Although I think the answer to that depends on how much (and
how) we use it, I'd say that most people don't feel at all guilty about
using any convenient access point for short, low-bandwidth activities.
If I need directions while out and about, I'll find an open AP and pull
up Google Maps. No guilt whatsoever, and I wouldn't mind if someone
used my AP for the same; In fact, I'd consider this one of the
greatest side-effects of ubiquitous open WAPs, the ability to
share a small trickle of a resource I never need all to myself
(and to use it when I similarly need that small trickle of data).
Now, regularly using a neighbor's wireless to avoid needing to
pay for your own ISP (unless you have an agreement to split the
cost - Of course, the ISPs hate this, but I see no ethical problem
with it) or downloading kiddie porn or sucking a large portion of
the available bandwidth... That gets into abusive territory, and
such people should feel guilty.
Oddly, you have it both right and wrong at the same time.
Teacher salaries correlate inversely with academic performance,
both across the US and within local areas.
Now, that doesn't mean we should pay teachers less... It just means
we need to make teaching a profession people enter out of love for the
job and desire to make a difference, rather than a high-paying job with
one of the sweetest vacation plans available in any career.
Of course, you can't accomplish that without hiring loads
of new teachers, and you can't hire loads of new teachers without
spending a lot more money.
Sure you can, and you can address class size at the same time...
Get rid of this BS about "no child left behind" and start kicking
the truly dumb kids (and yes, they do exist) out after elementary
school (or even earlier for the ones we currently spend the most
on, such as the autistics and Downs kids who require one-on-one
instruction just to keep them from causing problems, nevermind actually
learning anything). Put the average kids, who can learn but
will never really excel, in current-sized classes. And put the
brightest (y'know, our real future, unless we all want to
end up serving McDonalds to Chinese tourists) in small classes of
under ten people. The world needs ditch diggers, but it also needs
engineers to design the irrigation system using those ditches.
As an aside, did you (and others saying "pay teachers more") know that
in most towns, 80-90% of the town budget already goes toward the
school system? So even if they wanted to, most towns couldn't
realistically pay teachers any more.
I ask why the federal government needs to provide such information.
Because "We the people" paid for the collection of this information.
Why can't Joe Blow find this information out on his own or choose not to
go with a provider that does not make this information available.
Because Joe can't force his ISP, much less all ISPs, to disclose such
information. And as none of them voluntarily disclose this data,
Joe has no one to switch to as a means of applying that ever-popular
corporate imperialist cop-out, "market pressure".
And as always if the provider misinforms the customer, they
can be taken to court
Unless the government decides to give them a pass for selling us all
out to the NSA.
And of course, if there are no other choices of provider in
your area, guess (once again) who you have to thank.
FCC media consolidation rules, perchance?
I sincerely hope you meant your post as sarcasm, but I
didn't detect it as such, so, forgive my tone if I just missed
that.
If you boss spams like this, there exists the possibility that
the other firm have taken this elementary precaution, which may be
anything from seriously embarrassing to legally expensive.
Although it may count as UCE (though not illegal as long as it has
valid header info), I fail to see how making use of a mailing list
leaked through idiocy would count as embarassing to anyone but the
original company, nor how they would have any grounds to sue.
if any of them were to "leak", by CC etc, I'd start getting
emails
You can detect the leak... So?
"Company X used email addresses foolishly exposed by our own
unsolicited email, to send out unsolicited email back to us".
Yeah, I can see that going well in court...
Further...
addresses that *look* like real people but are in
fact aliases for me.
I have several such accounts as well, including a few on mail
servers I control, which I use for detecting and filtering similar
spam. I have never used those addresses, nor disclosed them to
anyone, electronically or physically.
They still get spam.
ANY realistic-sounding address will,
because spammers don't depend on known-good addresses, they'll
flood a server with tens of thousands of permutations of
first names, common last names, and every one and two letter
pair as a prefix to common last names. I've made user accounts
that have spam in them before the user even signs into it for
the first time (usually the next day).
So even if you could claim something like a copyright on your
mailing list, good luck proving how your competitor got that
address.
Between Firefox extensions such as DownloadHelper (and half a dozen others with similar
functionality), and the handy "dumpstream" option to MPlayer, does anyone really care
that Real has decided to support what we've had the ability to do all along?
