Relentless public announcements that we should accept our neighbor and be considerate of each other's differences. It's to the point now where people can't even make self-deprecating comments about their own race or sex without being fired for being racist or sexist. Jokes have become illegal.
Really? Where do you live that you hear relentless public announcements advocating tolerance? Here in the U.S. I hear the loudest voices calling for fear of gays, immigrants, Muslims, humanists, and socialists.
Where do you live that jokes are illegal? Insults in the workplace may be a tort, and threats are illegal; and perhaps people can no longer cover their insults and threats by saying "hey, just a joke".
We've made it illegal to cry tears, and so... some have started to cry bullets.
Very eloquent, but where exactly is it "illegal to cry tears"?
A few more fuck you's and honest brawls between people would do us all a lot of good.
A little bit of emotional maturity, where people learn resolve conflict without violence, and to deal with anger and frustration in more constructive ways, would do us all a world of good. There are alternatives besides lashing out at any provocation or bottling it all up until you explode.
It's like we got bored after 15 years in space and decided it wasn't worth the effort or something.
It pretty much turned out that, with our current level of technology, it's often not worth the effort to put humans into space. From Sputnik to Apollo, the "space race" was never about science, it was about Cold War propaganda and missile technology.
At the moment there are precious few reasons to lob a human into orbit to do science, much less to go through the trouble and expense to try to keep one alive for a trip to Luna or Mars. Cheaper and easier to send robotic probes.
It's going to remain that way until some technological breakthroughs make it easier to put people into orbit and keep them alive up there -- maybe nanotech that enables a space elevator and the construction of habitats, maybe something completely unexpected. Or maybe nothing, and we stay here and focus on making the Earth a safe and pleasant place to live. Or maybe we blow it and die off.
I'm somewhat at a loss as to why you'd want to send a link via SMS though.
May I introduce you to Twitter, a popular service which allows users to microblog via SMS, and also to receive microblog entries from other users via SMS?
Finding a URL to send generally needs the sending device to have a web browser
If both devices have a web browser and Internet connectivity then there are much better ways of exchanging data between them than SMS.
There are a large number of people who either don't have phones with these features, have phone with these features but not a plan that allows them, don't know how to use these features on their phones, find SMS more useful than e-mail due to spam issues, or prefer SMS's "push" nature for mobile use.
Love it or lump it, SMS is the de-facto lowest common denomination for mobile-to-mobile data communication (at least here in the U.S.).
And if the point of facebook status and twitter is to promote links, and you can't do that without some vulnerable external service, the the whole concept of that is f**ing broken!!
The point of microblogging is to broadcast short messages, not merely "to promote links".
Rule #1 of cops: there's more where that one came from. As far as a citizen is concerned, there are an infinite number of cops, and the state can *always* bring more firepower to bear than the citizen can.
The purpose of resisting police violence is not to prevent dealing with the state, but rather to change the circumstances of that interaction, to not let yourself be beaten.
If you have to defend yourself against an abusive cop and then run away, you contact your lawyer. If you are arrested (quite likely), you surrender to the cops in the presence of your lawyer, with the local media, the ACLU, the force's internal affairs department, etc., all alerted to keep an eye on the situation.
And you think fighting back and attacking the cops is going to stop that?
If a cop swings a nightstick at your head and you break his arm, or pepper spray or taze him, or shoot him, yes, I expect that he will stop swinging that nightstick. In a sane society, if he were acting without legitimate cause (and he survived), he would then be prosecuted for his assault on you.
Allowing people to "defend" themselves against the police because they think they are in the right is not one compatible with the rule of law.
SCOTUS disagreed, in the Bad Elk case, stating "If the officer had no right to arrest, the other party might resist the illegal attempt to arrest him, using no more force than was absolutely necessary to repel the assault constituting the attempt to arrest."
Expecting people to submit to kidnapping because the kidnappers have badges is not compatible with a free society.
I wouldn't expect courts to follow this precedent in our modern police state, but to my knowledge SCOTUS has not overturned it.
but aren't you spinning things a little bit too much by calling drug possession your "right to grow plants and have the products in your possession?"
No, it's an entirely accurate description.
