You know even when I was writing that, I was saying to myself, I just know some jarhead is going to jump in with two boots and start weeping about his war experience. Congratulations, sir, you are not only eminently predictable (a true credit to your training), you are, in fact, a cliche. Just Like Nam Baby!
Odd. The criticism you level against me is ironically only applicable to your comments. You're the apologist here, asking us to cry for the poor policemen! Their life is difficult, see, so don't criticize unless you know what it's like! Well fuck you, dude. I'm not crying. I'm not complaining. I am, in fact, illustrating thate it's possible to do a difficult and stressful job without becoming a dickhead.
I'm not sure I understand how it being an icon negates it being a threat. An icon is "a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something."
An IM icon gets transmitted to anyone and everyone you IM with. This is why comparisons to planning/conspiracy to commit are ridiculous. If you truly intended to kill someone, why the fuck would you broadcast it to all your friends as an IM icon? Even if you only intended it as a threat, how is that accomplished by only sending the picture to your friends as an IM icon? It's a lame joke by a dumbass kid. That's what dumbass kids do. Even the sheriff's department looked at it and said it was clearly not a threat. The law is meant to include a healthy portion of common sense. Instead of common sense, however, schools use "zero tolerance". Zero tolerance is a crap policy for chickenshit bureaucrats afraid of the slightest liability.
If you and your friend are drinking one night and say something like, "Yo, we need to pop a cap in Mr. X's ass." and one of you goes out and purchases a deer rifle - an overzealous DA can press charges and you'll probably be convicted by the average jury.... even if the conversation wasn't serious and you bought the rifle for a deer hunt.
What are you talking about? Based on a single drunken comment and an otherwise unrelated firearm purchase, you probably won't be convicted. DA's don't just randomly press charges like that.
It's a theory of mine that linking to a reputable site, such as Wikipedia will get any post modded informative, even if the link is completely irrelevant.
You may be right. Chicken (gallus gallus domesticus).
You're omitting a huge step between having the idea and delivering a product
Indeed, this is a classic example of the old military maxim of "amateurs discuss strategy; experts discuss logistics". A "great idea" is only a tactic. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Any fool can come up with a great idea. The real work is successfully marshalling the resources needed to bring the idea to fruition.
Before you start bawling like the survivalist microbe that you are about the bad, naughty cops, you walk a mile in their shoes. Or even better, walk ten years in their shoes.
No, thank you very much, I do not need to perform a particular dirty job to know that if the job turns someone into a law-bending dickhead on a power trip, they need to not be employed in that capacity. I don't care why the job fucked them up. It isn't relevant. Oh, you deal with vicious drunken animals every night and it turned you mean? Tough shit, pal, act like a professional or get out of the business. I spent six years intermittently dodging bullets, mines, and IEDs in the Army, so I know what the pressure of life-threatening employment is like. We didn't beat up the random hadjis who showed their soles to us, so I think a cop can do the same for civilians at home. Having a dangerous job doesn't excuse assholery.
Not that their wiretapping charges shouldn't be thrown out, but I expect that the police are tired of walking up to this shitbag's door every second day because of some crime this shitbag or his shitbag family has committed.
Be that as it may, it's part of performing the job of "policeman" in a professional manner. If they can't deal with shitbags, they need to get a job working at a yoga center or something.
And seat belt laws are not for the protection of the driver; they're for people around the driver because the seat belt keeps the driver at the controls after the initial impact.
Citation, please? I call bullshit. Seatbelts are designed to prevent injury. In any accident severe enough for the seat belt to perform it is unlikely that controlling the vehicle is even possible. If it was about control, they'd mandate 4-point restraints instead of collarbone-snapping diagonal shoulder belts. You ever tried to steer with a broken collarbone? How about early seat belts, which were only lap belts? Were they designed to keep you in control of the vehicle after your skull bounces off the steering wheel?
So if I use my credit card with google to buy something from you and google screws up,
This little bit was so mind-bogglingly dense that I didn't even see it the first time. Where in that disclaimer does it say that Google disavows any fault when they, themselves screw up? It doesn't! It only says that they aren't responsible for you making a bad deal with a third party. So long as they get your money to the seller, their involvement is done.
Um, no try again. If I use my credit card at a store and they charge the wrong amount I first bring it up with them. Then if that doesn't resolve and only then do I go to the credit card company.
