For Christ's sake, we have *cooking directions* on POPTARTS. We have chain saws with explicit warning labels to keep you from touching the flying blades with your fingers. My tractor's digging bit has a giant warning label depicting someone getting wrapped around the screw, and people STILL get killed by the damn things. At hospitals, motorcycle riders are referred to only as organ donors. How many people have fallen into a wood chipper, or tried to clean an obstruction while the thing was on and gotten eaten? I can't remember the last time I've gone a month without hearing of somebody dying due to their own stupidity. Americans steal high-voltage power lines for the copper, cut through tree limbs above themselves, and screw anything that moves, without protection.
I think you're making two big mistakes here:
First, you seem to assume that those labels are really meant for people who are stupid enough to deliberately take the depicted action which causes injury. No court would really accept liability for a company that made a chainsaw when someone deliberately stuck their fingers up to it -- most likely this is there to prevent people who acted recklessly from claiming that they didn't know how big of a risk their was in whatever action they took that led to flesh touching whirling chain. (And if you're implying that half of America would be killing themselves at any moment now but for a few good labels, I think you're exaggerating a bit.)
Second, what the heck is wrong with proper cooking directions for Pop-Tarts? Cooking something without directions without ruining the food (or in the case of Pop-Tarts, creating a hazardous risk to the soft, burnable tissues in your mouth) is a skill for experienced cooks only, and Pop-Tarts are a food product marketed to people who don't cook for themselves mostly.
I'd like to see you cook something you've never cooked before without any directions. Go ahead -- roast a duck or do something tasty with jicama or even just warm up some random frozen food item in the toaster oven without knowing what temperature and how long you're supposed to heat it. Pop-Tart instructions are practical.
Are you implying that using the results of studies is not scientific?
Cherry-picking them in favor of a personal agenda based on deep-seated dislike for people who disagree with you isn't. Dawkins suffers from the same kind of confirmation bias against religious people that fundamentalists have against people like him.
If $20 in employee compensation for a movie ticket and snacks will seriously affect a business of this site's size and age, then it's pretty much doomed already.
Why shouldn't the person or company that actually invented it first get the reward? Why should we put a premium on getting your legal paperwork in order first over getting your research and development done first? While I like the bit about people working on the same type of invention at the same time getting some immunity from patents issued to one of the parties, I don't see why the person with the fastest lawyers should be the one to profit from everyone who comes later.
A) Clicking on the link to read the comments was your choice, and... B) You must be really new to Idle to expect anything else of the comments found on articles there.
Have to post anon, can't undo the downmod of your post a few ones up.
You're a professional complainer then? And so it seems a waste of space, just ignore what you don't want to read and get on with your life, it's short enough already.
No irony there either. (And your futile attempts to mod me down shall only make me stronger!)
So you just skimmed the title and the summary, inadvertently failing to notice the idle tag, then clicked the link even though the story was clearly related to belly button lint. Moreover, having done so by what I can only assume is the purest accident, you read through the comments, and picked one to respond to?
No. Actually, I read the summary (which was the entire article for Slashdot purposes), was unimpressed with the content, then noticed the title with the Idle tag. I didn't click the link to the story, because it didn't interest me, and it was no coincidence that I read through the comments, because I was looking for similar minded people already complaining about its lack of front-page quality.
Why? Because to me, people griping about the story sucking was more interesting than the story itself. Your mileage obviously differs, but I don't see anything new that we didn't know from the work of the guy who won an IgNobel on the same subject matter in 2002.
Actually it's the mindless groupthink of the idle haters that is wasting my time, because I for one am curious about belly button lint, and rather than see comments relating to that topic, I have to suffer through the same stale rants about how someone saw idle and it hurt their little eyes and wasted their precious, precious time.
And thus your gripe about reading things that you don't like is superior to mine. No irony there./smirk
If half of the "UK is out to get it's citizens" articles here are to be believed - you might as well give up and get out as it appears that the fascists have taken over the UK government and nothing you can do will make it otherwise short of a revolution.
Or just challenge it in the European Court of Human Rights. They're likely to view such a change as a clear violation of the Data Protection Directive unless they think they can seriously walk such broad lifting of protections under the exemptions.
People who view science purely from a utilitarian viewpoint of wanting instant monetary or technology returns like you are the reason for the death of the US lead in the sciences.
