Boghossian has two accomplices, and yet the university's ire seems to be directed at him specifically. Someone seems very keen on making this personal. I cannot help but wonder why.
I've been on LinkedIN forever. There's hardly any local employer or recruiter that uses it. However most expats and most locals who worked abroad at some point are there as users.
Males who are low earners weed themselves out of the dating pool because women are hypergamic. For as long as you haven't solved that, males will not take on the lowest paying jobs.
I'd really like to know the answer to that one too.
Every time finding a replacement for Skype is brought up, suggestions fall into two camps:
– Whatever the GNOME guys currently like. – Some other obscure app-in-the-making that has not yet achieved mainstream usability and that is not ported/portable to all OS (typically: closed source and only for Mac/PC, or open source and essentially designed for a specific Free Desktop's toolkit).
Sorry, none of these qualify as a replacement that will guarantee seamless integration with personal contacts on all platforms the way Skype still does.
The l'Assomption sash pattern was brought by Acadians to the town of L'Assomption QC when they were deported from Acadia by the Brits. It was indeed widely adopted by the Metis later on. In modern times, that particular pattern, know as lightning and flames, has become the emblem of the Lanaudière region.
Because Google suffers from the same CADT syndrome as your typical free software project:
Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short. — Jamie Zawinski
China strikes me as incapable of responding to bug reports, because a bug report puts the manufacturer in a bad light and that amounts to losing face.
Case in point:
I was maintaining a driver for a widespread SoC. The driver would flat out crash the Linux kernel during bootup (kernel oops and complete freeze) at every other kernel release, but only when booted off a specific hardware vendor's product. On other vendors' products based on the same SoC, no such problem.
I contacted the SoC's manufacturer, asking if that particular issue rang a bell. It didn't. However, their product specialist recalled that this particular hardware vendor had very pointy questions about hardware interrupts, back when they were building their BIOS image. As far as he could guess, the vendor had probably messed their build configuration and produced faulty BIOS images whose bugs were triggered by changes in the Linux kernel's other subsystems at every other release.
He gave me the name of a contact person at the hardware vendor, suggesting to report the bug to them. My e-mail was passed around from department to department – OEM support, Marketing, Sales, etc. – to no avail. One department assumed that I didn't understand some BIOS settings, another presumed that I was placing an order that would require a custom BIOS build. No, I'm reporting a defect in the BIOS sold in your products. I'm asking you to find the cause of the issue I've described – which does NOT affect other products based on the same SoC reference design that are sold by other hardware vendors, so it HAS to be a BIOS bug – and to please release a fixed BIOS image. At that point, someone with a modicum of English skills figured out what the word "defect" means and promised to contact me as soon as they found the solution. They never did. They also stopped responding to any further e-mail.
We in the West are morally justified in destroying the nuclear-weapons facilities.
No, you are NOT justified any more than the East would in destroying YOUR nuclear weapons facility. As unbelievable as it might sound to American imperialistic cretins, everyone is allowed to own marbles. You DON'T get to decide who can have the toys and who cannot.
Depends how you define child pornography. By the time you arrest parents for taking pictures of their kids skinny dipping in the lake at their summerhouse, it goes too far.
And exactly how productive of a life can someone expect to have if the mere fact that they have to register and inform their neighbors is gonna mean that they will be denied housing, harassed by strangers, approached by people as if a 20-foot exclusion radius existed around them, preemptively denied jobs without anyone even bothering to check exactly what they did (mere indecency or gruesome rape?), etc. - essentially treated as pariah for the rest of their life? You'd actually call that a productive life?
By all means, be harsh with those who rape and kill. However, treating public indecency with the same harshness is blowing things out of proportion.
The crux of the problem is that the blanket term "sex offender" includes WAY too many types of offenses, from dumb public urination to aggravated rape, for this Law to be remotely justified. If they'd revise it to only affect pedophilia and rape, I'd guess that nobody would object. Even then, pedophilia is a also big can of worms, because of the way some states include statutory rape (sleeping with a fully consenting teenager) in their description of pedophilia.
