G
Sorry, I didn't necessarily mean blame the user himself, but rather that the problem is often on the user's end...i.e. client-side. And regardless of who sets them, cookies are *definitely* a client-side property.
Also, I held out very little hope that checking for stale cookies would solve the issue, but it is always a possibility. I guess what I was really getting at is that before you go wandering the world in search of obscure solutions, try the simple and easy ones first, i.e. "Is it plugged in?"
So along those lines, I would like to propose an alternate question to the submitter in lieu of my cookies question: "Is your computer plugged in?"
-G
Not to point out the obvious, but my first instinct is always "blame the user." Have you tried clearing out any cookies relevant to the offending sites?
-G
What. The. Fuck. "There is now law that says you must be allowed..." What the hell is that? Since when were activites implicitly blacklisted and then only allowed once added to a whitelist? This is not how the system works, and if you believe otherwise, you're practically *asking* to be fucked by the system. Laws are there to tell you what you *can't* do--and, in some special, alphabet-soup-agencies-which-are-only-allowed-to-exist-during-a-time-of-war-such-as-the-inane-war-on-drugs (i.e. FBI, CIA, EPA, etc.) cases, tell you *how* you can do it--and that is all. If there is no law stating you can *not* do something, then you *can* do it. Not the other way around.
There are laws stating you can *not* steal someone's property. This amusement park business is a slightly weirder case, as you agree to certain terms upon entering the park. HOWEVER, you can agree to a contract all you want, but when it comes to a court of law--and this may sound obvious, but it often seems to be confusing to some people--only the valid parts are valid. That is, if I sign a contract saying that you will let me onto your property for $100, but you can kill me while I'm there, everything but the murder is valid. That last clause is clearly invalid.
In this case, I have a hunch that whatever the courts might say about it, it won't ever come to that. It's very easy to make up some trivial case where surrendering the device is absolutely not an option. And claiming that you didn't know you were agreeing to some clause in a contract has proven to be remarkably successful in the courts.[citation needed] So some people will present perfectly valid reasons why the rule is inane, and the "special allowances" will propagate down the chain of validity inside of a week. This "test" will fail miserably, and nothing will come of it.
Back to the original cause of my response, though: Seriously. What the fuck. No law that says you must be allowed? AUGH! You're killing me here. And even if it *were* required that there be laws *allowing* you to do things, examine the Constitution. It *very explicitly* states that if there is no federal law stating you *can't*, and no state law stating you *can't*, THEN YOU CAN.
Whoa is me.
-G
Maybe they meant radio-dark. To earth. I guess. Seriously, though, you're not allowed to poke holes in the science until *after* it's out. :P
-G
Sounds interesting. How about a link to more details? I always enjoy reading stories about that stuff, but all you did was give me a teaser. Now I want the feature presentation. :)
-G
Hence the difference between CAN and NECESSARILY DOES. Or were you agreeing with me? It's too early, and reading the Slashdot forums and the Something Awful forums at the same time is immensely confusing. :P
-G
It's not a win-win. If they argue the second way, that they effectively broke the C&D, then this case (and perhaps a few others) are thrown out...IN MASS. Not elsewhere. There are 49 other states they can POTENTIALLY do business in, and that sucks for the rest of us.
-G
Customer: yes. Copyright-infringing individual: no. Say I run an open WAP and a NAT, and I *don't* log who uses it. All access to network resources through my WAP is under the disclaimer that you are responsible for your own actions, not me. It probably wouldn't help me in court, on account of I can't afford $10000/hr lawyers, but at least I feel good about myself. :P
-G
I disagree that you can use one to identify a location. I can be anywhere in the world and, according to my IP, it will appear to you I'm in Fairbanks AK, due to this handy little VPN I use. Granted, I have to have been granted access to the VPN, but the fact remains that IP addresses do not NECESSARILY denote location, either. It's the same problem with claiming an IP denotes an individual. An IP address CAN tell you those things, but it does not NECESSARILY tell you those things. A rectangle CAN be a square, but it is not NECESSARILY a square.
-G
I just got this snippet from an anonymous source. Behold, kdawson's automated article poster:
/brick/gis; }
foreach(@submission) { post if
FYI, it's "The War on Terror," not "The War on Terrorism." Your version would be a war against an act, which is potentially, under some circumstances, plausible. What we actually have is a war against an emotion, which can never, ever, ever succeed.
I'm just waiting for "The War on Debt," which will be the worlds first true perpetual motion machine.
-G
In all fairness, the one hanging over the steering wheel of the car isn't that crazy. Realize that, in 2015, cars will drive themselves. I read just the other day that the technology to do so is just around the corner. So, using a laptop like that is actually a really great idea. Also, the cars will fly. That's coming soon, too.
-G
Just be sure to use some sort of version control, or your branches may become unmanageable.
-G
The difference between genetic code and any human-invented language is the following: have you ever tried to debug a genome? It's friggin' ridiculous. No documentation at all.
-G
I would think you'd want those invented BY the weekend, rather than OVER the weekend. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure you'll miss work Monday, although I suppose that may happen either way, depending on how well they design the utility corridor and whether or not there are any back-doors. Mind the easter eggs! (Hint: those aren't eggs at all. And yes, they're attached to a tranny case. You ordered the wrong model!)
-G
Comment on your analogy:
I think the mere fact that American Gladiators is considered tv-worthy indicates that we, as a nation, have failed. Also, sorry about your brother. That was really brutal when they knocked him into the pool.
Just sayin'.
-G
Stranger to these parts? Dude, did you notice his user id? 3800. Yes, three-thousand-eight-hundred. He's been around these parts since before you were born. Which, I suppose, may actually be "strange"...as in, he's stranger than everyone who's ID is > 3800, but less strange than 3799 other people. Still!
-G
Now, maybe I'm mis-remembering here, but I seem to remember hearing about this little doo-dad called "Internet 2." You know, for scientists and certain authorized parties and such.
But yeah, we definitely need to get to work on that "Internet 3." Screw Web 2.0, I'm already on Internet 3!
-G