Also, as the other poster pointed out, he's not doing his research at a US institution, and I'd like to further point out that this is most likely a personal project of his. His usual research is a bit drier.
It's not hypocritical to complain about something that bothers you per se. After all, I'm not wasting everyone's time on the front page with it. You actually have to go into the comments section to see it, and you wouldn't even see this post without clicking if people with mod points didn't agree.
On the other hand, wasting time complaining about other people wasting time complaining...
Because it's on the freaking front page. It's easy to either overlook the "Idle" tag in the title, when you're just skimming the story bodies or to get curious despite knowing better. I mean, it's like telling someone not to think of elephants -- it's too late already.
So why not complain? Idle is on rare occasions amusing to read when you've exhausted everything *else* that you normally read online, but it's not like it's "A-list" material* that deserves to be on the front page.
* Even for relative definitions of "A-list" material.
Well, not to be childish, but he started it by using the network in a way that (a) has been complained about by the designers of the network for years now, (b) is blocked by most exit nodes unless you deliberately change your port to avoid it.
Nearly EVERY article on using TOR with BitTorrent says "don't do it" and lays all this out. The only people who do this are people who *know* that it's discouraged and do it anyway. i.e. Jackasses.
How is this any different to P2P over TOR, except for the fact TOR exit nodes tend to block several 'standard' P2P ports (which is easily fixed by using a non-standard port for your P2P)?
Stop doing that. People block these ports for a reason, and that's because the network is not intended to handle this kind of load. People like you make using TOR miserable for everyone else.
I've been doing BitTorrent over TOR for a while now. What makes this so great?
Stop it, jackass. TOR is not designed for that. It severely degrades the latency of the network, and the network does not have the bandwidth to sustain numerous users doing large file-transfers over it. The network is intended for anonymous expression -- not to transfer DVD after DVD.
Especially the fact that some of the lines are up to 20 miles apart from one another and the whole formation is almost 100 miles long and 50 tall. We're supposed to believe that 12000 years ago there was a city on a lone island that covered an area of 500 square miles?
Not to mention that the lines are all somehow preserved on the bottom of the ocean in an undisturbed fashion despite the notion that the island that was under the city some how went missing?
What, did the land just ever so gently lower the city to the bottom in the process of flatting out underneath it?
1. Yeah, yeah. It's a spelling mistake that I frequently make. And it's sad that that's your lead-in counterpoint.
2. It's one, frankly, that the libertarians embrace. Every single social program, taxation scheme, or other government initiative meant to level the playing field is vehemently despised by the Libertarian Party.
3. See reply to previous post. You have no more economic liberty in a system with no restraint on economic predators than you have personal liberty in a system with no restraint on violent ones.
While this is true, correlation is not causation...
You know, I hate anyone who pulls that phrase out in a knee-jerk manner like its the golden key to all wisdom without knowing a damned thing about what it means.
In this case, correlation is all that is important. This isn't axiom for proving in a court of law that someone actually is a domestic terrorist. This is grounds for a reasonable suspicion that they might be plugged into extreme right-wing subculture. It's grounds for suspecting that they might be a terrorist; not grounds to lock them up because they are one. It means, "Hey, pay attention to this guy. He might not be a harmless nut."
I don't keep a pocket copy of it on me or anything but I do firmly believe that a well thought out understanding of the Constitution is essential for being a citizen...
Well, I'd certainly agree that it's important!
But the problem is that the "keep a pocket copy on me" crowd frequently have a very bad understanding of the Constitution and think that you can define everything about the government's powers just by reading the document itself over and over again without any outside context and in complete dismissal of the precedents of the Supreme Court. These are the people who will decry practically anything they don't like about the federal government as unconstitutional, and these are the people who will immediately go to the "guns and revolution" solution as their dreamed way of solving the problem.
For these people, their interpretation of the Constitution is almost religious, with anyone who interprets it differently being evil and tyrannical. It from this seed that the roots of domestic terrorism grow, and where it becomes acceptable to bomb building; those people are all agents of tyranny and thus "fair game."
The real thing that I take issue with here is that mere possession of/any/ readily-available document could be grounds for suspicion.
Look, I neither support invasive tracking of what citizens read like the PATRIOT Act supports, nor do I think that reading any literature, whether subversive or patriotic should be grounds for a warrant, much less a full criminal investigation.
