Freedom of speech has its limitations-- very little within enforcement of the law but quite a bit within legal liability.
For example, it is illegal to impose a panic by false statements (bomb hoaxes).
Within the doctrine of "fighting words" (Chaplinksy v. New Hampshire), the liability of an attack is shared between the attacker and the person who intentionally goaded the attack. For example, if the Westboro Baptist Church is picketing the funeral of a homosexual Marine and Marine's father goes ape shit on the protestors, the father will be held accountable for his actions with adjustments made for the effects of the fighting words.
(It's worth noting that a Westboro Baptist Church has a well-known case that went to the Supreme Court. Their rights to free speech were upheld, but still, if they are ever attacked in direct response by someone grieving, that grieving attacker would not be held 100% liable for his actions under the law.)
The Pope is not suggesting that those who insult another's religion should be harmed or that harming an insulter of another's religion is a justified act. He's saying, "Don't be surprised if..."
Here's another way to look at it: You start dating a known rapist. You're alone with the rapist. You get raped. You are not at fault-- all fault lies with the rapist. But you shouldn't act surprised.
The Pope is simply suggesting that if we don't don't want to get shot by nutters, we shouldn't attempt to piss off the nutters. While the Pope isn't advocating "THE LIMITATION OF" the freedom of speech, he's suggesting "WE LIMIT OURSELVES INDIVIDUALLY" in the form of tact and conscientiousness. It's the difference between law and self-control. He's advocating self-control.
Rideshare is transportation by carpool, vanpool, and, in many implementations, bus, train, bike, and walking. The term "Rideshare" has been in use for DECADES to describe the use of low-emissions/fuel consumption transportation! (http://goo.gl/DXTYul)
Uber and Lyft are taxi companies who try to use the term rideshare to get around taxi regulations and to convey a veneer of sustainability. Even the Associated Press has edited their Stylebook so as to instruct media agencies to cease calling them rideshare and start calling them "ride-hailing" services.
I used to love the once-named Sci Fi channel. Doctor Who, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, Dresden Files, The Outer Limits, Sanctuary, Stargate: SG1, Stargate: Atlantis, Sliders, Warehouse 13. These were all beloved shows.
What Sci Fi turned into (SyFy wrestling and reality shows) is painful. I'm fairly certain that the audience watching SyFy is not the same audience that watched Sci Fi.
What if we could make that known loud and clear. If people CHOOSE not to subscribe to SyFy and can give a 3-month subscription commitment pending the development, launching, or re-running of X, Y, and Z shows, those people could affect change in SyFy. If everyone was to go unbundled, imagine the absolute panic fest some of the more inane stations would face. "OMG!! Why aren't people picking us up!? We're doomed!! PLEASE CHOOSE US!! TELL US WHAT YOU WANT!!"
And that's the power of unbundling. It allows actual demand to genuinely affect supply.
And it may mean that I can get a new Stargate series. And that's what matters in the end.
If all features or options in a flight were to be bundled with every ticket, the cost per person would be outright extravagant. Free checked baggage, enough room to cross your legs, a simple meal when flying cross-country, wider seats, onboard wi-fi-- you'd be buying all of that whether you like it or not. Since there's insufficient demand for flights at that price point and the businesses know that some willing are willing to pay more (though not max price), you get the fee-for-service system. That way, those who need less pay less and those who need more pay more.
Taking it to the discussion of unbundled cable, ya, if you divide your monthly cable bill by the number of channels you get, you're not likely going to come up with the price you're going to pay per channel that's going to eventually be offered a la carte. If you pay $100 per month and get 890 channels (450 of which are duplicates of other channels in different qualities), you're NOT going to be charged 11.2 cents per channel. It will likely be sub-bundled like this:
Sports Bundle: $20 --- $5 for each type of ESPN --- $5 for NFL --- etc.
Cable Super Bundle: $25 --- Bravo, TLC, Discovery, Food, HGTV, SciFi: $15 --- All the Rest: $15
Premium Bundle: $40 --- HBO: $15 --- Showtime: $15 --- Cinemax (Is this still a thing?): $10 --- Etc.
Chinese Bundle: $5 Arabic Bundle: $5 Spanish Bundle: $5
In the end, if you want it ALL, you'll be offered the $100 package (First Class). If you want nearly everything (AKA every option they offer in the Coach section short of moving to first class), you'll probably pay more than $100. The real benefit is for the tightwads who want Local, 24-Hour News, and Sports. They'll pay $55 instead of their previous $100. Sure, they won't get to watch Honey Boo Boo or reruns of Battlestar Galactica on TV, but they'll get their DC Comics shows, breaking news, and follow their favorite sports teams. And for a lot of people, that's all they care about.
