It's your damn xenophobia. Teach your people some manners and we'll talk about visiting.
I've spent about four months total in Japan, mostly in Osaka but some day trips out to the boonies. The Japanese people I encountered were almost universally polite and helpful. I got quite a few free drinks and even a free dinner from people who wanted to practice English.
Yes, there was one drunk guy unhappy to see a white guy on his street and yelled at me, one cashier who ignored me and one older guy who didn't want to sit next to me on a train. Meh. More than balanced out by the woman who all but took me by the hand to help me find the temple I was looking for when I got lost in her little town.
I see more rudeness from fellow Americans in a week here than I'd see in a month from how Japanese folks treat Americans. I'd go back in a heartbeat, and hope to do so someday.
No, actually, large numbers of people don't. Many Americans don't drive. I know that many middle-class suburban Americans are shocked to learn that other Americans live differently, but it's true. in fact some Americans are entirely unable to obtain government issued IDs.
When was the last time a US government agency massacred dozens of people here in the US?
Killing dozens at once? And federal government only? Ok, it's reasonabl rare for the US government to kill lots of people at once here, have to go back to the Waco massacre for that one. It kills lots of people at once in other countries on a regular basis, of course.
Killing people one by one? And including state and local governments? Dude, have you somehow missed the recent uproar over police shootings? And it's nothing new, the War on (Some) Drugs has had cops killing people for decades.
If you're not afraid of the government, that's a sign that either 1) you're white and rich and of sufficient status that you're glad to have the state keep "those people" in line with deadly force, or 2) you don't have a clue what's going on.
Logging enables features such as view history, which makes it easy to find and re-watch something.
Yeah, that certainly needs to be implemented with some sort of server-side user tracking. No way that a browser could have some sort of "history" or "bookmark" feature to allow the user to review and tag content on the client side.
The difference is Amazon is opt-in. If you don't want them collecting data on you, you can simply decline to use their products or services.
Unfortunately there's nothing simple about it. As they get their tentacles into more and more areas, your choice evaporates.
I'm an author. (If you're interested in Neopaganism or Buddhism, buy my book.) Not dealing with Amazon is not a practical option.
I'm a developer and system admin for a small company. The boss -- non-technical -- keeps talking about wanting to use AWS, because "it's what everybody's doing". I have to keep explaining why it's a bad move, both technically and because Amazon Is Evil.
Brick and mortar stores are closing. Sports Authority is the latest. Why? Competition from on-line sellers. Your alternatives to Amazon are dying off.
Amazon is a corporation -- a beast created by state fiat. The state has a duty to keep it leashed.
The obvious lesson here would be that 4G is really not the technology you want to be using for downloading +15GB/month of data.
I used to have Sprint's WiMax 4G service as my home ISP, same service as Clear/Clearwire but under a different branding. Downloaded on the order of 90GB some months. Worked fine for several years, other than that I was on the very edge of the service area and occasionally dropped signal in bad weather.
4G can get bits to homes. If an ISP sets out to do that and fails because it oversells, it's not a technical problem, it's poor planning and people have a right to be pissed about that.
a bad actor was able to use Amazon's online chat support and a fake address to get the rep to tell him Springer's real address and phone number. That was enough to commit fraud with a couple of unrelated online services
Wait what?
Public information, stuff that shows up in phone directories ("white pages" as we used to call 'em) was enough to commit fraud with some online services?
Amazon may have a problem here -- there are many reasons that company should be burned down and the ground salted -- but thinking that your address or phone number are ever private information that can be used to authenticate you is a much deeper problem.
Google for news articles about the Armatix IP1 smart gun. It's a "smart gun" that requires the user to wear a watch with an authorized RFID chip in order to fire.
Unless the watch somehow can't be worn by a child, this is not a "childproof gun".
No one who owns a firearm for self-defense wants a firearm that has an additional failure mode. But those unable to see that violence is a problem rooted in people rather than things have already managed to pass a law mandating that that once such unreliable guns are available, they will be the only legally available ones in one state. (For ordinary citizens, at least. I'm sure cop privilege will apply as usual.)