I have slight disagreements with some items in your list, but I fully agree with the substance of the message: "Enough is enough. We're not gonna tolerate living in a US-centric universe driven by lies and paranoia, anymore!" This being said, given how a lot of/. readers are Americans and fit the description for one or several of the groups of people you describe, you're likely to be modded down as a flame bait, precisely because you've touched on a number of proverbial "Elephant in the corner" issues.
In Finland, being very much of European descent, but having the misfortune of carrying a passport from a North American country, I have to call it like it is: having to repeat the whole story of how I moved to Finland, at every fucking border crossing in or out, over a 10-year period and yet having a permanent resident permit in my passport - and a very Karelian accent thank you - is a situation that smells of idiocy, paranoia and Spanish inquisition. So yes, when border surveillance and immigration practices are that 'tard, it becomes: 1) discrimination 2) invasion of privacy (you wouldn't believe the questions border guards ask) and 3) irritates perfectly legal immigrants to the point of testing their patience beyond reasonable limits, which THEN becomes a national security issue. Sitä saa, mitä tilaa, joten älä tilaa ikävyyksiä ärsyttämällä maahanmuuttajia raja-asemalla koko ajan, kiitos.
The way Harper tries to force this law through is eerily similar to what happened in Finland not too long ago, both in the fact that it was industry-backed (in Finland's case, it was downright industry-written) and that politicians ignored LOUD protests from artists and consumers. In Finland, in an unprecedented show of unanimity, all youth sections of the political parties undersigned the same memo opposing the law reform, to no avail: in Soviet Finland, a bureaucrat only has to claim that EU demands a legal change to silence the crowd. Google "Lex Karpela" and see Henri Sivonen's homepage for some background info.
Estonia has already had home Internet over fiber optic at affordable price since about year 2000. Like in Japan, it is mainly available in city area. In the countryside, core infrastructures were rebuilt with fiber optic after the collapse of USSR, so only the last mile has copper and brand new one at that. For the handful of really off-road villages not connected to the phone network, WiMax is available (not to mention the plethora of other wireless technologies available to Estonian consumers).
In a nutshell, just because dinosaurs in Western Europe don't have their act together doesn't mean that whole EU is a load of crap. Look east of Berlin and you'll find a dynamic side of EU that has all the latest gadgets and is busy inventing the next ones too.
Merely for informative purpose, I thought I'd mention that Finland has a similar system of nationwide compulsory TV license whose profits only go to the state-owned channels (privately-owned channels don't get a penny out of it), supported by an increasingly sizable brigade of TV permit inspectors. People who flatly don't own a TV are immediately regarded as worthy of an impromptu inspector visit and of endless phone calls to inquire why the heck they haven't been a good Finn and paid their license like everyone else. They essentially keep track of who has paid and who hasn't by comparing payment data with the civil registry data (changes of address notifications to the civil registry are compulsory in Finland).
The whole things often reaches ridiculous extents: they also keep track of cable TV subscribers and compare that to civil registry data and they get a lot of false positives because of cable-Internet subscribers. Yet, for a number of years, it simply wouldn't get into their head that customers of cable company can do business with them for non-TV related purposes; I obviously had a TV I wasn't paying a license for since I was doing business with the cable company! If I changed address and still only did business with the cable for Internet service, they'd notice a new resident at address X who hasn't paid a license and yet does business with the cable company, so one of their minions would call and sermon me about breaking the Law and, again, it simply wouldn't get into their head that the cable company offers services other than TV.
Machiavelli would sheepishly point out that all it takes for a criminal to go unnoticed in Finland is to pay their TV license, regardless of whether they have a TV or not.
It would be a good idea for wishful-thinking Scandinavian feminist PhD types to finally let go of the idea that pedophilia is a one-way street or that all sex is rape initiated by a male offender.