I read the headline as "GCPD Warns It Is Losing Track of Serious Criminals" and immediately thought to myself "Damn it! Someone call Batman!". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_City_Police_Department)
If they're using the existing Tesla Model S with the intention to have them pull over open bays in the ground and have robots remove battery packs built into the undercarriage, then it will fail. On the other hand if they were to make a new EV that had multiple bays from which you can pull out and swap rails of cells, then they'd have a good chance.
The only future for EVs is to go battery-swapping and to make swapping possible with human muscle.
In the article, the Peter Singer states, "Someone killed 12 people and shot another 70 people at the opening night of Batman: The Dark Knight [Rises]. They kept that movie in the theaters. You issue an anonymous cyber threat that you do not have the capability to carry out? We pulled a movie from 18,000 theaters."
In some ways, the comparison between the response to this current threat against movie theaters and the rampage that happened 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado is appropriate. Both target movie theaters and the people in them. But that's where it ends.
The Aurora shooting has gone down in history as an unforeseeable tragedy the fault of which lay entirely with the shooter. Everyone said, "This was very sad," and no one's expecting any victims' civil suits to win anything.
In fairly extreme contrast, ***IF*** Sony were to allow the movie to be shown in theaters and ***IF*** someone attacked a movie theater for any reason relating to the showing of the movie, then Sony would be very publicly acknowledged as having fault in the harm done to theater-goers and would be sued out of existence.
Everything in this decision has to do with LIABILITY. Even if the probability is extremely low, the potential liability is astronomical. It doesn't make financial sense for Sony to allow the movie to be shown.
Aside: Notice who the puppets and the puppet-masters are here. Those making the threats hold the strings, but they're not playing Sony. They're playing the American public. They know that the American public are so unhappy with their opportunities to be super-rich that they see legal liability as one of their few chances to get MILLIONS! As such, the nation is extremely risk-averse thus thoroughly negating out espoused resolve to not be susceptible to terroristic threats.
Keurig coffee, with all their DRM, just adds to our waste-plastic problem and costs about twice as much as coffee you grind at home. (http://goo.gl/NiVJ8D)
Get yourself a stainless steel cup, throw some coffee in there, and use the pilfered K-Cup tag to make it all work together.
I use AdBlock not because I believe no one with a website shouldn't have the opportunity to make money via advertising, but because of the METHOD of advertising.
Flashing ads, quick movements, anything with Flash that can crash and stall my use of my browser, or any ad of more than 600 KB in size is intrusive. I don't mind being advertised at, but if you DEMAND my attention via tactics instead of attempting to CONVINCE me to buy a service or product with the facts of that service or product, then I will turn off and walk away.
Example of good Slashdot-based advertising for me: "Newegg - 15% off orders $25 - $100. December 8 ONLY. We know there's a couple things you've been meaning to buy. Be smart about it and buy them now. CLICK HERE to apply coupon." The coupon could take effect only via clicking in from Slashdot.
Also, I pay for my bandwidth and if you want to advertise to me, cool. Just don't take liberties with the size of your advertisement. Keep it small. Maybe a 2-3 frame gif changing every 20 seconds.
Lastly, I don't like the tracker cookies. I know some people say that tracking one's surfing habits enables more relevant ads to be used, but I don't like being tracked at all. Why not just use advertisements relevant to the site content? It's Slashdot -- post tech stuff. Slashdot builder? Then push 3D printer filaments.
As a result of some really BADvertisers, no one gets to put advertisements in front of my web-surfing eyes. I don't even know if a site has changed to less-obtrusive ads unless they tell me. (And if they do, I turn off AdBlock.) It's as simple as that.
Lyft's use of the term "Rideshare" is a knowing and willing deception. Lyft's creator, John Zimmer, actually made a Ridesharing webapp that is still in use by many Universities (Zimride). Zimride facilitates the creation of carpools and vanpools-- not rides on a confederated taxi service. Of course, Zimmer saw the big money in a taxi service and with his history in actual Rideshare and has tried to re-write the definition so that (hopefully) he could side-step taxi regulations.
By the way, "Rideshare" is a federally recognized term that describes an entire industry whose job it is to reduce the number of automobiles on the road by convincing people to take transit, carpool, vanpool, bike, and walk instead of driving. (Check it out: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd...)
