Do they require lobotomies for Congress now, or are they just naturally morons?
Adults often discuss non-pornographic things which are not suitable for children. E.g., let's discuss the medical experiments done in the Nazi death camps (or Japanese biological experiments in China), complete with pictures. Nobody will be sexually aroused by those pix, but nobody would want a child (12 or under) to see them either. Are they to be forced into.prn?
It's much better to create a TLD specifically targeted for kids. E.g.,.kids. People and organizations getting.kids domains could be required to agree to acceptable content, and concerned parents could block everything except.kids if they cared about this.
Meanwhile the rest of us wouldn't be forced to go to cnn.prn to get stories that might upset the kiddies.
Y2K played down too much
on
Byte Wars
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Computers crash every day...."
Sure. But we weren't concerned about the average number of computers crashing, we were concerned about more computers crashing than normal. And these crashes being more difficult to fix than usual because so many people wrote their own (broken) date routines - there was no single point of failure. This could lead to cascade failures and it was not clear that any natural firebreaks existed to limit the damage.
The best analogy is probably the road net and accidents. You can usually handle a single big accident without a problem. Even two. But at some point you have so many accidents that the system can't cope. But even one really bad accident can shut down traffic citywide for hours, e.g., the torpedo spill at the intersection of I-25 and I-70 in Denver.
We saw this phenomenum in action after 9/11, when the air traffic system shut down, and later when there was the anthrax scare.
Was Y2K oversold? Of course, but the worst offenders were non-techies pushing their own questionable goods or techies trying to reach management too focused on a 6- or 12-month window.
It's easy to determine if someone is impaired - the roadside sobriety tests are specific enough (and now are routinely videotaped) that they would be hard to challenge.
But the problem is justifying that test. (Same thing with the BAC tests.) Someone weaving all over the road is clearly impaired, but what about someone "driving too carefully?"
Go to any state with citizen initiatives, and look at what they come up with.
You WANT laws to be written by lawyers, or at least people with a good legal sense. Laws written by non-lawyers tend to be ambiguous at best, actually contrary to what they intended at worst.
Tbe problem is when you have lawyers thinking they should act as gatekeepers to the legal system. Like some of the lawyers here. The laws should be easily understood by the average adult, with lawyers providing insight into specific case law and acting as an unbiased observer who can point out things overlooked by their client due to emotions.
I agree that, historically, 18 (or 21) was the age when people were well-enough informed to act as adults.
But over the past decade or two we've seen a lot of laws that deliberately infantize teens. We don't just see modest sex ed ("what is puberty?") taken out of lower grades, we've seen it removed from high school as well. If you cover anything other than abstinence, the conservative right screams bloody murder.
Likewise we've seen net filter laws that apply to all grades equally. It doesn't matter if a student is 17, married and legally emancipated or 7, the net filters make no distinction in what information is available to them.
Even outside of schools we're seeing more age restrictions than before. There used to be mixed-aged clubs, but the increasingly strict liquor license requirements have largely eliminated them.
Finally they're the common target of "zero sense" laws. Class validictorians expelled because their car contained a knife in the commercially prepared first aid kit. Or even more incredibly, a student was expelled for a year because someone tossed a knife into the open bed of his pickup truck! Mandatory revocation of drivers license until age 21 if *any* alcohol is found on breath - even if it's due to OTC cold medicine or mouth wash. Mandatory loss of financial aid if *any* pot is found in their possession.
There's a reason why adults are rarely subjected to ZT laws, but they don't apply to infants.
Nobody can seriously think that teens aren't aware of the issues facing adults... but they're getting a distorted view and not able to make "small" mistakes.
Re:The Theory of Panspermia
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2
There's no doubt that we're finding amino acids in interstellar dust, but it's a huge step from amino acids to life. Where is the energy coming from? The consumables?
In contrast, the theory that life started in gaps in clay near a shorelines has energy from both sun and surf, consumables brought in on the water, etc. It's a lot easier to see a self-reproducing chemical system getting started and taking off.
