Mod parent up! Many people answering the question the original submitter asked haven't tried to tackle this themselves, or they'd know the problems they'd run into, which the parent post nailed down.
Sadly, there isn't a perfect answer - yet. The Mozilla wiki covers this problem in more detail here.
There's another tool similar to Firefox ADM, but I can't find info on it at the moment.
Summary: Firefox is almost there, but in most enterprise situations, there's still a few features (mostly in the lockdown, and setting default features department) that are lacking. I expect that will become a non-issue by the end of this year.
Without defending the practice, I believe I read somewhere that Slashdot editors don't take down pages once posted, for legal reasons. My understanding is that if they have a "no stories come down" policy it's harder to sue them if they choose not to take a story down.
IANAL, but I don't see why this precludes giving users the ability to mod the story down.
I doubt this is the case - having seen a whole bunch of false arrest claims successfully argued in my time, that a five figure claim is pushing it, and a four figure claim is more realistic.
Some folks who were falsely arrested in 2002 in DC, who were hogtied most of the night at the jail, got $400,000 for seven people before legal costs. Usually the figures are closer to $4000-5000, because folks would rather settle than see it dragged out four years.
I may agree with you in theory, but keep in mind that the Supreme Court disagrees.
In the late 80's, someone brought suit against the city of Washington DC, claiming that he had a right to not hear the radio broadcasts on the public city buses. He made the argument that the First Amendment should be interpreted to mean that he shouldn't be forced to hear others' speech. I can find the citation when I'm not at work if you care.
Point being, I may have a lot of qualms with the SCOTUS, but I have a hard time saying they don't think about rights concepts in a particularly rigorous way, and I wouldn't presume my framework is the only one a rigorous thinker can hold.
Furthermore, there are lots of reasons to want to blog anonymously about my employer that have nothing to do with free speech (avoiding illegal retaliation is a good enough reason for me - whistleblowers, union organizers, and many others would agree).
There are also plenty of reasons to blog anonymously that ARE free speech issues - people get illegally arrested and/or beaten all the time based on the content of their speech by the police and vigilantes - it's happened to me often enough. It hasn't happened to me personally for what I've said online, but I could name acquaintances for whom that's not true.
On top of the excellent points made by other posters about special allocations etc., I'll point out that the Department of Defense isn't the only government agency that gets tax dollars for military purposes. For instance, the DoE nuclear weapons program is budgeted for $17 billion in FY2006.
How much of NASA, Homeland Security, etc. should one count? They have a combined budget of $48 billion, and some appreciable percentage of that is military in nature.
[Note: Some of these numbers are from the War Resister's League, who round up in a way that's not very scientific. The margin by which this is true, however, is not sufficient to throw off the argument.]
Plus there's Veteran's Services, as you pointed out - but the kicker is the $314 billion interest on debt we have, of which it is estimated between 50 and 80 percent is due to military spending.
Sorry, I think military spending wins on this one.
PS - I wish I could kick the ass of the Democrats who blocked a balanced budget amendment - I was 17 and I STILL saw this coming. Idiots.
Hi folks. I hate to provide actual info when everyone is getting into a self-righteous frenzy about what idiot radical admin keeps logs, but...
This came out literally three minutes ago over a listserv for radical tech folks:
"While I can't comment on the specifics of these cases, I'm sure that quite of few of you will go "Doh!" when the details come out.
The problem here isn't logs. The problem is forum and weblog software that stores IP addresses. In other words, PostNuke, phpBB, Geeklog and other need a system to delete IP addresses from the MySQL db on a regular basis. If this is even desirable."
Someone else immediately replied with, "If they're stored in a database, a daily/hourly/whatever SQL query to zero the field should suffice"
So there you have it. Not the box admin's fault, but the folks putting in their blog software to move content. Feel free to argue about whether THOSE folks should know better.
From what I tried, even if I add multiple sections say World News (US) and World News (UK), the stories do not repeat.
It appears that, only the first instance a story occurs, is displayed. No Repeats!
Wow! Could they sell this incredible new technology to Slashdot?
