iPhones, expensive as they are, constitute felony theft in many areas. The police LOVE to go after felonies if they don't have much else to do. By contrast, felony theft WILL get you arrested and not just a summons. Regular theft is pretty much a slap on the wrist and a fine, maybe probation. Felony theft starts with a large fine and probation if you have a clean record..if not you're going to do at least thirty days IF you can pay the owner back..if not you might do six months.
Now they're seeking to make abstinence-only education the norm and to define hand holding and kissing as sexual behavior. I wish my state would also ban dentistry so we can look like the fucking toothless yokels we are for letting shit like this pass.
Stand your Ground laws need to be appended a bit. Here's why. Suppose you get in a random fight at a bar. Most bar fights end pretty quickly when the two realize that getting punched sucks, or when they get ejected. However, with Stand your Ground laws the way they are, you have no duty to retreat and can simply pull out your gun and shoot them as soon as they get the upper hand over you, saying that you fear for your life. Similarly, when you pull your gun, they'll pull their gun, saying they fear for their life. So what you have is both combatants standing their ground and the fight won't end until someone (or both of them) is dead.
It also leads to situations where you could go pick a fight with someone and then shoot them before they even get to you because you feared for your life because you thought they had a weapon.
There's going to be a lot of people using Stand your Ground laws as an excuse to escalate a run of the mill fight into a deadly situation that wouldn't otherwise have turned deadly. Some things might be justified, like if someone is car jacking you or trying to force their way into your home, but other things wouldn't..like someone catching you in bed with their wife and ending up dead because you feared for your life and had no duty to retreat from their home.
Why not punish the abusers and not simply everyone that has to return things? A while back I purchased an LCD monitor from Walmart. There was a problem with the screen so I took it back and got an exchange. Well, there was a problem with THAT screen too, so I took it back. The second time they went through a lot of trouble of writing down serial numbers whereas the first time they didn't. They also checked it for any signs of tampering to make sure maybe I didn't crack it open, take the innards, and have a 'naked' monitor sitting around.
Immediately behind me was an obese woman with an empty food box demanding a refund because she didn't like the food.
Ahh, but this is nearly undetectable. While some people COULD come together and go all CSI and maybe find a few suspicious people, it wouldn't be 'beyond a shadow of a doubt' to see someone standing around in front of Walmart with a backpack on.
Relative safety increases the chances some psycho is going to try to fulfill their desires. If people suddenly had a 99% chance of robbing a bank and getting away with it, there'd be a lot more bank robberies.
Many states are at will employment. They don't want to have to worry about the small chance that you might have a problem with alcohol and sometimes maybe come in late for work on Monday morning due to a hangover. They might also have religious reasons for regulating your drinking. If they exclude you because you drink, they can probably find ten more people similar to you that might claim not to drink, or might simply just not drink.
Everyone thinks that it will be epic when/if marijuana is legalized, but you bet your ass insurance companies will still employers to test for it or they won't insure them. Nothing is preventing them from simply not hiring people that like to smoke it.
Air burst a few in the upper atmosphere, hit a big city or two. Resume life as usual while they're almost completely without power, infrastructure, and likely don't even know who the fuck hit them.
Think of the children, man. Just because a few people are jailed that were hitting on other people who were legal doesn't mean this system doesn't work. Besides, what would you rather have? A few people you don't know and will likely never interact with thrown in jail? Or the risk that maybe possibly someday your kid could be talked dirty to online?
That's how people think. Sorry to sound like an ass.
A majority of my friends that have bought new iPods and iPhones have had to get repairs on them every few months. The ones that bought used typically had no problems, so it's just one of those 'infant mortality' things where new devices fail a lot more often than do middle age devices, simply because defects will show up more often sooner than later.
Their lowest plan is $5 a month. But for smartphones, you pay an extra fee. And for SPECIAL smartphones, you pay an even higher fee. If you want unlimited, you'll pay a higher fee, but unlimited really isn't unlimited so if you need more, you'll pay a higher fee. If you need less, you'll end up running over, and paying a higher fee.
The cloud is a great idea. That way when your data is lost forever, you can simply point to whatever company you contracted to store your stuff whenever someone comes looking for the records you were legally required to have. They probably won't care much that you trusted the cloud with your vital data, who quickly lost it (while accepting your payments, of course)
The last thing I want is for all those 'important' people to talk from the time they get on the plane until the time they get off the plane. If you switch from 'turn your phones off or we're all going to die' over to 'be nice and don't talk on your phone during takeoff and landing' it'll be nothing but people talking the entire trip. People aren't nice.
