The more we deviate from normality, the more value we place on privacy.
In this context, the Japanese are an interesting study.
Their culture places a high value on homogeneity and comformity--everyone needs to be normal, or is ostracized (I'm making crass stereotypes here.)
Privacy is surprisingly important to them, in many different ways. Toilets that can make artificial flushing sounds in order to keep bodily sounds unheard.
But I was really surprised by the uprising a year or two ago when Japan introduced a national ID number. Somehow the quantification really bothered them.
You then get brought out in Times Square and the doctor puts you in order by smallest to largest.
One idea I'm exploring is the concept of anonymity regarding specifics.
The study was trying to figure out the privacy of weight. Now it's very easy to see who is fat and who isn't, but there's privacy and anonymity in just being any old fat person, as opposed to being a specific weight and therefore categorizable...the deviance can be quantified.
Getting people lined up in order of penis size may not be all that difficult. But does that scenario change if they also are holding up cards with their penis size in inches?
Does this mean that based on this study anti-privacy activists (how else to call them) will start saying that "as shown by studies, if you don't want to share your private information, thoughts, etc, it IS because you have something that you think you should hide"?
This thought went through my mind as well.
When I hear someone say that, I ask them if they try on clothes in a dressing room at a department store.
Obviously they answer in the affirmative, and then I ask why...why would they do that, if they have nothing to hide? Technically they don't, we all know what boys and girls look like.
And technically the people in this study do not either, because you can assess a person's weight just by looking at them.
But there is a psychological line crossed in specifically quantifying that weight. There is is a certain amount of anonymity to be had in being just any fatso, but being a 265lb fatso is a highly detailed portrait of how overweight one is.
Oh yeah, maybe in LOTR, but not in Hollywood. Hollywood has no morals, and if anything one lesson is that audiences will reward a film that makes the effort to stay true to the book. It was an extraordinary story (well, not for me, I'm not a fan) so why mess with it?
Movie making is about lots and lots of risks, and they tend to shy away from the costs of epics.
A calculator watch was my first watch--had it when I was, umm, maybe 8 (no more than 10.)
It begged many clueless adults, assuming the watchalator would dull my math skills, to ask "what happens if you're stuck on a desert island and the batteries are out."
To which I should have replied "if I'm stuck on a desert island, I'm fucked notwithstanding my long division."
Does this mean the party that controls the senate gets to hire the technician who manages the servers?
I read it this way:
I suspect that there are lots of networks/servers in the Senate, including:
*individual Senator office servers (run by a technician appointed by the Senator or the party)
*caucus servers (run by the party for all the Senators of that party)
*senate wide servers (which I could see being run by the party in power, or by some civil service group, if this were done at the state level, but since its Washington, I bet it's the party)
*congress wide caucus servers (run by the party)
*congress wide servers (no idea who would run this)
*commitee servers...the Judiciary committee is a big, powerful committee which I bet has lots of documents. The chair of that committee runs the everyday affairs of the committee, so it makes sense that when it reversed to Democrat hands, the servers went under a technician appointed by the chair of that committee, who was a Democrat. As a way of simplifying things, they probably had a Dems only area, a shared area, and perhaps a Republican only area (which I suspect the Republicans didn't actually use; they would use their own caucus servers for party internal docs if they were smart.)
This is a lot of complex sillyness, but makes sense at some level. After all, would you approve of tax payer dollars being used to support computers which are holding documents which are inherently political? Though that does happen, it would have to, Senator/Rep offices do get a stipend for employees and equipment, and I can't believe that they do that good a job at keeping things separate. (Often a politician has multiple phone lines if their offices, those supplied by the legislature for legislature business, and those supplied by his own campaign for political business.)
The idea is that a spammer using said haiku to get through spamfilters can be prosecuted under the more stringent copyright laws instead of the weaker antispam ones.
Which should read:
The idea is that a spammer using said haiku to get through spamfilters can be prosecuted under the more stringent laws that are difficult to enforce instead of the weaker laws which have proven so hard to enforce.