The only effect this might have (and the reason it scares companies)? It might
reduce ad revenue from page views because Joe Sixpack can now store the "funny"
clip of some guy getting his 'nads crushed by a 2x4, rather than needing to reload
it live every time he wants to make his friends squirm. But even that depends
on Joe Sixpack remembering where he saved the file, no small feat for Joe (in my
experience).
At least in FireFox, your bookmarks just exist as a plain ol' HTML file in your profile directory. You don't need any
special tools to sync that across multiple machines, you just copy it between machines (or better, use FireFox Portable off
a thumbdrive).
However, for those who really need their bookmarks accessible from anywhere, an old and simple method
will completely solve your problem - Keep your bookmarks on a live website and set that to your homepage. When you want
to add new ones, add them to the online version rather than locally. Problem solved, no help from Google required.
you never traveled with all your personel papers, love
letters, note books, and your corporate trade secrets in
your luguage because the border gaurds would be searching
your stuff and possible reading it. So why is storing it
on a computer so different.
Because I can't realistically take the contents of my desk,
my filing cabinet, my credenza, my photo albums, and my "memento
box" with me every time I decide to take a quick trip to Montreal.
I can, however, take my laptop.
Similarly, while I don't need to take all those physical
things to do an on-site service call for an important Canadian
customer, I absolutely do need to take my laptop.
Once you are used to it its really very comfortable,
balancing is fairly easy and kind of forces you into the
right posture.
I have one of these at home, and would partially agree
with you - Though not for use at a desk.
I find that sitting on a ball-chair does wonders for my back.
Watching TV or sitting around chatting, I love my ball chair.
Sitting at a desk (with the intention of working at that desk),
however, requires you to shift your center of gravity toward
the desk. This results (at least for me) in putting more weight
than normal on my forearms, meaning my hands go numb within half
an hour or so.
Granted, I do/did have CTS (under control largely thanks to
ergonomically aranging my work area and frequently taking a
minute or three to get up and stretch), but IMO that makes
me sort of a canary in a mineshaft when it comes to postural
issues.
This gives the server time to analyze its content and filter
out the junk before it gets to you. Not so with internet telephony
which is why radically different strategies are needed
Or, you can just treat your phone as a verbal "inbox", and never
actually answer it in person. Back before the Do Not Call
registry, I know quite a few people who took that approach (myself
included, to some degree).
Telemarketers will almost never actually leave a message, and
the few who do, you can instantly detect and delete it.
Do I just not know some Windows Admin secret magic, or is
it true that I really can't back up my applications. I'd like
to be able to reinstall Windows and then restore all of my
applications.
Not quite a direct answer, but you might want to consider using
mostly "Portable" apps (that
site has tons of them, but by no means counts as the only source...
And of course, better-designed programs work portably without
needing a wrapper).
They have nothing to do with Linux or FOSS (though they do tend to
exist as FOSS and have Linux versions available). You copy the
program's directory (and, if you changed it, your data directory)
to a new machine, and bam, it just works. No installation, no
annoying migration tools that fail half the time, no custom
compression schemes that only worked back on version 4.8 but
they stopped supporting in 5.0 and no longer sell version 4.8,
etc.
With most of them, you can run them from USB thumb-drives (the original
meaning in this context of "portable" - Literally, you can take them
with you); With many, you can even run them from read-only media such
as a CD (though obviously you can't save your data in the same place
when doing so).
As has been pointed out in the past - the people who are most
likely to become infected with a ransomware virus are exactly the
same people who are least likely to have backups available.
Back in my youth, I never made regular backups.
Then I got a virus.
Since then, I make regular backups.
As annoying as it seems, sometimes people need to understand
first-hand the need for regular, offline backups.
Until they have the experience of data-loss, they just won't
appreciate what could happen.
Other "marketers" who used that spam message, not to mention the
spamming service that actually provided the email address list, don't
need to honor opt-outs
Damn! I guess this means an end to the three wonderful years of
relief we've all enjoyed from spam thanks to the oh-so-effective
initial rules.
Seriously, this change really doesn't matter, except it will let
the FTC claim success due to a massive drop in the number of "valid"
complaints against spammers. Whining that it weakens the existing
law strikes me as similar to complaining that a serial killer violated
a restraining order.
For fuck's sake people, grow up. Can't we discuss a cool
scientific discovery without dragging religion-bashing into it?
