Intent is the point here. The attackers intent to cause harm is blindingly obvious, the video used serves no other purpose other than to cause a seizure in susceptible people. If they'd sent gore pics with the intent to make someone sick to their stomach and maybe lose their lunch, then that would be just a juvenile trick, but inducing a seizure in someone with epilepsy can be life-threatening. Add to this the other aggressive and violent acts that have been perpetrated against this guy and his family, and you have a pattern of behavior that clearly indicates the intent to cause bodily harm and/or death. Do you wait for someone to show up with a gun in their hand ready to kill before you act to stop them, or do you see the handwriting on the wall and stop them as soon as possible?
Basically, there are plenty of people in that area of the country that I think would be perfectly happy to have modern-day feudalism and a theocracy, with the Church controlling and limiting what the commoners are allowed to learn and what news they're allowed to hear, otherwise they should keep quiet and do as they're told by the nobility -- just like the Old Days. Of course the flaw in that plan is always that everyone for it automatically assumes they'll be the nobles, not the commoners.;-)
Based on a lifetime of experience with people from all walks of life I'd have to say yes, it's rather scary inside my head by most people's standards, but that's besides the point, we're talking about one of the states of the union that is about as ass-backwards (and wanting to become even more so) as you can get, socially-speaking, and given their druthers they'd do all the above, and much, much more. If you think what I said above scares you, then I won't even list the other things they'd likely want to do, it'd scare you so far inside yourself that you'd be catatonic for years.
Note that I said the Trump administration, not President Pussy-Grabber personally. Some of the appointees might not be at all above the idea of destroying 'inconvenient' data. And since I'm pretty sure you're a Trump supporter and a climate-change denier, I really aren't all that interested in debating anything with you, so don't bother replying.
Don't forget the illegal drug sites. And fake news, and...
..and 'liberal' websites, non-Christian religious sites, any website that even mentions birth control or abortion, and.. as a matter of fact, they should just disable all internet access completely. Much simpler than having to have a terabyte drive to contain all the domain names, all around the world, that they'd consider objectionable. I'm sure people will be perfectly happy reading the books that they haven't banned in that state, and whatever their religious leaders decide they should know.
Microsoft's Windows 10, however, already improved substantially since its launch in 2015..
'Improved' for the user, or have they just 'improved' their spyware/adware/malware/surveillance/privacy-invasion software? I'll never use it willingly until it's 100% free of all the above. I'd rather use some flavor of Linux, even if that means I lose access to some software and some functionality. Fascism is a real thing, and even a corporation can be Fascist in how they conduct themselves; this does not however mean that we end-users must put up with corporate Fascism.
Another thought I just had on this subject, which I'm surprised I didn't think of when writing the original comment (I have a cold today, not totally awake yet:-/ ): They should bundle all their data up and send it to their colleagues in other countries, assuming that is that they haven't already done so. Who better to safeguard the products of their research than their fellow scientists? Seems to me that any real scientist, understanding the situation, would scruplously guard and protect another's work, even if they don't necessarily agree with it.
They should send all their data to Wikileaks, or otherwise put it somewhere on the public Internet not hosted on a U.S.-based server, then let the general Internet public know it's there so it can all be copied and diseminated widely and freely. We all know that once you post something on the Internet it's never, ever going completely away, and I believe this is their best strategy to preserve and protect the products of their research. Between that data being released and data from scientists in other countries, climate change research should be safe.
I'd also like to point out that if the Trump administration actually did literally destroy the data from climate change research, in my opinion that would be roughly equivalent to burning books -- and I'm morally offended by the idea -- and I don't get 'morally offended' very easily or very often; this is one of those deal-breakers for me.
Relative position, or absolute position? If the latter, then do they really think they can get centimeter accuracy out of GPS? If the former, do they really think they can get reliability out of whatever sensing system they plan to use? What about jamming, intentional or not intentional? What about vehicles that don't have this technology? What about motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians? Animals? Random inanimate objects? Will you be able to turn it off if it's causing problems? I see lots and lots of problems with a 'system' like this.
Here's my take on that: If you're a single adult, or two married single adults, you don't have as much to lose if you feel strongly enough about something to speak up or do something active about it. However if you have children, now you have innocent lives to protect who can't do anything to protect themselves. So now the government can, in one sense or another, hold them hostage, to force you to do what they want you to do. Consider also how little regard, apparently, the Chinese government has for human life; if you accept that as fact, then it makes the above all the more plausible.
I don't realistically think we have much to worry about. The mandate doesn't mean anything if auto manufacturers can't develop a working system like this in the first place, and it also won't mean anything if nobody buys the vehicles because they're too expensive. Also, consider this: The mandate would have to apply to foreign cars as well as domestic. How do they think they're going to enforce that? It's about as enforcable as China deciding that an American website violates their laws when not a single webserver exists physically within their borders; the most they can do is prevent access to it. The mandate may have the effect of having some manufacturers stop selling their vehicles in the U.S., or discontinuing selling some models of vehicles in the U.S.. That won't go over well with anyone.