Huh... there's a lot about this post that can be used to sprout new conversation.
1. PPOs are move expensive than HMOs. To save money, go to an HMO.
2. There is no such thing as a "modest six-figure household income"-- at least without context. $100,000/year in California's Inland Empire will get you a lot more than $200,000/year in the middle of Manhattan.
3. You're paying $1,000/month in premiums? Do you pay for it personally? One would assume that the employers that could facilitate a household's 6-figure income could negotiate a lower premium for its employees.
4. You didn't mention if there was any change to your coverage (for example, if you get a whiff of cancer, you'll still taken care of).
5. The law didn't require insurance premiums to go up. Insurers decided to jack up their prices instead of cutting profits. And no one knows if they simply used the opportunity to increase the prices on the independently insured.
6. I work for a major university system. My rates stayed the same and my coverage expanded. My household makes significantly less than yours. I guess we can chalk it up to my employer having more negotiating power than yours. But here's the big question: why does there need to be insurance price bargaining in the first place? Oh yes... the for-profit insurance industry and associated medical industries.
"While similar bullying applied to short rentals of private rooms through sites like Airbnb"
Look-- Uber, Lyft, and all the other distributed taxi services are being so heavily attacked by regulatory agencies because it is the responsibility of those agencies to protect consumer safety. Voluntarily make sure your company meets all the same safety and insurance requirements as an existing taxi system and you'll be set.
AirBnB is similar in that the repeated short-term rental of homes as hotels requires health and fire inspections of these distributed hotels, BUT there's an additional issue. Amsterdam is a massive tourist attraction. People want to visit Amsterdam, ride bikes, get high, and maybe visit a prostitute. However, Amsterdam is not that big... and the people who live there don't want it to get very big. In fact, if it got too big or too expensive, then you'd have no dutch people living there-- just tourist agencies and immigrants dressed in stereotypical Dutch garb-- "Welcome to Dutch Land, Americans!".
The ease of facilitating short-term tourism rentals via AirBnB makes it exceedingly profitable to buy a flat and use AirBnB to bring in more revenue per month than you could get renting the place out to people who actually want to live and work in the city. And that's the problem. Amsterdam should be full of the Dutch but without appropriate regulation, it will be full of tourists with some Dutch on the side.
I would love to visit Amsterdam, but wouldn't care to do so in the future if it's jam packed with tourists.
When selling to end-users, you should be describing cost per distance traveled. They will want to know how much it will costs them to use the vehicle day to day. When describing emissions, you should be describing lbs or kg of CO2 or CO2e per distance traveled. Since vehicle mileage is easily tracked, we can use that figure to determine, with simple multiplication environmental effects of driving an automobile.
Of course, when you are using an EV, this goes out the window because the cost of refueling is highly dependent on when and where you charge. Moreover, the blend of electricity sources determines the actual pollution from charging the vehicle. (Charging in West Virgina is significantly worse for the environment than Southern California).
Countries most likely to require a bribe (per Transparency International)
1. Russia 2. China 3. Mexico 4. Indonesia 5. United Arab Emirates 6. Argentina 7. Saudi Arabia 8. Turkey 9. India 10. Taiwan
Sometimes bribery is just expected. Russians have been brow-beaten by their ruling class(es) since the dawn of time. If you were to moan about paying a bribe there, grandmother passers-by would tell you to nut up and just get it done. In China, it's simply an expected part of business-- gifts of all sorts and money are expected when visiting offices, homes, and closing deals. Mexico's just messed up. They've not had a stable government since the narco cartels took over.
Just a quick correction because I see a lot of people buying Fitbits without understanding what they actually do. And then returning them.
Fitbits are very simple devices that act as an accelerometer, pedometer, altimeter, and a watch.
Worn Fitbits do not monitor your health or fitness. They cannot tell you if you're sick, developing cancer, or at risk for heart disease. They cannot tell you your BMI, your body fat percentages, glucose levels, or blood pressure. They can't tell you if you need a recovery day or if you're about to pass out due to dehydration.
Fitbits are not substitutes for regular medical visits. It sounds nitpicky, but as a go-to nerd, I've had to explain this to too many people who then feel dumb for the purchase. Everything you think your Fitbit is doing for you, you can do on your own or don't need to do in the first place.
I know next to nothing about what is required to inventory, issue, use, download, store, index, and recall all the hardware and video that would be required for such a system. I can only speculate. Has anyone had experience in this realm? Creating massive databases for video or images and indexing them in such a way that police reports could be tied directly to them and be pulled up as necessary?
