The guy was an immature twat, but he was not wrong. You can not simply take somebody else's property, and it does not matter how many memos or advisories you write to the contrary. Seizure of property is simply not within your legal rights.
If you want to terminate the employee for it, you are welcome to do so. If you want to force them to remove the property you are welcome to do so. You might even be able to dock their pay for the time they spend running back home to get rid of it, or take it out of their vacation hours or some such -- that much I am not certain about and it probably would vary from state to state and situation to situation. "It's mine now!" will not hold up in any courtroom in the country, and quite frankly the attempt would likely cause far more and far bigger problems than the device itself ever would have. Giving back their property would become the least your concerns.
I actually tend to agree with most of what you have said. I framed the difference as one of religion (organized belief) versus faith (belief), but believe much the same. (Ultimately, if you're curious, I still come out as an unbeliever.)
One thing confuses me, however. How can you make that distinction and yet still turn to Christ? I can understand somebody reaching a decision that they believe in a god. Absent the influence of religion, that god can take any shape and any form the believer wishes, can have whatever history the believer wishes -- in essence, it is a belief that is unburdened with all the nonsense that makes religion such a joke to most atheists. But that being the case I see no reason to involve Jesus. Other than the Bible, and the teachings of Christianity, there is little reason to believe he was much more than a man.
Selective belief in a religion's dogma is, I suppose, a step improved from unconditional belief, but I also can't see it as the free pursuit of truth you espouse. You are a Christian, if only a weak one. I'd hardly say that puts you in some elite 10% of believers who understand "true religion."
your idiot mods are probably going to mod me out into -1000 troll territory for saying what I'm about to say
Yeah man, it must be because everybody on this website is too dumb to recognize your brilliance.
It couldn't be because you're some anti-social, self-important twat who spends the first paragraph of his post calling people names, the second paragraph insulting their intelligence and gushing about yourself and how there is literally nobody in a two-million-plus person community who could possibly know what you know, and have a signature that--just in case somebody missed it--does it all again.
Perhaps you have problems with troll mods because, I don't know, you go out of your way to troll people?
I don't think it is an issue of being ignored, I think it is an issue of being circumvented.
The First Amendment is a good example, but probably a simpler one would be the second. Think of all the Constitution debate over the placement of a comma. Is the right to bear arms only guaranteed to members of a well-regulated militia? What, exactly, is a militia? Is it simply the National Guard, or is it something more? What does "well-regulated" mean? What, exactly, constitutes "arms?" Guns would be a pretty obvious one. Cannons? They had those at the time of the founding. Tanks? Modern-day cannons mounted on a vehicle. Missiles? Obviously there are other equally huge interpretational issues involved elsewhere, such as the Commerce Clause.
My point being, it's exceptionally easy to look at the first amendment text and parse it in a way that Internet access does not apply. It is equally easy to parse it in a way that does, and perhaps unsurprisingly I've seen it done at least two different ways so far on Slashdot; is Internet access a free speech right or a freedom of assembly right, both or neither? The purpose of an amendment would be to spell the restriction out in as clear a term as possible to do what we can to ensure it is not interpreted around. This is probably moreso valuable to the courts. Politicians will still, almost certainly, pass laws they know are unconstitutional so that they can paint people who didn't vote the way they want as terrorists or whatever the buzzword of the day is. A painfully clear amendment would be hard for courts to ignore, however, and it would also serve to overturn any contrary precedents that have been set thus far -- whether that is an intended consequence or not. If desired, it could also spell out the closure of loopholes that people may use to circumvent it beyond that; as an example, "you are not permitted to use the Internet" is not an atypical punishment for some computer-related crimes. It would not be difficult to spell out, if only for clarity's sake, that you can not sign away your the right as part of a probation agreement or other such.
The fact that you do not like their position (which you then hilariously misinterpret and set up... good god, is that five strawmans?) is not an indication that it is not important. If nothing else, the debate is staggeringly important.
Having to explain and defend your beliefs is important, even if you come away believing the exact same thing as you did going in.
Your entire post is nothing but self-rightouesness. I particularly enjoy how a friend who acts hurt or annoyed that you don't use Facebook is because they're not a real friend and can't respect your making decisions for yourself, yet people who choose to use Facebook must be because they don't have a clue, care about privacy or make their own decisions. Somehow "not use Facebook" is a decision and "use Facebook" is peer pressure conformity by weak-willed clueless people. Okay then.
Have you ever entertained the possibility that people know, at least in simple terms, about the privacy implications of Facebook and simply don't see them as a big deal? Privacy is vastly important as a concept, but the idea that one must lock themselves in a basement to prevent anybody anywhere from knowing anything about them that they don't explicitly tell or else are somehow uninterested in privacy is simply false. I care about privacy, particularly as it pertains to being from government intrusion. I don't particularly care if Facebook knows the information I tell it (or I wouldn't tell it) or that I like baseball, Slashdot and stumble into sites with Like buttons in search results from time to time. And this from somebody who has posted maybe 75 things on Facebook in something around six years (yes, I first registered when it required a.edu email).
