Ah, your sig reminds me... must stay away from Slashdot on Sunday... I don't wan to see that stupid ponies theme again or any of the other crap it brings.
I don't get it...why should there be hate crimes at all?
Well, this is one of the really aggregious examples I can think of, along with anything to do with lynching.
If you deliberately set out to cause harm to someone because of their skin color, religion, sexual orientation or whatever, then this can manifest into some pretty brutal crimes with a strong prior intent. The ones I've paid attention to tend to highlight some pretty serious sociopathic personalities.
McKinney and Henderson subsequently drove the car to a remote, rural area and proceeded to rob, pistol-whip, and torture Shepard, tying him to a fence and leaving him to die. According to their court testimony, McKinney and Henderson also discovered his address and intended to steal from his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard, who was still alive but in a coma, was discovered 18 hours later by Aaron Kreifels, a cyclist who initially mistook Shepard for a scarecrow.
Shepard had suffered fractures to the back of his head and in front of his right ear. He experienced severe brainstem damage, which affected his body's ability to regulate heart rate, body temperature, and other vital functions. There also were about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face, and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate. Shepard never regained consciousness and remained on full life support.
Why? Simply because he was gay.
The whole point of labeling them as hate crimes is to apply a stiffer penalty -- and of course all criminal penalties are about deterrent to others or some measure of revenge. If there weren't stiffer penalities, assholes would go around attacking whatever people they liked and it would simply be assault.
I figure is Fred Phelps and the Assboro Baptist Church applaud something, it is a good test of just how messed up it was.
It's really easy for white middle class folks to not see the issue with hate crimes. But if you know anybody who has ever been targeted, it's an entirely different thing.
They'll use best practices and outside-the-box thinking to rightsize the cloud-based agile empowerment solutions with viral social messaging, of course
There is, however, a significant market for people who would buy movie files if that option were offered to them at an attractive price.
I realize a lot of people will probably find this objectionable, since it's still essentially DRM'd... but I've taken to only buying Blu Rays that have the digital copy included as well as a DVD copy.
I'm aware of the fact that it's still got DRM, and in theory they could go in and disable it for me, but I find having the digital copy allows me to use it the way I want to.
If someone *does* decide I'm no longer allowed to have it... well, then I might need to look into cracking the DRM and say the hell with them. But for now, I actually like the digital copy.
Blue-ray started at a higher price and remain at a higher price for the player and content. No thanks.
Increasingly I'm seeing some older movies which have been re-released on Blu Ray coming down in price.
I've seen some movies at Wal Mart for $9.99, and even re-bought a couple of titles now that I've switched to Blu Ray. Many movies I don't care, but "The Dark Knight" for the $12.99 I saw it for last week is appealing.
I'm not looking to replace my entire library of DVD with Blu Ray, since I have literally hundreds of DVDs. But some movies which I really like I've re-invested in them because seeing them in full HD is worth it if I can find the disk on sale.
The only reason that streaming services haven't completely phased out Blu-rays is the fact that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection. Once such connections become ubiquitous, most of the titles owned by consumers would probably end up being stored in the cloud.
Some of us have no interest in streaming our media. And many of us have no interest in storing our stuff in the cloud.
I want my movies stored local, offline, and accessible when I want it and without asking permission. Streaming is just going to lead to 'monetizing' each view. Storing it in the cloud means I can't watch movies on the plane, in bed, or by the pool.
I'm probably old fashioned, but I still buy Blu Ray discs and CDs which I rip to MP3. With ISPs adding bandwidth caps and the like, I'm not going to pay to stream down a movie I've already bought, and then pay my ISP again for the bandwidth for re-watching the movie again. Everyone wants a piece of that action, and I'm not playing.
So, for many of us, the physical disk is going to remain as the way we play these movies for a long time yet.
Is this a good move for security, or just another step towards a totalitarian society that prohibits free expression?
Sadly, from the point of the totalitarian society, this is not an "either or" question.
Unfortunately, this proposal sounds a little like thought crime to me. You've not done anything illegal, but by looking at it, you're now a criminal.
If I read a copy of the "Anarchists Cookbook", am I now a terrorist? Once you start outlawing certain kinds of thought and expression, you can definitely be on a slippery slope... what next, books by Che Guevara? He was a revolutionary. What about Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"? Ghandi maybe?
