I think in time the definition will change: by definition, if a "security official" does it, it's not a molest.
As someone else pointed out, this isn't about security, it's about training us to allow invasive searches without due process. Which includes training us to accept that whatever Authority does is acceptable.
Inevitable expenses... Who's gonna pay them? With civil cases, quite often an innocent party who just happened to have enough money to make them worth suing.
Yeah, everything has a cost. But that's not the point of the ambulance chaser philosophy of "Someone Must Pay!" That point is to create blame where none truly existed, for the purpose of extracting money, of which the lawyer takes 30% to 50%.
Yes, sometimes it's reasonable to "make someone pay" (achieve a fitting vengeance). But other times... it's like this case, not even reasonsable as *revenge* (what rational person takes revenge on a child, or for an accident?)
The trouble is we've gotten into a legal habit of assuming someone is ALWAYS at fault, and therefore... "someone must pay", even if that's completely irrational. Of course, it's also the most profitable situation for the ambulance-chasing lawyers.
By the same token, should a frail 87 year old woman be allowed to roam the sidewalks without assistance? Should she be left to her own devices, unprotected from every risk -- tripping over uneven pavement; stepping off the curb and landing wrong; her own perhaps-failing vision that didn't warn her of an oncoming hazard, such as toddlers on bicycles??
Perhaps her family should be sued for letting her out on her own, without their aid and protection. Perhaps she should be sued for failing to get out of the way of an obvious hazard, such as uncoordinated toddlers on bicycles.
Or maybe we should recognise that unless everyone lives in a bubble, sometimes stupid accidents happen and people get hurt, and no one party is to blame.
I think that's a reasonable conjecture, now that you bring it up.
As someone above linked (http://www.healthnews.com/blogs/cary-presant/family-health/aging-getter-older/broken-bones-risk-death-elderly-2964.html ), fractures are a fatality risk in the elderly. The lawyer's "job" is now to transmute this unfortunate fact of life into a monetized asset.:(
Not quite. In the elderly, any time being bedridden can be fatal due to various complications that can set in. They need not start off especially fragile.
That said, I agree entirely with Hairyfeet -- kids are KIDS, and maybe the old lady's family should have been looking out for her a bit better in the first place.
And maybe we should admit that sometimes accidents are just accidents, and no one is particularly to blame. The old lady and the kids, neither being at the coordinated prime of life, were likely about equally incapable of dodging each other, and Shit Happened.
The trouble with today's litigious society is that it's founded on the notion that *Someone Must Pay!* and this leads to ludicrous situations like suing little kids over stupid accidents.
The conclusion is clear. The Neanderthals went extinct due to an insufficiency of booze, cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol...
I'm of 1955 vintage and have been reading since I was 3 or 4... but maybe I've just got an older collection of books. I first noticed the ads with older dog-training reference works (which is what I've got the most of, going back to the 1920s) but have seen it in old novels too (back into the 1880s or so). Some of these are old enough that the ads are for patent medicines.
And I learned that the past tense of "lead" was also "lead" but if you write that nowadays, no one understands what you meant. Don't know what the origin is but at a guess something Anglo-Saxon. I expect in another generation we'll have to write "read, red" for the young punks to grok that we meant the past tense. Red meaning the colour will be right out; you'll have to say "cherry" or "strawberry" or maybe even "#ff0000" to be understood.;)
Coincidentally, someone just emailed me a gripe about ambiguous punctuation, which I responded to with a reference to "Eats, Shoots and Leaves".:)
I don't know, maybe it was an American-publisher thing, but it used to be more routine than not. I have a bunch of older books (1900-1920ish) with ad pages in the back, and a ton of 1950s/60s/70s paperbacks that have (well, had, I removed them all) the glossy insert ad page.
Magazines used to have their ads more confined to one area in the back too, rather than every other page being either an ad or a thinly-disguised infomercial.
Actually you could strip the ads out of deadtree books, all it took was 5 seconds with a scissor or razor blade, and halfway-fair aim. (When you see an old book with a bunch of the last few pages missing, that's probably what happened.)