This is how censorship begins. Right now, you and I are kicking up a shitstorm. We don't want our connections to be censored, so we call in. Right now, there's a thousand working stiffs who are too tired or just too embarrassed to call and deal with people they can barely understand so they can visit boobies.com on their phones.
In five years, they'll have one person at that part of the call center. It'll be an unpublished number, passed around only by word of mouth, and it'll be widespread knowledge that cell phone internet is inherently restrictive and you can't look too much up on it.
This is how censorship begins. It starts with the people in power saying, "We're not going to take your Internet away, don't worry. We're just going to hold on to it. Now we're going to put it over here, okay? You can come use it any time you want, okay? Now we're going to take it down the street here but it's just a block away and you can come use it any time you like. But when under our roof, you'll follow our rules.."
Under certain specific circumstances you can sign away legal rights. Like I'm free to talk about my employer all I want, but I am not free to divulge trade secrets and things like that. Here, I have signed away my freedom of speech in order to remain in good standing with the company and be a trusted employee. If I were not an employee, however, I'm completely free to divulge trade secrets if I haven't signed anything preventing me from doing so.
Also, you may be forced to give up certain rights in certain areas. Most bars don't allow weapons on premises, unless you're an active duty police officer, even though you might have a carry permit.
However, more and more EULAs are asking people to give up rights for no goddamn reason at all. Like the right to sue. I don't think this one would stand up in court if it came to blows. There's absolutely no reason someone would agree to give up their right to sue if they had any other choice. It's basically saying, "If we do something that causes you trouble, there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it except ask someone we're paying to ask us to reimburse you."
According to fair use rights already in place, you can do this. There's a law (DMCA) that conflicts with it, but it is specifically against breaking encryption and not necessarily copying..even though breaking the encryption is a necessary part of copying the DVD in accordance with your own fair use rights.
It's kind of like saying that you can legally get gas for your car from any gas station, but it's illegal to put any brand besides Ford gas through the gas hole in your car. Also Ford gas is 3x the price of normal gas for the same product.
Scenario: You blew a.04% on the breathalyzer and showed a.03% on the blood test, but you swerved. We have it on video. You also stumbled when we asked you to walk the straight line during the field sobriety test, never mind that it was twenty degrees out and we didn't let you put your jacket on and we drew the line right beside a busy interstate. We have this on video too. We can make a deal where you lose your license for a year, pay ten grand, take some classes, and are on probation for a year...or you can take it to trial and go to jail for a year. During that time, your girlfriend will see other men, you'll lose your pets, most of your possessions, and come out pretty much bankrupt from all the bills you weren't able to pay. Your move.
Hypothetical situation: I am hiring you for a sensitive position. Let's just say my company makes widgets that I really don't want Spacely's Sprockets to be able to make them too. My business has secrets. Since if you went down the hall, broke through a secure door, beat my security guards to death, and cracked the safe, you would have access to those secrets I'd rather Spacely not get ahold of, I am requiring you not to post my company information.
To get compliance out of you, I need all the logins of your personal accounts (social media, email, video games, etc) and I need you to consent to this monitoring software on your home electronics devices. I also need a background check, drug test, lie detector test, and to know how you fuck your wife at night. Company secrets, and all that. Is this acceptable?
You see, there's a certain limit that has to be reached. I cannot infringe upon the rights of your company to keep its secrets secret, you cannot infringe upon my right to privacy and right to free speech. No matter how important you think your company is, you just can't do this.
Can you? All it takes is a few SRBMs disguised as shipping containers to pull up to a coast line near a major port and hit a few cities nearby to fucking devastate a country. They can simply be sank afterwords. If you saw them, assuming you were even looking for them in the first place and had automatic detection capabilities, you'd have a few minutes of warning, max. You might be able to figure out where the ship launched from, but good luck figuring out which nationality was responsible for nuking you.
We'll never be able to come up with a complete theory of everything until we can 100% model the interactions of the smallest bits of matter in every circumstance. Once upon a time, we could only model the interactions of macro objects, that is, classical mechanics. A lot of wonderful things came out of this, like skyscrapers, airplanes, jet engines, etc. Imagine what will happen when we can model the smallest of particles. Perhaps one day we'll have electrons coming in on one wire, positrons coming in on another, and they'll annihilate each other in a basement reactor to provide a shitload of power to the house. Who knows?