If so, in your perfect world, how would you build the system and how much would it cost?
Where do you go to see RL gay people and women being verbally attacked online because they are gay and/or women? That's sounds like a horrible place. Why do you go there?
But are you certain it's *because* they have those characteristics or might it be, as suggested, that knowing those characteristics, the offender specifically uses certain terms and phrases to hurt that person?
There's a big difference between a person who thinks everyone woman is a slut to be hated and person angry at another person who happens to be a woman and (using the knowledge of womanhood) chooses the word "slut" as a means of honing one's insult.
Too hard to believe? Consider the angry rantings of a child.
Almost everyone has heard a pissed off kid say, "I hate you! I wish you weren't my mom!!"? Maybe you said it yourself as a child. Which is the more likely interpretation? (A) "I genuinely wishes that s/he had different parents. I would not cry if I was taken away from you." (B) "I'm pissed that I didn't get my way. Knowing that you love me as a parent, I offer words contrary to my own knowledge and opinion with for the specific intent in doing you emotional or psychological harm in retribution."
This is easy and it's happening more and more frequently. Today's games are much more likely to have female non-victim playable characters. But if that's going to be a gauge for any kind of improvement over time, then you have to establish a reference date. For example:
2003 -- Year Zero -- X number of games and Y% of games on the market have the option to play female lead characters. 2004 -- Year One -- X number...
But then you can't go back and say, ".01% of all video games made between 1982 and 2014 have had the option of playing a female lead character." That would be disingenuous. That would be holding today's developers and writers accountable for actions taken by other developers while today's developers were in primary school. At some point, you have to have the integrity to say, "The old generational thought is dying out. The new generational thought is taking hold. It just takes time from here."
And still, you can't force game designers to choose to make a character female any more than you can force a novelist. Part of game creation is following a creative vision. Yes, studios can make such changes. Yes, we can HOPE that newer game designers have the same gender-based sentiments as we, but since it is still an artistic endeavor, they should have the freedom to create the games they wish to create... with the audience deciding if it's a game they want to buy.
"Assuming that art is ultimately a cultural product, what does that say about the gaming industry's attitudes toward women? How do they compare to other creative industries? (Movies, TV, etc.)"
It says a couple things-- neither are too surprising. Young girls are taught to want to be rescued. Young men are taught to want to rescue. After the rescue transaction, adult-oriented fiction asserts that there's an expectation of physical intimacy. That's the fantasy story that told day-in and day-out. Sometimes the story is reversed. Sometimes it includes the same gender. It says nothing about women but quite a bit about our **historical** fantasies.
Today's stories are different. Resident Evil, Salt, Twilight, Harry Potter-- Female competence and heroism is a celebrated expectation and is becoming more and more mainstream-- not because peoples' tastes are being forcibly changed, but because kids grew up with the expectation that boys and girls can both be whomever they wish.
It's generational. The old and their ideas will die off. The new and their ideas will replace them. So just make sure not to hold the new accountable for the actions of the old. Hell... don't even lump them into the same categories.
Translation A: I don't like what you've said and I'm showing it by saying things that I hope to make you angry. Translation B: I'm a random troll.
And by the way, I wish you hadn't capitalized all those words. Now I can't help but imagine what a culture of reptilian Mexicans worshiping at Temple would look like. And now I'm imagining the combination of cultural dietary habits. Great! Now I have a novel!
There are some things (very few) in this world that I simply accept to be inevitable. I predict that the cost of having non-tracked auto insurance will increase greatly in relation to the cost of tracked auto insurance. It will become costly to hold onto 100% privacy in your automobile transportation habits.
While I have the preference of not being tracked whatsoever, what limitations would you propose within such a tracking system to preserve as much privacy as possible while also promoting the risk analysis that an insurance company would want from the data?
My suggestions: -- Record speed measurements every 5 seconds the engine is on. -- Record mile traveled per day. -- No GPS coordinates recorded. (No actual location.) -- Transmit data only once per month. Frequent transmissions can be used as a means of obtaining location.
Slashdot Mirror
But it doesn't work for all. And that's the Pope's message. Not everyone is so self-controlled, so don't be *surprised* if they react.
Freedom of speech has its limitations-- very little within enforcement of the law but quite a bit within legal liability.
For example, it is illegal to impose a panic by false statements (bomb hoaxes).