I should know: ages ago, I was one of those kids who was too shy and too skinny to get laid with people their own age and who willingly sought older girls who had already achieved the age of majority. The point is that most adults I've had sex with had no harmful intentions; there was no "molesting" taking place [1] as I was not beat up or harmed in any way. Rather, I got the sex that girls my own age wouldn't have given me even if their life depended on it. I had fun and I enjoyed every minute of it. Both sides benefited from it, so what's the harm?
Having been a teenager during the Internet age, I would have had an even easier time meeting willing sexual companions over the Internet and I would have jumped at the opportunity. That society or my parents might have had a problem with that is a separate issue.
Face it: kids have a penis or a vagina just like adults do and their hands quickly find out how good it feels to be touched down below. Beyond that, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it's even more fun when someone else touches you down below. Yes, kids have a sexuality. It might not involve making babies or dealing with STD and the whole lot, but it sure as hell feels good. Add a few more years, until they reach puberty and get a vague idea of what the hardware really is meant for and you'll get a horny bunch of teenagers all too eager to go for it and enjoy. Funny how society and their parents are the only ones having a problem with that, whereas the teens just acknowledge nature's call and jump in.
The whole issue of pedophilia comes into the picture when someone hasn't gotten enough affection in their childhood or downright experienced peer rejection in their teens. Pedophiles then locate some teen who is experiencing the same thing they did and, suddenly, you have two people feeling in good company and experiencing sexual contentment. That's what I experienced back then. It's only years later, once I realized the causes of the rejection I had experienced that I understood how I ended up sleeping with people others would call pedophiles. In short: if girls my age would have given me any standing chance at it, I wouldn't have started looking for older ones. Sadly, life in some countries has it that boys who are skinny or shy instead experience harassment from their peers and get ridiculed as non-virile by potential girlfriends their own age. What's a boy with exploding hormones supposed to do? Find an older one who just thinks he's adorable, that's what.
1. statutory rape has nothing to do with molestation; all it implies is that someone violated the artificial age limit imposed by society as to what constitutes its idea of "age of consent".
As we migrate to IPv6, we should adopt the approach of developing all new protocols with port randomness and encryption-by-design in mind, then gradually phase out old protocols. Even basic infrastructure protocols could be phased out: think of the day UUCP was replaced by SMTP; both coexisted for a while, but nowadays UUCP is virtually unheard of.
What's good for the goose...
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Right, so it's OK for USA to teach its kids about explosives? Imagine the outcry if someone heard about a similar program taking place, say, in Iran. I can already see the headline we would be getting: "Iran training dozens of kids into becoming terrorists with an expertise in explosives."
This is the same sort of fuzzy logic we see with USA possessing nuclear weapons and yet demanding that Iran be prevented from ever having any.
Mark my words: there is no single democratic country left on this planet. Except Switzerland and even then I have my doubts about this one.
The titles have changed from Count, Duke, Earl, King, Sheik, etc. to Fortune-500 CEO, Prime Minister or President but, let's not fool ourselves: exactly when did the rulers ever represent their constituents? Never. That's when. There might have been episodes when the people felt enpowered, but that was just for show.
Face it: democracy (or, actually, what some people imagine it is: casting a ballot to send someone over to Parliament hill) can only work at an infinitely small scale, where whoever gets elected factually is someone you know personally and whom you can positively trust to represent your interests.
I stand corrected: Passport Canada said it, but the Court overturned. Still, there are scary aspects to this case: it was found that a Minister has signed the refusal, right after the Law was changed to suddenly allow them to refuse a passport to "suspected" terrorists (to fit the case) and, more scarily, the Court left the door open for Passport Canada to retroactively withdraw the passport based on that new Law.
Slashdot Mirror
Computer says no. Let's ban Bell Canada instead.
Boghossian has two accomplices, and yet the university's ire seems to be directed at him specifically. Someone seems very keen on making this personal. I cannot help but wonder why.