Oh, for god's sake. My argument presumes that the existence of an unresolved "dispute" is the result of the store refusing to make it right.
So if I use my credit card with google to buy something from you and google screws up, I should be able to go to them to fix it. Since they are effectively the ones selling me the product [the "seller" is just providing it].
Huh? Google didn't sell you anything. The guy with the actual goods is doing the selling. Google is a payment processing middleman. If the guy sends you a box of rocks instead of a PSP, how is that the middleman's problem? You can't hold someone liable for something over which they have no control.
I mean this is like going to Sony because Best Buy charged you wrong on the TV you bought. No, you go to best buy to fix the charge.
What the hell are you talking about? Best Buy is not a card processor, and Google is not a merchant. Nothing is even remotely comparable. Best Buy has a card processing company. You buy a TV and Best Buy charges you wrong, do you call up (say) Card1 Merchant Services to complain about it? No, you go to Best Buy and, when it results in a dispute, you go to your credit card issuer. The middleman, who operates the swipe-reader system, has nothing to do with that process. That's all the Google disclaimer says: if you get ripped off by a sleazebag, take it up with the sleazebag, or take i up with your credit card company. This is how it works everywhere else.
The GP took issue with the statement by Rand that,"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." He then listed many powers of government that do not fit that mold, and hence called the statement stupid. You did absolutely nothing to refute his point.
It's worth noting that Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical treatise wrapped in a rather awkwardly executed work of fiction. The Ayn Rand "quote" is the words of a character. Unlike PhDs writing academic papers, who must carefully frame their claims and exhaustively make caveats for all assertions, writers of fiction have the luxury of creating characters that are permitted to speak in hyperbole, and make utterly reprehensible statements. Judging the words of an arrogant bastard character as if they were part of a peer reviewed paper is the real stupidity here. Rand was making an expansive, dramatic point, based on a kernal of reality. Pedantically pointing out that there are some things the government does without "creating more criminals" is an utter (and probably willful) failure to recognize the difference between writing fiction and writing a research paper.
Question I've been meaning to ask: are debit cards as risky? I'm sure I read somewhere that you can't do chargebacks with them.
Ten years ago, when electronic debit transactions were still new, that was the case. Now most financial institutions offer protections similar to credit cards. That's not to say that debit card protection is as convenient as credit card protection, though. The disadvantage is that, unlike a straight credit card, you start off with the money gone and must wrangle with the bank to get it back. Credit cards, it's the bank that's out the money and you need only refuse to pay.
When's the last time you called a credit card processor to resolve a disputed charge? You deal with the card issuer. This is no different from any other card processor agreement. Get a grip.
Probably the last thing I want is to "use payment and shipping information they keep on file with Google" (quote from TFA). Keep my info in vast searchable financial database which makes it attractive to black hats and goverment?
No thanks , I'd prefer to spend a minute to create one-off credit card number each time I shop.
Point taken, but you have to realize that you, like the vast majority of us, are of absolutely no interest to the government's secretive minions. Face it, our lives are for the most part not like that of James Bond. We're dull. That Visa or MasterCard logo already ensures that all your transactions are in a central database anyway-- a much better one than Google could ever have, too. The only thing you're preventing is potential credit card fraud. That's a worthwhile goal in itself.
A better idea is if the Alphabet Agencies (CIA/DoD/NSA/DoJ/etc) uses FMRI's for security screenings, in the same way that polygraph's are used. That way science can build up a body of knowledge at the Federal Gov'ts expense and the results can be backed up with polygraphs.
Polygraphs can't back up shit. They're a pile of crap. There are no physiological reactions that can be specifically atributed to deception. That's why they're not permitted as evidence in any court. Why do you think it is that the two possible results of a polygraph are "shows signs of deception" or "inconclusive"? Polygraph results are highly subjective interpretations of ill-defined measurements. Baseline questions are asked that supposedly set the thresholds for "truth" and "deception", but the machines largely rely on the subject's subconscious fear that the machine is catching them in the lie. There isn't a red light or buzzer on the machine that goes off every time the subject lies. What you have is just one man's opinion of what a lot of jumpy marks on graph paper mean in relation to your guilt or innocence-- influenced, of course, by his guess, based upon what he has heard about you, and deductions he draws from how you appear and act.
My world was a world of security fences and guards carrying AK47s.
Unless you grew up in an eastern bloc country, I seriously doubt they were AK-47's.
If you can't tell an AK from an M-16, you should just call them "guns".