I'm amused by the idea, but it seems to me that if you couldn't get (find) them under anti-spam laws (especially the newest ones) then how could you get them on copyright laws? Are the new anti-spam laws so lacking in punishment that they pale in comparison to copyright laws?
a standard my mom taught me probably would let him know: if you can't admit what you are doing, then you probably aren't doing the right thing.
There are however times when I sincerely believe that people can't handle the truth.
In my mind a lie is most serious if it could harm life, liberty, property. If the only harm that a lie can cause is when the person finds out about the lie, then honestly, the truth must be really stupid.
Here is a great example of that, the truth is indeed stupid. His location has no effect on his reporting, and people were conjuring up artificial attachment concepts in their head to a radio personality who could have been broadcasting from Boston, New Hampshire, NYC, or Tokyo.
A brouhaha of similar proportions happened here...an engineering professor at Ohio State had an article ghostwritten concerning some random thing, and it was published in the Columbus Dispatch. He did not tell the Dispatch that it was ghostwritten, and they got cheesed off.
The funny thing is, had they known it was ghostwritten, that would not have bothered them; it's a very common practice. It was the fact that they didn't know that bothered them.
Of course, people got cheesed off at the ghostwriting concept, which is very very common. (My gf has written articles for the local newspaper for media, and then the "journalist" prints it verbatim and sticks his name on it.) And a lot of people pointed out that this is not necessarily all that much off of plagiarism, and that's a little odd coming from someone in an academic environment.
I trust the Economist. They almost never tell you who wrote the article. It honestly doesn't matter. I also trust them because they have an opinion and first present facts and then give you the opinion (which they call "analysis.") To me it's very insincere to pretend to be "objective" when really, no one is truly objective.
So, obviously, the fun for the discussion is to think about and discuss (1) what ways this is happening that we don't really know about
Morning radio often interviews all sorts of famous people. They are carrying on as if the famous person were right there, but often I suspect that this is not the case, the famous person is in a studio elsewhere.
What country are you from? In the US color tv's came about in the late 60s and were commonplace in the early 70s.
NBC had the first color TV broadcast in 1953.
RCA owned NBC, and was the developer of the NTSC standard. At the time (1949-52) there was actually a competing standard called the CBS color system, which was actually the one chosen by the FCC as the one to take. Long story short and lots of lawsuits later, the CBS color system was still adopted by the FCC, but that adoption was delayed until 1953.
The CBS color system had one issue, it was not compatible with the black and white standard. If you had a black and white set, you couldn't view a CBS color program (CBS color sets displayed color with, god help us all, two spinning color disks, so if you were switching back to a black and white program, you flipped a switch on the TV that stopped the disks and moved them out of the way.)
By 1953 there were too many people with black and white sets, and therefore no interest in spending large sums of money on a new standard. The RCA standard was backwards and forwards compatible, so it was to be the clear winner.
Except...CBS was miffed about getting dissed, so wouldn't touch color. ABC saw no reason to make programs in color, as that would just mean more sales for RCA, which owned NBC. It wasn't until the mid 1960s that ABC relented, started broadcasting in color, and then CBS had no choice but to start broadcasting in color as well.
The PAL european standard has 625 lines horizontal resolution, which was a new TV standard. The BBC was broadcasting black and white at 425 lines. BBC1 broadcast at 425 for many years, but BBC 2 broadcast at 625 lines color for many years, way before BBC 1 made the switchover. If you had an older TV, you needed a converter to see BBC 2. A newer TV had a switch to go back and forth. (Obviously BBC 2 had more expensive equipment, which explans the oddity of British TV licensing, which is considerably more expensive for a color TV than a black and white one.) PAL wasn't developed until the mid 1960's, and the fact that it was a new standard, plus the expense, made its adoption much slower than that of NTSC in North America. (I think BBC1 switched over to color 625 in 1981, so saying that most peeps had color TV's in Britain in the mid 1980's in not all that far off the mark.)