I've been on LinkedIN forever. There's hardly any local employer or recruiter that uses it. However most expats and most locals who worked abroad at some point are there as users.
Considering how women have a generally longer lifespan than men, women should only be allowed to retire at 10 years older than men.
Males who are low earners weed themselves out of the dating pool because women are hypergamic. For as long as you haven't solved that, males will not take on the lowest paying jobs.
I'd really like to know the answer to that one too.
Every time finding a replacement for Skype is brought up, suggestions fall into two camps:
– Whatever the GNOME guys currently like.
– Some other obscure app-in-the-making that has not yet achieved mainstream usability and that is not ported/portable to all OS (typically: closed source and only for Mac/PC, or open source and essentially designed for a specific Free Desktop's toolkit).
Sorry, none of these qualify as a replacement that will guarantee seamless integration with personal contacts on all platforms the way Skype still does.
Ah so they adopted GNOME's filesystem abstraction layer? ;)
The l'Assomption sash pattern was brought by Acadians to the town of L'Assomption QC when they were deported from Acadia by the Brits. It was indeed widely adopted by the Metis later on. In modern times, that particular pattern, know as lightning and flames, has become the emblem of the Lanaudière region.
Because Google suffers from the same CADT syndrome as your typical free software project: Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short. — Jamie Zawinski
You probably meant "fuck you, don't touch the Lennart" I presume?
China strikes me as incapable of responding to bug reports, because a bug report puts the manufacturer in a bad light and that amounts to losing face.
Case in point:
I was maintaining a driver for a widespread SoC. The driver would flat out crash the Linux kernel during bootup (kernel oops and complete freeze) at every other kernel release, but only when booted off a specific hardware vendor's product. On other vendors' products based on the same SoC, no such problem.
I contacted the SoC's manufacturer, asking if that particular issue rang a bell. It didn't. However, their product specialist recalled that this particular hardware vendor had very pointy questions about hardware interrupts, back when they were building their BIOS image. As far as he could guess, the vendor had probably messed their build configuration and produced faulty BIOS images whose bugs were triggered by changes in the Linux kernel's other subsystems at every other release.
He gave me the name of a contact person at the hardware vendor, suggesting to report the bug to them. My e-mail was passed around from department to department – OEM support, Marketing, Sales, etc. – to no avail. One department assumed that I didn't understand some BIOS settings, another presumed that I was placing an order that would require a custom BIOS build. No, I'm reporting a defect in the BIOS sold in your products. I'm asking you to find the cause of the issue I've described – which does NOT affect other products based on the same SoC reference design that are sold by other hardware vendors, so it HAS to be a BIOS bug – and to please release a fixed BIOS image. At that point, someone with a modicum of English skills figured out what the word "defect" means and promised to contact me as soon as they found the solution. They never did. They also stopped responding to any further e-mail.
China. Sigh.
No, you are NOT justified any more than the East would in destroying YOUR nuclear weapons facility. As unbelievable as it might sound to American imperialistic cretins, everyone is allowed to own marbles. You DON'T get to decide who can have the toys and who cannot.
Depends how you define child pornography. By the time you arrest parents for taking pictures of their kids skinny dipping in the lake at their summerhouse, it goes too far.
And exactly how productive of a life can someone expect to have if the mere fact that they have to register and inform their neighbors is gonna mean that they will be denied housing, harassed by strangers, approached by people as if a 20-foot exclusion radius existed around them, preemptively denied jobs without anyone even bothering to check exactly what they did (mere indecency or gruesome rape?), etc. - essentially treated as pariah for the rest of their life? You'd actually call that a productive life?
By all means, be harsh with those who rape and kill. However, treating public indecency with the same harshness is blowing things out of proportion.