I mean, context matters. You might as well describe speeding laws as interfering with your "right to drive,"
You don't have a right to drive on the public roads. It's a privilege.
noise ordinances as abridging the "right to enjoy music,"
You have every right to enjoy music, so long as it does not conflict with my right to peace and quiet. Tell me, what right of yours does my (hypothetical) possession of cannabis threaten to violate?
and laws against shooting people as abridging your "right to play catch."
It takes two to play catch. If you and your consenting adult buddy want to do it with very small and very fast balls launched by propellants, it might be evidence of mental incompetence that would be grounds for civil commitment to an institution, but it's not a violation of anyone's rights that should be thought of as a crime.
What if the laywer and judge were LinkedIn "contacts"? Does that make it better?
Yes, I should think so. Having someone as a LinkedIn "contact" indicates that you are familiar with and respect their professional work, whereas being someone's Facebook "friend" mean that you are hearing about (looking at my friends' recent posts) their politics, what clothes they're buying, their religion, jokes they're sharing, their dogs, their exercise program, their kids, their cats...
Now when someoen sends a request I need to put it into a group and maintain that group
Only when it's somebody whose FB actions I want to track, do I need to add them to the group.
much easier to have 2 accounts.
Not only is that not easier, it's forbidden by the TOS: "Please be aware that managing multiple accounts is a serious violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts."
The fact is I don't want my wall cluttered with crap.
Create a list of the people you want to keep track of. (Click on "More" under the left-hand menu, then "Create new list".) Drag that new list to the top of the left hand menu. You'll just see their activity on your homepage by default.
I don't understand this - why would you want someone on your friends list if they're not a friend, nor even acquaintance?
I perform poetry and music, and give workshops on various topics. Many of my Facebook "friends" are people who have seen me perform or attended a workshop. When I get a friend request from someone I don't know, I assume they fall into one of those categories.
He claims it was done by accident, that the files magically got buried deep within the system. Yeah, because that stuff happens. Not.
That's exactly how files get "deleted" on most filesystems -- the data is not removed, merely indicies to it. Describing that data as "buried" is more accurate than calling it "deleted". I don't know if that's the case here or not, but this:
"I asked them, 'Where did you get that? I don't remember that.' I asked them, 'Could I access that if I wanted to?'" Matt said. "They said no."
suggests that the data in question was not in a regular file.
Well, we all know that Nature, NASA, and the U.N. are prime players in the conspiracy. As are NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the science academies of Brazil, China and India.
I mean, either there's a massive conspiracy by climatologists all around the world, or a handful of corporate shills and religious true believers (including both fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist propertarians) have the media's ear and are quoting stuff out of context and flat-out inventing shit. And that's impossible, right?
Even worse, lets say we go all "Pol Pot" on our civilization like the global warming religion desperately wants us to
Pardon? I don't see any "global warming religion". I do however see some who take a religious approach to capitalism and believe that nothing that comes out the unregulated free market can be bad, and so ignore the science behind climate change just as the religious right ignores the science behind evolution.
as if a degree here and there or a meter here and there would even be noticeable to us...
Ask the folks in New Orleans if a meter here and there is noticeable.
Of course, I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will weave this into their fantasies as well, that those laws were passed specifically to enable the climatological cabal to steal away America's sovereignty, or whatever.
Just because you can do something does not make it legal to do.
Or, do you believe that an door is unlocked door is an invitation to enter?
Not necessarily, but that's irrelevant. Broadcast your radio signal though my home is not analogous to leaving a door unlocked. The state has no legitimate power to make me a criminal for building a radio receiver or for operating it in my home.
No matter how you argue the numbers, there are way too many for a conspiracy.
Oh, no no no. They're all in on it. See, they've been at it for a while. It goes all the way back to 1961, when the secret Muslim socialists inserted that fake birth notice for Obama in the Honolulu Advertiser. But they knew that their sleeper agent would need some sort of crisis to provide a cover for his actions, so their next step was to infiltrate climatology and use the Big Lie technique.
NASA, of course, has been in on it since the beginning -- same guys who faked the moon landings, so we know they can get a bunch of people to keep a conspiracy secret. See, after the first astronauts and cosmonauts encountered the saucer people -- which also happened in 1961, which just proves that it can't be a coincidence! -- the top folks at NASA and in the Soviet space program made a pact with the aliens to get the Earth to de-industrialize so that when the invasion fleet arrives we won't be able to resist.