Not to say that I'm defending the guy whose killing spree triggered this, but at a certain point, you can't criminalize thoughts and ideas unless they're directly inciting harm and violence.
But, how many of us still have that uncle (or father) who still makes really crass jokes we all cringe about? Do we start outlawing that?
This seems like it might cause more alienation between France and its Muslim population than actually helping anything.
What's strange is that he was able to do this multiple times. I always thought the Casinos kept tabs on people like this and shared the information between themselves.
They do. But, since he wasn't cheating, and was playing according to the rules they established, it's not like he was doing anything wrong.
In fact, they were competing for his business:
Johnson had not played a game at the Borgata in more than a year. He had been trying to figure out its blackjack game for years but had never been able to win big. At one point, he accepted a âoelifetime discount,â but when he had a winning trip he effectively lost the benefit of the discount. The way any discount works, you have to lose a certain amount to capitalize on it. If you had a lifetime discount of, say, 20 percent on $500,000, you would have to lose whatever money youâ(TM)d made on previous trips plus another $500,000 before the discount kicked in. When this happened to Johnson, he knew the ground rules had skewed against him. So it was no longer worth his while to play there.
He explained this when the Borgata tried to entice him back.
"Well, what if we change that?" he recalls a casino executive saying. "What if we put you on a trip-to-trip discount basis?"
Johnson started negotiating.
Once the Borgata closed the deal, he says, Caesars and the Trop, competing for Johnson's business, offered similar terms. That's what enabled him to systematically beat them, one by one.
Basically he managed to negotiate terms that allowed him to beat the house odds.
They screwed up on the math to keep a high stakes player coming to them. He won, fair and square. Well, at least as fair and square as if they'd won it from you based on the same math.
They might not offer him the same terms, but he did nothing at all that would cause them to ban him. They just won't be stupid enough to change their edge in such a way as to give him the advantage.
Sounds to me like he didn't so much "win" as was "paid for a commercial". This is going to attract tons of people who think they can do the same thing. They will make their money back 10 fold thanks to him.
Sure, all you need is a million of your own money, and a rep with the casino as a big spender.
Once that happens, you too can have 50/50 odds at blackjack if you're skilled enough at it.
I'm sorry, but if I walk into a casino, I'm not getting any of the things he did which skewed the house take. By the time you've put in enough time to "game" the system this way, they've probably already collected just as much money from you.
The dictionary shows common usage, not correct usage.
As has been pointed out in countless threads on Slashdot -- by the time it's been in common usage long enough, it is the correct usage.
Since you're talking about a word which originated with the Roman Army, it's had a lot of time to change its meaning. In fact, it's apparently been in use like this since the 19th Century. So, well over 100 years by now.
In fact, in my lifetime, I've only heard it in its modern form. So, sorry you're all bummed out that the usage of the word has changed over time... but I'd suggest getting over it.:-P
I'm sure that as soon as selective breeding took place the result, it is no longer a natural process, but one that was influenced by humans.
Well, there's there's 'natural', 'normal', and 'un-natural' (and I don't mean the latter in the sense of some abomination).
Natural would be breeding in the wild -- whatever makes them do well and pass on their genes. This is what they do without us.
Normal would be breeding two horses in the hopes of trying to get one where you get a desirable trait for that breed. This is selective breeding. It's influenced by people, but it's not like it's ceased to be a natural process -- horses do occasionally get to mate and mares still give birth.
Un-natural is where you take things to an entirely new level. Goats which produce spider silk proteins, glow in the dark cats, venomous cabbage. No matter how hard you try to cross breed goats, or cats, or cabbages... you can't really express any of those traits. It's just not there to be expressed, because it doesn't occur naturally in those kinds of things.
Still even if they did find a species, they could patent the proper way to cultivate it.
How? By describing what kind of plant species it is, what temperature and soil conditions it thrives in, what kind of acidity?
That's called gardening and botany -- I don't think you can patent those.
I'm neither genetic engineer nor patent lawyer, but my guess would be that what is patentable here is transporting the gene from one species to another one.
Not always. This, this, this, this... all of them indicate that merely identifying the gene allows them to be patentable.
Not create. Not move from one species to another. Merely identifying the existence of it.
Sorry, but in my mind they're naturally occurring and have no business being patented.
No, I got that. They claim it goes in just like normal ink and then you re-magnetize later. Choose your own design and everything.