You're being sarcastic, but it's really no surprise at all. People won't ever be comfortable with sitting in a box that can go anywhere it decides to at high speeds, and not have any positive and direct way to control what it's doing. Imagine a rollercoaster that has no tracks and a mind of it's own; it's the stuff of nightmares.
Then where is the Senate investigation of these problems??? We're just citizens, we have no power to 'investgate' anything, all we can do is judge for ourselves based on what we see happening. Are you proposing ignoring what we see? Just keep our heads down and accept whatever it is they're going to do, even if it's wrong? Are you so indoctrinated into the idea of being in a Police State that you've given up? Or are you a coward, not willing to fight for what's right?
Yesterday we saw a story posted here about the DHS trying to hack into a State governments' information systems, and now today we see corruption and gross overreach in the DEA. We're all familiar with the overreaches of the TSA as well, aren't we? These and many more things are all examples of politicians taking advantage of the 'war on terror' and the 'war on drugs' has bought us. Too many people in these United States have been trading their Constitutional rights, civil rights, and even human rights, for empty promises of 'safety' for long enough that the corruption within three-letter government agencies has now become rampant; we're one step away from an outright Police State, where no one has any 'freedom' and we're all under the thumbs of jackbooted thugs with badges and guns.
This is more along the lines of what I was thinking. To quote the Baron Acton, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely". DHS has quite a bit of autonomy and little or no transparency, and that's a very tempting combination for ambitious -- or just plain power-seeking types. Who watches the watchers? We've seen this sort of phenomenon happen on a smaller scale with the TSA; now scale it up to the size and reach of DHS, and you begin to see what I'm talking about. They could, theoretically, 'find' reasons to detain elected officials, without charging them, claiming it's 'for reasons of National Security'. Perhaps a bit far-fetched, perhaps not. Attempting to covertly dig through a State governments information systems makes you wonder.
Here, have a microphone connected to the Internet and Microsoft servers enabled in your house 24/7/365, listening to every sound and voice in your house! What could POSSIBLY be wrong with that!?
It's worse than that, really. The shills and the trolls (Anonymous, I'm looking at YOU, among others) and the intentional troublemakers, the people who just want to watch the world burn, will band together and call legitimate content 'misleading' and protect their own rhetoric.
When so-called 'social media' is the primary place online that people congregate anymore to have discussions and share information, and voluntarily excluding yourself from social media causes you to be left behind and forgotten by most people, then 'social media' arbitrarily deciding what is and is not 'extremist' amounts to violating people's 1st Amendment rights, yes.
If you were talking to someone on your phone about some hot-button political or social issue and the operator cut in and informed you that your discussion was 'extremist' and against the phone company's terms of service and shut down your call, how would you fell about that?
That would never happen! I'd sue them!
But Bitey, the phone company is a private corporation, they can do whatever they want, right?
Exactly, precisely this. Who gets to decide what is and is not 'extremist'? And of course there's always going to be someone who decides to slip something into the list that really doesn't belong there, just because they don't think people should see it. "Oh well they're obviously a supporter of {insert political candidate or cause here}, and naturally that's wrong of them, so I should protect the public from their extremist opinions, wouldn't want them poisoning anyone's minds with their nonsense" and voila, 1st Amendment right violated. How degenerate of you, Social Media.
If the movie you want to watch is on Netflix and that's all you got, then you're going to watch it on Netflix. Most people are not going to run out and buy a disc for a movie they want to see once, and most people don't care if it's theatre-quality if it's on their TV, so this whole subject is pointless, really. Seriously, do you think the average person is going to think "..well, the bitrate and quantization are not quite up to my standards, so I'm going to spend the next hour or so setting up an Amazon subscription so I can stream it from them instead, or maybe I'll spend the next two hours driving to Best Buy to see if I can buy this movie I want to watch once". Nope, they'll think this: "Whatever, it's not great, but at least I get to watch it, who cares anyway, it's only Netflix, what do I expect?"
I'd have to read in-depth on it, but on the surface at least I like that idea much better than some fantasy land where nobody works at all as if there's anything to do anyway and we're all living on 'welfare' rebranded as 'Universal Basic Income', and nobody has any real incentive to learn anything or acquire useful skills. I assume you're talking about something like employee-owned companies? Of course the first potential problem that comes to mind is that a major shift like this would likely be met with strong resistance from Corporate America, who wants to keep all the eggs in their basket, not distributed into everyones baskets.