Although only God knows why 3 ft is the magic number
It's a nice round number that people can easily judge by eyeball, and it's generous enough to encompass all the likely scenarios with plenty of "fudge factor" for those dunderheads who figure it's OK if they "bend" the rule a little? The real, tested minimum was probably something inscrutable and random like "68 centimeters". "3 feet" is a good Magic Number. It approximates a yard, a meter, one long step or pace for an average height human, the distance from the floor to the waist area for same; it's a very "human scale" distance.
despite his having been retired, when i read it, he still wasnt sure how the man was issued an active ID for a retired officer
Retired military are generally still issued a military ID, giving them access to base hospitals, the PX/BX, etc. There's a difference between someone who's simply a veteran and someone who's stayed in for 20 years and retired.
A lot of big box stores do similar things. Look up at the cieling of your friendly local neighborhood Wal-Mart sometime. You'll see those black camera domes sticking down about every 20 feet or so.
I did an estimate once, and in the Super Wal-Mart in my area, there would have literally been hundreds of cameras. While perhaps they're all real (if anyone would take surveillance to that obsessive a level, it would be Wally World), they don't all need to be.
I can't say about Wally World, but about 10 years ago I was working an electrical job in the ceiling of the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas and I noticed that only 1 in three or so of those domes in the ceiling actually had a camera in 'em. Then again, that was when cameras were still large and expensive. A friend of mine who worked at Caesar's Palace says that nowadays every single one of those little bubbles has a camera. Really, the limitation is how much you can afford to spend on recording and monitoring. A casino can't afford not to have a camera on every table, door, and hallway and keep months of recorded activity on file, with a big security staff to keep it all going. Wally World, probably not so much. I bet only 1 in 5 of those cameras is "live", and then only goes to a DVR that keeps a week's worth of video.
Some fake cameras are easy to spot and pro theives are quick to spot them. If you want to be effective, either put up real cameras or use dummy cameras from the manufacture of real cameras. A warped painted lens is a dead giveaway of a dummy. A Sanyo dummy using a real camera case, lens, and cables is the twin of the real camera except the guts are missing.
Yeah, if you're buying a dummy cam, get something like that. Any of the cheap crap you see with a lit LED on the front is obviously a dummy. In 5 years of maintaining real, functional security cams, I haven't seen a single one that had a power LED on the front.
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Odd. The criticism you level against me is ironically only applicable to your comments. You're the apologist here, asking us to cry for the poor policemen! Their life is difficult, see, so don't criticize unless you know what it's like! Well fuck you, dude. I'm not crying. I'm not complaining. I am, in fact, illustrating thate it's possible to do a difficult and stressful job without becoming a dickhead.
I'm not sure I understand how it being an icon negates it being a threat. An icon is "a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something."
An IM icon gets transmitted to anyone and everyone you IM with. This is why comparisons to planning/conspiracy to commit are ridiculous. If you truly intended to kill someone, why the fuck would you broadcast it to all your friends as an IM icon? Even if you only intended it as a threat, how is that accomplished by only sending the picture to your friends as an IM icon? It's a lame joke by a dumbass kid. That's what dumbass kids do. Even the sheriff's department looked at it and said it was clearly not a threat. The law is meant to include a healthy portion of common sense. Instead of common sense, however, schools use "zero tolerance". Zero tolerance is a crap policy for chickenshit bureaucrats afraid of the slightest liability.
What are you talking about? Based on a single drunken comment and an otherwise unrelated firearm purchase, you probably won't be convicted. DA's don't just randomly press charges like that.
It's a theory of mine that linking to a reputable site, such as Wikipedia will get any post modded informative, even if the link is completely irrelevant.
You may be right.
Chicken (gallus gallus domesticus).
You're omitting a huge step between having the idea and delivering a product
Indeed, this is a classic example of the old military maxim of "amateurs discuss strategy; experts discuss logistics". A "great idea" is only a tactic. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Any fool can come up with a great idea. The real work is successfully marshalling the resources needed to bring the idea to fruition.
Sorry. You just can't translate Russian with a Serbian dictionary. "Buran" means "snowstorm" or "blizzard".
Hell, all of our plans for the "shuttle replacement" look a heck of a lot like the Russian lifting-body-atop-a-tube designs.
The Russians are hardly pioneers there. We've had similar designs on the drawing board since the 50's.