You're cute. The whole reason AT&T gives for capping their bandwidth so low is that they have limited bandwidth on their towers (and backends for landlines). Charging developers isn't going to fix this..you really think they'd make it to where netflix or someone similar would have to pay for all the bandwidth you used? This would make the limited bandwidth situation worse and would drive away newcomers to the mobile app market.
No, more than likely what will happen is they'll charge the developer for the bandwidth their app used, charge the customer for the bandwidth they're using, and pocket the rest of the funds. Don't like it? You're banned from the AT&T mobile network.
It would have been awesome if they said, "Well, do this and you can download your game again and put it on the Vita!" But they make you jump through hoops AND pay for what you already own. Most people aren't willing to do this. Sorry Sony.
Four Loko isn't actually a bad drink in my opinion, but they're so big and full of alcohol that I really don't want to drink more than one. However, there's the occasional idiot that will drink six and then die to it, but they're just as likely to snort pure caffeine powder if they had it and die anyway.
"Your Honor, the defendant drove through all the same traffic lights they would if they were leaving the victim's house at the estimated time of the victim's death and heading towards their own house. There were only a few other cars on the road at the time, so they had a straight shot all the way home. We estimate that with no traffic and the defendant speeding, since there were no police watching, that they made the thirty minute drive in under fifteen minutes. This means that the alibi their neighbor gave was still correct, he was home at the time he said he was, which was approximately sixteen minutes after the murder. Obviously the defendant is guilty since they were the only one on the road at the time."
But it would be okay. The people that could acquire those things that enjoyed them a little too much would slowly become addicts after a year or two, and be dead from overdose in another. While the supply kept coming, they'd probably be alright unless their liver failed, but maybe they couldn't afford it for a week or two and bam, they inject their old level and kill over. Not that many new people would want to try it after a generation of it being easy to acquire.
Or I could spend a Saturday learning damn near everything there is to know about how to setup computers and their hardware for basic home use, build my own high quality computer out of parts I ordered and put together, and have no one to answer to but myself (and warranty holders) if something breaks. I'm at my own availability 24/7 and don't have to risk getting a "Well what did you think you could do with the low end model? Play flash games? No, you need a high end PC for that."
Note: I'm an experienced computer tech who does all this already, but if I were starting at the level of barely being able to use a mouse, I'd totally go this route.
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iPhones, expensive as they are, constitute felony theft in many areas. The police LOVE to go after felonies if they don't have much else to do. By contrast, felony theft WILL get you arrested and not just a summons. Regular theft is pretty much a slap on the wrist and a fine, maybe probation. Felony theft starts with a large fine and probation if you have a clean record..if not you're going to do at least thirty days IF you can pay the owner back..if not you might do six months.
Now they're seeking to make abstinence-only education the norm and to define hand holding and kissing as sexual behavior. I wish my state would also ban dentistry so we can look like the fucking toothless yokels we are for letting shit like this pass.
Stand your Ground laws need to be appended a bit. Here's why. Suppose you get in a random fight at a bar. Most bar fights end pretty quickly when the two realize that getting punched sucks, or when they get ejected. However, with Stand your Ground laws the way they are, you have no duty to retreat and can simply pull out your gun and shoot them as soon as they get the upper hand over you, saying that you fear for your life. Similarly, when you pull your gun, they'll pull their gun, saying they fear for their life. So what you have is both combatants standing their ground and the fight won't end until someone (or both of them) is dead.
It also leads to situations where you could go pick a fight with someone and then shoot them before they even get to you because you feared for your life because you thought they had a weapon.
There's going to be a lot of people using Stand your Ground laws as an excuse to escalate a run of the mill fight into a deadly situation that wouldn't otherwise have turned deadly. Some things might be justified, like if someone is car jacking you or trying to force their way into your home, but other things wouldn't..like someone catching you in bed with their wife and ending up dead because you feared for your life and had no duty to retreat from their home.
Why not punish the abusers and not simply everyone that has to return things? A while back I purchased an LCD monitor from Walmart. There was a problem with the screen so I took it back and got an exchange. Well, there was a problem with THAT screen too, so I took it back. The second time they went through a lot of trouble of writing down serial numbers whereas the first time they didn't. They also checked it for any signs of tampering to make sure maybe I didn't crack it open, take the innards, and have a 'naked' monitor sitting around.
Immediately behind me was an obese woman with an empty food box demanding a refund because she didn't like the food.
Ahh, but this is nearly undetectable. While some people COULD come together and go all CSI and maybe find a few suspicious people, it wouldn't be 'beyond a shadow of a doubt' to see someone standing around in front of Walmart with a backpack on.