Yes, but instead of opening the blocked ports, you could have configured Bittorrent to run on ANY OTHER port(s). The parent poster's point was that you COULD block the ports that Bittorrent normally runs on, but you could configure Bittorrent to run on other ports. There's no single port you can block to make a P2P program unusable.
One of the women in the NOC at the last HOPE conference had the FreeBSD daemon tattooed on her shoulder...man, that's gonna be a long story to tell the grandkids.
Mod parent up - Emacspeak is a great option. The maintainer of the emacspeak listserv was a sysadmin at the college I attended, and he has a disability similar to dyslexia. He often worked on a portable computer of his own design. It had an ultra-small mobo with a PCMCIA hard drive in a case about six inches square, and headphones instead of a monitor. He was often seen wandering the halls listening to and responding to e-mail via Emacspeak (using a one-handed chording keyboard).
I also set up a computer for a blind acquaintance of mine in college, and configured some hardware for a center set up for students with disabilities. I hope the tech's come a ways since then - there was a hardware text-to-speech reader on LPT1, you redirected all of your screen output to lpt1 and let it be spoken. The Braille printer was on LPT2.
In the movie Sneakers, the blind hacker had a neat device that created Braille dots under your finger, but I've never seen one in use. Are these in common use?
I've hired a handful of entry-level sysadmins in my time, and conducted close to 50 interviewsin the process. Since I have a liberal arts degree myself, I'm inclined to look past the degree someone has, but...
Over time I've learned to be distrustful of folks with degrees from DeVry and the local equivalents. A standard "filter" question I ask during the interview is, "What is DHCP for?" and a sad number of folks couldn't answer correctly. I've never had a trade school degree recipient answer correctly.
Note that this is NOT the same as having a degree from a "good" school - if I had to choose blindly, I'd sooner pick a graduate of one of the CUNY schools (city colleges) than just about anywhere else. In NYC especially, there's a lot of folks with brains but no money for college.
Babelfish link anyone? I can't figure out what a "spiv" is, QC versus SC (something counsel?), etc. The only Australian I know I learned from Foster's commercials...
I've worked as a per-diem EMT, although it's mostly a volunteer endeavor for me. I also know a handful of other EMT/IT folks. The (probably false) story I've heard is that in the 80's and before, a lot of the IT folks were working in industries where you needed a security clearance (defense, aerospace), and they needed to have their own internal EMS teams as a consequence.
People get arrested ONLY for speaking their mind more often than you think. Police will make up a crime - I've seen it done many times, and had it happen to me once - you can read about it here if you feel like it.
Of course, you're breaking a law at almost any time. It's more common to arrest someone for breaking a law that many other people are breaking, the only difference being that the arrested person spoke their mind against the current Administration.
I step off the sidewalk to walk around people every time I walk down Canal Street in Manhattan, as do the cops. However, people who have more of a history of speaking their mind get arrested for the same act - I read an article here about this just today.
So I don't find your criticism credible. I wouldn't bother posting, except you seem like someone logical who's drawn a conclusion based on incomplete information, and I wouldn't want others to do the same.
Thanks, actually, but if you read my post you'll see that I, like you, am an EMT, and I ride on an ambulance every week in this city. I'm well aware of how bicyclists do - and don't - provide headaches to emergency workers, so please don't patronize me by saying I can't begin to understand.
You didn't really address my points, so my statements still stand. There's no point in rebutting you - I think my original post does a pretty decent job.
If a little traveler from Logitech shows up at your house, you might want to give it a laser. If you give it a laser, it's going to ask for a non-reflective surface. It'll want to compare itself to a Microsoft mouse to make sure it performs better. Soon, the Microsoft mouse will want to be paid for. The money will go to anti-Linux FUD. Soon you'll put a brick through your computer, and have to buy a new one. And when you take home that new Logitech mouse....
Your post is well-intentioned, but ill-informed - I'm sorry you're so willing to state "these people were not arrested for political reasons" as fact.
First, let me state where I'm coming from. I was arrested at the Critical Mass bike ride on Friday night, and spent most of Saturday in a cell diagonally across from Josh Kinsberg. I am an active EMT (and sysadmin) here in NYC, and was present to provide medical support, not to break laws.