No, for one simple reason: They would poison childrens' minds,
our laws, even our science textbooks, with their lies. For that
reason alone, we need to make it absolutely, unambiguously clear to
everyone that they don't just have it "wrong", they have it mockably
wrong.
I have no problem with what someone believes, so long as they keep it
to themselves. But when people start talking about teaching fiction
as anything other than literature, they need to understand that they
have gone from "cutely naive" to "dangerously delusional". We humor
the kid trying to stay awake to see Santa; We lock up Charles Manson
for Killing In The Name Of.
we will have wasted our time, and ceded any moral high ground
You don't need to hold the moral high ground when you have
reality on your side.
They ignore the facts about evolution anyway; why would this
change anything. This will just be added to the list of things to
ignore or distort through the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design.
The article even does that for them:
"Indeed, the
inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which
bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species.
The citrate-using mutants increased in population size
and diversity."
See? E. coli don't metabolize
citrate by the "evolutionists'" own admission. Thus, around
generation 20k, their culture must have suffered some
contamination.
(For the humor impaired - I mean this as a Devil's Advocate
position, not a serious criticism of a major discovery in
genetics)
Please make sure you don't label "disagreement" the same thing
as "hatemongering".
Another well-known "club" has a set of beliefs (based on the same
book, ironically enough) whereby they don't allow blacks and Jews
to join. Would you call their stance "hatemongering" or "disagreement"?
VS.Net is much better than any other IDE, at least
as far as I've seen
Oh, yeah, just a fabulous tool... Why, what other program
do you know of that, on trying to do a simple plaintext search in
a currently open text file, can peg a dual core CPU at 100%
for up to a minute (sometimes never coming back, requiring
you to kill the "devenv" process via Task Manager?
And let's not forget the ever-so-spiffy "intelligent" object name
completion that makes such bizarre, inconceivable tasks as going to
the next line, require using the mouse (or erasing the end of the
line you accidentally broke in half because VS didn't consider
you done with it)...
By the peculiarities of special relativity, the high relative
velocity between the observers means that both will always be able
to claim to have carried out their measurement first, thereby
ruling out the naysayers' arguments
Of course, by that same logic, naysayers can always claim that each
side carried out its measurement last, negating whatever
benefit this "feature" supposedly proves.
Or, put another way, yet another display that can show about 999 million
more colors than most people can tell apart (or in my case, 999,999,000,
aka "six-nines of wasted color").
With 6 built-in color spaces [...snip...] you can easily switch
to the one that best suits your applications and process.
Translation - Users will always pick the wrong one, "guaranteeing" that
they never see the right thing.
Direct net connection was less private and more dangerous than a BBS?
I don't know about your area, but in mine, all the BBS admins had CID, so that seems a moot point.
Always on broadband was less private and more dangerous than connect on demand?
And do you run without a firewall that blocks everything inbound except possibly a small
number of ports bound to specific external addresses?
Automatic updates the same...
...Which I disable on any machine I use. I can pick my own updates, thankyouverymuch. BTW, how do you
like that great new WGA "feature" in Windows XP? We'd all just hate to miss updates like that, eh?
MMORPGs the same...
Can't say I understand that one, unless you mean the possibility of admins monitoring your chats (which
you can make irrelevant by only discussing in-game topics).
Cookies
Still browse with them off. And I use Flashblock and QuickJava (like NoScript but IMO better) to disable
active content unless I explicitly allow it. And Adblock to remove most tracking images (not to mention
ads).
RHN
Slackware man, myself.
However, I would point out that in (almost) all of the examples you give - You've demonstrated the
correctness of exactly what you meant to disprove. Only an idiot would leave a box connected 24/7 without
a well locked-down firewall; XP did get such great "fixes" as WGA; In some games (*cough*Eve*Cough*) you
can't even safely chat about in-game topics without admins using that to cheat; When not enough people allowed
cookies, they moved to tracking bugs then Flash bugs and no doubt will continue to escalate that particular war.
All those prove that we should listen to our fears on occasion, and take at least basic steps to protect
ourselves, our hardware, and our information from those who consider it nothing more than a way to improve ad
response rates.
You mean you would rather do this: [...snip...]
This applies to everything: LiveJournal, WordPress, Twitter, Flikr,.Mac, YouTube, GMail, etc.