But, I think you can't close your eyes when someone starts advocating violent revolution instead of just reading about it, and I don't think police should have to close their eyes and hum loudly to prevent themselves from getting a hunch about someone. If someone has a serious "I think I'm living in a tyrannical state; we should all be arming up" stance, the police shouldn't have to put blinders on about it and should be able to follow up on hunches within the boundaries of law and in keeping with respect to the 4th Amendment.
They aren't wrong, but I'm sick of doing anti-virus updates, tired of all the malware, and I don't care anymore if they take my name so I can have an internet where I don't have to worry if downloading some EXE will screw up my machine.
It's a nice idea. But I'm just fed up with the crime.
Ah, so you're for trading liberty for security, then?
Taking away anonymity won't help with any of that without a complete, total, and frankly magical redesign of the internet and of computers in general to not allow ANY transaction without identifying yourself and to be perfectly secure against hacking (to prevent people from spoofing other people's IDs).
Then again, if we had computers that were perfectly secure against hacking, you'd never have to worry about viruses, malware, or bad EXEs in the first place even with anonymity.
So, economic liberties don't count? Everyone draws the freedom line somewhere.
Personally, I think being free from private predation is just as important as being free from government predation. Libertarians only care about the government side of the oppression coin and ignore that power abhors a vacuum. Economic liberty requires that we keep both in check.
Also, libertarians rarely account for economic externalities in their notions of economic liberty and ignore how freedoms for one person may seriously hurt a lot of other people. (e.g. Pollution.)
Oh, and it's Gilded Age (as in golden).
Yeah, yeah. I know where the word comes from, but I keep forgetting "gilded" is spelled that way. Bad habit. Irritating as it is, thanks for pointing that out.
Slashdot Mirror
For Christ's sake, we have *cooking directions* on POPTARTS. We have chain saws with explicit warning labels to keep you from touching the flying blades with your fingers. My tractor's digging bit has a giant warning label depicting someone getting wrapped around the screw, and people STILL get killed by the damn things. At hospitals, motorcycle riders are referred to only as organ donors. How many people have fallen into a wood chipper, or tried to clean an obstruction while the thing was on and gotten eaten? I can't remember the last time I've gone a month without hearing of somebody dying due to their own stupidity. Americans steal high-voltage power lines for the copper, cut through tree limbs above themselves, and screw anything that moves, without protection.
I think you're making two big mistakes here:
First, you seem to assume that those labels are really meant for people who are stupid enough to deliberately take the depicted action which causes injury. No court would really accept liability for a company that made a chainsaw when someone deliberately stuck their fingers up to it -- most likely this is there to prevent people who acted recklessly from claiming that they didn't know how big of a risk their was in whatever action they took that led to flesh touching whirling chain. (And if you're implying that half of America would be killing themselves at any moment now but for a few good labels, I think you're exaggerating a bit.)
Second, what the heck is wrong with proper cooking directions for Pop-Tarts? Cooking something without directions without ruining the food (or in the case of Pop-Tarts, creating a hazardous risk to the soft, burnable tissues in your mouth) is a skill for experienced cooks only, and Pop-Tarts are a food product marketed to people who don't cook for themselves mostly.
I'd like to see you cook something you've never cooked before without any directions. Go ahead -- roast a duck or do something tasty with jicama or even just warm up some random frozen food item in the toaster oven without knowing what temperature and how long you're supposed to heat it. Pop-Tart instructions are practical.
Are you implying that using the results of studies is not scientific?
Cherry-picking them in favor of a personal agenda based on deep-seated dislike for people who disagree with you isn't. Dawkins suffers from the same kind of confirmation bias against religious people that fundamentalists have against people like him.
"Increase Slashdot's losses?"
If $20 in employee compensation for a movie ticket and snacks will seriously affect a business of this site's size and age, then it's pretty much doomed already.
The US *should* be on a first to file system.
Why?
Why shouldn't the person or company that actually invented it first get the reward? Why should we put a premium on getting your legal paperwork in order first over getting your research and development done first? While I like the bit about people working on the same type of invention at the same time getting some immunity from patents issued to one of the parties, I don't see why the person with the fastest lawyers should be the one to profit from everyone who comes later.