I disagree with this statement. Mexican "Telenovelas" are aspirational.
In Mexican soaps (and to a certain extent, soap operas from the rest of Latin America) the story is often rags to riches; the heroine seeks to marry some terribly attractive hero (and telenovelas are built to end, usually they number under 500 episodes, and then they end with the heroine and hero marrying.) There is an overall plot aspiring from one condition to another, and by the end that aspiration is fufilled. (There is a new reaction to this, which is TV Azteca's soaps which are soap operas married to Jerry Springer. More info as this develops.)
American soaps I would describe as "faux-dramatic." Everyone in the soap is already rich and comfortable, and complex inter-relationship situations are leveraged for drama. Often soaps will make an entire cast change, but still carry the same name (and be from the same "family.") Rarely are soaps ended, and even rarer are new ones begun.
While the British may consider East Enders a soap opera, I don't. To me it's just a serialized drama. Instead, the closest thing the British have to soap operas is expensive productions set in different time periods (often based on a book, I mean, how many Pride and Prejudice remakes can the British do anyway?) Interestingly enough, there was a Mexican Telenovela (the name of which I don't recall) that was based in late 1800's Mexico. It had quite a following.
Put your characters into situations so embarrassing, pathetic, and all-around squirmy your audience wants to scream.
It doesn't surprise me to hear that this is how the Office is, because a lot of newer british comedies are going this direction. "Coupling" is like this, and I despise it (I've spent every episode I've watched cringing. "One foot in the grave" was like this as well.) "Chef" could be like that, but it's saved by an amazingly strong actor, with a really good character (Chef himself.)
It was one of those annoying "adventure" games where you have to try 6000 different bizarre things before you stumble across the one that lets you advance the story, because the programmers never bothered to account for the obvious solutions.
A later version of this game was my first encounter with the Hitchhikers guide (my father bought it for me when he saw that I liked Monty Python.) At first you had to buy a clue book, but with the game I had the clues were built in. I remember typing in "help" every other turn. (And it still took a very long time.)
I played it on the XT. God help you if you turned on the turbo button.
The point is to make the public belive that they are secure and the the government is taking action.
Actually, it's more than that. Not only is the government taking action, but there's a lot of people who are becoming very rich.
How about the tourist fingerprinting system? Cross Match charges $400 per scanner. That entire package probably runs into the several hundred million dollars range, and not a single person has explained, logically, how it enhances security.
Both of my girlfriends I don't think you belong here. This is Slashdot, News for Nerds, Stuff that matters?
What is required to keep two girls, but keep them apart and happy is very fast thinking, attention to detail, a great memory and good time management, plus a slight detachment to the world around them.
That sounds like many nerds to me.:-)
(Uhh...new innovations on morality too...but that's a different topic.)
What kind of diplomatic measure is this to exclude countries from a policy, just because they enjoy the same wealth as you do?
Technically it's not just that, after all, Qatar is also a rich country as well...and been quite an ally during the recent Iraq war.
We share lots in common with Europeans, and that makes us feel more comfortable with them.
Great example of this? Americans bitch up a storm when manufacturing plants are moved to Mexico. You hear silence when the move is made to Canada...hell, the auto unions are cross border.
... at Miami International....none of the people I saw going through it seemed to have any problem with it
Many passengers through Miami come from Latin American countries. Expectations of privacy in Latin American countries are much lower; I would venture a guess that all LatAm nations have a national ID card with a fingerprint. (At least the ones I know of...)And with, as another poster noted, people being scared of customs officials, they'll do whatever they can.
Brazil takes itself a bit more seriously than other LatAm nations. They have the weight to throw around if they wanted, and they're used to being listened to much more than El Salvador. They resent being treated as less than Europeans. It's not so much the fingerprinting, as much as the grouping.
Illegal immigrants? What does that have to do with terrorism, because that's the excuse used to justify all this shit.
A lot of the anti illegal immigrant groups (and what we're talking about is Mexicans coming across the border, not overseas nationals overstaying visas) get support from...wait for it...biometric/ID companies.