On a related note, many states had split drinking ages - 18 for 3.1 beer, 21 for hard liquor. The theory was that it's hard to get really drunk on 3.1 beer and this would give young adults a chance to learn their tolerance to alcohol before they started the hard stuff.
But the national drinking age of 21 blew that away. On your 21st birthday, you're expected to go from teetotaller to someone competent to know your limit when served Long Island Iced Teas.
In practice, the zero tolerance policies have actually resulted in far worse binge drinking. When I was a teenager, the drinking age was 18 for both beer and spirits and many parents looked the other way when HS students sneaked a beer or two from a senior. But now parents don't dare turn a blind eye and the teenagers know that the system makes no distinction between nursing a can of beer for hours and getting wasted, so they drive to remote locations and drink heavily. Then the parents wonder how five could be killed at a train crossing, or how a "good student" could cross an interstate median at 80 MPH and kill a father and critically injure the rest of his father.
Re:The Theory of Panspermia
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2
One big problem with the theory of panspermia is that it just pushes back the questions. If life didn't start on earth, fine. Then how did it start?
David Brin's uplift series
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2
Ironically, one possibility is addressed in David Brin's "uplift" series (Startide Rising, Uplift War, etc.) Only instead of being the brash wolfling race, we would be the Progenitors that first started uplifting other species.
But as a practical matter we would just overwhelm any existing life on these planets. Even our "primitive" life forms have billions of years of evolution on the competition, and they wouldn't stand a chance.
Sure we have. Look at the solar spectrums. Older stars have less metals (and remember that to an astronomer a "metal" is anything heavier than helium), younger stars have more metals. I think there's also a connection with distance from the center of the galaxy - further in you have more metals, further out you have fewer metals.
This makes sense - metals are distributed in planetary nebula and supernova explosions (and the heavier metals are only produced in SN explosions), and the gas clouds that give birth to stars are increasingly 'polluted' over time. The gas cloud that the solar system formed in was probably close to a supernova explosion - the shock wave both compressed the gas (leading to stellar formation) and deposited an unusual amount of metal in it.
When astronomers compare our sun to similar main sequence stars, we have significantly more metals. But we don't know that that means about their planetary systems - are they limited to small rocky bodies (Mercury, Mars) in addition to Jovians? Earth-like planets with a frozen core (no magnetic field, erosion reducing everything to a submerged swamp)? Or maybe an earth-like planet incapable of supporting any civilization higher than basic agriculture?
On the flip side, IIRC the youngest stars have the same amount of metals as us. This means that we could find millions of inhabitable planets where life is still at the 'ocean slime' stage.
BTW, the "Iceball Earth" scenario was covered in Scientific American a year or two ago, in addition to the documentary airing on the Discovery Channel. The "metals" analysis was covered in Analog (IIRC).
If we let the so-called conservatives have their way, the day before her 18th birthday that cute little thing shouldn't even be aware that pornography exists (much less that the pictures last forever) or aware that people will pay her money to take her clothes off. As for sex, that's something she'll learn about on her wedding night.
But at midnight she's thrown to the wolves - it's legal for some sleazy operator to sign her up to not only take off her clothes on film, but to have engage in all types of sex.
Fortunately some judges have (finally) started to realize that applying laws intended to protect children - real children, no more than 10 or 12 - from the harsher facts of life are morally reprehensible when they're applied to teenagers. It's better to shock a sheltered 15- or 16-year-old than to leave an 18-year-old unprepared for life. But Congress is still getting away with crappy laws - they get to pander to the idiots back home while counting on the courts to eventually save themselves from their own folly.
Iceball Earth
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There's strong evidence that the earth was once an iceball yet life not only survived, it had an unprecedent and unmatched explosion of diversity after the Thaw.
The problem with the earlier models is that they only considered the incoming solar radiation and the ice. Shortly after the oceans froze over, the surface temperature near the equator was -50F and stayed there for many thousands of years.