#1 - The arrest was for a violation - that's not even a misdemeanor. It's like getting a jaywalking or speeding ticket. People are almost NEVER arrested for violations in NYC - they receive a summons, they're not handcuffed and thrown in jail.
#2 - On 8/28/04, at 10:10AM, at Pier 57 in NYC (temporary holding cells for arrestees this weekend), Patrol Officer Hugo Dominguez said to an arrestee words to the effect that arresting for a violation was highly unusual, but "some people, not myself" thought it was a good way to keep protestors off of the streets for a few days. Giving different punishments based on someone's political beliefs is not only immoral but illegal - see here for info on the NYPD settling a similar lawsuit out of court a few years ago.
#3 - Critical Mass takes place in the exact same way every month in NYC, and has for three years. The police have wished me a happy ride in the past. Our behavior was no different, but this time over 150 people were arrested. This, along with numerous statements by the police (the item above was only one example) indicated that arrests this weekend were political in nature.
#3 - It's quite common for the police to arrest people during protests without regard to whether they've broken the law or not. Take a look at any major protest (25000+ people) that had arrests in the past few years - the conviction rates are incredibly low, even accounting for people pleading guilty to minor charges in exchange for time served. During this weekend, people were arrested for walking to their home on the same block as a protest.
In short, people ARE arrested for political reasons and not for breaking the law, and even they ARE breaking a minor law for political reasons (such as jaywalking, or drawing in chalk on the street), they are arrested even when someone else arrested for the same crime would get a summons.
Folks who have questions, trolls, etc. about my arrest situation can reply to this post.
Someone I know got fired for this once...
on
Fun With Passwords?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I was consulting at a company called "ESP", and we needed to look at some data in an Excel file. For whatever reason, the employee who created the file decided to password-protect it, and he had gone home for the day. Important fact: This employee had previously treated me very poorly.
So the company's owner (we'll call her "Dee") calls him up, and asks him for the password. He says, "I'd rather not say." Then he asks her to put another employee on the phone, and he'll tell someone else.
So while she's arguing with him, I try to guess the password. Knowing this employee, though, I don't try his dog's name, I tried "fuckdee" and "fuckesp". The latter turned out to be correct, and I told her I was in. She told the employee not to come to work the next day.
The moral of this story MIGHT be to be smarter in password selection, but I'd LIKE to think it's to not piss off the IT staff - I always could have lied about the password.
Unfortunately, you can't abrogate the rights of citizens without people to enforce that abrogation. Those people are MORE likely than the general populace to be sociopaths.
I provide medical support during protests - I have a commitment to nonviolence. I've nevertheless been arrested, shoved to the ground by riot police, shot in the head with a rubber bullet, and countless other abrogations of my right to be secure in my person, peaceably assemble, etc. Sometimes I can get a settlement later, sometimes I can't. It doesn't change the fact that I've seen several gatherings broken up by UNPROVOKED police violence.
Since the government reserves powers to itself that it regularly abuses, my litmus test for whether an abrogation is needed is to compare the likely and potential damage of not having the abrogation compared to the potential damage of reserving one more power to the government without a civilian balance.
There's no shortage of examples of murderous behavior on the part of governments in history, even on its own citizens, even in modern U.S. history. To me, there are few (not none, but VERY few) abrogations of civil liberties that pass that litmus test.
Can anyone tell me why I should get an Infocus versus the BenQ 6100? The BenQ seems to sell better, is about the same price, and lighter. The light lasts longer, and is warranteed for an extra year.
I would be using it for weekly film nights (VHS/DVD), and occasionally for video art installations. I'm not concerned with HDTV, PC resolution, etc. I'm really wondering if there's some problem I'm not considering (fan noise? Lens quality?). Price is my main concern - I wouldn't even by considering one if they weren't in the $800-850 range.
I, like half of the posters on this website, was in the same position as this kid. I'm going to guess that the kid hass most (or all) of the following characteristics: He expects to go to a "good" college. His peers are mainly from his own socioeconomic bracket. He mostly interacts with other "smart" children.