Slashdot Mirror
Intent is the point here. The attackers intent to cause harm is blindingly obvious, the video used serves no other purpose other than to cause a seizure in susceptible people. If they'd sent gore pics with the intent to make someone sick to their stomach and maybe lose their lunch, then that would be just a juvenile trick, but inducing a seizure in someone with epilepsy can be life-threatening. Add to this the other aggressive and violent acts that have been perpetrated against this guy and his family, and you have a pattern of behavior that clearly indicates the intent to cause bodily harm and/or death. Do you wait for someone to show up with a gun in their hand ready to kill before you act to stop them, or do you see the handwriting on the wall and stop them as soon as possible?
Basically, there are plenty of people in that area of the country that I think would be perfectly happy to have modern-day feudalism and a theocracy, with the Church controlling and limiting what the commoners are allowed to learn and what news they're allowed to hear, otherwise they should keep quiet and do as they're told by the nobility -- just like the Old Days. Of course the flaw in that plan is always that everyone for it automatically assumes they'll be the nobles, not the commoners. ;-)
Apart from the fact that their idea of "Make America Great Again" is return not to 1950 but to 1850?
*nodding* Yeah you're on the right track there, except add to that 'occasional excursions all the way back to The Inquisition and Salem Witch Trials'.
Based on a lifetime of experience with people from all walks of life I'd have to say yes, it's rather scary inside my head by most people's standards, but that's besides the point, we're talking about one of the states of the union that is about as ass-backwards (and wanting to become even more so) as you can get, socially-speaking, and given their druthers they'd do all the above, and much, much more. If you think what I said above scares you, then I won't even list the other things they'd likely want to do, it'd scare you so far inside yourself that you'd be catatonic for years.
Note that I said the Trump administration, not President Pussy-Grabber personally. Some of the appointees might not be at all above the idea of destroying 'inconvenient' data. And since I'm pretty sure you're a Trump supporter and a climate-change denier, I really aren't all that interested in debating anything with you, so don't bother replying.
Don't forget the illegal drug sites. And fake news, and ...
..and 'liberal' websites, non-Christian religious sites, any website that even mentions birth control or abortion, and.. as a matter of fact, they should just disable all internet access completely. Much simpler than having to have a terabyte drive to contain all the domain names, all around the world, that they'd consider objectionable. I'm sure people will be perfectly happy reading the books that they haven't banned in that state, and whatever their religious leaders decide they should know.
Microsoft's Windows 10, however, already improved substantially since its launch in 2015..
'Improved' for the user, or have they just 'improved' their spyware/adware/malware/surveillance/privacy-invasion software? I'll never use it willingly until it's 100% free of all the above. I'd rather use some flavor of Linux, even if that means I lose access to some software and some functionality. Fascism is a real thing, and even a corporation can be Fascist in how they conduct themselves; this does not however mean that we end-users must put up with corporate Fascism.
Another thought I just had on this subject, which I'm surprised I didn't think of when writing the original comment (I have a cold today, not totally awake yet :-/ ): They should bundle all their data up and send it to their colleagues in other countries, assuming that is that they haven't already done so. Who better to safeguard the products of their research than their fellow scientists? Seems to me that any real scientist, understanding the situation, would scruplously guard and protect another's work, even if they don't necessarily agree with it.
They should send all their data to Wikileaks, or otherwise put it somewhere on the public Internet not hosted on a U.S.-based server, then let the general Internet public know it's there so it can all be copied and diseminated widely and freely. We all know that once you post something on the Internet it's never, ever going completely away, and I believe this is their best strategy to preserve and protect the products of their research. Between that data being released and data from scientists in other countries, climate change research should be safe.
I'd also like to point out that if the Trump administration actually did literally destroy the data from climate change research, in my opinion that would be roughly equivalent to burning books -- and I'm morally offended by the idea -- and I don't get 'morally offended' very easily or very often; this is one of those deal-breakers for me.
Relative position, or absolute position? If the latter, then do they really think they can get centimeter accuracy out of GPS? If the former, do they really think they can get reliability out of whatever sensing system they plan to use? What about jamming, intentional or not intentional? What about vehicles that don't have this technology? What about motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians? Animals? Random inanimate objects? Will you be able to turn it off if it's causing problems? I see lots and lots of problems with a 'system' like this.
Why ever would they clamp down on pornography?
Here's my take on that: If you're a single adult, or two married single adults, you don't have as much to lose if you feel strongly enough about something to speak up or do something active about it. However if you have children, now you have innocent lives to protect who can't do anything to protect themselves. So now the government can, in one sense or another, hold them hostage, to force you to do what they want you to do. Consider also how little regard, apparently, the Chinese government has for human life; if you accept that as fact, then it makes the above all the more plausible.