A) Clicking on the link to read the comments was your choice, and...
B) You must be really new to Idle to expect anything else of the comments found on articles there.
Have to post anon, can't undo the downmod of your post a few ones up.
You're a professional complainer then?
And so it seems a waste of space, just ignore what you don't want to read and get on with your life, it's short enough already.
No irony there either. (And your futile attempts to mod me down shall only make me stronger!)
Seeing as I always get the two of them mixed up, I will take your word for it.
So you just skimmed the title and the summary, inadvertently failing to notice the idle tag, then clicked the link even though the story was clearly related to belly button lint. Moreover, having done so by what I can only assume is the purest accident, you read through the comments, and picked one to respond to?
No. Actually, I read the summary (which was the entire article for Slashdot purposes), was unimpressed with the content, then noticed the title with the Idle tag. I didn't click the link to the story, because it didn't interest me, and it was no coincidence that I read through the comments, because I was looking for similar minded people already complaining about its lack of front-page quality.
Why? Because to me, people griping about the story sucking was more interesting than the story itself. Your mileage obviously differs, but I don't see anything new that we didn't know from the work of the guy who won an IgNobel on the same subject matter in 2002.
Actually it's the mindless groupthink of the idle haters that is wasting my time, because I for one am curious about belly button lint, and rather than see comments relating to that topic, I have to suffer through the same stale rants about how someone saw idle and it hurt their little eyes and wasted their precious, precious time.
And thus your gripe about reading things that you don't like is superior to mine. No irony there. /smirk
If half of the "UK is out to get it's citizens" articles here are to be believed - you might as well give up and get out as it appears that the fascists have taken over the UK government and nothing you can do will make it otherwise short of a revolution.
Or just challenge it in the European Court of Human Rights. They're likely to view such a change as a clear violation of the Data Protection Directive unless they think they can seriously walk such broad lifting of protections under the exemptions.
People who view science purely from a utilitarian viewpoint of wanting instant monetary or technology returns like you are the reason for the death of the US lead in the sciences.
Also, as the other poster pointed out, he's not doing his research at a US institution, and I'd like to further point out that this is most likely a personal project of his. His usual research is a bit drier.
And now you know where to go to get some essential proteins, fats, sodium, and minerals! Plus fiber too!
It's not hypocritical to complain about something that bothers you per se. After all, I'm not wasting everyone's time on the front page with it. You actually have to go into the comments section to see it, and you wouldn't even see this post without clicking if people with mod points didn't agree.
On the other hand, wasting time complaining about other people wasting time complaining...
Because it's on the freaking front page. It's easy to either overlook the "Idle" tag in the title, when you're just skimming the story bodies or to get curious despite knowing better. I mean, it's like telling someone not to think of elephants -- it's too late already.
So why not complain? Idle is on rare occasions amusing to read when you've exhausted everything *else* that you normally read online, but it's not like it's "A-list" material* that deserves to be on the front page.
* Even for relative definitions of "A-list" material.
Well, not to be childish, but he started it by using the network in a way that (a) has been complained about by the designers of the network for years now, (b) is blocked by most exit nodes unless you deliberately change your port to avoid it.
Nearly EVERY article on using TOR with BitTorrent says "don't do it" and lays all this out. The only people who do this are people who *know* that it's discouraged and do it anyway. i.e. Jackasses.
How is this any different to P2P over TOR, except for the fact TOR exit nodes tend to block several 'standard' P2P ports (which is easily fixed by using a non-standard port for your P2P)?
Stop doing that. People block these ports for a reason, and that's because the network is not intended to handle this kind of load. People like you make using TOR miserable for everyone else.
I've been doing BitTorrent over TOR for a while now. What makes this so great?
Stop it, jackass. TOR is not designed for that. It severely degrades the latency of the network, and the network does not have the bandwidth to sustain numerous users doing large file-transfers over it. The network is intended for anonymous expression -- not to transfer DVD after DVD.
That's okay. I just need something set way back in the middle of a field. Just a funky old shack.
The operating system formerly known as Ubuntu?
You've never had to listen to music you don't like?
Can I have your tin shack when you're done with your manifesto?
Especially the fact that some of the lines are up to 20 miles apart from one another and the whole formation is almost 100 miles long and 50 tall. We're supposed to believe that 12000 years ago there was a city on a lone island that covered an area of 500 square miles?