But the earth (and any tectonically active planet) has volcanoes. Volcanoes release greenhouse gases, notably CO. According to one estimate I saw on the Discovery Channel (IIRC), the CO level hit _10%_ and the surface temperature was something like 150F before the ice started to melt. (Remember that the conversion from ice to water takes a *lot* of energy, and there was only poor thermal coupling between the hot atmosphere and frozen ocean.) Once the ice started breaking up, there was a cascade effect that lead to a thousand years of acid rain as the CO was washed out of the atmosphere.
And after the Thaw, we had the Cambrian(?) Explosion, the transition from the simple single-celled organism (the only life that could survive under the shattered sea ice) to multicellular life.
This begs the question - is an "iceball" stage a necessary precondition to multicellular life? If it is, and the fact that most life-bearing planets will have an iceball stage since stars become brighter over their lifetime as main sequence stars, then a key part of their argument is invalid. Life-bearing planets will have ice-ball stages, and multi-cellular life will appear after the Thaw.
As an aside, one thing that's unique about the solar system is the unusually high level of metals for a system of our age. Maybe complex life requires these metals, and we're a few billion years too early.
My HS library had a copy of that book... and even then I was surprised. Then again, that library saw less action than the Hellmouth library in Buffy, so they probably figured that leaving it on the shelves was the best way to ensure a student would never stumble upon it.
Still, I would be surprised if the book is still on the shelves today, over 20 years later.
The reason for the bad Denver smog was thermal inversions where a layer of cold air near the ground was capped by warmer air above. That's why it could be sub-zero on the plains, but 20-30 degrees warmer if you went into the mountains.
We still have those inversions (and "no burn days"), but the bad smog was largely eliminated as newer, cleaner cars replaced the older fleet. Unfortunately we still have a stupid oxygenated fuels program in the winter months, and pollution levels are rising again (but still below Federal guidelines) due to large number of people who moved into Denver and insisted on big SUVs for the "lifestyle" nonsense.
But wait until we've been burning hydrogen-powered cars for a thousand years, locking up all of the atmospheric oxygen in water. People will be gasping for air at sea level, and the 'dead zone' on mountains (which the oxygen level is too low to support human life) will include cities like Denver and Mexico City.
You worry about what your boss tells you to do while on the job.
I'm worried about a boss having the legal right to fire employees because they're gay. Or they're not married. Or because they're married, but don't have kids yet. Or they do have children, but aren't married yet.
You worry about the boss blocking web sites at work.
I'm worried about a boss firing people because he came across evidence that they went into an adult bookstore... or even just an R-rated movie. Or the "wrong section" of a very good bookstore. (Think Tattered Cover in Denver, or even a Border's with a large section on human sexuality or other "controversial" subjects.)
You worry about the boss keeping people from talking politics during their lunch break.
I'm worried about a boss deciding to fire people because they're politically active "for the wrong causes" on their own time.
You worry about employers controlling every word a person types on the job.
I'm worried about employers demanding the IP rights to everything an employee does AT ANY TIME while an employee. Including projects they developed at their own expense on evenings and weekends. This attitude was common a few years ago, then got beaten back in the courts, but seems to be making a rebound.
Finally there's the whole drug-testing issue pushed by the feds. I do not support someone working while high. But I don't see how firing people at random because of false positives (since everyone except the DEA understands that these tests are not perfect), or for going to the "wrong concert" on the weekend (where others are smoking and you pick up some second-hand smoke) will make the workplace safer.
You may think my examples are made up, but they're not. Most states have "hire at will" laws and employees can be fired for any reason, or none at all, without prior notice. Only a handful of reasons can't be used, and it's virtually impossible to prove that the true reason for your termination was one of these excluded reasons.
Damn it, what part of "Freedom of Speech" do people not get?
History has made it clear that the people pay dearly when free speech, esp. free speech regarding a matter of community security, is abridged. Telling us that Acme locks are easily broken does not protect us from criminals who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves, it only serves to give us a false sense of security.