Yes, actually, for one simple reason - The first method doesn't depend
on SL staying on good terms (in the corporate sense, ie, money flowing
both ways, usually from us-the-users) with Google or LJ or
whatever.
Additionally, you've ignored the fact that the "easier" method allows
those two companies to know that those two accounts most likely belong
to the same human... They can't buy information like that, and
you'll just give it to them to save three clicks?
Call me a Luddite, but I will never consider it a "good deal"
to save a trivial amount of money or time in exchange for having no
real control over my own data.
They tried to Google-translate Canadian into English? You fools,
It cannot be done!
You actually make a good point, humor aside... Why does an article
from a primarily-English speaking country (And the Quebecois all
speak English fluently, the pompous gits just won't) need
translation in the first place?
Offhand, I would have to suspect this as some sort of propagandist
rag that cares more about inciting the masses than
reaching them.
Seriously - Ship your supplies (and if possible, clothing) there,
and ship them back. You should only have two things to actually lug
around while travelling - You, and a book to read on the plane.
The RIAA had a hissy-fit over a search engine helping its users find what they want.
What's the prominent link here?
Umm... The only thing on the entire page in English, that says "MP3"?;-)
How are they encouraging piracy? Specifically. What EXACTLY are they doing?
Here you ask a "hard" question. Does a search engine facilitate/encourage piracy (or other
crimes) merely by allowing users to search the web for topics some people might not like? By
analogy, if a stranger pulls to the side of the road and asks how to get to Walmart, have
you "encouraged" murder because he goes there, buys a gun, and kills his wife with it?
I think any sane human would say "no". The courts have so far tended to favor that
sane answer, though a few notable counterexamples have come up (with Napster as the
most obvious).
Hmmm...wouldn't that be interesting if it applied to young
earth creationism as well...
Yes, actually, it would.
Of course, you appear to want to conflate "ignorance in the absence
of data" with "ignorance despite contradictory data". Not
quite the same.
Honestly, it surprises me that creationists don't recognize the
biggest problem with their stance - Not that evolution fits the known
facts; Not that "god did it" poses an untestable hypothesis; Not even
that it shows a complete lack of understanding of "scientific method".
No, the biggest problem with a young Earth? If true, it makes
god a mean-spirited bastard who put us here intending us to
fail, and continues to plant false evidence to lead us away
from "the truth". I can accept a creator as the universal
primum mobile; If, however, your god behaves like
you would have us believe, well, would you really want to
spend eternity hanging out with that?
Slashdot Mirror
But how guilty do we really feel?
Although I think the answer to that depends on how much (and how) we use it, I'd say that most people don't feel at all guilty about using any convenient access point for short, low-bandwidth activities.
If I need directions while out and about, I'll find an open AP and pull up Google Maps. No guilt whatsoever, and I wouldn't mind if someone used my AP for the same; In fact, I'd consider this one of the greatest side-effects of ubiquitous open WAPs, the ability to share a small trickle of a resource I never need all to myself (and to use it when I similarly need that small trickle of data).
Now, regularly using a neighbor's wireless to avoid needing to pay for your own ISP (unless you have an agreement to split the cost - Of course, the ISPs hate this, but I see no ethical problem with it) or downloading kiddie porn or sucking a large portion of the available bandwidth... That gets into abusive territory, and such people should feel guilty.
No, really, it is largely about finance
Oddly, you have it both right and wrong at the same time.
Teacher salaries correlate inversely with academic performance, both across the US and within local areas.
Now, that doesn't mean we should pay teachers less... It just means we need to make teaching a profession people enter out of love for the job and desire to make a difference, rather than a high-paying job with one of the sweetest vacation plans available in any career.
Of course, you can't accomplish that without hiring loads of new teachers, and you can't hire loads of new teachers without spending a lot more money.
Sure you can, and you can address class size at the same time... Get rid of this BS about "no child left behind" and start kicking the truly dumb kids (and yes, they do exist) out after elementary school (or even earlier for the ones we currently spend the most on, such as the autistics and Downs kids who require one-on-one instruction just to keep them from causing problems, nevermind actually learning anything). Put the average kids, who can learn but will never really excel, in current-sized classes. And put the brightest (y'know, our real future, unless we all want to end up serving McDonalds to Chinese tourists) in small classes of under ten people. The world needs ditch diggers, but it also needs engineers to design the irrigation system using those ditches.