Within the doctrine of "fighting words" (Chaplinksy v. New Hampshire), the liability of an attack is shared between the attacker and the person who intentionally goaded the attack. For example, if the Westboro Baptist Church is picketing the funeral of a homosexual Marine and Marine's father goes ape shit on the protestors, the father will be held accountable for his actions with adjustments made for the effects of the fighting words.
(It's worth noting that a Westboro Baptist Church has a well-known case that went to the Supreme Court. Their rights to free speech were upheld, but still, if they are ever attacked in direct response by someone grieving, that grieving attacker would not be held 100% liable for his actions under the law.)
To all the hyper-sensitive reactors;
The Pope is not suggesting that those who insult another's religion should be harmed or that harming an insulter of another's religion is a justified act. He's saying, "Don't be surprised if..."
Here's another way to look at it: You start dating a known rapist. You're alone with the rapist. You get raped. You are not at fault-- all fault lies with the rapist. But you shouldn't act surprised.
The Pope is simply suggesting that if we don't don't want to get shot by nutters, we shouldn't attempt to piss off the nutters. While the Pope isn't advocating "THE LIMITATION OF" the freedom of speech, he's suggesting "WE LIMIT OURSELVES INDIVIDUALLY" in the form of tact and conscientiousness. It's the difference between law and self-control. He's advocating self-control.
Uber and Lyft is NOT Rideshare!
Rideshare is transportation by carpool, vanpool, and, in many implementations, bus, train, bike, and walking. The term "Rideshare" has been in use for DECADES to describe the use of low-emissions/fuel consumption transportation! (http://goo.gl/DXTYul)
Uber and Lyft are taxi companies who try to use the term rideshare to get around taxi regulations and to convey a veneer of sustainability. Even the Associated Press has edited their Stylebook so as to instruct media agencies to cease calling them rideshare and start calling them "ride-hailing" services.
http://greatergreaterwashingto...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/charli...
I used to love the once-named Sci Fi channel. Doctor Who, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, Dresden Files, The Outer Limits, Sanctuary, Stargate: SG1, Stargate: Atlantis, Sliders, Warehouse 13. These were all beloved shows.
What Sci Fi turned into (SyFy wrestling and reality shows) is painful. I'm fairly certain that the audience watching SyFy is not the same audience that watched Sci Fi.
What if we could make that known loud and clear. If people CHOOSE not to subscribe to SyFy and can give a 3-month subscription commitment pending the development, launching, or re-running of X, Y, and Z shows, those people could affect change in SyFy. If everyone was to go unbundled, imagine the absolute panic fest some of the more inane stations would face. "OMG!! Why aren't people picking us up!? We're doomed!! PLEASE CHOOSE US!! TELL US WHAT YOU WANT!!"
And that's the power of unbundling. It allows actual demand to genuinely affect supply.
And it may mean that I can get a new Stargate series. And that's what matters in the end.
If all features or options in a flight were to be bundled with every ticket, the cost per person would be outright extravagant. Free checked baggage, enough room to cross your legs, a simple meal when flying cross-country, wider seats, onboard wi-fi-- you'd be buying all of that whether you like it or not. Since there's insufficient demand for flights at that price point and the businesses know that some willing are willing to pay more (though not max price), you get the fee-for-service system. That way, those who need less pay less and those who need more pay more.
Taking it to the discussion of unbundled cable, ya, if you divide your monthly cable bill by the number of channels you get, you're not likely going to come up with the price you're going to pay per channel that's going to eventually be offered a la carte. If you pay $100 per month and get 890 channels (450 of which are duplicates of other channels in different qualities), you're NOT going to be charged 11.2 cents per channel. It will likely be sub-bundled like this:
The Super Package: $100
Base Fees: $25
(Admin, Connection, Taxes, etc.)
Local Bundle: $10
--- Antenna-based TV
24-Hour News Bundle: $10
--- CNN: $5
--- MSNBC: $5
--- Fox News: $5
--- C-Span Bundle: $5
--- Other: $5
Sports Bundle: $20
--- $5 for each type of ESPN
--- $5 for NFL
--- etc.
Cable Super Bundle: $25
--- Bravo, TLC, Discovery, Food, HGTV, SciFi: $15
--- All the Rest: $15
Premium Bundle: $40
--- HBO: $15
--- Showtime: $15
--- Cinemax (Is this still a thing?): $10
--- Etc.