You hear that? That loud sucking sound? It's the sound of an IT union driving the last of our jobs overseas at warp speed.
There are two ways to prevent jobs from being outsourced in a "race to the bottom" of wages and working conditions: 1) pass regulatory legislation, and 2) organize crippling strikes and boycotts against any company that does such outsourcing.
Effective organization for labor -- a union -- is necessary for either to come about.
'I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem,' Garrett says
So, in other words, this guy is commenting on a field about which he has no knowledge, using tools that have no proven relevance or use to the area under discussion.
I'm shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- that he had a hard time getting his paper published.
That's not natural selection. Hiring the fine gunsmiths at Colt to protect you shows that you're too weak to defend yourself, and so -- if we're going to get all socially Darwinian here -- ought to be culled from the herd.
No law you can pass is going to protect someone who is so weak kneed that they can't handle verbal/written insults.
Making public untrue insults against someone is defamation, and is a legitimate tort.
How do I link to something I saw on television, and copied down? The answer of course is that I can't.
If you can't find the video on-line, and you can't find another source (and, for simple factual data, I find that hard to believe), then provide something approximating a proper citation. While the formatting isn't really important, in MLA format would include:
Title of episode or segment
Title of program
Title of series
Producer, Director, Performers, Writer (if known. Inclusion and order depends on emphasis)
Network
Local Affiliate and the city
Date of Broadcast
Examples at the linked page:
Racism 101. Prod. Thomas Lennon. PBS. KQED, San Francisco. 5 Oct. 1988.
White House Prayer Breakfast. Al Gore (Introduction), Bill Clinton (Address), Rev. Gerald Mann (Closing prayer), Rabbi Alan Cohen (Interview)." C-SPAN, Washington, D.C. 11 Sept. 1998.
"Torture." Narr. Scott Pelley. Sixty Minutes. CBS. WCBS, New York. 30 March 2008.
It's impossible to track down "The BBC, May 2009" and see the source myself; a full citation makes that possible (though not necessarily easy or practical), and more importantly lets me know if the source is reputable. "The BBC" covers a lot of ground -- was this an opinion piece? An interview with a politician? A piece of investigative journalism?
My dad had a damaged shouler, and they had it fixed just 2 weeks later. (more below)
Of course, many Americans have a very long wait time for healthcare services, because they never receive them.
(And as for those wait times, you know, here on the web, it's traditional to actually link to sources that you cite, rather than say "The BBC, May 2009".)
Many people in the U.K. have some private healthcare, and so don't wait. But if those without a private plan have to wait for lower priority procedures, that's a lot better than not getting them at all, or being forced into bankruptcy to get them.
why people say the U.S. has the best healthcare in the world, because the cure rate is soooo much higher than in countries where care is monopolized by the government.
And then you "prove" this by cherry-picking one statistic? One that's been widely debunked?
The measures of prostate cancer "survival" rate are not comparable because of differences in screening and detection. In the U.S., your diagnosis of "prostate cancer" may well be based on an abnormal PSA reading, whereas a U.K. diagnosis is more likely to be based on an enlarged prostate -- a much more advanced form of the disease. This selection bias skews the five year survival rates, but makes little difference in actual outcomes; the prostate cancer mortality rate is roughly the same between the two countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Where do you live that you hear relentless public announcements advocating tolerance? Here in the U.S. I hear the loudest voices calling for fear of gays, immigrants, Muslims, humanists, and socialists.
Where do you live that jokes are illegal? Insults in the workplace may be a tort, and threats are illegal; and perhaps people can no longer cover their insults and threats by saying "hey, just a joke".
Very eloquent, but where exactly is it "illegal to cry tears"?
A little bit of emotional maturity, where people learn resolve conflict without violence, and to deal with anger and frustration in more constructive ways, would do us all a world of good. There are alternatives besides lashing out at any provocation or bottling it all up until you explode.
It pretty much turned out that, with our current level of technology, it's often not worth the effort to put humans into space. From Sputnik to Apollo, the "space race" was never about science, it was about Cold War propaganda and missile technology.