Makes sense, they sell their crapo products as a way of decreasing illegal immigration (dunno how) and the anti illegal groups get money in return.
Re:WAS JESUS A GAY NIGGER? YES HE WAS!
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
I do not believe in the tenants of NAMBLA, but sadly its existence squashes any discussion of what the real age of consent should be. Fear of PC backlash requires that I say I don't know what the age of consent should be, that I am not for lower it, just that it should be possible to discuss the issue. Ideally it would be based on some testable mental maturity of a minor wishing to enter adulthood.
Interestingly, many cultures seem to set adulthood at 13 (like when youre bar/bat mitzvah happens.) There are countries with an age of consent this low, but not in North America.
Having said that, age of consent is there for parents, not for anyone else. It simply makes them feel better much like anti-tattoing laws (for minors.) Therefore drives to raise it seem to come from parents.
Hawaii recently raised their age of consent from 14 to 16, entirely because of conservative/religious pressure on the state legislature.
Interestingly, they did it as a trial for a few years, made a report, and then made it permanent. The report makes for a very interesting read...as far as I can tell, the task force came to the conclusion that there wasn't any particularly good reason to raise the age of consent to 16, but it didn't seem to harm anything either.
But another reader may examine the report and disagree.
2) Jews (and ethnic Chinese for that matter) become influential in diaspora because they have cultures which value hard work and study, so over the course of a couple generations, they eat the lunch of any "natives" who don't value that (like every antisemitic racist bubba still digging ditches in my hometown). Duh. It never ceases to amaze me that people think there's more to it than that.
There is a bit more than that. With respect to both cultures, there's inherently a comfort zone regarding people like them. When a job at a Jewish business becomes available, word will spread in the tight-knit community, and someone whom they are comfortable with will be chosen. It's not a purposeful discrimination, but with such community ties it's bound to occur that way.
Second, with specific regards to (the stereotype of) Jews and banking...Christ overturned the money changers in the temple. Christians were prohibited for centuries from participating in the banking business; Jews had no such prohibition. Many banks can trace their lineages hundreds of years....Diamonds and other precious metals were forms of currency, and therefore a jeweler was just another form of a banker.
I wrote the following on my journal (above) concerning this very topic. The quote that I'm referecing in the first paragraph actually was a quote from slashdot's quote of the day:
One of my favorite quites (currently non-attributed) is "there are four sides to every situation" what he said, what she said, the truth, and what really happened." My personal take on this epistemology follows.
The difference between the "truth" and "what really happened" is this: "what really happened" is a reference to actual facts. This is however not always the truth, in that personal connotation., perspectives, experience, et cetera, often take actual facts (often regarded as "truth") and corrupt them internally and form bad or incorrect impressions. It is therefore necessary, at times, to tell "the truth" which is designed to lead the person to the correct interpretation of events, even though the actual facts of those events would be misleading. (I admit to a certain amount of disingenuousness here.)
People are not binary machines, yet information from humans, about humans, is handled as if it were either true or not true; information is not taken by all people the same way. Retelling of situations or characteristics involving people may involve readjustment so that people simply don't take things the wrong way. Had they been in the same situation, they may be able to take the actual facts of the situation and reason with it; but as long as they are unable to do so, bad conclusions may be reached. (This is not lying: lying is knowingly deceiving a person so that the person may be defrauded with a version of truth that could never have been explained, under any perspective, by the actual facts.)
Therefore, it can be said that the "truth" as we know it is simply misleading.
It may also be said that you can't handle the truth.
Correlary to this, that children are automatically harmed by sexual activity.
Actually, an entirely different corollary is this:
A parent can punish a child through hitting them, in a reasonable way. That means they can slap their face, they can slape their ass, but if they slapped their croutch all sorts of hell would occur.
Slashdot Mirror
The more we deviate from normality, the more value we place on privacy.
In this context, the Japanese are an interesting study.
Their culture places a high value on homogeneity and comformity--everyone needs to be normal, or is ostracized (I'm making crass stereotypes here.)