It doesn't make me any more interested. I have surprisingly little desire to have my tattoo vibrate because my phone is doing something. I simply don't care to have something like this... I'm not that attached to my phone.
If sure someone could make a blue-tooth enabled butt-plug which would do the exact same thing -- I'm not buying one of those either.
I have no doubt there are some people who will decide they need a vibrating tattoo, but I can't see it becoming really widespread for a lot of years.
Pretty much the only thing I see saving Nokia is Android.
And, given their commitment to make Microsoft-based phones, that pretty much makes them doomed.
Make them with a nice clean stock Android loadout instead of some dumbass custom crapware laden ugly UI
See above... they may be too far along in the jumping of the shark.
I don't see a Windows based phone in my future any time soon. Though, I'm sure there's likely some hardcore fanbois who are salivating at the prospect.
But a vibrating tattoo patented by Nokia? Not so much.
I can kind of see why I'd want this as a wearable patch, but actually doing it as a tattoo? Well, that's right up there with getting a Zune tattoo -- it just sounds stupid.:-P
I'll take my actual tattoos as non-magnetic, non vibrating thanks.
60 TB might seem like a lot now but I am sure that humanity will figure out new ways to fill the capacity. We always do.
I've got about 6TB of physical storage in my personal machine. Almost half of that is in use.
Years ago, a terabyte was something that sounded like an abstraction. Many business will now have hundreds of terabytes. Gone are the days when a 360K floppy could hold all of your documents.
I suspect the number of people on Slashdot who are into the 10's of terabytes is probably not insignificant... with the serious porn, er, movie collectors likely going way beyond that.;-)
Oh, I know why people don't like it, and certainly people don't like taking production outages for a mystery reboot.
But if you have spent a week on the phone with the vendor, involved several teams to trouble shoot, spent countless hours trying to identify the problem, and gotten nowhere... If the reboot fixes the problem and it never comes back (which I have seen), then sometimes you have no better options.
The vendor just asks for logs. Nothing anywhere ever actually shows the source. And all you do is lose a lot of time to it.
I absolutely hate it, but there have been times when everyone just throws up their hands and says "bugger it, try rebooting".
In this case it's more general, you have to press the reset button which is the most frequent solution to any computer problem on any platform.
Oh, if only that weren't true.
My wife does enterprise storage, used to do backups... occasionally a server gets out of whack, and has all sorts of problems. Eventually she or someone on her team ends up saying "can we just reboot it?". This is usually after several days of troubleshooting and huge amounts of time spent.
It fixes a vast amount of issue in which nobody can identify what's going wrong. Though, it makes any proper form of root-cause impossible to track down. I've heard this referred to as "The Microsoft Patch".
I also know some old-school UNIX admins and mainframe guys who cringe at the notion that a reboot can be a viable way of troubleshooting/making the problem go away. Because they don't reboot unless God himself has filled out all of the right paperwork, and only then if he's got a really good reason and there are no alternatives.
Neither is a valid word under the rules of Scrabble, which restricts you to English words.
That would be true if it wasn't false.
My Official Scrabble Dictionary lists qi as a valid word.
If you allow qi, then you can basically allow any foreign word that someone might use in an English sentence
Once it's commonly used within English, is is an English word -- I once had a guy from France ask for the English word for 'gourmet'. I had to explain to him that we liked their word so much, we stole it.:-P
While it's true that not all foreign words are valid English, we've imported an awful lot of words without making any changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, your sig reminds me ... must stay away from Slashdot on Sunday ... I don't wan to see that stupid ponies theme again or any of the other crap it brings.
Dude, if a can of shit is art, why not Star Trek New Voyages?
There's amendments with lower numbers they ignore all the time.
Why should the 10th be any different?
Well, this is one of the really aggregious examples I can think of, along with anything to do with lynching.
If you deliberately set out to cause harm to someone because of their skin color, religion, sexual orientation or whatever, then this can manifest into some pretty brutal crimes with a strong prior intent. The ones I've paid attention to tend to highlight some pretty serious sociopathic personalities.
Why? Simply because he was gay.
The whole point of labeling them as hate crimes is to apply a stiffer penalty -- and of course all criminal penalties are about deterrent to others or some measure of revenge. If there weren't stiffer penalities, assholes would go around attacking whatever people they liked and it would simply be assault.