A rule of thumb for evaluating this study, or any one about guns, BTW: anything coming from an institute of public health rather than an institute of criminology is not credible. Crime and violence are not diseases. We have scientific discipline that studies crime; but for prohibitionists, it keeps coming up with the "wrong" answer regarding gun control.
Purposeful violence against civilians is a breaking of the basic social contract and deserves a forfeiture of rights.
Yes, a forfeiture of rights...after a trial. And based on individual charges, not guilt by association.
If you think that ISIS and "Martin Luthor King, Jr" (sic) are "the same general concept, then you don't really know anything about either.
The freedom of speech of DAESH/ISIS supporters and the freedom of speech of Martin Luther King are the same general concept: the state has no right to use force to silence people, and a communications company should be required to carry all communications regardless of content. (Otherwise it's not a communications company, it's an advocacy group of some sort.)
ISIS is a bad bunch of people. I don't support them. But censorship is strategically counter-productive in the short term, and corrosive to liberty in the long term. Trying to silence a group is an admission that their message is attractive and important. It only lends them credibility, the old "forbidden fruit" syndrome.
My instances keep on chugging along as if nothing is wrong.
Mine haven't.:-( I'm in Atlanta, was off-line most of yesterday, came back up before I went to bed, was off again this morning. It's the suck. Not Linode's fault, but the suck.
This plus the BBC outage suggests that 2016 is that year we'll learn the net is made of tissue paper.
So Iran teaching it's schoolchildren to chant 'Death to America' is a 'dissenting political opinion'
Yes. "Death to America" is an opinion about what should happen, and it's a political one.
and you're OK with it, then?
"Okay with it" in the sense of approve and agree? No. "Okay with it" in the sense of not wanting to invoke state force to stop it, or to permit a communications company to pick-and-choose content? Yes.
So-called 'Islamic state' assholes tweeting about cutting off people's heads is a 'dissenting political opinion'?
Yes. Just like so-called "American patriots" tweeting about how Snowden should be executed.
But that's the point. Consent was granted. You can't retroactively revoke it. It's polite to do so, yes, but a stunning overreach of state power to make this a law. You consent to me taking your photo, that photo is mine, and that state will have to pry it from my cold dead hand. Zero tolerance for government censorship.
Muslims have had a beef with America as long as America has existed
Uh, no, actually. There were Muslim American soldiers in the Revolution, and the first country to recognize the United States was the Sultanate of Morocco.
Muslims have had "beef" with the US mostly since WWII, as our stupid and brutal foreign policy started to intrude more and more on the Muslim world: the CIA-backed coup in Iran, support for the rogue nation of Israel, suport for Saudi Arabia. The grievances are rooted in geopolitics, religion merely helps gives them some specifics of form.
/me doesn't like the use of the word predecessor here.
"A model or type of machinery or device which precedes the current one. Usually used to describe an earlier, outdated model." Seem entirely appropriate.
I'm pretty sure I can post open and honest comments while not being anonymous.
If you're white, middle-class, cisgendered, belong to a mainstream religion, have political views within the mainstream, and live in a cosmopolitan community, yes.
If you're a closeted gay atheist anarcho-communist in a small town in "flyover country", maybe not so much.
No - according to the CDC, 18.3% of women and 1.4% of men experience rape.
>
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey -- source of the CDC numbers, according to your linked PDF -- doesn't include prisons. It also does not count the 4.8% of men who reported being "made to penetrate someone else" as rape victims; a definition of rape that's dependent on the topology of someone's genitals rather than issues of bodily agency is highly problematic.
Requiring residents to complete a census of their households is hardly onerous.
Disclosing private information to the state is onerous. Especially when that data may later be misused if a later government decides to change policy. (Japanese Americans who told the feds their details in the 1940s thought their data was protected by law. Then the feds changed the law. Haw haw.)