But the real point was that other than noticing they were there, you weren't forced to view them. Nothing prevented you from turning the page and totally ignoring them, or never going that far in the first place. (Tho the insert in paperbacks was a bit obnoxious because it made a stiff spot in the book, and sometimes a weak point at the spine.)
If we can ignore or bypass ads in ebooks, then who cares, let them advertise. But if they're thrust into our faces like it or not and before we can read the rest of the book -- that's a great way to either fail, or as you say, incite the legions of pissed-off coders.
You young whippersnappers wouldn't remember this, but back in the Olden Days most deadtree books contained advertising. Paperbacks typically had a glossy insert in the middle (most often a cigarette ad), and hardbacks had several pages of ads in the back, usually something at least vaguely relevant to the book's content, and also sometimes ads for other books (and not only from that book's publisher).
It occurs to me that if ads were placed at the end of the ebook (much as ads in hardbacks used to be at the back of the book) there's incentive to improve content, to get the average reader to finish the book and see the ads.
My oldest still-working IDE is a 20 MEG W.D. dated 1991. NO surface errors!!
My oldest still-working of any sort are a pair of MFM 20MBs both dated 1986 (I think one is a Seagate and the other a Micropolis). Frightening to contemplate, the XT they're in still works fine too!
The oldest that I still use regularly is an 800mb W.D. dated 1995 (handy test HD, and no worry about damaging it).
I just retired a box with a pair of WD dated 1997 and '98, that had run 24/7 all those years (still good).
The four WDs running this instant are dated 2000, 2002, and I think 2003 and 2007, also 24/7 HDs.
In terms of lifespan, I think I'm getting my money's worth.;)
Still, it would be nice to not have to worry about head-crashing 'em.
It's also a psych thing. Some runners slide into first to intimidate or try to make the first baseman miscalculate, same as why some others barrel right through him.
That's a different thing (tho a very good story!) from someone who's bored out of their minds and looking for any excuse to do ANYTHING but sit on their ass in a 6x8 cell. To my understanding, most prisons have more volunteer labour than they can use, because of this. And if you fuck up, well, you lose that privilege.
But meanwhile we're still paying $25k/year to maintain 'em while they sit on their ass in prison, learning better perp skills.
In Another Discussion I had a different suggestion... use hardcore prisoners to build the wall along the Mexican border. Let anyone who wishes to do so "escape" southward (after all, they've been generously 'sharing' their criminals with us, time to return the favour!) but if they return northward across the border, when they get caught, they get shot.
So... while claiming that Macs need less brains to use, you're also saying Mac users are smarter??;)
In my observation, average Mac users are even less cognizant of the distinction between OS and hardware than average Windows users. But the Mac more actively encourages a "magic box" outlook, what with the history of the OS being tied to Apple hardware.
A good example of why I believe in restitution of some sort, rather than prison as a punishment. At the very least, restitution gets your property value back; at most it may give someone a leg up to a different life. Prison does nothing but spend a lot of taxpayer dollars, make bad habits worse, and generate resentment.
[To be accurate, I believe in four possible punishments: death, restitution, exile/shunning, and forgiveness. But pointless confinement is not one of them.]
You can force them to work, or you can force them to sit on their asses in prison. At least the former gets some use from them; the latter is nothing but an expense to society.
We're not expecting top-of-the-line work from punishment-labour; we're just expecting them to be of more value than a seat-warmer in a 6x8 cell.
Sounds like it's at least a good start (tho I'm not a Mac or Safari user).
Maybe best of all would be a generic sandbox that any browser could run inside of, built for each of the common OSs. I don't know how practical that is, tho as you say it probably would be a good idea if browsers were designed as a sandbox from the gitgo.
I think I'll be using the VM approach myself, if I ever move the internet connection to a more "modern" setup. One good thing about antiquity, it won't even RUN modern malware.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, now I see what's really going on... The terrorists can't get pr0n in their own countries, so they're getting the TSA to generate it for them!!
I think in time the definition will change: by definition, if a "security official" does it, it's not a molest.
As someone else pointed out, this isn't about security, it's about training us to allow invasive searches without due process. Which includes training us to accept that whatever Authority does is acceptable.
Inevitable expenses... Who's gonna pay them? With civil cases, quite often an innocent party who just happened to have enough money to make them worth suing.