As an aside, did you (and others saying "pay teachers more") know that in most towns, 80-90% of the town budget already goes toward the school system? So even if they wanted to, most towns couldn't realistically pay teachers any more.
I ask why the federal government needs to provide such information.
Because "We the people" paid for the collection of this information.
Why can't Joe Blow find this information out on his own or choose not to go with a provider that does not make this information available.
Because Joe can't force his ISP, much less all ISPs, to disclose such information. And as none of them voluntarily disclose this data, Joe has no one to switch to as a means of applying that ever-popular corporate imperialist cop-out, "market pressure".
And as always if the provider misinforms the customer, they can be taken to court
Unless the government decides to give them a pass for selling us all out to the NSA.
And of course, if there are no other choices of provider in your area, guess (once again) who you have to thank.
FCC media consolidation rules, perchance?
I sincerely hope you meant your post as sarcasm, but I didn't detect it as such, so, forgive my tone if I just missed that.
If you boss spams like this, there exists the possibility that the other firm have taken this elementary precaution, which may be anything from seriously embarrassing to legally expensive.
Although it may count as UCE (though not illegal as long as it has valid header info), I fail to see how making use of a mailing list leaked through idiocy would count as embarassing to anyone but the original company, nor how they would have any grounds to sue.
if any of them were to "leak", by CC etc, I'd start getting emails
You can detect the leak... So?
"Company X used email addresses foolishly exposed by our own unsolicited email, to send out unsolicited email back to us". Yeah, I can see that going well in court...
Further...
addresses that *look* like real people but are in fact aliases for me.
I have several such accounts as well, including a few on mail servers I control, which I use for detecting and filtering similar spam. I have never used those addresses, nor disclosed them to anyone, electronically or physically.
They still get spam.
ANY realistic-sounding address will, because spammers don't depend on known-good addresses, they'll flood a server with tens of thousands of permutations of first names, common last names, and every one and two letter pair as a prefix to common last names. I've made user accounts that have spam in them before the user even signs into it for the first time (usually the next day).
So even if you could claim something like a copyright on your mailing list, good luck proving how your competitor got that address.
Between Firefox extensions such as DownloadHelper (and half a dozen others with similar functionality), and the handy "dumpstream" option to MPlayer, does anyone really care that Real has decided to support what we've had the ability to do all along?
The only effect this might have (and the reason it scares companies)? It might reduce ad revenue from page views because Joe Sixpack can now store the "funny" clip of some guy getting his 'nads crushed by a 2x4, rather than needing to reload it live every time he wants to make his friends squirm. But even that depends on Joe Sixpack remembering where he saved the file, no small feat for Joe (in my experience).
At least in FireFox, your bookmarks just exist as a plain ol' HTML file in your profile directory. You don't need any special tools to sync that across multiple machines, you just copy it between machines (or better, use FireFox Portable off a thumbdrive).
However, for those who really need their bookmarks accessible from anywhere, an old and simple method will completely solve your problem - Keep your bookmarks on a live website and set that to your homepage. When you want to add new ones, add them to the online version rather than locally. Problem solved, no help from Google required.
You might as well ask about Zune support in Itunes.
Well... What about Zune support in iTunes?
you never traveled with all your personel papers, love letters, note books, and your corporate trade secrets in your luguage because the border gaurds would be searching your stuff and possible reading it. So why is storing it on a computer so different.
Because I can't realistically take the contents of my desk, my filing cabinet, my credenza, my photo albums, and my "memento box" with me every time I decide to take a quick trip to Montreal.
I can, however, take my laptop.
Similarly, while I don't need to take all those physical things to do an on-site service call for an important Canadian customer, I absolutely do need to take my laptop.
Once you are used to it its really very comfortable, balancing is fairly easy and kind of forces you into the right posture.
I have one of these at home, and would partially agree with you - Though not for use at a desk.
I find that sitting on a ball-chair does wonders for my back. Watching TV or sitting around chatting, I love my ball chair. Sitting at a desk (with the intention of working at that desk), however, requires you to shift your center of gravity toward the desk. This results (at least for me) in putting more weight than normal on my forearms, meaning my hands go numb within half an hour or so.
Granted, I do/did have CTS (under control largely thanks to ergonomically aranging my work area and frequently taking a minute or three to get up and stretch), but IMO that makes me sort of a canary in a mineshaft when it comes to postural issues.