At no time has anyone ever faced a fine or spent time in jail for failing to complete the census. There is a penalty, because under law you cannot have an action declared mandatory without a statement of penalty for failing to comply.
So it's not actually mandatory. So people who don't want to complete it can trash it with no consequences. So it's a volunatry survey. You support the state lying? Saying "we'll put you in jail if you don't fill out this paperwork!" and then not doing it?
Your position seems self-contradictory. "We have to compel people to give us their data or else we won't have accurate data![*] But if we put people in jail for not giving us their data people will get upset and overturn that law. So we can't really compel people to give us their data. Se we can't get accurate data. And that's a return to rational, science and evidence based decision making."
([*] I don'r accept that, I'm trying to summarize what I read your position to be.)
No, but they are assistants to concentration camp operators. That happened in the U.S. within living memory, it's not ancient history or something that can only happen in so-called "backwards" countries. It is established historical fact that census data can be used against people.
Most human research is voluntary. You think most published psychological and sociological studies are absurd? You think psychologists should be able to make participation in their studies mandatory?
No, their plan actually calls for making evidence based policy instead of simply deciding what they want the facts to be.
Evidence would be good. Compelling people by threat of force to give evidence is not.
And it degrades the quality of the evidence. "I'm from the government. How often do you use illegal drugs? If you don't answer you're going to jail. If you say yes it goes on a permanent record that the next administration might use against you. Ah, you never use them? Thanks for the valuable sociological data, citizen.
There are ways to gather sociological data that don't involve threatening people. Give me an anonymous survey, maybe a cash incentive for filling it out.
Don't know Canada's laws but the U.S. census gets nothing from me but a number; the feds are constitutionally empowered to conduct an enumeration for purposes of allocating representatives, not to forcibly pry into my life to evaluate the effectiveness of their policies.
Last night I saw a Maybelline commercial, advertising Star Wars-themed makeup. Note that this was aimed at adult women, not little girls or teenage girls. That by itself was the Writing On The Wall, telling the story of what's become of the entire Star Wars franchise: It's turned into some sort of a joke.
Meh. Is that any more ridiculous than the Burger King Star Wars glasses that were out in the 70s?
I agree that the ST reboot movies were bad (the first could just be taken as fun, but Into Darkness was awful) and I've got a bad feeling about Abrams and Lucas and Disney and taking a crap on the corpse of the original SW trilogy, but I'm not seeing that merchandizing deals tell us anything about the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
I've spent about four months total in Japan, mostly in Osaka but some day trips out to the boonies. The Japanese people I encountered were almost universally polite and helpful. I got quite a few free drinks and even a free dinner from people who wanted to practice English.
Yes, there was one drunk guy unhappy to see a white guy on his street and yelled at me, one cashier who ignored me and one older guy who didn't want to sit next to me on a train. Meh. More than balanced out by the woman who all but took me by the hand to help me find the temple I was looking for when I got lost in her little town.
I see more rudeness from fellow Americans in a week here than I'd see in a month from how Japanese folks treat Americans. I'd go back in a heartbeat, and hope to do so someday.
No, actually, large numbers of people don't. Many Americans don't drive. I know that many middle-class suburban Americans are shocked to learn that other Americans live differently, but it's true. in fact some Americans are entirely unable to obtain government issued IDs.
Killing dozens at once? And federal government only? Ok, it's reasonabl rare for the US government to kill lots of people at once here, have to go back to the Waco massacre for that one. It kills lots of people at once in other countries on a regular basis, of course.
Killing people one by one? And including state and local governments? Dude, have you somehow missed the recent uproar over police shootings? And it's nothing new, the War on (Some) Drugs has had cops killing people for decades.
If you're not afraid of the government, that's a sign that either 1) you're white and rich and of sufficient status that you're glad to have the state keep "those people" in line with deadly force, or 2) you don't have a clue what's going on.