I believe that my parents compounded my social problems by telling me that the kids who made fun of me were stupid or jealous, or my problems would go away when I went to college, etc. They taught me to have a superiority complex. In turn, that meant that even as I learned "normal" social skills, I came off as a real asshole who assumed I knew more than everyone about everything. This was especially true when I dealt with people who either weren't "smart", or didn't come from a place of privilege, so their "smarts" didn't look like mine.
Get him to realize that looking smart isn't always important - make him realize that BEING smart isn't always important. If he's the type that raises his hand every time he knows the answer to the teacher's question, get him to value not taking up more than his share of time in a classroom setting. Get him to practice not "showing off" when he gives his answer. Give him a chance to meet people who are smart who aren't like him. The less he tries to make himself seem better than others, the less folks will treat him as different. Don't let him build his self-esteem around being smart - there will always be smarter folks, and it counts for less than he thinks in the "real" world.
Re-reading this, I hope I'm not misinterpreted to be saying, "Tell him to act dumb." I want to emphasize that you can be smart without (unintentionally) being a prick about it.
Finally, get him to practice thinking before he opens his mouth EVERY time he opens his mouth. This is HUGE. He'll seem far less like a jerk if, before he says something, he considers how interested his audience is in hearing it, and how to say it in the fewest words possible.
I play E-Scrabble with friends that I don't live near anymore. I play at e-scrabble.com since it's not "real-time". It has a chat box, and while it works fine for someone you talk to a lot, it's REALLY good for folks who you wouldn't talk to every day anyway. I actually use it to keep in touch with my now-married ex-girlfriend. We used to talk maybe once a month, now we can stay in touch every day, in a "low emotional investment" sort of a way.
private citizens' initiatives at law enforcement always turn out to be fair and equatible treatments of not only the letter but the spirit of the law.
Hmm...I disagree with this sentiment because I am a lefty anti-authoritarian, as you seem to be.
It's my experience that governments' initiatives at law enforcement turn out to be unfair and inequitable (and I have the police-inflicted injuries to prove it). Citizens' private initiatives are no more or less likely than governments' initiatives to be unfair or inequitable - at least if the RIAA comes to my door I can tell them to fuck off.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, there isn't a perfect answer - yet. The Mozilla wiki covers this problem in more detail here.
Firefox ADM partially covers this ground - here.
There's another tool similar to Firefox ADM, but I can't find info on it at the moment.
Summary: Firefox is almost there, but in most enterprise situations, there's still a few features (mostly in the lockdown, and setting default features department) that are lacking. I expect that will become a non-issue by the end of this year.
Without defending the practice, I believe I read somewhere that Slashdot editors don't take down pages once posted, for legal reasons. My understanding is that if they have a "no stories come down" policy it's harder to sue them if they choose not to take a story down.
IANAL, but I don't see why this precludes giving users the ability to mod the story down.
"stolen £200,000 using United States customers' personal information"
£200,000?! I smell a rat. What kind of Americans keep that much British money around?
I doubt this is the case - having seen a whole bunch of false arrest claims successfully argued in my time, that a five figure claim is pushing it, and a four figure claim is more realistic.
Some folks who were falsely arrested in 2002 in DC, who were hogtied most of the night at the jail, got $400,000 for seven people before legal costs. Usually the figures are closer to $4000-5000, because folks would rather settle than see it dragged out four years.
I may agree with you in theory, but keep in mind that the Supreme Court disagrees.
In the late 80's, someone brought suit against the city of Washington DC, claiming that he had a right to not hear the radio broadcasts on the public city buses. He made the argument that the First Amendment should be interpreted to mean that he shouldn't be forced to hear others' speech. I can find the citation when I'm not at work if you care.
Point being, I may have a lot of qualms with the SCOTUS, but I have a hard time saying they don't think about rights concepts in a particularly rigorous way, and I wouldn't presume my framework is the only one a rigorous thinker can hold.
Furthermore, there are lots of reasons to want to blog anonymously about my employer that have nothing to do with free speech (avoiding illegal retaliation is a good enough reason for me - whistleblowers, union organizers, and many others would agree).
There are also plenty of reasons to blog anonymously that ARE free speech issues - people get illegally arrested and/or beaten all the time based on the content of their speech by the police and vigilantes - it's happened to me often enough. It hasn't happened to me personally for what I've said online, but I could name acquaintances for whom that's not true.