This gives the server time to analyze its content and filter out the junk before it gets to you. Not so with internet telephony which is why radically different strategies are needed
Or, you can just treat your phone as a verbal "inbox", and never actually answer it in person. Back before the Do Not Call registry, I know quite a few people who took that approach (myself included, to some degree).
Telemarketers will almost never actually leave a message, and the few who do, you can instantly detect and delete it.
Do I just not know some Windows Admin secret magic, or is it true that I really can't back up my applications. I'd like to be able to reinstall Windows and then restore all of my applications.
Not quite a direct answer, but you might want to consider using mostly "Portable" apps (that site has tons of them, but by no means counts as the only source... And of course, better-designed programs work portably without needing a wrapper).
They have nothing to do with Linux or FOSS (though they do tend to exist as FOSS and have Linux versions available). You copy the program's directory (and, if you changed it, your data directory) to a new machine, and bam, it just works. No installation, no annoying migration tools that fail half the time, no custom compression schemes that only worked back on version 4.8 but they stopped supporting in 5.0 and no longer sell version 4.8, etc.
With most of them, you can run them from USB thumb-drives (the original meaning in this context of "portable" - Literally, you can take them with you); With many, you can even run them from read-only media such as a CD (though obviously you can't save your data in the same place when doing so).
As has been pointed out in the past - the people who are most likely to become infected with a ransomware virus are exactly the same people who are least likely to have backups available.
Back in my youth, I never made regular backups.
Then I got a virus.
Since then, I make regular backups.
As annoying as it seems, sometimes people need to understand first-hand the need for regular, offline backups. Until they have the experience of data-loss, they just won't appreciate what could happen.
Other "marketers" who used that spam message, not to mention the spamming service that actually provided the email address list, don't need to honor opt-outs
Damn! I guess this means an end to the three wonderful years of relief we've all enjoyed from spam thanks to the oh-so-effective initial rules.
Seriously, this change really doesn't matter, except it will let the FTC claim success due to a massive drop in the number of "valid" complaints against spammers. Whining that it weakens the existing law strikes me as similar to complaining that a serial killer violated a restraining order.
For fuck's sake people, grow up. Can't we discuss a cool scientific discovery without dragging religion-bashing into it?
No, for one simple reason: They would poison childrens' minds, our laws, even our science textbooks, with their lies. For that reason alone, we need to make it absolutely, unambiguously clear to everyone that they don't just have it "wrong", they have it mockably wrong.
I have no problem with what someone believes, so long as they keep it to themselves. But when people start talking about teaching fiction as anything other than literature, they need to understand that they have gone from "cutely naive" to "dangerously delusional". We humor the kid trying to stay awake to see Santa; We lock up Charles Manson for Killing In The Name Of.
we will have wasted our time, and ceded any moral high ground
You don't need to hold the moral high ground when you have reality on your side.
The article even does that for them: See? E. coli don't metabolize citrate by the "evolutionists'" own admission. Thus, around generation 20k, their culture must have suffered some contamination.
(For the humor impaired - I mean this as a Devil's Advocate position, not a serious criticism of a major discovery in genetics)
Please make sure you don't label "disagreement" the same thing as "hatemongering".
Another well-known "club" has a set of beliefs (based on the same book, ironically enough) whereby they don't allow blacks and Jews to join. Would you call their stance "hatemongering" or "disagreement"?
VS.Net is much better than any other IDE, at least as far as I've seen
Oh, yeah, just a fabulous tool... Why, what other program do you know of that, on trying to do a simple plaintext search in a currently open text file, can peg a dual core CPU at 100% for up to a minute (sometimes never coming back, requiring you to kill the "devenv" process via Task Manager?
And let's not forget the ever-so-spiffy "intelligent" object name completion that makes such bizarre, inconceivable tasks as going to the next line, require using the mouse (or erasing the end of the line you accidentally broke in half because VS didn't consider you done with it)...
By the peculiarities of special relativity, the high relative velocity between the observers means that both will always be able to claim to have carried out their measurement first, thereby ruling out the naysayers' arguments
Of course, by that same logic, naysayers can always claim that each side carried out its measurement last, negating whatever benefit this "feature" supposedly proves.
HP's new 30-bit, 1 billion color LCD display.
Or, put another way, yet another display that can show about 999 million more colors than most people can tell apart (or in my case, 999,999,000, aka "six-nines of wasted color").