Yeah, that certainly needs to be implemented with some sort of server-side user tracking. No way that a browser could have some sort of "history" or "bookmark" feature to allow the user to review and tag content on the client side.
Unfortunately there's nothing simple about it. As they get their tentacles into more and more areas, your choice evaporates.
I'm an author. (If you're interested in Neopaganism or Buddhism, buy my book.) Not dealing with Amazon is not a practical option.
I'm a developer and system admin for a small company. The boss -- non-technical -- keeps talking about wanting to use AWS, because "it's what everybody's doing". I have to keep explaining why it's a bad move, both technically and because Amazon Is Evil.
Brick and mortar stores are closing. Sports Authority is the latest. Why? Competition from on-line sellers. Your alternatives to Amazon are dying off.
Amazon is a corporation -- a beast created by state fiat. The state has a duty to keep it leashed.
A browser impossible to check for backdoors? Sorry, no.
I used to have Sprint's WiMax 4G service as my home ISP, same service as Clear/Clearwire but under a different branding. Downloaded on the order of 90GB some months. Worked fine for several years, other than that I was on the very edge of the service area and occasionally dropped signal in bad weather.
4G can get bits to homes. If an ISP sets out to do that and fails because it oversells, it's not a technical problem, it's poor planning and people have a right to be pissed about that.
Hi! Welcome to the internet. I see you're new here. So let me give you some advice: Amazon eats babies. With puppy sauce. Avoid them at all costs.
Yes, preserving...in part by burning to death people who suggested advancing that knowledge.
Wait what?
Public information, stuff that shows up in phone directories ("white pages" as we used to call 'em) was enough to commit fraud with some online services?
Amazon may have a problem here -- there are many reasons that company should be burned down and the ground salted -- but thinking that your address or phone number are ever private information that can be used to authenticate you is a much deeper problem.
Unless the watch somehow can't be worn by a child, this is not a "childproof gun".
Perhaps you're unaware of the facts about the iP1 protests? It's not the availability of misdesigned guns that got people (pardon the pun) up in arms about it, it's the fact that such availability triggers (again, pardon) yet another pointless bit of firearm criminalization in the name of the culture-war push to scapegoat guns for violent crime.
No one who owns a firearm for self-defense wants a firearm that has an additional failure mode. But those unable to see that violence is a problem rooted in people rather than things have already managed to pass a law mandating that that once such unreliable guns are available, they will be the only legally available ones in one state. (For ordinary citizens, at least. I'm sure cop privilege will apply as usual.)
A rule of thumb for evaluating this study, or any one about guns, BTW: anything coming from an institute of public health rather than an institute of criminology is not credible. Crime and violence are not diseases. We have scientific discipline that studies crime; but for prohibitionists, it keeps coming up with the "wrong" answer regarding gun control.
HTH. HAND.
Yes, a forfeiture of rights...after a trial. And based on individual charges, not guilt by association.
The freedom of speech of DAESH/ISIS supporters and the freedom of speech of Martin Luther King are the same general concept: the state has no right to use force to silence people, and a communications company should be required to carry all communications regardless of content. (Otherwise it's not a communications company, it's an advocacy group of some sort.)
ISIS is a bad bunch of people. I don't support them. But censorship is strategically counter-productive in the short term, and corrosive to liberty in the long term. Trying to silence a group is an admission that their message is attractive and important. It only lends them credibility, the old "forbidden fruit" syndrome.
Mine haven't. :-( I'm in Atlanta, was off-line most of yesterday, came back up before I went to bed, was off again this morning. It's the suck. Not Linode's fault, but the suck.
This plus the BBC outage suggests that 2016 is that year we'll learn the net is made of tissue paper.
Yes. "Death to America" is an opinion about what should happen, and it's a political one.
"Okay with it" in the sense of approve and agree? No. "Okay with it" in the sense of not wanting to invoke state force to stop it, or to permit a communications company to pick-and-choose content? Yes.
Yes. Just like so-called "American patriots" tweeting about how Snowden should be executed.