Chinese Bundle: $5
Arabic Bundle: $5
Spanish Bundle: $5
In the end, if you want it ALL, you'll be offered the $100 package (First Class). If you want nearly everything (AKA every option they offer in the Coach section short of moving to first class), you'll probably pay more than $100. The real benefit is for the tightwads who want Local, 24-Hour News, and Sports. They'll pay $55 instead of their previous $100. Sure, they won't get to watch Honey Boo Boo or reruns of Battlestar Galactica on TV, but they'll get their DC Comics shows, breaking news, and follow their favorite sports teams. And for a lot of people, that's all they care about.
I read the headline as "GCPD Warns It Is Losing Track of Serious Criminals" and immediately thought to myself "Damn it! Someone call Batman!". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_City_Police_Department)
If they're using the existing Tesla Model S with the intention to have them pull over open bays in the ground and have robots remove battery packs built into the undercarriage, then it will fail. On the other hand if they were to make a new EV that had multiple bays from which you can pull out and swap rails of cells, then they'd have a good chance.
The only future for EVs is to go battery-swapping and to make swapping possible with human muscle.
In the article, the Peter Singer states, "Someone killed 12 people and shot another 70 people at the opening night of Batman: The Dark Knight [Rises]. They kept that movie in the theaters. You issue an anonymous cyber threat that you do not have the capability to carry out? We pulled a movie from 18,000 theaters."
In some ways, the comparison between the response to this current threat against movie theaters and the rampage that happened 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado is appropriate. Both target movie theaters and the people in them. But that's where it ends.
The Aurora shooting has gone down in history as an unforeseeable tragedy the fault of which lay entirely with the shooter. Everyone said, "This was very sad," and no one's expecting any victims' civil suits to win anything.
In fairly extreme contrast, ***IF*** Sony were to allow the movie to be shown in theaters and ***IF*** someone attacked a movie theater for any reason relating to the showing of the movie, then Sony would be very publicly acknowledged as having fault in the harm done to theater-goers and would be sued out of existence.
Everything in this decision has to do with LIABILITY. Even if the probability is extremely low, the potential liability is astronomical. It doesn't make financial sense for Sony to allow the movie to be shown.
Aside: Notice who the puppets and the puppet-masters are here. Those making the threats hold the strings, but they're not playing Sony. They're playing the American public. They know that the American public are so unhappy with their opportunities to be super-rich that they see legal liability as one of their few chances to get MILLIONS! As such, the nation is extremely risk-averse thus thoroughly negating out espoused resolve to not be susceptible to terroristic threats.
To be cliche, the enemy is us.
Keurig coffee, with all their DRM, just adds to our waste-plastic problem and costs about twice as much as coffee you grind at home. (http://goo.gl/NiVJ8D)
Get yourself a stainless steel cup, throw some coffee in there, and use the pilfered K-Cup tag to make it all work together.
I use AdBlock not because I believe no one with a website shouldn't have the opportunity to make money via advertising, but because of the METHOD of advertising.
Flashing ads, quick movements, anything with Flash that can crash and stall my use of my browser, or any ad of more than 600 KB in size is intrusive. I don't mind being advertised at, but if you DEMAND my attention via tactics instead of attempting to CONVINCE me to buy a service or product with the facts of that service or product, then I will turn off and walk away.
Example of good Slashdot-based advertising for me: "Newegg - 15% off orders $25 - $100. December 8 ONLY. We know there's a couple things you've been meaning to buy. Be smart about it and buy them now. CLICK HERE to apply coupon." The coupon could take effect only via clicking in from Slashdot.
Also, I pay for my bandwidth and if you want to advertise to me, cool. Just don't take liberties with the size of your advertisement. Keep it small. Maybe a 2-3 frame gif changing every 20 seconds.
Lastly, I don't like the tracker cookies. I know some people say that tracking one's surfing habits enables more relevant ads to be used, but I don't like being tracked at all. Why not just use advertisements relevant to the site content? It's Slashdot -- post tech stuff. Slashdot builder? Then push 3D printer filaments.
As a result of some really BADvertisers, no one gets to put advertisements in front of my web-surfing eyes. I don't even know if a site has changed to less-obtrusive ads unless they tell me. (And if they do, I turn off AdBlock.) It's as simple as that.
My kingdom for mod points! (+1 Funny)
Yes, please.
Lyft's use of the term "Rideshare" is a knowing and willing deception. Lyft's creator, John Zimmer, actually made a Ridesharing webapp that is still in use by many Universities (Zimride). Zimride facilitates the creation of carpools and vanpools-- not rides on a confederated taxi service. Of course, Zimmer saw the big money in a taxi service and with his history in actual Rideshare and has tried to re-write the definition so that (hopefully) he could side-step taxi regulations.