Yeah, everything has a cost. But that's not the point of the ambulance chaser philosophy of "Someone Must Pay!" That point is to create blame where none truly existed, for the purpose of extracting money, of which the lawyer takes 30% to 50%.
Yes, sometimes it's reasonable to "make someone pay" (achieve a fitting vengeance). But other times... it's like this case, not even reasonsable as *revenge* (what rational person takes revenge on a child, or for an accident?)
The trouble is we've gotten into a legal habit of assuming someone is ALWAYS at fault, and therefore ... "someone must pay", even if that's completely irrational. Of course, it's also the most profitable situation for the ambulance-chasing lawyers.
That argument cuts both ways:
By the same token, should a frail 87 year old woman be allowed to roam the sidewalks without assistance? Should she be left to her own devices, unprotected from every risk -- tripping over uneven pavement; stepping off the curb and landing wrong; her own perhaps-failing vision that didn't warn her of an oncoming hazard, such as toddlers on bicycles??
Perhaps her family should be sued for letting her out on her own, without their aid and protection. Perhaps she should be sued for failing to get out of the way of an obvious hazard, such as uncoordinated toddlers on bicycles.
Or maybe we should recognise that unless everyone lives in a bubble, sometimes stupid accidents happen and people get hurt, and no one party is to blame.
I think that's a reasonable conjecture, now that you bring it up.
As someone above linked (http://www.healthnews.com/blogs/cary-presant/family-health/aging-getter-older/broken-bones-risk-death-elderly-2964.html ), fractures are a fatality risk in the elderly. The lawyer's "job" is now to transmute this unfortunate fact of life into a monetized asset. :(
Not quite. In the elderly, any time being bedridden can be fatal due to various complications that can set in. They need not start off especially fragile.
That said, I agree entirely with Hairyfeet -- kids are KIDS, and maybe the old lady's family should have been looking out for her a bit better in the first place.
And maybe we should admit that sometimes accidents are just accidents, and no one is particularly to blame. The old lady and the kids, neither being at the coordinated prime of life, were likely about equally incapable of dodging each other, and Shit Happened.
The trouble with today's litigious society is that it's founded on the notion that *Someone Must Pay!* and this leads to ludicrous situations like suing little kids over stupid accidents.
The conclusion is clear. The Neanderthals went extinct due to an insufficiency of booze, cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol...
I'm of 1955 vintage and have been reading since I was 3 or 4... but maybe I've just got an older collection of books. I first noticed the ads with older dog-training reference works (which is what I've got the most of, going back to the 1920s) but have seen it in old novels too (back into the 1880s or so). Some of these are old enough that the ads are for patent medicines.
And I learned that the past tense of "lead" was also "lead" but if you write that nowadays, no one understands what you meant. Don't know what the origin is but at a guess something Anglo-Saxon. I expect in another generation we'll have to write "read, red" for the young punks to grok that we meant the past tense. Red meaning the colour will be right out; you'll have to say "cherry" or "strawberry" or maybe even "#ff0000" to be understood. ;)
Coincidentally, someone just emailed me a gripe about ambiguous punctuation, which I responded to with a reference to "Eats, Shoots and Leaves". :)
I don't know, maybe it was an American-publisher thing, but it used to be more routine than not. I have a bunch of older books (1900-1920ish) with ad pages in the back, and a ton of 1950s/60s/70s paperbacks that have (well, had, I removed them all) the glossy insert ad page.
Magazines used to have their ads more confined to one area in the back too, rather than every other page being either an ad or a thinly-disguised infomercial.
At any rate, my point was it's not a new concept.
Actually you could strip the ads out of deadtree books, all it took was 5 seconds with a scissor or razor blade, and halfway-fair aim. (When you see an old book with a bunch of the last few pages missing, that's probably what happened.)
But the real point was that other than noticing they were there, you weren't forced to view them. Nothing prevented you from turning the page and totally ignoring them, or never going that far in the first place. (Tho the insert in paperbacks was a bit obnoxious because it made a stiff spot in the book, and sometimes a weak point at the spine.)
If we can ignore or bypass ads in ebooks, then who cares, let them advertise. But if they're thrust into our faces like it or not and before we can read the rest of the book -- that's a great way to either fail, or as you say, incite the legions of pissed-off coders.