Privacy is surprisingly important to them, in many different ways. Toilets that can make artificial flushing sounds in order to keep bodily sounds unheard.
But I was really surprised by the uprising a year or two ago when Japan introduced a national ID number. Somehow the quantification really bothered them.
You then get brought out in Times Square and the doctor puts you in order by smallest to largest.
One idea I'm exploring is the concept of anonymity regarding specifics.
The study was trying to figure out the privacy of weight. Now it's very easy to see who is fat and who isn't, but there's privacy and anonymity in just being any old fat person, as opposed to being a specific weight and therefore categorizable...the deviance can be quantified.
Getting people lined up in order of penis size may not be all that difficult. But does that scenario change if they also are holding up cards with their penis size in inches?
Does this mean that based on this study anti-privacy activists (how else to call them) will start saying that "as shown by studies, if you don't want to share your private information, thoughts, etc, it IS because you have something that you think you should hide"?
This thought went through my mind as well.
When I hear someone say that, I ask them if they try on clothes in a dressing room at a department store.
Obviously they answer in the affirmative, and then I ask why...why would they do that, if they have nothing to hide? Technically they don't, we all know what boys and girls look like.
And technically the people in this study do not either, because you can assess a person's weight just by looking at them.
But there is a psychological line crossed in specifically quantifying that weight. There is is a certain amount of anonymity to be had in being just any fatso, but being a 265lb fatso is a highly detailed portrait of how overweight one is.
There's a moral to this story
Oh yeah, maybe in LOTR, but not in Hollywood. Hollywood has no morals, and if anything one lesson is that audiences will reward a film that makes the effort to stay true to the book. It was an extraordinary story (well, not for me, I'm not a fan) so why mess with it?
Movie making is about lots and lots of risks, and they tend to shy away from the costs of epics.
A calculator watch was my first watch--had it when I was, umm, maybe 8 (no more than 10.)
It begged many clueless adults, assuming the watchalator would dull my math skills, to ask "what happens if you're stuck on a desert island and the batteries are out."
To which I should have replied "if I'm stuck on a desert island, I'm fucked notwithstanding my long division."
Does this mean the party that controls the senate gets to hire the technician who manages the servers?
I read it this way:
I suspect that there are lots of networks/servers in the Senate, including:
*individual Senator office servers (run by a technician appointed by the Senator or the party)
*caucus servers (run by the party for all the Senators of that party)
*senate wide servers (which I could see being run by the party in power, or by some civil service group, if this were done at the state level, but since its Washington, I bet it's the party)
*congress wide caucus servers (run by the party)
*congress wide servers (no idea who would run this)
*commitee servers...the Judiciary committee is a big, powerful committee which I bet has lots of documents. The chair of that committee runs the everyday affairs of the committee, so it makes sense that when it reversed to Democrat hands, the servers went under a technician appointed by the chair of that committee, who was a Democrat. As a way of simplifying things, they probably had a Dems only area, a shared area, and perhaps a Republican only area (which I suspect the Republicans didn't actually use; they would use their own caucus servers for party internal docs if they were smart.)
This is a lot of complex sillyness, but makes sense at some level. After all, would you approve of tax payer dollars being used to support computers which are holding documents which are inherently political? Though that does happen, it would have to, Senator/Rep offices do get a stipend for employees and equipment, and I can't believe that they do that good a job at keeping things separate.
(Often a politician has multiple phone lines if their offices, those supplied by the legislature for legislature business, and those supplied by his own campaign for political business.)
Has anyone ever seen slow time imagery of a popcorn kernel popping? I've been looking for that for years.
The idea is that a spammer using said haiku to get through spamfilters can be prosecuted under the more stringent copyright laws instead of the weaker antispam ones.
Which should read:
The idea is that a spammer using said haiku to get through spamfilters can be prosecuted under the more stringent laws that are difficult to enforce instead of the weaker laws which have proven so hard to enforce.