By the way, "Rideshare" is a federally recognized term that describes an entire industry whose job it is to reduce the number of automobiles on the road by convincing people to take transit, carpool, vanpool, bike, and walk instead of driving. (Check it out: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd...)
Huh... there's a lot about this post that can be used to sprout new conversation.
1. PPOs are move expensive than HMOs. To save money, go to an HMO.
2. There is no such thing as a "modest six-figure household income"-- at least without context. $100,000/year in California's Inland Empire will get you a lot more than $200,000/year in the middle of Manhattan.
3. You're paying $1,000/month in premiums? Do you pay for it personally? One would assume that the employers that could facilitate a household's 6-figure income could negotiate a lower premium for its employees.
4. You didn't mention if there was any change to your coverage (for example, if you get a whiff of cancer, you'll still taken care of).
5. The law didn't require insurance premiums to go up. Insurers decided to jack up their prices instead of cutting profits. And no one knows if they simply used the opportunity to increase the prices on the independently insured.
6. I work for a major university system. My rates stayed the same and my coverage expanded. My household makes significantly less than yours. I guess we can chalk it up to my employer having more negotiating power than yours. But here's the big question: why does there need to be insurance price bargaining in the first place? Oh yes... the for-profit insurance industry and associated medical industries.
"While similar bullying applied to short rentals of private rooms through sites like Airbnb"
Look-- Uber, Lyft, and all the other distributed taxi services are being so heavily attacked by regulatory agencies because it is the responsibility of those agencies to protect consumer safety. Voluntarily make sure your company meets all the same safety and insurance requirements as an existing taxi system and you'll be set.
AirBnB is similar in that the repeated short-term rental of homes as hotels requires health and fire inspections of these distributed hotels, BUT there's an additional issue. Amsterdam is a massive tourist attraction. People want to visit Amsterdam, ride bikes, get high, and maybe visit a prostitute. However, Amsterdam is not that big... and the people who live there don't want it to get very big. In fact, if it got too big or too expensive, then you'd have no dutch people living there-- just tourist agencies and immigrants dressed in stereotypical Dutch garb-- "Welcome to Dutch Land, Americans!".
The ease of facilitating short-term tourism rentals via AirBnB makes it exceedingly profitable to buy a flat and use AirBnB to bring in more revenue per month than you could get renting the place out to people who actually want to live and work in the city. And that's the problem. Amsterdam should be full of the Dutch but without appropriate regulation, it will be full of tourists with some Dutch on the side.
I would love to visit Amsterdam, but wouldn't care to do so in the future if it's jam packed with tourists.
When selling to end-users, you should be describing cost per distance traveled. They will want to know how much it will costs them to use the vehicle day to day.
When describing emissions, you should be describing lbs or kg of CO2 or CO2e per distance traveled. Since vehicle mileage is easily tracked, we can use that figure to determine, with simple multiplication environmental effects of driving an automobile.
Of course, when you are using an EV, this goes out the window because the cost of refueling is highly dependent on when and where you charge. Moreover, the blend of electricity sources determines the actual pollution from charging the vehicle. (Charging in West Virgina is significantly worse for the environment than Southern California).
Countries most likely to require a bribe (per Transparency International)
1. Russia
2. China
3. Mexico
4. Indonesia
5. United Arab Emirates
6. Argentina
7. Saudi Arabia
8. Turkey
9. India
10. Taiwan
Sometimes bribery is just expected. Russians have been brow-beaten by their ruling class(es) since the dawn of time. If you were to moan about paying a bribe there, grandmother passers-by would tell you to nut up and just get it done. In China, it's simply an expected part of business-- gifts of all sorts and money are expected when visiting offices, homes, and closing deals. Mexico's just messed up. They've not had a stable government since the narco cartels took over.
No one NEEDS a smartphone either. People WANT and LIKE smartphones because it allows them to be less foresightful than before.
Just a quick correction because I see a lot of people buying Fitbits without understanding what they actually do. And then returning them.
Fitbits are very simple devices that act as an accelerometer, pedometer, altimeter, and a watch.
Worn Fitbits do not monitor your health or fitness. They cannot tell you if you're sick, developing cancer, or at risk for heart disease. They cannot tell you your BMI, your body fat percentages, glucose levels, or blood pressure. They can't tell you if you need a recovery day or if you're about to pass out due to dehydration.