All to the good. Thanks for the references. Goes to show there's more than one way to do ebooks.
You young whippersnappers wouldn't remember this, but back in the Olden Days most deadtree books contained advertising. Paperbacks typically had a glossy insert in the middle (most often a cigarette ad), and hardbacks had several pages of ads in the back, usually something at least vaguely relevant to the book's content, and also sometimes ads for other books (and not only from that book's publisher).
It occurs to me that if ads were placed at the end of the ebook (much as ads in hardbacks used to be at the back of the book) there's incentive to improve content, to get the average reader to finish the book and see the ads.
My oldest still-working IDE is a 20 MEG W.D. dated 1991. NO surface errors!!
My oldest still-working of any sort are a pair of MFM 20MBs both dated 1986 (I think one is a Seagate and the other a Micropolis). Frightening to contemplate, the XT they're in still works fine too!
The oldest that I still use regularly is an 800mb W.D. dated 1995 (handy test HD, and no worry about damaging it).
I just retired a box with a pair of WD dated 1997 and '98, that had run 24/7 all those years (still good).
The four WDs running this instant are dated 2000, 2002, and I think 2003 and 2007, also 24/7 HDs.
In terms of lifespan, I think I'm getting my money's worth. ;)
Still, it would be nice to not have to worry about head-crashing 'em.
You evil person.. now I'm gonna be hearing Yakety Sax for the rest of the night!! ;}~
Now I'm wondering how far any ML'er has been seen running from the baseline, albeit perhaps with the added incentive of a brain cramp. :)
Where do you ump, what level? I'm a big fan of good umpires, myself.
It's also a psych thing. Some runners slide into first to intimidate or try to make the first baseman miscalculate, same as why some others barrel right through him.
Especially when you consider that Taco Bell produces tacos filled with meat analog...
That's a different thing (tho a very good story!) from someone who's bored out of their minds and looking for any excuse to do ANYTHING but sit on their ass in a 6x8 cell. To my understanding, most prisons have more volunteer labour than they can use, because of this. And if you fuck up, well, you lose that privilege.
But meanwhile we're still paying $25k/year to maintain 'em while they sit on their ass in prison, learning better perp skills.
In Another Discussion I had a different suggestion ... use hardcore prisoners to build the wall along the Mexican border. Let anyone who wishes to do so "escape" southward (after all, they've been generously 'sharing' their criminals with us, time to return the favour!) but if they return northward across the border, when they get caught, they get shot.
So... while claiming that Macs need less brains to use, you're also saying Mac users are smarter?? ;)
In my observation, average Mac users are even less cognizant of the distinction between OS and hardware than average Windows users. But the Mac more actively encourages a "magic box" outlook, what with the history of the OS being tied to Apple hardware.
For those who are checking their leg length...
http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/
http://dir.filewatcher.com/d/SuSE/9.2/src/Development/Tools/Other/hello-2.1.1-311.src.rpm.397493.html
and numerous other references...
No, it's not forced. But most prisoners are bored enough to want to work anyway.
However, there's a limit to what kind of work can be done IN prison.
A good example of why I believe in restitution of some sort, rather than prison as a punishment. At the very least, restitution gets your property value back; at most it may give someone a leg up to a different life. Prison does nothing but spend a lot of taxpayer dollars, make bad habits worse, and generate resentment.
[To be accurate, I believe in four possible punishments: death, restitution, exile/shunning, and forgiveness. But pointless confinement is not one of them.]
You can force them to work, or you can force them to sit on their asses in prison. At least the former gets some use from them; the latter is nothing but an expense to society.
We're not expecting top-of-the-line work from punishment-labour; we're just expecting them to be of more value than a seat-warmer in a 6x8 cell.
Sounds like it's at least a good start (tho I'm not a Mac or Safari user).
Maybe best of all would be a generic sandbox that any browser could run inside of, built for each of the common OSs. I don't know how practical that is, tho as you say it probably would be a good idea if browsers were designed as a sandbox from the gitgo.
I think I'll be using the VM approach myself, if I ever move the internet connection to a more "modern" setup. One good thing about antiquity, it won't even RUN modern malware.