Relative safety increases the chances some psycho is going to try to fulfill their desires. If people suddenly had a 99% chance of robbing a bank and getting away with it, there'd be a lot more bank robberies.
Many states are at will employment. They don't want to have to worry about the small chance that you might have a problem with alcohol and sometimes maybe come in late for work on Monday morning due to a hangover. They might also have religious reasons for regulating your drinking. If they exclude you because you drink, they can probably find ten more people similar to you that might claim not to drink, or might simply just not drink.
Everyone thinks that it will be epic when/if marijuana is legalized, but you bet your ass insurance companies will still employers to test for it or they won't insure them. Nothing is preventing them from simply not hiring people that like to smoke it.
Air burst a few in the upper atmosphere, hit a big city or two. Resume life as usual while they're almost completely without power, infrastructure, and likely don't even know who the fuck hit them.
Think of the children, man. Just because a few people are jailed that were hitting on other people who were legal doesn't mean this system doesn't work. Besides, what would you rather have? A few people you don't know and will likely never interact with thrown in jail? Or the risk that maybe possibly someday your kid could be talked dirty to online?
That's how people think. Sorry to sound like an ass.
A majority of my friends that have bought new iPods and iPhones have had to get repairs on them every few months. The ones that bought used typically had no problems, so it's just one of those 'infant mortality' things where new devices fail a lot more often than do middle age devices, simply because defects will show up more often sooner than later.
Their lowest plan is $5 a month. But for smartphones, you pay an extra fee. And for SPECIAL smartphones, you pay an even higher fee. If you want unlimited, you'll pay a higher fee, but unlimited really isn't unlimited so if you need more, you'll pay a higher fee. If you need less, you'll end up running over, and paying a higher fee.
That $5 will turn into $20+.
The cloud is a great idea. That way when your data is lost forever, you can simply point to whatever company you contracted to store your stuff whenever someone comes looking for the records you were legally required to have. They probably won't care much that you trusted the cloud with your vital data, who quickly lost it (while accepting your payments, of course)
The last thing I want is for all those 'important' people to talk from the time they get on the plane until the time they get off the plane. If you switch from 'turn your phones off or we're all going to die' over to 'be nice and don't talk on your phone during takeoff and landing' it'll be nothing but people talking the entire trip. People aren't nice.
This is how censorship begins. Right now, you and I are kicking up a shitstorm. We don't want our connections to be censored, so we call in. Right now, there's a thousand working stiffs who are too tired or just too embarrassed to call and deal with people they can barely understand so they can visit boobies.com on their phones.
In five years, they'll have one person at that part of the call center. It'll be an unpublished number, passed around only by word of mouth, and it'll be widespread knowledge that cell phone internet is inherently restrictive and you can't look too much up on it.
This is how censorship begins. It starts with the people in power saying, "We're not going to take your Internet away, don't worry. We're just going to hold on to it. Now we're going to put it over here, okay? You can come use it any time you want, okay? Now we're going to take it down the street here but it's just a block away and you can come use it any time you like. But when under our roof, you'll follow our rules.."
Under certain specific circumstances you can sign away legal rights. Like I'm free to talk about my employer all I want, but I am not free to divulge trade secrets and things like that. Here, I have signed away my freedom of speech in order to remain in good standing with the company and be a trusted employee. If I were not an employee, however, I'm completely free to divulge trade secrets if I haven't signed anything preventing me from doing so.
Also, you may be forced to give up certain rights in certain areas. Most bars don't allow weapons on premises, unless you're an active duty police officer, even though you might have a carry permit.
However, more and more EULAs are asking people to give up rights for no goddamn reason at all. Like the right to sue. I don't think this one would stand up in court if it came to blows. There's absolutely no reason someone would agree to give up their right to sue if they had any other choice. It's basically saying, "If we do something that causes you trouble, there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it except ask someone we're paying to ask us to reimburse you."
According to fair use rights already in place, you can do this. There's a law (DMCA) that conflicts with it, but it is specifically against breaking encryption and not necessarily copying..even though breaking the encryption is a necessary part of copying the DVD in accordance with your own fair use rights.
It's kind of like saying that you can legally get gas for your car from any gas station, but it's illegal to put any brand besides Ford gas through the gas hole in your car. Also Ford gas is 3x the price of normal gas for the same product.
Lies. It happens all the time.