I'm amused by the idea, but it seems to me that if you couldn't get (find) them under anti-spam laws (especially the newest ones) then how could you get them on copyright laws? Are the new anti-spam laws so lacking in punishment that they pale in comparison to copyright laws?
a standard my mom taught me probably would let him know: if you can't admit what you are doing, then you probably aren't doing the right thing.
There are however times when I sincerely believe that people can't handle the truth.
In my mind a lie is most serious if it could harm life, liberty, property. If the only harm that a lie can cause is when the person finds out about the lie, then honestly, the truth must be really stupid.
Here is a great example of that, the truth is indeed stupid. His location has no effect on his reporting, and people were conjuring up artificial attachment concepts in their head to a radio personality who could have been broadcasting from Boston, New Hampshire, NYC, or Tokyo.
A brouhaha of similar proportions happened here...an engineering professor at Ohio State had an article ghostwritten concerning some random thing, and it was published in the Columbus Dispatch. He did not tell the Dispatch that it was ghostwritten, and they got cheesed off.
The funny thing is, had they known it was ghostwritten, that would not have bothered them; it's a very common practice. It was the fact that they didn't know that bothered them.
Of course, people got cheesed off at the ghostwriting concept, which is very very common. (My gf has written articles for the local newspaper for media, and then the "journalist" prints it verbatim and sticks his name on it.) And a lot of people pointed out that this is not necessarily all that much off of plagiarism, and that's a little odd coming from someone in an academic environment.
I trust the Economist. They almost never tell you who wrote the article. It honestly doesn't matter. I also trust them because they have an opinion and first present facts and then give you the opinion (which they call "analysis.") To me it's very insincere to pretend to be "objective" when really, no one is truly objective.
So, obviously, the fun for the discussion is to think about and discuss (1) what ways this is happening that we don't really know about
Morning radio often interviews all sorts of famous people. They are carrying on as if the famous person were right there, but often I suspect that this is not the case, the famous person is in a studio elsewhere.
What country are you from? In the US color tv's came about in the late 60s and were commonplace in the early 70s.
NBC had the first color TV broadcast in 1953.
RCA owned NBC, and was the developer of the NTSC standard. At the time (1949-52) there was actually a competing standard called the CBS color system, which was actually the one chosen by the FCC as the one to take. Long story short and lots of lawsuits later, the CBS color system was still adopted by the FCC, but that adoption was delayed until 1953.
The CBS color system had one issue, it was not compatible with the black and white standard. If you had a black and white set, you couldn't view a CBS color program (CBS color sets displayed color with, god help us all, two spinning color disks, so if you were switching back to a black and white program, you flipped a switch on the TV that stopped the disks and moved them out of the way.)
By 1953 there were too many people with black and white sets, and therefore no interest in spending large sums of money on a new standard. The RCA standard was backwards and forwards compatible, so it was to be the clear winner.
Except...CBS was miffed about getting dissed, so wouldn't touch color. ABC saw no reason to make programs in color, as that would just mean more sales for RCA, which owned NBC. It wasn't until the mid 1960s that ABC relented, started broadcasting in color, and then CBS had no choice but to start broadcasting in color as well.
The PAL european standard has 625 lines horizontal resolution, which was a new TV standard. The BBC was broadcasting black and white at 425 lines. BBC1 broadcast at 425 for many years, but BBC 2 broadcast at 625 lines color for many years, way before BBC 1 made the switchover. If you had an older TV, you needed a converter to see BBC 2. A newer TV had a switch to go back and forth. (Obviously BBC 2 had more expensive equipment, which explans the oddity of British TV licensing, which is considerably more expensive for a color TV than a black and white one.)
PAL wasn't developed until the mid 1960's, and the fact that it was a new standard, plus the expense, made its adoption much slower than that of NTSC in North America. (I think BBC1 switched over to color 625 in 1981, so saying that most peeps had color TV's in Britain in the mid 1980's in not all that far off the mark.)
That's because American soaps are aspirational
I disagree with this statement. Mexican "Telenovelas" are aspirational.