On top of the excellent points made by other posters about special allocations etc., I'll point out that the Department of Defense isn't the only government agency that gets tax dollars for military purposes. For instance, the DoE nuclear weapons program is budgeted for $17 billion in FY2006.
How much of NASA, Homeland Security, etc. should one count? They have a combined budget of $48 billion, and some appreciable percentage of that is military in nature.
[Note: Some of these numbers are from the War Resister's League, who round up in a way that's not very scientific. The margin by which this is true, however, is not sufficient to throw off the argument.]
Plus there's Veteran's Services, as you pointed out - but the kicker is the $314 billion interest on debt we have, of which it is estimated between 50 and 80 percent is due to military spending.
Sorry, I think military spending wins on this one.
PS - I wish I could kick the ass of the Democrats who blocked a balanced budget amendment - I was 17 and I STILL saw this coming. Idiots.
Hi folks. I hate to provide actual info when everyone is getting into a self-righteous frenzy about what idiot radical admin keeps logs, but...
This came out literally three minutes ago over a listserv for radical tech folks:
"While I can't comment on the specifics of these cases, I'm sure that quite of few of you will go "Doh!" when the details come out.
The problem here isn't logs. The problem is forum and weblog software that stores IP addresses. In other words, PostNuke, phpBB, Geeklog and other need a system to delete IP addresses from the MySQL db on a regular basis. If this is even desirable."
Someone else immediately replied with, "If they're stored in a database, a daily/hourly/whatever SQL query to zero the field should suffice"
So there you have it. Not the box admin's fault, but the folks putting in their blog software to move content. Feel free to argue about whether THOSE folks should know better.
From what I tried, even if I add multiple sections say World News (US) and World News (UK), the stories do not repeat.
It appears that, only the first instance a story occurs, is displayed. No Repeats!
Wow! Could they sell this incredible new technology to Slashdot?
Yes, but instead of opening the blocked ports, you could have configured Bittorrent to run on ANY OTHER port(s). The parent poster's point was that you COULD block the ports that Bittorrent normally runs on, but you could configure Bittorrent to run on other ports. There's no single port you can block to make a P2P program unusable.
One of the women in the NOC at the last HOPE conference had the FreeBSD daemon tattooed on her shoulder...man, that's gonna be a long story to tell the grandkids.
Mod parent up - Emacspeak is a great option. The maintainer of the emacspeak listserv was a sysadmin at the college I attended, and he has a disability similar to dyslexia. He often worked on a portable computer of his own design. It had an ultra-small mobo with a PCMCIA hard drive in a case about six inches square, and headphones instead of a monitor. He was often seen wandering the halls listening to and responding to e-mail via Emacspeak (using a one-handed chording keyboard).
I also set up a computer for a blind acquaintance of mine in college, and configured some hardware for a center set up for students with disabilities. I hope the tech's come a ways since then - there was a hardware text-to-speech reader on LPT1, you redirected all of your screen output to lpt1 and let it be spoken. The Braille printer was on LPT2.
In the movie Sneakers, the blind hacker had a neat device that created Braille dots under your finger, but I've never seen one in use. Are these in common use?
I've hired a handful of entry-level sysadmins in my time, and conducted close to 50 interviewsin the process. Since I have a liberal arts degree myself, I'm inclined to look past the degree someone has, but...
Over time I've learned to be distrustful of folks with degrees from DeVry and the local equivalents. A standard "filter" question I ask during the interview is, "What is DHCP for?" and a sad number of folks couldn't answer correctly. I've never had a trade school degree recipient answer correctly.
Note that this is NOT the same as having a degree from a "good" school - if I had to choose blindly, I'd sooner pick a graduate of one of the CUNY schools (city colleges) than just about anywhere else. In NYC especially, there's a lot of folks with brains but no money for college.
Babelfish link anyone? I can't figure out what a "spiv" is, QC versus SC (something counsel?), etc. The only Australian I know I learned from Foster's commercials...
I've worked as a per-diem EMT, although it's mostly a volunteer endeavor for me. I also know a handful of other EMT/IT folks. The (probably false) story I've heard is that in the 80's and before, a lot of the IT folks were working in industries where you needed a security clearance (defense, aerospace), and they needed to have their own internal EMS teams as a consequence.