(As an aside, this is also the foundation of some of the most damning condemnations I've seen of "child protection" laws. As some judges have observed, the true obscenity is attempting to protect minors from all adult concerns until their 18th birthday... at which point they are thrown to the wolves with absolutely no preparation for the very real challenges adults must face.)
A virus exchange site is similar. Yes, there will be some idiots (who deserve to have the full wrath of the law on them for their acts) who will use those viruses for ill will. But the same sites will also allow others to be warned that viruses against this specific software exists and is in the wild. No more Microsoft stonewalling about the existence of such attacks. No more trivializing them as highly specialized and not a concern to the average user.
This is a bit scary... but that's part of being an adult. A child can go to bed at peace that the closet is empty of monsters, but part of being an adult is knowing that there are bad guys out there *and* that you've done everything you can to keep them away. I, for one, and getting damn tired of my self-appointed "betters" trying to infantilize me.
Many cities have laws declaring these signs public nuisances because they post a significant threat to public safety.
Some fliers have been put on utility boxes, sometimes blocking vents or making access more difficult because they covered hinges or latches. In the worst case scenarios the equipment can fail (due to blocked ventilation) or even catch on fire, and public services (e.g., road signals) fail.
Some fliers are on a stuff boarding that blocks the view of drivers of other traffic, traffic control signals, or pedestrians.
Finally, even the flat papers are often distracting because of bright colors, etc. And, legally, it's easier to ban everything than to try to write legislation that allows some fliers while refusing others.
In light of these problems - problems which are not abstract fears but real problems reported in real traffic accidents where people were injured - it's obscene to call this postering "reasonable and non-destructive." There are extensive regulations on the right-of-way of roadways for a reason, and the desire of some cheapskates for free advertising does not negate the very real problems those regulations are designed to address.
I thought he was referring to those singing plastic fish that were heavily advertised a few Christmases ago.
I didn't think they got much radio airplay, or had much bass for that matter (weren't they trout?), but I stopped listening to Corporate Radio years ago and I've heard weirder things promoted.
First, the way the US is set up forces any interstate fraud issue onto the FBI. Your local police can handle intra-state complaints, but they have no jurisdiction once a problem crosses the state line. They can forward the complaint to the other state, but as a practical matter it will get bumped to the national agency with jurisdiction - the FBI.
Second, we don't know that these are all small scams. A lot of scam artists have learned to keep each individual scam small (<$500, say) to avoid triggering local attention. It's only when you realize that it's a group working together that have scammed thousands of people that you discover this "small complaint" is actually part of a multi-million dollar fraud ring. And that is definitely large enough for the FBI's attention.
Educated people have known that the earth was round since antiquity. They weren't dumb and there was plenty of evidence - lunar eclipses, ships disappearing over the horizon, etc. They even had a relatively good estimate of the size of the earth.
In fact, that's why Columbus had a hard time finding a backer for his journey. Everyone knew the approximate size of the earth. Columbus, the bozo, had the numbers wrong. He avoided disaster only because of incredible luck in hitting an unanticipated continent. Think of how different history would be North America were further west, if the Atlantic was the large ocean.
The guy with no formal education and who never traveled more than a dozen miles from the place of his birth might have thought the earth was flat, but more likely he never thought about the shape of the earth at all. But he was no more the final word on "what people believed" than the trailer trash watching Jerry Springer is of our society.
Yes, Freedoms of Speech and Press includes the right of others to listen/read in peace.
This means that the police can't hassle the audience - they can't question you, or demand you identify yourself, or even (arguably) photograph the crowd in an aggressive manner. This is especially noteworthy in light of the recent disclosure that the Denver Police (and remember that it was a Denver DA that signed off on this after the cop's own DA refused to) have been maintaining overly-broad files on "gang" members.
The police can still act in the name of compelling public interest, e.g., keeping people from spilling onto the street, from blocking passage by others, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they require lobotomies for Congress now, or are they just naturally morons?
.prn?
.kids. People and organizations getting .kids domains could be required to agree to acceptable content, and concerned parents could block everything except .kids if they cared about this.