Not to mention that the lines are all somehow preserved on the bottom of the ocean in an undisturbed fashion despite the notion that the island that was under the city some how went missing?
What, did the land just ever so gently lower the city to the bottom in the process of flatting out underneath it?
1. Yeah, yeah. It's a spelling mistake that I frequently make. And it's sad that that's your lead-in counterpoint.
2. It's one, frankly, that the libertarians embrace. Every single social program, taxation scheme, or other government initiative meant to level the playing field is vehemently despised by the Libertarian Party.
3. See reply to previous post. You have no more economic liberty in a system with no restraint on economic predators than you have personal liberty in a system with no restraint on violent ones.
While this is true, correlation is not causation...
You know, I hate anyone who pulls that phrase out in a knee-jerk manner like its the golden key to all wisdom without knowing a damned thing about what it means.
In this case, correlation is all that is important. This isn't axiom for proving in a court of law that someone actually is a domestic terrorist. This is grounds for a reasonable suspicion that they might be plugged into extreme right-wing subculture. It's grounds for suspecting that they might be a terrorist; not grounds to lock them up because they are one. It means, "Hey, pay attention to this guy. He might not be a harmless nut."
I don't keep a pocket copy of it on me or anything but I do firmly believe that a well thought out understanding of the Constitution is essential for being a citizen...
Well, I'd certainly agree that it's important!
But the problem is that the "keep a pocket copy on me" crowd frequently have a very bad understanding of the Constitution and think that you can define everything about the government's powers just by reading the document itself over and over again without any outside context and in complete dismissal of the precedents of the Supreme Court. These are the people who will decry practically anything they don't like about the federal government as unconstitutional, and these are the people who will immediately go to the "guns and revolution" solution as their dreamed way of solving the problem.
For these people, their interpretation of the Constitution is almost religious, with anyone who interprets it differently being evil and tyrannical. It from this seed that the roots of domestic terrorism grow, and where it becomes acceptable to bomb building; those people are all agents of tyranny and thus "fair game."
The real thing that I take issue with here is that mere possession of /any/ readily-available document could be grounds for suspicion.
Look, I neither support invasive tracking of what citizens read like the PATRIOT Act supports, nor do I think that reading any literature, whether subversive or patriotic should be grounds for a warrant, much less a full criminal investigation.
But, I think you can't close your eyes when someone starts advocating violent revolution instead of just reading about it, and I don't think police should have to close their eyes and hum loudly to prevent themselves from getting a hunch about someone. If someone has a serious "I think I'm living in a tyrannical state; we should all be arming up" stance, the police shouldn't have to put blinders on about it and should be able to follow up on hunches within the boundaries of law and in keeping with respect to the 4th Amendment.
I want them wrapped. Same as my gifts.
Stuffed hastily into a box, wrapped up to hide it, and tucked away under a tree somewhere?
You and Hans Reiser need to hang out less. ('Course, he got his in the mail too...)
They aren't wrong, but I'm sick of doing anti-virus updates, tired of all the malware, and I don't care anymore if they take my name so I can have an internet where I don't have to worry if downloading some EXE will screw up my machine.
It's a nice idea. But I'm just fed up with the crime.
Ah, so you're for trading liberty for security, then?
Taking away anonymity won't help with any of that without a complete, total, and frankly magical redesign of the internet and of computers in general to not allow ANY transaction without identifying yourself and to be perfectly secure against hacking (to prevent people from spoofing other people's IDs).
Then again, if we had computers that were perfectly secure against hacking, you'd never have to worry about viruses, malware, or bad EXEs in the first place even with anonymity.
So, economic liberties don't count? Everyone draws the freedom line somewhere.
Personally, I think being free from private predation is just as important as being free from government predation. Libertarians only care about the government side of the oppression coin and ignore that power abhors a vacuum. Economic liberty requires that we keep both in check.
Also, libertarians rarely account for economic externalities in their notions of economic liberty and ignore how freedoms for one person may seriously hurt a lot of other people. (e.g. Pollution.)
Oh, and it's Gilded Age (as in golden).
Yeah, yeah. I know where the word comes from, but I keep forgetting "gilded" is spelled that way. Bad habit. Irritating as it is, thanks for pointing that out.