In Mexican soaps (and to a certain extent, soap operas from the rest of Latin America) the story is often rags to riches; the heroine seeks to marry some terribly attractive hero (and telenovelas are built to end, usually they number under 500 episodes, and then they end with the heroine and hero marrying.) There is an overall plot aspiring from one condition to another, and by the end that aspiration is fufilled. (There is a new reaction to this, which is TV Azteca's soaps which are soap operas married to Jerry Springer. More info as this develops.)
American soaps I would describe as "faux-dramatic." Everyone in the soap is already rich and comfortable, and complex inter-relationship situations are leveraged for drama. Often soaps will make an entire cast change, but still carry the same name (and be from the same "family.") Rarely are soaps ended, and even rarer are new ones begun.
While the British may consider East Enders a soap opera, I don't. To me it's just a serialized drama. Instead, the closest thing the British have to soap operas is expensive productions set in different time periods (often based on a book, I mean, how many Pride and Prejudice remakes can the British do anyway?) Interestingly enough, there was a Mexican Telenovela (the name of which I don't recall) that was based in late 1800's Mexico. It had quite a following.
Put your characters into situations so embarrassing, pathetic, and all-around squirmy your audience wants to scream.
It doesn't surprise me to hear that this is how the Office is, because a lot of newer british comedies are going this direction. "Coupling" is like this, and I despise it (I've spent every episode I've watched cringing. "One foot in the grave" was like this as well.) "Chef" could be like that, but it's saved by an amazingly strong actor, with a really good character (Chef himself.)
It was one of those annoying "adventure" games where you have to try 6000 different bizarre things before you stumble across the one that lets you advance the story, because the programmers never bothered to account for the obvious solutions.
A later version of this game was my first encounter with the Hitchhikers guide (my father bought it for me when he saw that I liked Monty Python.) At first you had to buy a clue book, but with the game I had the clues were built in. I remember typing in "help" every other turn. (And it still took a very long time.)
I played it on the XT. God help you if you turned on the turbo button.
The point is to make the public belive that they are secure and the the government is taking action.
Actually, it's more than that. Not only is the government taking action, but there's a lot of people who are becoming very rich.
How about the tourist fingerprinting system? Cross Match charges $400 per scanner. That entire package probably runs into the several hundred million dollars range, and not a single person has explained, logically, how it enhances security.
Both of my girlfriends
:-)
I don't think you belong here. This is Slashdot, News for Nerds, Stuff that matters?
What is required to keep two girls, but keep them apart and happy is very fast thinking, attention to detail, a great memory and good time management, plus a slight detachment to the world around them.
That sounds like many nerds to me.
(Uhh...new innovations on morality too...but that's a different topic.)
but 83 plus silver-balls is [newer]
Hmm...just like my grandfather.
Well grandma is happy. They're like a cowbell.
And what does the average French/German have to share with his American counterpart at this time ?
Your'e correct here...not a lot, at least in a political sense. But there is a perception of camaraderie anyway.
What kind of diplomatic measure is this to exclude countries from a policy, just because they enjoy the same wealth as you do?
Technically it's not just that, after all, Qatar is also a rich country as well...and been quite an ally during the recent Iraq war.
We share lots in common with Europeans, and that makes us feel more comfortable with them.
Great example of this? Americans bitch up a storm when manufacturing plants are moved to Mexico. You hear silence when the move is made to Canada...hell, the auto unions are cross border.
... at Miami International....none of the people I saw going through it seemed to have any problem with it
Many passengers through Miami come from Latin American countries. Expectations of privacy in Latin American countries are much lower; I would venture a guess that all LatAm nations have a national ID card with a fingerprint. (At least the ones I know of...)And with, as another poster noted, people being scared of customs officials, they'll do whatever they can.
Brazil takes itself a bit more seriously than other LatAm nations. They have the weight to throw around if they wanted, and they're used to being listened to much more than El Salvador. They resent being treated as less than Europeans. It's not so much the fingerprinting, as much as the grouping.