I figure is Fred Phelps and the Assboro Baptist Church applaud something, it is a good test of just how messed up it was.
It's really easy for white middle class folks to not see the issue with hate crimes. But if you know anybody who has ever been targeted, it's an entirely different thing.
Hey, I got Bingo!! Awesome, thanks.
I realize a lot of people will probably find this objectionable, since it's still essentially DRM'd ... but I've taken to only buying Blu Rays that have the digital copy included as well as a DVD copy.
I'm aware of the fact that it's still got DRM, and in theory they could go in and disable it for me, but I find having the digital copy allows me to use it the way I want to.
If someone *does* decide I'm no longer allowed to have it ... well, then I might need to look into cracking the DRM and say the hell with them. But for now, I actually like the digital copy.
Increasingly I'm seeing some older movies which have been re-released on Blu Ray coming down in price.
I've seen some movies at Wal Mart for $9.99, and even re-bought a couple of titles now that I've switched to Blu Ray. Many movies I don't care, but "The Dark Knight" for the $12.99 I saw it for last week is appealing.
I'm not looking to replace my entire library of DVD with Blu Ray, since I have literally hundreds of DVDs. But some movies which I really like I've re-invested in them because seeing them in full HD is worth it if I can find the disk on sale.
Some of us have no interest in streaming our media. And many of us have no interest in storing our stuff in the cloud.
I want my movies stored local, offline, and accessible when I want it and without asking permission. Streaming is just going to lead to 'monetizing' each view. Storing it in the cloud means I can't watch movies on the plane, in bed, or by the pool.
I'm probably old fashioned, but I still buy Blu Ray discs and CDs which I rip to MP3. With ISPs adding bandwidth caps and the like, I'm not going to pay to stream down a movie I've already bought, and then pay my ISP again for the bandwidth for re-watching the movie again. Everyone wants a piece of that action, and I'm not playing.
So, for many of us, the physical disk is going to remain as the way we play these movies for a long time yet.
Sadly, from the point of the totalitarian society, this is not an "either or" question.
Unfortunately, this proposal sounds a little like thought crime to me. You've not done anything illegal, but by looking at it, you're now a criminal.
If I read a copy of the "Anarchists Cookbook", am I now a terrorist? Once you start outlawing certain kinds of thought and expression, you can definitely be on a slippery slope ... what next, books by Che Guevara? He was a revolutionary. What about Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"? Ghandi maybe?
Not to say that I'm defending the guy whose killing spree triggered this, but at a certain point, you can't criminalize thoughts and ideas unless they're directly inciting harm and violence.
But, how many of us still have that uncle (or father) who still makes really crass jokes we all cringe about? Do we start outlawing that?
This seems like it might cause more alienation between France and its Muslim population than actually helping anything.
They do. But, since he wasn't cheating, and was playing according to the rules they established, it's not like he was doing anything wrong.
In fact, they were competing for his business:
Basically he managed to negotiate terms that allowed him to beat the house odds.
They screwed up on the math to keep a high stakes player coming to them. He won, fair and square. Well, at least as fair and square as if they'd won it from you based on the same math.
They might not offer him the same terms, but he did nothing at all that would cause them to ban him. They just won't be stupid enough to change their edge in such a way as to give him the advantage.
Sure, all you need is a million of your own money, and a rep with the casino as a big spender.
Once that happens, you too can have 50/50 odds at blackjack if you're skilled enough at it.
I'm sorry, but if I walk into a casino, I'm not getting any of the things he did which skewed the house take. By the time you've put in enough time to "game" the system this way, they've probably already collected just as much money from you.
As has been pointed out in countless threads on Slashdot -- by the time it's been in common usage long enough, it is the correct usage.
Since you're talking about a word which originated with the Roman Army, it's had a lot of time to change its meaning. In fact, it's apparently been in use like this since the 19th Century. So, well over 100 years by now.
In fact, in my lifetime, I've only heard it in its modern form. So, sorry you're all bummed out that the usage of the word has changed over time ... but I'd suggest getting over it. :-P
Hell, even Oxford says:
Language evolves over time. This is just one instance.
But, hey, cling to your pedantry if that makes you feel better.
Well, there's there's 'natural', 'normal', and 'un-natural' (and I don't mean the latter in the sense of some abomination).
Natural would be breeding in the wild -- whatever makes them do well and pass on their genes. This is what they do without us.