And just to show that there's no hard feelings between the /. crowd and the IP czar, I think we should chip in and buy him a brand-new cellphone...
OK, I'm being trolled, but...
People get arrested ONLY for speaking their mind more often than you think. Police will make up a crime - I've seen it done many times, and had it happen to me once - you can read about it here if you feel like it.
Of course, you're breaking a law at almost any time. It's more common to arrest someone for breaking a law that many other people are breaking, the only difference being that the arrested person spoke their mind against the current Administration.
I step off the sidewalk to walk around people every time I walk down Canal Street in Manhattan, as do the cops. However, people who have more of a history of speaking their mind get arrested for the same act - I read an article here about this just today.
So I don't find your criticism credible. I wouldn't bother posting, except you seem like someone logical who's drawn a conclusion based on incomplete information, and I wouldn't want others to do the same.
Thanks, actually, but if you read my post you'll see that I, like you, am an EMT, and I ride on an ambulance every week in this city. I'm well aware of how bicyclists do - and don't - provide headaches to emergency workers, so please don't patronize me by saying I can't begin to understand.
You didn't really address my points, so my statements still stand. There's no point in rebutting you - I think my original post does a pretty decent job.
If a little traveler from Logitech shows up at your house, you might want to give it a laser. If you give it a laser, it's going to ask for a non-reflective surface. It'll want to compare itself to a Microsoft mouse to make sure it performs better. Soon, the Microsoft mouse will want to be paid for. The money will go to anti-Linux FUD. Soon you'll put a brick through your computer, and have to buy a new one. And when you take home that new Logitech mouse....
...it's going to want a laser!
Your post is well-intentioned, but ill-informed - I'm sorry you're so willing to state "these people were not arrested for political reasons" as fact.
First, let me state where I'm coming from. I was arrested at the Critical Mass bike ride on Friday night, and spent most of Saturday in a cell diagonally across from Josh Kinsberg. I am an active EMT (and sysadmin) here in NYC, and was present to provide medical support, not to break laws.
#1 - The arrest was for a violation - that's not even a misdemeanor. It's like getting a jaywalking or speeding ticket. People are almost NEVER arrested for violations in NYC - they receive a summons, they're not handcuffed and thrown in jail.
#2 - On 8/28/04, at 10:10AM, at Pier 57 in NYC (temporary holding cells for arrestees this weekend), Patrol Officer Hugo Dominguez said to an arrestee words to the effect that arresting for a violation was highly unusual, but "some people, not myself" thought it was a good way to keep protestors off of the streets for a few days. Giving different punishments based on someone's political beliefs is not only immoral but illegal - see here
for info on the NYPD settling a similar lawsuit out of court a few years ago.
#3 - Critical Mass takes place in the exact same way every month in NYC, and has for three years. The police have wished me a happy ride in the past. Our behavior was no different, but this time over 150 people were arrested. This, along with numerous statements by the police (the item above was only one example) indicated that arrests this weekend were political in nature.
#3 - It's quite common for the police to arrest people during protests without regard to whether they've broken the law or not. Take a look at any major protest (25000+ people) that had arrests in the past few years - the conviction rates are incredibly low, even accounting for people pleading guilty to minor charges in exchange for time served. During this weekend, people were arrested for walking to their home on the same block as a protest.
In short, people ARE arrested for political reasons and not for breaking the law, and even they ARE breaking a minor law for political reasons (such as jaywalking, or drawing in chalk on the street), they are arrested even when someone else arrested for the same crime would get a summons.
Folks who have questions, trolls, etc. about my arrest situation can reply to this post.
I was consulting at a company called "ESP", and we needed to look at some data in an Excel file. For whatever reason, the employee who created the file decided to password-protect it, and he had gone home for the day. Important fact: This employee had previously treated me very poorly.
So the company's owner (we'll call her "Dee") calls him up, and asks him for the password. He says, "I'd rather not say." Then he asks her to put another employee on the phone, and he'll tell someone else.