Scenario: You blew a .04% on the breathalyzer and showed a .03% on the blood test, but you swerved. We have it on video. You also stumbled when we asked you to walk the straight line during the field sobriety test, never mind that it was twenty degrees out and we didn't let you put your jacket on and we drew the line right beside a busy interstate. We have this on video too. We can make a deal where you lose your license for a year, pay ten grand, take some classes, and are on probation for a year...or you can take it to trial and go to jail for a year. During that time, your girlfriend will see other men, you'll lose your pets, most of your possessions, and come out pretty much bankrupt from all the bills you weren't able to pay. Your move.
Hypothetical situation: I am hiring you for a sensitive position. Let's just say my company makes widgets that I really don't want Spacely's Sprockets to be able to make them too. My business has secrets. Since if you went down the hall, broke through a secure door, beat my security guards to death, and cracked the safe, you would have access to those secrets I'd rather Spacely not get ahold of, I am requiring you not to post my company information.
To get compliance out of you, I need all the logins of your personal accounts (social media, email, video games, etc) and I need you to consent to this monitoring software on your home electronics devices. I also need a background check, drug test, lie detector test, and to know how you fuck your wife at night. Company secrets, and all that. Is this acceptable?
You see, there's a certain limit that has to be reached. I cannot infringe upon the rights of your company to keep its secrets secret, you cannot infringe upon my right to privacy and right to free speech. No matter how important you think your company is, you just can't do this.
Can you? All it takes is a few SRBMs disguised as shipping containers to pull up to a coast line near a major port and hit a few cities nearby to fucking devastate a country. They can simply be sank afterwords. If you saw them, assuming you were even looking for them in the first place and had automatic detection capabilities, you'd have a few minutes of warning, max. You might be able to figure out where the ship launched from, but good luck figuring out which nationality was responsible for nuking you.
We'll never be able to come up with a complete theory of everything until we can 100% model the interactions of the smallest bits of matter in every circumstance. Once upon a time, we could only model the interactions of macro objects, that is, classical mechanics. A lot of wonderful things came out of this, like skyscrapers, airplanes, jet engines, etc. Imagine what will happen when we can model the smallest of particles. Perhaps one day we'll have electrons coming in on one wire, positrons coming in on another, and they'll annihilate each other in a basement reactor to provide a shitload of power to the house. Who knows?
You're cute. The whole reason AT&T gives for capping their bandwidth so low is that they have limited bandwidth on their towers (and backends for landlines). Charging developers isn't going to fix this..you really think they'd make it to where netflix or someone similar would have to pay for all the bandwidth you used? This would make the limited bandwidth situation worse and would drive away newcomers to the mobile app market.
No, more than likely what will happen is they'll charge the developer for the bandwidth their app used, charge the customer for the bandwidth they're using, and pocket the rest of the funds. Don't like it? You're banned from the AT&T mobile network.
It would have been awesome if they said, "Well, do this and you can download your game again and put it on the Vita!" But they make you jump through hoops AND pay for what you already own. Most people aren't willing to do this. Sorry Sony.
Four Loko isn't actually a bad drink in my opinion, but they're so big and full of alcohol that I really don't want to drink more than one. However, there's the occasional idiot that will drink six and then die to it, but they're just as likely to snort pure caffeine powder if they had it and die anyway.
"Your Honor, the defendant drove through all the same traffic lights they would if they were leaving the victim's house at the estimated time of the victim's death and heading towards their own house. There were only a few other cars on the road at the time, so they had a straight shot all the way home. We estimate that with no traffic and the defendant speeding, since there were no police watching, that they made the thirty minute drive in under fifteen minutes. This means that the alibi their neighbor gave was still correct, he was home at the time he said he was, which was approximately sixteen minutes after the murder. Obviously the defendant is guilty since they were the only one on the road at the time."
But it would be okay. The people that could acquire those things that enjoyed them a little too much would slowly become addicts after a year or two, and be dead from overdose in another. While the supply kept coming, they'd probably be alright unless their liver failed, but maybe they couldn't afford it for a week or two and bam, they inject their old level and kill over. Not that many new people would want to try it after a generation of it being easy to acquire.
Or I could spend a Saturday learning damn near everything there is to know about how to setup computers and their hardware for basic home use, build my own high quality computer out of parts I ordered and put together, and have no one to answer to but myself (and warranty holders) if something breaks. I'm at my own availability 24/7 and don't have to risk getting a "Well what did you think you could do with the low end model? Play flash games? No, you need a high end PC for that."
Note: I'm an experienced computer tech who does all this already, but if I were starting at the level of barely being able to use a mouse, I'd totally go this route.