Normal would be breeding two horses in the hopes of trying to get one where you get a desirable trait for that breed. This is selective breeding. It's influenced by people, but it's not like it's ceased to be a natural process -- horses do occasionally get to mate and mares still give birth.
Un-natural is where you take things to an entirely new level. Goats which produce spider silk proteins, glow in the dark cats, venomous cabbage. No matter how hard you try to cross breed goats, or cats, or cabbages ... you can't really express any of those traits. It's just not there to be expressed, because it doesn't occur naturally in those kinds of things.
How? By describing what kind of plant species it is, what temperature and soil conditions it thrives in, what kind of acidity?
That's called gardening and botany -- I don't think you can patent those.
Not always. This, this, this, this ... all of them indicate that merely identifying the gene allows them to be patentable.
Not create. Not move from one species to another. Merely identifying the existence of it.
Sorry, but in my mind they're naturally occurring and have no business being patented.
Does this also cover patenting genes too?
Because I've never understood how you can patent a gene someone already had.
No, I got that. They claim it goes in just like normal ink and then you re-magnetize later. Choose your own design and everything.
It doesn't make me any more interested. I have surprisingly little desire to have my tattoo vibrate because my phone is doing something. I simply don't care to have something like this ... I'm not that attached to my phone.
If sure someone could make a blue-tooth enabled butt-plug which would do the exact same thing -- I'm not buying one of those either.
I have no doubt there are some people who will decide they need a vibrating tattoo, but I can't see it becoming really widespread for a lot of years.
And, given their commitment to make Microsoft-based phones, that pretty much makes them doomed.
See above ... they may be too far along in the jumping of the shark.
I don't see a Windows based phone in my future any time soon. Though, I'm sure there's likely some hardcore fanbois who are salivating at the prospect.
I like tattoos. I have several of them.
But a vibrating tattoo patented by Nokia? Not so much.
I can kind of see why I'd want this as a wearable patch, but actually doing it as a tattoo? Well, that's right up there with getting a Zune tattoo -- it just sounds stupid. :-P
I'll take my actual tattoos as non-magnetic, non vibrating thanks.
Where's the fun in that? ;-)
I've got about 6TB of physical storage in my personal machine. Almost half of that is in use.
Years ago, a terabyte was something that sounded like an abstraction. Many business will now have hundreds of terabytes. Gone are the days when a 360K floppy could hold all of your documents.
I suspect the number of people on Slashdot who are into the 10's of terabytes is probably not insignificant ... with the serious porn, er, movie collectors likely going way beyond that. ;-)
Do we need to speculate that human settlements need water?
This sounds like it should be fairly obvious ... you need water for people, livestock, plants ...
Oh, I know why people don't like it, and certainly people don't like taking production outages for a mystery reboot.
But if you have spent a week on the phone with the vendor, involved several teams to trouble shoot, spent countless hours trying to identify the problem, and gotten nowhere ... If the reboot fixes the problem and it never comes back (which I have seen), then sometimes you have no better options.
The vendor just asks for logs. Nothing anywhere ever actually shows the source. And all you do is lose a lot of time to it.
I absolutely hate it, but there have been times when everyone just throws up their hands and says "bugger it, try rebooting".
Oh, if only that weren't true.
My wife does enterprise storage, used to do backups ... occasionally a server gets out of whack, and has all sorts of problems. Eventually she or someone on her team ends up saying "can we just reboot it?". This is usually after several days of troubleshooting and huge amounts of time spent.
It fixes a vast amount of issue in which nobody can identify what's going wrong. Though, it makes any proper form of root-cause impossible to track down. I've heard this referred to as "The Microsoft Patch".
I also know some old-school UNIX admins and mainframe guys who cringe at the notion that a reboot can be a viable way of troubleshooting/making the problem go away. Because they don't reboot unless God himself has filled out all of the right paperwork, and only then if he's got a really good reason and there are no alternatives.
Is it me, or does that look like a Romulan War Bird? :-P
That would be true if it wasn't false.
My Official Scrabble Dictionary lists qi as a valid word.
Once it's commonly used within English, is is an English word -- I once had a guy from France ask for the English word for 'gourmet'. I had to explain to him that we liked their word so much, we stole it. :-P
While it's true that not all foreign words are valid English, we've imported an awful lot of words without making any changes.