So while she's arguing with him, I try to guess the password. Knowing this employee, though, I don't try his dog's name, I tried "fuckdee" and "fuckesp". The latter turned out to be correct, and I told her I was in. She told the employee not to come to work the next day.
The moral of this story MIGHT be to be smarter in password selection, but I'd LIKE to think it's to not piss off the IT staff - I always could have lied about the password.
Unfortunately, you can't abrogate the rights of citizens without people to enforce that abrogation. Those people are MORE likely than the general populace to be sociopaths.
I provide medical support during protests - I have a commitment to nonviolence. I've nevertheless been arrested, shoved to the ground by riot police, shot in the head with a rubber bullet, and countless other abrogations of my right to be secure in my person, peaceably assemble, etc. Sometimes I can get a settlement later, sometimes I can't. It doesn't change the fact that I've seen several gatherings broken up by UNPROVOKED police violence.
Since the government reserves powers to itself that it regularly abuses, my litmus test for whether an abrogation is needed is to compare the likely and potential damage of not having the abrogation compared to the potential damage of reserving one more power to the government without a civilian balance.
There's no shortage of examples of murderous behavior on the part of governments in history, even on its own citizens, even in modern U.S. history. To me, there are few (not none, but VERY few) abrogations of civil liberties that pass that litmus test.
Can anyone tell me why I should get an Infocus versus the BenQ 6100? The BenQ seems to sell better, is about the same price, and lighter. The light lasts longer, and is warranteed for an extra year.
I would be using it for weekly film nights (VHS/DVD), and occasionally for video art installations. I'm not concerned with HDTV, PC resolution, etc. I'm really wondering if there's some problem I'm not considering (fan noise? Lens quality?). Price is my main concern - I wouldn't even by considering one if they weren't in the $800-850 range.
Any advice would be helpful!
I, like half of the posters on this website, was in the same position as this kid. I'm going to guess that the kid hass most (or all) of the following characteristics:
He expects to go to a "good" college.
His peers are mainly from his own socioeconomic bracket.
He mostly interacts with other "smart" children.
I believe that my parents compounded my social problems by telling me that the kids who made fun of me were stupid or jealous, or my problems would go away when I went to college, etc. They taught me to have a superiority complex. In turn, that meant that even as I learned "normal" social skills, I came off as a real asshole who assumed I knew more than everyone about everything. This was especially true when I dealt with people who either weren't "smart", or didn't come from a place of privilege, so their "smarts" didn't look like mine.
Get him to realize that looking smart isn't always important - make him realize that BEING smart isn't always important. If he's the type that raises his hand every time he knows the answer to the teacher's question, get him to value not taking up more than his share of time in a classroom setting. Get him to practice not "showing off" when he gives his answer. Give him a chance to meet people who are smart who aren't like him. The less he tries to make himself seem better than others, the less folks will treat him as different. Don't let him build his self-esteem around being smart - there will always be smarter folks, and it counts for less than he thinks in the "real" world.
Re-reading this, I hope I'm not misinterpreted to be saying, "Tell him to act dumb." I want to emphasize that you can be smart without (unintentionally) being a prick about it.
Finally, get him to practice thinking before he opens his mouth EVERY time he opens his mouth. This is HUGE. He'll seem far less like a jerk if, before he says something, he considers how interested his audience is in hearing it, and how to say it in the fewest words possible.
I play E-Scrabble with friends that I don't live near anymore. I play at e-scrabble.com since it's not "real-time". It has a chat box, and while it works fine for someone you talk to a lot, it's REALLY good for folks who you wouldn't talk to every day anyway. I actually use it to keep in touch with my now-married ex-girlfriend. We used to talk maybe once a month, now we can stay in touch every day, in a "low emotional investment" sort of a way.
private citizens' initiatives at law enforcement always turn out to be fair and equatible treatments of not only the letter but the spirit of the law.
Hmm...I disagree with this sentiment because I am a lefty anti-authoritarian, as you seem to be.
It's my experience that governments' initiatives at law enforcement turn out to be unfair and inequitable (and I have the police-inflicted injuries to prove it). Citizens' private initiatives are no more or less likely than governments' initiatives to be unfair or inequitable - at least if the RIAA comes to my door I can tell them to fuck off.