Before you start bawling like the survivalist microbe that you are about the bad, naughty cops, you walk a mile in their shoes. Or even better, walk ten years in their shoes.
No, thank you very much, I do not need to perform a particular dirty job to know that if the job turns someone into a law-bending dickhead on a power trip, they need to not be employed in that capacity. I don't care why the job fucked them up. It isn't relevant. Oh, you deal with vicious drunken animals every night and it turned you mean? Tough shit, pal, act like a professional or get out of the business. I spent six years intermittently dodging bullets, mines, and IEDs in the Army, so I know what the pressure of life-threatening employment is like. We didn't beat up the random hadjis who showed their soles to us, so I think a cop can do the same for civilians at home. Having a dangerous job doesn't excuse assholery.
Be that as it may, it's part of performing the job of "policeman" in a professional manner. If they can't deal with shitbags, they need to get a job working at a yoga center or something.
Citation, please? I call bullshit. Seatbelts are designed to prevent injury. In any accident severe enough for the seat belt to perform it is unlikely that controlling the vehicle is even possible. If it was about control, they'd mandate 4-point restraints instead of collarbone-snapping diagonal shoulder belts. You ever tried to steer with a broken collarbone? How about early seat belts, which were only lap belts? Were they designed to keep you in control of the vehicle after your skull bounces off the steering wheel?
So if I use my credit card with google to buy something from you and google screws up,
This little bit was so mind-bogglingly dense that I didn't even see it the first time. Where in that disclaimer does it say that Google disavows any fault when they, themselves screw up? It doesn't! It only says that they aren't responsible for you making a bad deal with a third party. So long as they get your money to the seller, their involvement is done.
Um, no try again. If I use my credit card at a store and they charge the wrong amount I first bring it up with them. Then if that doesn't resolve and only then do I go to the credit card company.
Oh, for god's sake. My argument presumes that the existence of an unresolved "dispute" is the result of the store refusing to make it right.
So if I use my credit card with google to buy something from you and google screws up, I should be able to go to them to fix it. Since they are effectively the ones selling me the product [the "seller" is just providing it].
Huh? Google didn't sell you anything. The guy with the actual goods is doing the selling. Google is a payment processing middleman. If the guy sends you a box of rocks instead of a PSP, how is that the middleman's problem? You can't hold someone liable for something over which they have no control.
I mean this is like going to Sony because Best Buy charged you wrong on the TV you bought. No, you go to best buy to fix the charge.
What the hell are you talking about? Best Buy is not a card processor, and Google is not a merchant. Nothing is even remotely comparable. Best Buy has a card processing company. You buy a TV and Best Buy charges you wrong, do you call up (say) Card1 Merchant Services to complain about it? No, you go to Best Buy and, when it results in a dispute, you go to your credit card issuer. The middleman, who operates the swipe-reader system, has nothing to do with that process. That's all the Google disclaimer says: if you get ripped off by a sleazebag, take it up with the sleazebag, or take i up with your credit card company. This is how it works everywhere else.
The GP took issue with the statement by Rand that,"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." He then listed many powers of government that do not fit that mold, and hence called the statement stupid. You did absolutely nothing to refute his point.
It's worth noting that Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical treatise wrapped in a rather awkwardly executed work of fiction. The Ayn Rand "quote" is the words of a character. Unlike PhDs writing academic papers, who must carefully frame their claims and exhaustively make caveats for all assertions, writers of fiction have the luxury of creating characters that are permitted to speak in hyperbole, and make utterly reprehensible statements. Judging the words of an arrogant bastard character as if they were part of a peer reviewed paper is the real stupidity here. Rand was making an expansive, dramatic point, based on a kernal of reality. Pedantically pointing out that there are some things the government does without "creating more criminals" is an utter (and probably willful) failure to recognize the difference between writing fiction and writing a research paper.
Yes, DNS works. Allow me to fill in the implied context of my comment:
Voice recognition is 'being developed (for this wrist-top computer platform).'
Somebody mispronounced 'doesn't work yet (for this wrist-top computer platform).'
Even DNS Mobile Edition won't fit in 64MB of flash. DNS is not relevant to the subject of this article.
Question I've been meaning to ask: are debit cards as risky? I'm sure I read somewhere that you can't do chargebacks with them.