Adults often discuss non-pornographic things which are not suitable for children. E.g., let's discuss the medical experiments done in the Nazi death camps (or Japanese biological experiments in China), complete with pictures. Nobody will be sexually aroused by those pix, but nobody would want a child (12 or under) to see them either. Are they to be forced into
It's much better to create a TLD specifically targeted for kids. E.g.,
Meanwhile the rest of us wouldn't be forced to go to cnn.prn to get stories that might upset the kiddies.
"Computers crash every day...."
Sure. But we weren't concerned about the average number of computers crashing, we were concerned about more computers crashing than normal. And these crashes being more difficult to fix than usual because so many people wrote their own (broken) date routines - there was no single point of failure. This could lead to cascade failures and it was not clear that any natural firebreaks existed to limit the damage.
The best analogy is probably the road net and accidents. You can usually handle a single big accident without a problem. Even two. But at some point you have so many accidents that the system can't cope. But even one really bad accident can shut down traffic citywide for hours, e.g., the torpedo spill at the intersection of I-25 and I-70 in Denver.
We saw this phenomenum in action after 9/11, when the air traffic system shut down, and later when there was the anthrax scare.
Was Y2K oversold? Of course, but the worst offenders were non-techies pushing their own questionable goods or techies trying to reach management too focused on a 6- or 12-month window.
It's easy to determine if someone is impaired - the roadside sobriety tests are specific enough (and now are routinely videotaped) that they would be hard to challenge.
But the problem is justifying that test. (Same thing with the BAC tests.) Someone weaving all over the road is clearly impaired, but what about someone "driving too carefully?"
Go to any state with citizen initiatives, and look at what they come up with.
You WANT laws to be written by lawyers, or at least people with a good legal sense. Laws written by non-lawyers tend to be ambiguous at best, actually contrary to what they intended at worst.
Tbe problem is when you have lawyers thinking they should act as gatekeepers to the legal system. Like some of the lawyers here. The laws should be easily understood by the average adult, with lawyers providing insight into specific case law and acting as an unbiased observer who can point out things overlooked by their client due to emotions.
I agree that, historically, 18 (or 21) was the age when people were well-enough informed to act as adults.
But over the past decade or two we've seen a lot of laws that deliberately infantize teens. We don't just see modest sex ed ("what is puberty?") taken out of lower grades, we've seen it removed from high school as well. If you cover anything other than abstinence, the conservative right screams bloody murder.
Likewise we've seen net filter laws that apply to all grades equally. It doesn't matter if a student is 17, married and legally emancipated or 7, the net filters make no distinction in what information is available to them.
Even outside of schools we're seeing more age restrictions than before. There used to be mixed-aged clubs, but the increasingly strict liquor license requirements have largely eliminated them.
Finally they're the common target of "zero sense" laws. Class validictorians expelled because their car contained a knife in the commercially prepared first aid kit. Or even more incredibly, a student was expelled for a year because someone tossed a knife into the open bed of his pickup truck! Mandatory revocation of drivers license until age 21 if *any* alcohol is found on breath - even if it's due to OTC cold medicine or mouth wash. Mandatory loss of financial aid if *any* pot is found in their possession.
There's a reason why adults are rarely subjected to ZT laws, but they don't apply to infants.
Nobody can seriously think that teens aren't aware of the issues facing adults... but they're getting a distorted view and not able to make "small" mistakes.
There's no doubt that we're finding amino acids in interstellar dust, but it's a huge step from amino acids to life. Where is the energy coming from? The consumables?
In contrast, the theory that life started in gaps in clay near a shorelines has energy from both sun and surf, consumables brought in on the water, etc. It's a lot easier to see a self-reproducing chemical system getting started and taking off.
I gotta ask... if I forget to flush the toilet, is it an Honor Code violation if somebody else flushes it for me?
Don't be too quick to answer - maybe I need a stool sample for one of those 'blood in stool' tests and forgot the test kit until the deed was done.