I don't realistically think we have much to worry about. The mandate doesn't mean anything if auto manufacturers can't develop a working system like this in the first place, and it also won't mean anything if nobody buys the vehicles because they're too expensive. Also, consider this: The mandate would have to apply to foreign cars as well as domestic. How do they think they're going to enforce that? It's about as enforcable as China deciding that an American website violates their laws when not a single webserver exists physically within their borders; the most they can do is prevent access to it. The mandate may have the effect of having some manufacturers stop selling their vehicles in the U.S., or discontinuing selling some models of vehicles in the U.S.. That won't go over well with anyone.
You're being sarcastic, but it's really no surprise at all. People won't ever be comfortable with sitting in a box that can go anywhere it decides to at high speeds, and not have any positive and direct way to control what it's doing. Imagine a rollercoaster that has no tracks and a mind of it's own; it's the stuff of nightmares.
Then where is the Senate investigation of these problems??? We're just citizens, we have no power to 'investgate' anything, all we can do is judge for ourselves based on what we see happening. Are you proposing ignoring what we see? Just keep our heads down and accept whatever it is they're going to do, even if it's wrong? Are you so indoctrinated into the idea of being in a Police State that you've given up? Or are you a coward, not willing to fight for what's right?
Yesterday we saw a story posted here about the DHS trying to hack into a State governments' information systems, and now today we see corruption and gross overreach in the DEA. We're all familiar with the overreaches of the TSA as well, aren't we? These and many more things are all examples of politicians taking advantage of the 'war on terror' and the 'war on drugs' has bought us. Too many people in these United States have been trading their Constitutional rights, civil rights, and even human rights, for empty promises of 'safety' for long enough that the corruption within three-letter government agencies has now become rampant; we're one step away from an outright Police State, where no one has any 'freedom' and we're all under the thumbs of jackbooted thugs with badges and guns.
This is more along the lines of what I was thinking.
To quote the Baron Acton, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely". DHS has quite a bit of autonomy and little or no transparency, and that's a very tempting combination for ambitious -- or just plain power-seeking types. Who watches the watchers? We've seen this sort of phenomenon happen on a smaller scale with the TSA; now scale it up to the size and reach of DHS, and you begin to see what I'm talking about. They could, theoretically, 'find' reasons to detain elected officials, without charging them, claiming it's 'for reasons of National Security'. Perhaps a bit far-fetched, perhaps not. Attempting to covertly dig through a State governments information systems makes you wonder.
We're not talking about a 'private party'.
The only way they could have designed this to be more of a meme is if they made it an 'Internet of Things' device, and made it 'wirelessly charging'.
Unplug or cut the wire connecting the microphone. Put an SPST switch inline with it so you can easily turn it on and off.
Here, have a microphone connected to the Internet and Microsoft servers enabled in your house 24/7/365, listening to every sound and voice in your house! What could POSSIBLY be wrong with that!?
No, NO, NO, just NO!
More censorship
If you were talking to someone on your phone about some hot-button political or social issue and the operator cut in and informed you that your discussion was 'extremist' and against the phone company's terms of service and shut down your call, how would you fell about that?
That would never happen! I'd sue them!
But Bitey, the phone company is a private corporation, they can do whatever they want, right?
Exactly, precisely this. Who gets to decide what is and is not 'extremist'? And of course there's always going to be someone who decides to slip something into the list that really doesn't belong there, just because they don't think people should see it. "Oh well they're obviously a supporter of {insert political candidate or cause here}, and naturally that's wrong of them, so I should protect the public from their extremist opinions, wouldn't want them poisoning anyone's minds with their nonsense" and voila, 1st Amendment right violated. How degenerate of you, Social Media.
If the movie you want to watch is on Netflix and that's all you got, then you're going to watch it on Netflix. Most people are not going to run out and buy a disc for a movie they want to see once, and most people don't care if it's theatre-quality if it's on their TV, so this whole subject is pointless, really. Seriously, do you think the average person is going to think "..well, the bitrate and quantization are not quite up to my standards, so I'm going to spend the next hour or so setting up an Amazon subscription so I can stream it from them instead, or maybe I'll spend the next two hours driving to Best Buy to see if I can buy this movie I want to watch once". Nope, they'll think this: "Whatever, it's not great, but at least I get to watch it, who cares anyway, it's only Netflix, what do I expect?"
I'd have to read in-depth on it, but on the surface at least I like that idea much better than some fantasy land where nobody works at all as if there's anything to do anyway and we're all living on 'welfare' rebranded as 'Universal Basic Income', and nobody has any real incentive to learn anything or acquire useful skills. I assume you're talking about something like employee-owned companies? Of course the first potential problem that comes to mind is that a major shift like this would likely be met with strong resistance from Corporate America, who wants to keep all the eggs in their basket, not distributed into everyones baskets.