Fitbits are not substitutes for regular medical visits. It sounds nitpicky, but as a go-to nerd, I've had to explain this to too many people who then feel dumb for the purchase. Everything you think your Fitbit is doing for you, you can do on your own or don't need to do in the first place.
I know next to nothing about what is required to inventory, issue, use, download, store, index, and recall all the hardware and video that would be required for such a system. I can only speculate. Has anyone had experience in this realm? Creating massive databases for video or images and indexing them in such a way that police reports could be tied directly to them and be pulled up as necessary?
If so, in your perfect world, how would you build the system and how much would it cost?
Where do you go to see RL gay people and women being verbally attacked online because they are gay and/or women? That's sounds like a horrible place. Why do you go there?
But are you certain it's *because* they have those characteristics or might it be, as suggested, that knowing those characteristics, the offender specifically uses certain terms and phrases to hurt that person?
There's a big difference between a person who thinks everyone woman is a slut to be hated and person angry at another person who happens to be a woman and (using the knowledge of womanhood) chooses the word "slut" as a means of honing one's insult.
Too hard to believe? Consider the angry rantings of a child.
Almost everyone has heard a pissed off kid say, "I hate you! I wish you weren't my mom!!"? Maybe you said it yourself as a child.
Which is the more likely interpretation?
(A) "I genuinely wishes that s/he had different parents. I would not cry if I was taken away from you."
(B) "I'm pissed that I didn't get my way. Knowing that you love me as a parent, I offer words contrary to my own knowledge and opinion with for the specific intent in doing you emotional or psychological harm in retribution."
This is easy and it's happening more and more frequently. Today's games are much more likely to have female non-victim playable characters. But if that's going to be a gauge for any kind of improvement over time, then you have to establish a reference date. For example:
2003 -- Year Zero -- X number of games and Y% of games on the market have the option to play female lead characters.
2004 -- Year One -- X number...
But then you can't go back and say, ".01% of all video games made between 1982 and 2014 have had the option of playing a female lead character." That would be disingenuous. That would be holding today's developers and writers accountable for actions taken by other developers while today's developers were in primary school. At some point, you have to have the integrity to say, "The old generational thought is dying out. The new generational thought is taking hold. It just takes time from here."
And still, you can't force game designers to choose to make a character female any more than you can force a novelist. Part of game creation is following a creative vision. Yes, studios can make such changes. Yes, we can HOPE that newer game designers have the same gender-based sentiments as we, but since it is still an artistic endeavor, they should have the freedom to create the games they wish to create... with the audience deciding if it's a game they want to buy.
"Assuming that art is ultimately a cultural product, what does that say about the gaming industry's attitudes toward women? How do they compare to other creative industries? (Movies, TV, etc.)"
It says a couple things-- neither are too surprising. Young girls are taught to want to be rescued. Young men are taught to want to rescue. After the rescue transaction, adult-oriented fiction asserts that there's an expectation of physical intimacy. That's the fantasy story that told day-in and day-out. Sometimes the story is reversed. Sometimes it includes the same gender. It says nothing about women but quite a bit about our **historical** fantasies.
Today's stories are different. Resident Evil, Salt, Twilight, Harry Potter-- Female competence and heroism is a celebrated expectation and is becoming more and more mainstream-- not because peoples' tastes are being forcibly changed, but because kids grew up with the expectation that boys and girls can both be whomever they wish.
It's generational. The old and their ideas will die off. The new and their ideas will replace them. So just make sure not to hold the new accountable for the actions of the old. Hell... don't even lump them into the same categories.
Insightful and well said.
Translation A: I don't like what you've said and I'm showing it by saying things that I hope to make you angry.
Translation B: I'm a random troll.
And by the way, I wish you hadn't capitalized all those words. Now I can't help but imagine what a culture of reptilian Mexicans worshiping at Temple would look like. And now I'm imagining the combination of cultural dietary habits. Great! Now I have a novel!
There are some things (very few) in this world that I simply accept to be inevitable. I predict that the cost of having non-tracked auto insurance will increase greatly in relation to the cost of tracked auto insurance. It will become costly to hold onto 100% privacy in your automobile transportation habits.
While I have the preference of not being tracked whatsoever, what limitations would you propose within such a tracking system to preserve as much privacy as possible while also promoting the risk analysis that an insurance company would want from the data?
My suggestions:
-- Record speed measurements every 5 seconds the engine is on.
-- Record mile traveled per day.
-- No GPS coordinates recorded. (No actual location.)
-- Transmit data only once per month. Frequent transmissions can be used as a means of obtaining location.
What say you?