On a related note, many states had split drinking ages - 18 for 3.1 beer, 21 for hard liquor. The theory was that it's hard to get really drunk on 3.1 beer and this would give young adults a chance to learn their tolerance to alcohol before they started the hard stuff.
But the national drinking age of 21 blew that away. On your 21st birthday, you're expected to go from teetotaller to someone competent to know your limit when served Long Island Iced Teas.
In practice, the zero tolerance policies have actually resulted in far worse binge drinking. When I was a teenager, the drinking age was 18 for both beer and spirits and many parents looked the other way when HS students sneaked a beer or two from a senior. But now parents don't dare turn a blind eye and the teenagers know that the system makes no distinction between nursing a can of beer for hours and getting wasted, so they drive to remote locations and drink heavily. Then the parents wonder how five could be killed at a train crossing, or how a "good student" could cross an interstate median at 80 MPH and kill a father and critically injure the rest of his father.
One big problem with the theory of panspermia is that it just pushes back the questions. If life didn't start on earth, fine. Then how did it start?
Ironically, one possibility is addressed in David Brin's "uplift" series (Startide Rising, Uplift War, etc.) Only instead of being the brash wolfling race, we would be the Progenitors that first started uplifting other species.
But as a practical matter we would just overwhelm any existing life on these planets. Even our "primitive" life forms have billions of years of evolution on the competition, and they wouldn't stand a chance.
Sure we have. Look at the solar spectrums. Older stars have less metals (and remember that to an astronomer a "metal" is anything heavier than helium), younger stars have more metals. I think there's also a connection with distance from the center of the galaxy - further in you have more metals, further out you have fewer metals.
This makes sense - metals are distributed in planetary nebula and supernova explosions (and the heavier metals are only produced in SN explosions), and the gas clouds that give birth to stars are increasingly 'polluted' over time. The gas cloud that the solar system formed in was probably close to a supernova explosion - the shock wave both compressed the gas (leading to stellar formation) and deposited an unusual amount of metal in it.
When astronomers compare our sun to similar main sequence stars, we have significantly more metals. But we don't know that that means about their planetary systems - are they limited to small rocky bodies (Mercury, Mars) in addition to Jovians? Earth-like planets with a frozen core (no magnetic field, erosion reducing everything to a submerged swamp)? Or maybe an earth-like planet incapable of supporting any civilization higher than basic agriculture?
On the flip side, IIRC the youngest stars have the same amount of metals as us. This means that we could find millions of inhabitable planets where life is still at the 'ocean slime' stage.
BTW, the "Iceball Earth" scenario was covered in Scientific American a year or two ago, in addition to the documentary airing on the Discovery Channel. The "metals" analysis was covered in Analog (IIRC).
The situation is far worse than that.
If we let the so-called conservatives have their way, the day before her 18th birthday that cute little thing shouldn't even be aware that pornography exists (much less that the pictures last forever) or aware that people will pay her money to take her clothes off. As for sex, that's something she'll learn about on her wedding night.
But at midnight she's thrown to the wolves - it's legal for some sleazy operator to sign her up to not only take off her clothes on film, but to have engage in all types of sex.
Fortunately some judges have (finally) started to realize that applying laws intended to protect children - real children, no more than 10 or 12 - from the harsher facts of life are morally reprehensible when they're applied to teenagers. It's better to shock a sheltered 15- or 16-year-old than to leave an 18-year-old unprepared for life. But Congress is still getting away with crappy laws - they get to pander to the idiots back home while counting on the courts to eventually save themselves from their own folly.
There's strong evidence that the earth was once an iceball yet life not only survived, it had an unprecedent and unmatched explosion of diversity after the Thaw.
The problem with the earlier models is that they only considered the incoming solar radiation and the ice. Shortly after the oceans froze over, the surface temperature near the equator was -50F and stayed there for many thousands of years.