At the moment there are precious few reasons to lob a human into orbit to do science, much less to go through the trouble and expense to try to keep one alive for a trip to Luna or Mars. Cheaper and easier to send robotic probes.
It's going to remain that way until some technological breakthroughs make it easier to put people into orbit and keep them alive up there -- maybe nanotech that enables a space elevator and the construction of habitats, maybe something completely unexpected. Or maybe nothing, and we stay here and focus on making the Earth a safe and pleasant place to live. Or maybe we blow it and die off.
May I introduce you to Twitter, a popular service which allows users to microblog via SMS, and also to receive microblog entries from other users via SMS?
Not at all. "We're meeting at Joe's Bar and Grill. http://www.joesbarandgrill.com/ for directions."
There are a large number of people who either don't have phones with these features, have phone with these features but not a plan that allows them, don't know how to use these features on their phones, find SMS more useful than e-mail due to spam issues, or prefer SMS's "push" nature for mobile use.
Love it or lump it, SMS is the de-facto lowest common denomination for mobile-to-mobile data communication (at least here in the U.S.).
I was unaware that SMS supported hyperlinks. When was this feature added?
The point of microblogging is to broadcast short messages, not merely "to promote links".
The purpose of resisting police violence is not to prevent dealing with the state, but rather to change the circumstances of that interaction, to not let yourself be beaten.
If you have to defend yourself against an abusive cop and then run away, you contact your lawyer. If you are arrested (quite likely), you surrender to the cops in the presence of your lawyer, with the local media, the ACLU, the force's internal affairs department, etc., all alerted to keep an eye on the situation.
If a cop swings a nightstick at your head and you break his arm, or pepper spray or taze him, or shoot him, yes, I expect that he will stop swinging that nightstick. In a sane society, if he were acting without legitimate cause (and he survived), he would then be prosecuted for his assault on you.
Of course, we do not like in a sane society.
SCOTUS disagreed, in the Bad Elk case, stating "If the officer had no right to arrest, the other party might resist the illegal attempt to arrest him, using no more force than was absolutely necessary to repel the assault constituting the attempt to arrest."
Expecting people to submit to kidnapping because the kidnappers have badges is not compatible with a free society.
I wouldn't expect courts to follow this precedent in our modern police state, but to my knowledge SCOTUS has not overturned it.
No, it's an entirely accurate description.
You don't have a right to drive on the public roads. It's a privilege.
You have every right to enjoy music, so long as it does not conflict with my right to peace and quiet. Tell me, what right of yours does my (hypothetical) possession of cannabis threaten to violate?
It takes two to play catch. If you and your consenting adult buddy want to do it with very small and very fast balls launched by propellants, it might be evidence of mental incompetence that would be grounds for civil commitment to an institution, but it's not a violation of anyone's rights that should be thought of as a crime.
Yes, I should think so. Having someone as a LinkedIn "contact" indicates that you are familiar with and respect their professional work, whereas being someone's Facebook "friend" mean that you are hearing about (looking at my friends' recent posts) their politics, what clothes they're buying, their religion, jokes they're sharing, their dogs, their exercise program, their kids, their cats...
Only when it's somebody whose FB actions I want to track, do I need to add them to the group.
Not only is that not easier, it's forbidden by the TOS: "Please be aware that managing multiple accounts is a serious violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts."
Create a list of the people you want to keep track of. (Click on "More" under the left-hand menu, then "Create new list".) Drag that new list to the top of the left hand menu. You'll just see their activity on your homepage by default.
I perform poetry and music, and give workshops on various topics. Many of my Facebook "friends" are people who have seen me perform or attended a workshop. When I get a friend request from someone I don't know, I assume they fall into one of those categories.
That's exactly how files get "deleted" on most filesystems -- the data is not removed, merely indicies to it. Describing that data as "buried" is more accurate than calling it "deleted". I don't know if that's the case here or not, but this:
suggests that the data in question was not in a regular file.
Well, we all know that Nature, NASA, and the U.N. are prime players in the conspiracy. As are NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the science academies of Brazil, China and India.