The crux of the problem is that the blanket term "sex offender" includes WAY too many types of offenses, from dumb public urination to aggravated rape, for this Law to be remotely justified. If they'd revise it to only affect pedophilia and rape, I'd guess that nobody would object. Even then, pedophilia is a also big can of worms, because of the way some states include statutory rape (sleeping with a fully consenting teenager) in their description of pedophilia.
I have slight disagreements with some items in your list, but I fully agree with the substance of the message: "Enough is enough. We're not gonna tolerate living in a US-centric universe driven by lies and paranoia, anymore!" This being said, given how a lot of /. readers are Americans and fit the description for one or several of the groups of people you describe, you're likely to be modded down as a flame bait, precisely because you've touched on a number of proverbial "Elephant in the corner" issues.
In Finland, being very much of European descent, but having the misfortune of carrying a passport from a North American country, I have to call it like it is: having to repeat the whole story of how I moved to Finland, at every fucking border crossing in or out, over a 10-year period and yet having a permanent resident permit in my passport - and a very Karelian accent thank you - is a situation that smells of idiocy, paranoia and Spanish inquisition. So yes, when border surveillance and immigration practices are that 'tard, it becomes: 1) discrimination 2) invasion of privacy (you wouldn't believe the questions border guards ask) and 3) irritates perfectly legal immigrants to the point of testing their patience beyond reasonable limits, which THEN becomes a national security issue. Sitä saa, mitä tilaa, joten älä tilaa ikävyyksiä ärsyttämällä maahanmuuttajia raja-asemalla koko ajan, kiitos.
The way Harper tries to force this law through is eerily similar to what happened in Finland not too long ago, both in the fact that it was industry-backed (in Finland's case, it was downright industry-written) and that politicians ignored LOUD protests from artists and consumers. In Finland, in an unprecedented show of unanimity, all youth sections of the political parties undersigned the same memo opposing the law reform, to no avail: in Soviet Finland, a bureaucrat only has to claim that EU demands a legal change to silence the crowd. Google "Lex Karpela" and see Henri Sivonen's homepage for some background info.
Estonia has already had home Internet over fiber optic at affordable price since about year 2000. Like in Japan, it is mainly available in city area. In the countryside, core infrastructures were rebuilt with fiber optic after the collapse of USSR, so only the last mile has copper and brand new one at that. For the handful of really off-road villages not connected to the phone network, WiMax is available (not to mention the plethora of other wireless technologies available to Estonian consumers).
In a nutshell, just because dinosaurs in Western Europe don't have their act together doesn't mean that whole EU is a load of crap. Look east of Berlin and you'll find a dynamic side of EU that has all the latest gadgets and is busy inventing the next ones too.
Merely for informative purpose, I thought I'd mention that Finland has a similar system of nationwide compulsory TV license whose profits only go to the state-owned channels (privately-owned channels don't get a penny out of it), supported by an increasingly sizable brigade of TV permit inspectors. People who flatly don't own a TV are immediately regarded as worthy of an impromptu inspector visit and of endless phone calls to inquire why the heck they haven't been a good Finn and paid their license like everyone else. They essentially keep track of who has paid and who hasn't by comparing payment data with the civil registry data (changes of address notifications to the civil registry are compulsory in Finland).
The whole things often reaches ridiculous extents: they also keep track of cable TV subscribers and compare that to civil registry data and they get a lot of false positives because of cable-Internet subscribers. Yet, for a number of years, it simply wouldn't get into their head that customers of cable company can do business with them for non-TV related purposes; I obviously had a TV I wasn't paying a license for since I was doing business with the cable company! If I changed address and still only did business with the cable for Internet service, they'd notice a new resident at address X who hasn't paid a license and yet does business with the cable company, so one of their minions would call and sermon me about breaking the Law and, again, it simply wouldn't get into their head that the cable company offers services other than TV.
Machiavelli would sheepishly point out that all it takes for a criminal to go unnoticed in Finland is to pay their TV license, regardless of whether they have a TV or not.