But the earth (and any tectonically active planet) has volcanoes. Volcanoes release greenhouse gases, notably CO. According to one estimate I saw on the Discovery Channel (IIRC), the CO level hit _10%_ and the surface temperature was something like 150F before the ice started to melt. (Remember that the conversion from ice to water takes a *lot* of energy, and there was only poor thermal coupling between the hot atmosphere and frozen ocean.) Once the ice started breaking up, there was a cascade effect that lead to a thousand years of acid rain as the CO was washed out of the atmosphere.
And after the Thaw, we had the Cambrian(?) Explosion, the transition from the simple single-celled organism (the only life that could survive under the shattered sea ice) to multicellular life.
This begs the question - is an "iceball" stage a necessary precondition to multicellular life? If it is, and the fact that most life-bearing planets will have an iceball stage since stars become brighter over their lifetime as main sequence stars, then a key part of their argument is invalid. Life-bearing planets will have ice-ball stages, and multi-cellular life will appear after the Thaw.
As an aside, one thing that's unique about the solar system is the unusually high level of metals for a system of our age. Maybe complex life requires these metals, and we're a few billion years too early.
My HS library had a copy of that book... and even then I was surprised. Then again, that library saw less action than the Hellmouth library in Buffy, so they probably figured that leaving it on the shelves was the best way to ensure a student would never stumble upon it.
Still, I would be surprised if the book is still on the shelves today, over 20 years later.
The reason for the bad Denver smog was thermal inversions where a layer of cold air near the ground was capped by warmer air above. That's why it could be sub-zero on the plains, but 20-30 degrees warmer if you went into the mountains.
We still have those inversions (and "no burn days"), but the bad smog was largely eliminated as newer, cleaner cars replaced the older fleet. Unfortunately we still have a stupid oxygenated fuels program in the winter months, and pollution levels are rising again (but still below Federal guidelines) due to large number of people who moved into Denver and insisted on big SUVs for the "lifestyle" nonsense.
Come on, people, it was a joke. A deliberate attempt to imitate the "there's no silver lining so bright that it doesn't contain a dark cloud" crowd.
Sure, it sounds like a neat idea now.
But wait until we've been burning hydrogen-powered cars for a thousand years, locking up all of the atmospheric oxygen in water. People will be gasping for air at sea level, and the 'dead zone' on mountains (which the oxygen level is too low to support human life) will include cities like Denver and Mexico City.
What planet are you from?!
You worry about what your boss tells you to do while on the job.
I'm worried about a boss having the legal right to fire employees because they're gay. Or they're not married. Or because they're married, but don't have kids yet. Or they do have children, but aren't married yet.
You worry about the boss blocking web sites at work.
I'm worried about a boss firing people because he came across evidence that they went into an adult bookstore... or even just an R-rated movie. Or the "wrong section" of a very good bookstore. (Think Tattered Cover in Denver, or even a Border's with a large section on human sexuality or other "controversial" subjects.)
You worry about the boss keeping people from talking politics during their lunch break.
I'm worried about a boss deciding to fire people because they're politically active "for the wrong causes" on their own time.
You worry about employers controlling every word a person types on the job.
I'm worried about employers demanding the IP rights to everything an employee does AT ANY TIME while an employee. Including projects they developed at their own expense on evenings and weekends. This attitude was common a few years ago, then got beaten back in the courts, but seems to be making a rebound.
Finally there's the whole drug-testing issue pushed by the feds. I do not support someone working while high. But I don't see how firing people at random because of false positives (since everyone except the DEA understands that these tests are not perfect), or for going to the "wrong concert" on the weekend (where others are smoking and you pick up some second-hand smoke) will make the workplace safer.
You may think my examples are made up, but they're not. Most states have "hire at will" laws and employees can be fired for any reason, or none at all, without prior notice. Only a handful of reasons can't be used, and it's virtually impossible to prove that the true reason for your termination was one of these excluded reasons.
So what? The advertisers can hope for whatever they want but it's a public space and they have absolutely no expectation of control of their image.
Damn it, what part of "Freedom of Speech" do people not get?
History has made it clear that the people pay dearly when free speech, esp. free speech regarding a matter of community security, is abridged. Telling us that Acme locks are easily broken does not protect us from criminals who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves, it only serves to give us a false sense of security.