With 6 built-in color spaces [...snip...] you can easily switch to the one that best suits your applications and process.
Translation - Users will always pick the wrong one, "guaranteeing" that they never see the right thing.
Direct net connection was less private and more dangerous than a BBS?
...Which I disable on any machine I use. I can pick my own updates, thankyouverymuch. BTW, how do you
like that great new WGA "feature" in Windows XP? We'd all just hate to miss updates like that, eh?
I don't know about your area, but in mine, all the BBS admins had CID, so that seems a moot point.
Always on broadband was less private and more dangerous than connect on demand?
And do you run without a firewall that blocks everything inbound except possibly a small number of ports bound to specific external addresses?
Automatic updates the same...
MMORPGs the same...
Can't say I understand that one, unless you mean the possibility of admins monitoring your chats (which you can make irrelevant by only discussing in-game topics).
Cookies
Still browse with them off. And I use Flashblock and QuickJava (like NoScript but IMO better) to disable active content unless I explicitly allow it. And Adblock to remove most tracking images (not to mention ads).
RHN
Slackware man, myself.
However, I would point out that in (almost) all of the examples you give - You've demonstrated the correctness of exactly what you meant to disprove. Only an idiot would leave a box connected 24/7 without a well locked-down firewall; XP did get such great "fixes" as WGA; In some games (*cough*Eve*Cough*) you can't even safely chat about in-game topics without admins using that to cheat; When not enough people allowed cookies, they moved to tracking bugs then Flash bugs and no doubt will continue to escalate that particular war.
All those prove that we should listen to our fears on occasion, and take at least basic steps to protect ourselves, our hardware, and our information from those who consider it nothing more than a way to improve ad response rates.
You mean you would rather do this: [...snip...] .Mac, YouTube, GMail, etc.
This applies to everything: LiveJournal, WordPress, Twitter, Flikr,
Yes, actually, for one simple reason - The first method doesn't depend on SL staying on good terms (in the corporate sense, ie, money flowing both ways, usually from us-the-users) with Google or LJ or whatever.
Additionally, you've ignored the fact that the "easier" method allows those two companies to know that those two accounts most likely belong to the same human... They can't buy information like that, and you'll just give it to them to save three clicks?
Call me a Luddite, but I will never consider it a "good deal" to save a trivial amount of money or time in exchange for having no real control over my own data.
They tried to Google-translate Canadian into English? You fools, It cannot be done!
You actually make a good point, humor aside... Why does an article from a primarily-English speaking country (And the Quebecois all speak English fluently, the pompous gits just won't) need translation in the first place?
Offhand, I would have to suspect this as some sort of propagandist rag that cares more about inciting the masses than reaching them.
Seriously - Ship your supplies (and if possible, clothing) there, and ship them back. You should only have two things to actually lug around while travelling - You, and a book to read on the plane.
Tell us what's going on.
;-)
The RIAA had a hissy-fit over a search engine helping its users find what they want.
What's the prominent link here?
Umm... The only thing on the entire page in English, that says "MP3"?
How are they encouraging piracy? Specifically. What EXACTLY are they doing?
Here you ask a "hard" question. Does a search engine facilitate/encourage piracy (or other crimes) merely by allowing users to search the web for topics some people might not like? By analogy, if a stranger pulls to the side of the road and asks how to get to Walmart, have you "encouraged" murder because he goes there, buys a gun, and kills his wife with it?
I think any sane human would say "no". The courts have so far tended to favor that sane answer, though a few notable counterexamples have come up (with Napster as the most obvious).
Hmmm...wouldn't that be interesting if it applied to young earth creationism as well...
Yes, actually, it would.
Of course, you appear to want to conflate "ignorance in the absence of data" with "ignorance despite contradictory data". Not quite the same.
Honestly, it surprises me that creationists don't recognize the biggest problem with their stance - Not that evolution fits the known facts; Not that "god did it" poses an untestable hypothesis; Not even that it shows a complete lack of understanding of "scientific method". No, the biggest problem with a young Earth? If true, it makes god a mean-spirited bastard who put us here intending us to fail, and continues to plant false evidence to lead us away from "the truth". I can accept a creator as the universal primum mobile; If, however, your god behaves like you would have us believe, well, would you really want to spend eternity hanging out with that?