It would be a good idea for wishful-thinking Scandinavian feminist PhD types to finally let go of the idea that pedophilia is a one-way street or that all sex is rape initiated by a male offender.
I should know: ages ago, I was one of those kids who was too shy and too skinny to get laid with people their own age and who willingly sought older girls who had already achieved the age of majority. The point is that most adults I've had sex with had no harmful intentions; there was no "molesting" taking place [1] as I was not beat up or harmed in any way. Rather, I got the sex that girls my own age wouldn't have given me even if their life depended on it. I had fun and I enjoyed every minute of it. Both sides benefited from it, so what's the harm?
Having been a teenager during the Internet age, I would have had an even easier time meeting willing sexual companions over the Internet and I would have jumped at the opportunity. That society or my parents might have had a problem with that is a separate issue.
Face it: kids have a penis or a vagina just like adults do and their hands quickly find out how good it feels to be touched down below. Beyond that, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it's even more fun when someone else touches you down below. Yes, kids have a sexuality. It might not involve making babies or dealing with STD and the whole lot, but it sure as hell feels good. Add a few more years, until they reach puberty and get a vague idea of what the hardware really is meant for and you'll get a horny bunch of teenagers all too eager to go for it and enjoy. Funny how society and their parents are the only ones having a problem with that, whereas the teens just acknowledge nature's call and jump in.
The whole issue of pedophilia comes into the picture when someone hasn't gotten enough affection in their childhood or downright experienced peer rejection in their teens. Pedophiles then locate some teen who is experiencing the same thing they did and, suddenly, you have two people feeling in good company and experiencing sexual contentment. That's what I experienced back then. It's only years later, once I realized the causes of the rejection I had experienced that I understood how I ended up sleeping with people others would call pedophiles. In short: if girls my age would have given me any standing chance at it, I wouldn't have started looking for older ones. Sadly, life in some countries has it that boys who are skinny or shy instead experience harassment from their peers and get ridiculed as non-virile by potential girlfriends their own age. What's a boy with exploding hormones supposed to do? Find an older one who just thinks he's adorable, that's what.
1. statutory rape has nothing to do with molestation; all it implies is that someone violated the artificial age limit imposed by society as to what constitutes its idea of "age of consent".
As we migrate to IPv6, we should adopt the approach of developing all new protocols with port randomness and encryption-by-design in mind, then gradually phase out old protocols. Even basic infrastructure protocols could be phased out: think of the day UUCP was replaced by SMTP; both coexisted for a while, but nowadays UUCP is virtually unheard of.
Right, so it's OK for USA to teach its kids about explosives? Imagine the outcry if someone heard about a similar program taking place, say, in Iran. I can already see the headline we would be getting: "Iran training dozens of kids into becoming terrorists with an expertise in explosives."
This is the same sort of fuzzy logic we see with USA possessing nuclear weapons and yet demanding that Iran be prevented from ever having any.
Mark my words: there is no single democratic country left on this planet. Except Switzerland and even then I have my doubts about this one.
The titles have changed from Count, Duke, Earl, King, Sheik, etc. to Fortune-500 CEO, Prime Minister or President but, let's not fool ourselves: exactly when did the rulers ever represent their constituents? Never. That's when. There might have been episodes when the people felt enpowered, but that was just for show.
Face it: democracy (or, actually, what some people imagine it is: casting a ballot to send someone over to Parliament hill) can only work at an infinitely small scale, where whoever gets elected factually is someone you know personally and whom you can positively trust to represent your interests.
In Finland, the Ministry of Justice recently switched to ODF. Other Finnish ministries and parapublic organizations are expected to follow soon.
I stand corrected: Passport Canada said it, but the Court overturned. Still, there are scary aspects to this case: it was found that a Minister has signed the refusal, right after the Law was changed to suddenly allow them to refuse a passport to "suspected" terrorists (to fit the case) and, more scarily, the Court left the door open for Passport Canada to retroactively withdraw the passport based on that new Law.