I mean, either there's a massive conspiracy by climatologists all around the world, or a handful of corporate shills and religious true believers (including both fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist propertarians) have the media's ear and are quoting stuff out of context and flat-out inventing shit. And that's impossible, right?
No, I assure you they teach about the ice ages out here on the coasts too. Glacier melt erosion played a large role in shaping the region where I live.
Pardon? I don't see any "global warming religion". I do however see some who take a religious approach to capitalism and believe that nothing that comes out the unregulated free market can be bad, and so ignore the science behind climate change just as the religious right ignores the science behind evolution.
Ask the folks in New Orleans if a meter here and there is noticeable.
Great. Let's eliminate the "intellectual property" laws that have closed off some of the data.
Many nation's weather services -- the sources of the CRU's data -- claim copyright or place other restrictions on their data.
Of course, I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will weave this into their fantasies as well, that those laws were passed specifically to enable the climatological cabal to steal away America's sovereignty, or whatever.
Not necessarily, but that's irrelevant. Broadcast your radio signal though my home is not analogous to leaving a door unlocked. The state has no legitimate power to make me a criminal for building a radio receiver or for operating it in my home.
Oh, no no no. They're all in on it. See, they've been at it for a while. It goes all the way back to 1961, when the secret Muslim socialists inserted that fake birth notice for Obama in the Honolulu Advertiser. But they knew that their sleeper agent would need some sort of crisis to provide a cover for his actions, so their next step was to infiltrate climatology and use the Big Lie technique.
NASA, of course, has been in on it since the beginning -- same guys who faked the moon landings, so we know they can get a bunch of people to keep a conspiracy secret. See, after the first astronauts and cosmonauts encountered the saucer people -- which also happened in 1961, which just proves that it can't be a coincidence! -- the top folks at NASA and in the Soviet space program made a pact with the aliens to get the Earth to de-industrialize so that when the invasion fleet arrives we won't be able to resist.
There are two ways to prevent jobs from being outsourced in a "race to the bottom" of wages and working conditions: 1) pass regulatory legislation, and 2) organize crippling strikes and boycotts against any company that does such outsourcing.
Effective organization for labor -- a union -- is necessary for either to come about.
So, in other words, this guy is commenting on a field about which he has no knowledge, using tools that have no proven relevance or use to the area under discussion.
I'm shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- that he had a hard time getting his paper published.
That's not natural selection. Hiring the fine gunsmiths at Colt to protect you shows that you're too weak to defend yourself, and so -- if we're going to get all socially Darwinian here -- ought to be culled from the herd.
Making public untrue insults against someone is defamation, and is a legitimate tort.
If you can't find the video on-line, and you can't find another source (and, for simple factual data, I find that hard to believe), then provide something approximating a proper citation. While the formatting isn't really important, in MLA format would include:
Examples at the linked page:
It's impossible to track down "The BBC, May 2009" and see the source myself; a full citation makes that possible (though not necessarily easy or practical), and more importantly lets me know if the source is reputable. "The BBC" covers a lot of ground -- was this an opinion piece? An interview with a politician? A piece of investigative journalism?
People all over the developing world. You generally turn it into charcoal first, to mitigate the problems you cite.
Of course, many Americans have a very long wait time for healthcare services, because they never receive them.
(And as for those wait times, you know, here on the web, it's traditional to actually link to sources that you cite, rather than say "The BBC, May 2009".)
Many people in the U.K. have some private healthcare, and so don't wait. But if those without a private plan have to wait for lower priority procedures, that's a lot better than not getting them at all, or being forced into bankruptcy to get them.
And then you "prove" this by cherry-picking one statistic? One that's been widely debunked?
The measures of prostate cancer "survival" rate are not comparable because of differences in screening and detection. In the U.S., your diagnosis of "prostate cancer" may well be based on an abnormal PSA reading, whereas a U.K. diagnosis is more likely to be based on an enlarged prostate -- a much more advanced form of the disease. This selection bias skews the five year survival rates, but makes little difference in actual outcomes; the prostate cancer mortality rate is roughly the same between the two countries.
Overall, cancer deaths are much lower in the U.K. than in the U.S., and life expectancy and infant mortality are better in the U.K. than in the U.S.