Illegal immigrants? What does that have to do with terrorism, because that's the excuse used to justify all this shit.
A lot of the anti illegal immigrant groups (and what we're talking about is Mexicans coming across the border, not overseas nationals overstaying visas) get support from...wait for it...biometric/ID companies.
Makes sense, they sell their crapo products as a way of decreasing illegal immigration (dunno how) and the anti illegal groups get money in return.
I do not believe in the tenants of NAMBLA, but sadly its existence squashes any discussion of what the real age of consent should be. Fear of PC backlash requires that I say I don't know what the age of consent should be, that I am not for lower it, just that it should be possible to discuss the issue. Ideally it would be based on some testable mental maturity of a minor wishing to enter adulthood.
Interestingly, many cultures seem to set adulthood at 13 (like when youre bar/bat mitzvah happens.) There are countries with an age of consent this low, but not in North America.
Having said that, age of consent is there for parents, not for anyone else. It simply makes them feel better much like anti-tattoing laws (for minors.) Therefore drives to raise it seem to come from parents.
Hawaii recently raised their age of consent from 14 to 16, entirely because of conservative/religious pressure on the state legislature.
Interestingly, they did it as a trial for a few years, made a report, and then made it permanent. The report makes for a very interesting read...as far as I can tell, the task force came to the conclusion that there wasn't any particularly good reason to raise the age of consent to 16, but it didn't seem to harm anything either.
But another reader may examine the report and disagree.
2) Jews (and ethnic Chinese for that matter) become influential in diaspora because they have cultures which value hard work and study, so over the course of a couple generations, they eat the lunch of any "natives" who don't value that (like every antisemitic racist bubba still digging ditches in my hometown). Duh. It never ceases to amaze me that people think there's more to it than that.
There is a bit more than that. With respect to both cultures, there's inherently a comfort zone regarding people like them. When a job at a Jewish business becomes available, word will spread in the tight-knit community, and someone whom they are comfortable with will be chosen. It's not a purposeful discrimination, but with such community ties it's bound to occur that way.
Second, with specific regards to (the stereotype of) Jews and banking...Christ overturned the money changers in the temple. Christians were prohibited for centuries from participating in the banking business; Jews had no such prohibition. Many banks can trace their lineages hundreds of years....Diamonds and other precious metals were forms of currency, and therefore a jeweler was just another form of a banker.
I wrote the following on my journal (above) concerning this very topic. The quote that I'm referecing in the first paragraph actually was a quote from slashdot's quote of the day:
One of my favorite quites (currently non-attributed) is "there are four sides to every situation" what he said, what she said, the truth, and what really happened." My personal take on this epistemology follows.
The difference between the "truth" and "what really happened" is this: "what really happened" is a reference to actual facts. This is however not always the truth, in that personal connotation., perspectives, experience, et cetera, often take actual facts (often regarded as "truth") and corrupt them internally and form bad or incorrect impressions. It is therefore necessary, at times, to tell "the truth" which is designed to lead the person to the correct interpretation of events, even though the actual facts of those events would be misleading. (I admit to a certain amount of disingenuousness here.)
People are not binary machines, yet information from humans, about humans, is handled as if it were either true or not true; information is not taken by all people the same way. Retelling of situations or characteristics involving people may involve readjustment so that people simply don't take things the wrong way. Had they been in the same situation, they may be able to take the actual facts of the situation and reason with it; but as long as they are unable to do so, bad conclusions may be reached. (This is not lying: lying is knowingly deceiving a person so that the person may be defrauded with a version of truth that could never have been explained, under any perspective, by the actual facts.)
Therefore, it can be said that the "truth" as we know it is simply misleading.
It may also be said that you can't handle the truth.
Correlary to this, that children are automatically harmed by sexual activity.
Actually, an entirely different corollary is this:
A parent can punish a child through hitting them, in a reasonable way. That means they can slap their face, they can slape their ass, but if they slapped their croutch all sorts of hell would occur.
That to me is a double standard.