Ten years ago, when electronic debit transactions were still new, that was the case. Now most financial institutions offer protections similar to credit cards. That's not to say that debit card protection is as convenient as credit card protection, though. The disadvantage is that, unlike a straight credit card, you start off with the money gone and must wrangle with the bank to get it back. Credit cards, it's the bank that's out the money and you need only refuse to pay.
When's the last time you called a credit card processor to resolve a disputed charge? You deal with the card issuer. This is no different from any other card processor agreement. Get a grip.
Probably the last thing I want is to "use payment and shipping information they keep on file with Google" (quote from TFA). Keep my info in vast searchable financial database which makes it attractive to black hats and goverment? No thanks , I'd prefer to spend a minute to create one-off credit card number each time I shop.
Point taken, but you have to realize that you, like the vast majority of us, are of absolutely no interest to the government's secretive minions. Face it, our lives are for the most part not like that of James Bond. We're dull. That Visa or MasterCard logo already ensures that all your transactions are in a central database anyway-- a much better one than Google could ever have, too. The only thing you're preventing is potential credit card fraud. That's a worthwhile goal in itself.
Somebody mispronounced 'doesn't work yet'.
Polygraphs can't back up shit. They're a pile of crap. There are no physiological reactions that can be specifically atributed to deception. That's why they're not permitted as evidence in any court. Why do you think it is that the two possible results of a polygraph are "shows signs of deception" or "inconclusive"? Polygraph results are highly subjective interpretations of ill-defined measurements. Baseline questions are asked that supposedly set the thresholds for "truth" and "deception", but the machines largely rely on the subject's subconscious fear that the machine is catching them in the lie. There isn't a red light or buzzer on the machine that goes off every time the subject lies. What you have is just one man's opinion of what a lot of jumpy marks on graph paper mean in relation to your guilt or innocence-- influenced, of course, by his guess, based upon what he has heard about you, and deductions he draws from how you appear and act.
Unless you grew up in an eastern bloc country, I seriously doubt they were AK-47's.
If you can't tell an AK from an M-16, you should just call them "guns".
Although only God knows why 3 ft is the magic number
It's a nice round number that people can easily judge by eyeball, and it's generous enough to encompass all the likely scenarios with plenty of "fudge factor" for those dunderheads who figure it's OK if they "bend" the rule a little? The real, tested minimum was probably something inscrutable and random like "68 centimeters". "3 feet" is a good Magic Number. It approximates a yard, a meter, one long step or pace for an average height human, the distance from the floor to the waist area for same; it's a very "human scale" distance.
despite his having been retired, when i read it, he still wasnt sure how the man was issued an active ID for a retired officer
Retired military are generally still issued a military ID, giving them access to base hospitals, the PX/BX, etc. There's a difference between someone who's simply a veteran and someone who's stayed in for 20 years and retired.
A lot of big box stores do similar things. Look up at the cieling of your friendly local neighborhood Wal-Mart sometime. You'll see those black camera domes sticking down about every 20 feet or so. I did an estimate once, and in the Super Wal-Mart in my area, there would have literally been hundreds of cameras. While perhaps they're all real (if anyone would take surveillance to that obsessive a level, it would be Wally World), they don't all need to be.
I can't say about Wally World, but about 10 years ago I was working an electrical job in the ceiling of the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas and I noticed that only 1 in three or so of those domes in the ceiling actually had a camera in 'em. Then again, that was when cameras were still large and expensive. A friend of mine who worked at Caesar's Palace says that nowadays every single one of those little bubbles has a camera. Really, the limitation is how much you can afford to spend on recording and monitoring. A casino can't afford not to have a camera on every table, door, and hallway and keep months of recorded activity on file, with a big security staff to keep it all going. Wally World, probably not so much. I bet only 1 in 5 of those cameras is "live", and then only goes to a DVR that keeps a week's worth of video.
Some fake cameras are easy to spot and pro theives are quick to spot them. If you want to be effective, either put up real cameras or use dummy cameras from the manufacture of real cameras. A warped painted lens is a dead giveaway of a dummy. A Sanyo dummy using a real camera case, lens, and cables is the twin of the real camera except the guts are missing.
Yeah, if you're buying a dummy cam, get something like that. Any of the cheap crap you see with a lit LED on the front is obviously a dummy. In 5 years of maintaining real, functional security cams, I haven't seen a single one that had a power LED on the front.
Well, the Xscale is used in the Blackberry 8700G - which is a mobile phone / PDA.
I contend that if it looks like you're holding a pocket calculator against your head, it's not really a mobile phone.