But that's the point. Consent was granted. You can't retroactively revoke it. It's polite to do so, yes, but a stunning overreach of state power to make this a law. You consent to me taking your photo, that photo is mine, and that state will have to pry it from my cold dead hand. Zero tolerance for government censorship.
Uh, no, actually. There were Muslim American soldiers in the Revolution, and the first country to recognize the United States was the Sultanate of Morocco.
Muslims have had "beef" with the US mostly since WWII, as our stupid and brutal foreign policy started to intrude more and more on the Muslim world: the CIA-backed coup in Iran, support for the rogue nation of Israel, suport for Saudi Arabia. The grievances are rooted in geopolitics, religion merely helps gives them some specifics of form.
No, they mostly came from "ordinary" criminal violence, largely gang-related. Shootingtracker.com is a source of noise: there have not been hundreds of mass shootings this year, unless you re-define the term.
"A model or type of machinery or device which precedes the current one. Usually used to describe an earlier, outdated model." Seem entirely appropriate.
If you're white, middle-class, cisgendered, belong to a mainstream religion, have political views within the mainstream, and live in a cosmopolitan community, yes.
If you're a closeted gay atheist anarcho-communist in a small town in "flyover country", maybe not so much.
>
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey -- source of the CDC numbers, according to your linked PDF -- doesn't include prisons. It also does not count the 4.8% of men who reported being "made to penetrate someone else" as rape victims; a definition of rape that's dependent on the topology of someone's genitals rather than issues of bodily agency is highly problematic.
If we include prison rape, evidence suggests that more men are raped than women, though we're dealing with numbers with large error bars.
(None of this is intended to downplay the seriousness of sexual assault.)
So gather data via surveys.
Disclosing private information to the state is onerous. Especially when that data may later be misused if a later government decides to change policy. (Japanese Americans who told the feds their details in the 1940s thought their data was protected by law. Then the feds changed the law. Haw haw.)
So it's not actually mandatory. So people who don't want to complete it can trash it with no consequences. So it's a volunatry survey. You support the state lying? Saying "we'll put you in jail if you don't fill out this paperwork!" and then not doing it?
Your position seems self-contradictory. "We have to compel people to give us their data or else we won't have accurate data![*] But if we put people in jail for not giving us their data people will get upset and overturn that law. So we can't really compel people to give us their data. Se we can't get accurate data. And that's a return to rational, science and evidence based decision making." ([*] I don'r accept that, I'm trying to summarize what I read your position to be.)
No, but they are assistants to concentration camp operators. That happened in the U.S. within living memory, it's not ancient history or something that can only happen in so-called "backwards" countries. It is established historical fact that census data can be used against people.
Most human research is voluntary. You think most published psychological and sociological studies are absurd? You think psychologists should be able to make participation in their studies mandatory?
Evidence would be good. Compelling people by threat of force to give evidence is not.
And it degrades the quality of the evidence. "I'm from the government. How often do you use illegal drugs? If you don't answer you're going to jail. If you say yes it goes on a permanent record that the next administration might use against you. Ah, you never use them? Thanks for the valuable sociological data, citizen.
There are ways to gather sociological data that don't involve threatening people. Give me an anonymous survey, maybe a cash incentive for filling it out.
Don't know Canada's laws but the U.S. census gets nothing from me but a number; the feds are constitutionally empowered to conduct an enumeration for purposes of allocating representatives, not to forcibly pry into my life to evaluate the effectiveness of their policies.
If you don't think this is important, ask a Japanese-American who was put in a concentration camp in the 1940s. Once the state has your data, it is not private; it can always change the rules.
Meh. Is that any more ridiculous than the Burger King Star Wars glasses that were out in the 70s?
I agree that the ST reboot movies were bad (the first could just be taken as fun, but Into Darkness was awful) and I've got a bad feeling about Abrams and Lucas and Disney and taking a crap on the corpse of the original SW trilogy, but I'm not seeing that merchandizing deals tell us anything about the movie.