(As an aside, this is also the foundation of some of the most damning condemnations I've seen of "child protection" laws. As some judges have observed, the true obscenity is attempting to protect minors from all adult concerns until their 18th birthday... at which point they are thrown to the wolves with absolutely no preparation for the very real challenges adults must face.)
A virus exchange site is similar. Yes, there will be some idiots (who deserve to have the full wrath of the law on them for their acts) who will use those viruses for ill will. But the same sites will also allow others to be warned that viruses against this specific software exists and is in the wild. No more Microsoft stonewalling about the existence of such attacks. No more trivializing them as highly specialized and not a concern to the average user.
This is a bit scary... but that's part of being an adult. A child can go to bed at peace that the closet is empty of monsters, but part of being an adult is knowing that there are bad guys out there *and* that you've done everything you can to keep them away. I, for one, and getting damn tired of my self-appointed "betters" trying to infantilize me.
Many cities have laws declaring these signs public nuisances because they post a significant threat to public safety.
Some fliers have been put on utility boxes, sometimes blocking vents or making access more difficult because they covered hinges or latches. In the worst case scenarios the equipment can fail (due to blocked ventilation) or even catch on fire, and public services (e.g., road signals) fail.
Some fliers are on a stuff boarding that blocks the view of drivers of other traffic, traffic control signals, or pedestrians.
Finally, even the flat papers are often distracting because of bright colors, etc. And, legally, it's easier to ban everything than to try to write legislation that allows some fliers while refusing others.
In light of these problems - problems which are not abstract fears but real problems reported in real traffic accidents where people were injured - it's obscene to call this postering "reasonable and non-destructive." There are extensive regulations on the right-of-way of roadways for a reason, and the desire of some cheapskates for free advertising does not negate the very real problems those regulations are designed to address.
I thought he was referring to those singing plastic fish that were heavily advertised a few Christmases ago.
I didn't think they got much radio airplay, or had much bass for that matter (weren't they trout?), but I stopped listening to Corporate Radio years ago and I've heard weirder things promoted.
Only two problems with your pity.
First, the way the US is set up forces any interstate fraud issue onto the FBI. Your local police can handle intra-state complaints, but they have no jurisdiction once a problem crosses the state line. They can forward the complaint to the other state, but as a practical matter it will get bumped to the national agency with jurisdiction - the FBI.
Second, we don't know that these are all small scams. A lot of scam artists have learned to keep each individual scam small (<$500, say) to avoid triggering local attention. It's only when you realize that it's a group working together that have scammed thousands of people that you discover this "small complaint" is actually part of a multi-million dollar fraud ring. And that is definitely large enough for the FBI's attention.
Why does this myth keep coming up?
Educated people have known that the earth was round since antiquity. They weren't dumb and there was plenty of evidence - lunar eclipses, ships disappearing over the horizon, etc. They even had a relatively good estimate of the size of the earth.
In fact, that's why Columbus had a hard time finding a backer for his journey. Everyone knew the approximate size of the earth. Columbus, the bozo, had the numbers wrong. He avoided disaster only because of incredible luck in hitting an unanticipated continent. Think of how different history would be North America were further west, if the Atlantic was the large ocean.
The guy with no formal education and who never traveled more than a dozen miles from the place of his birth might have thought the earth was flat, but more likely he never thought about the shape of the earth at all. But he was no more the final word on "what people believed" than the trailer trash watching Jerry Springer is of our society.
Yes, Freedoms of Speech and Press includes the right of others to listen/read in peace.
This means that the police can't hassle the audience - they can't question you, or demand you identify yourself, or even (arguably) photograph the crowd in an aggressive manner. This is especially noteworthy in light of the recent disclosure that the Denver Police (and remember that it was a Denver DA that signed off on this after the cop's own DA refused to) have been maintaining overly-broad files on "gang" members.
The police can still act in the name of compelling public interest, e.g., keeping people from spilling onto the street, from blocking passage by others, etc.