If we were talking about some sort of law where a person's lack of concerns about a specific situation involving privacy affected others, I could probably get behind you in calling it clueless. But we're not. It's a personal decision, no matter how you choose to frame it, and choosing to use Facebook is no more or less right than not. It's simply a choice.
Continue to not use... gosh, you couldn't pull your punches or anything? Talk about kicking somebody when they're down, that's just overboard! They'll be devastated!
This is what passes for +5 insightful these days. Awesome.
There may not be a 1:1 correlation, but $1 in new taxes probably ends up being far less than $1 out of their pocket when all is said and done. It may even make you more money.
I think that theory works better when we're talking about middle classes families struggling. They are probably already paying for their home, power, heating, groceries, etc, and have cut back on the more frivolous things: Dinners out, cable, maybe Internet (though I'm seeing that as more of a necessity these days), etc. Most of the extra dollars will go back into those goods and services when they have them, and thus they do trickle back to producers.
The problem is poor people -- and I just heard on the news this morning that the poverty rate has been adjusted and now encompasses 16.1% of Americans, or 49 million people. When I say poverty, I mean poverty that most people here on Slashdot won't understand: A family of four (two adults/two kids) is considered living in poverty if they make less than $24,343. These people will--and rightly so I think--get the bulk of those extra tax dollars in the form of social services like food stamps, and if any actual dollars do make it into their pockets they're going disproportionately to necessities like food, clothing and shelter. That's great if you're in the food, clothing or shelter business, but not nearly as good if you're in any other business. Don't get me wrong, even poor people buy a lot of frivolous shit that they can probably pare back on, but overall they legitimately need help.
All that said, I still feel like taxes should be raised if they can be raised intelligently. I don't want to squeeze poor people; I don't want to squeeze middle income people who are struggling; I just want people who can afford to help them to do so. I make roughly twice the poverty rate myself--a nice salary, but hardly rich by any stretch of the imagination--and I would be willing to pay more.
A friend once said something to that effect to a co-worker and got reamed out: "You're hoodwinked into thinking this will somehow help you." No. Some people just give a shit. I wish people would help on their own and not be forced to do so via taxes, but by and large that is a fallacy. An extra $5 a month from 100,000,000 taxpayers with a tax liability would raise six billion dollars a year. In the scope of the problem, that's not much -- but giving each of those poor families an extra $372 a year amounts to about an extra 1.5% money in their pockets. Combine that with some decent government management (I know, I know) and you can provide more value than that in services.
Your point is fair enough, but I can't help but notice you fully avoided the question. What would you have said and to what effect? "Beware Arabs?"
The purpose of the system isn't to inform, it is to alert to action. "Tornado coming, duck!" is an actionable alert. The more probable intent at the time of invention, "incoming bombers" or "incoming missile, get to a shelter" is an actionable alert. You would have told people on 9/11 what? At any point in the situation?
Once we knew what was going on, planes were grounded. Fighters were in the air. For all the terrible injury and death that occurred I can't think of hearing about a single case that was because the police hadn't properly cordoned off the area around the towers, or any other such issue where action might actually be feasible. The only things we might have said we didn't know to say.
There may well be problems with the Emergency Alert System, but I would hardly call 9/11 an example of a failure.
How can flaws in nature be an argument against creationism any more than they can be used against evolution theory, when evolution supposedly optimizes away flawed designs in the long run?
I don't think vestigial organs are a good case against creationism per se, but this one is actually easy to explain:
Because you're playing with the definition of "flawed." Evolutionarily speaking, "flawed" does not mean "imperfect;" flawed means reduces your ability to survive to reproduce and pass on your genes. If there is no negative selector against the vestigial organs, they may or may not evolve away. It's kind of like eye color; there is no survival advantage or disadvantage to one color versus another, so there is no reason to believe one eye color will ever simply disappear.
there won't be a revolution because not many people agree with you. If they did, you'd get the change you want.
Let's get one thing out of the way: There won't be a revolution because we're too fucking lazy. I give the Occupy folks a lot of credit; they probably represent the best protests we have had in this country since Vietnam. But they're just not big enough to get anything meaningful done.
Beyond that, your post is just simple-minded drivel built on faulty assumptions.
For starters, we are a country that, by and large, doesn't even vote. Something like a third of the nation will stay home on a high-turnout election This is undoubtedly a failure on our part as citizenry, but it is an even larger statement about the value of voting. If these people thought their votes mattered, most of them would storm the polls. It has nothing to do with agreeing with somebody and everything to do with lack of belief in the possibility of change.
A recent New York Times poll puts congressional approval rating at 9% with a disapproval rating of 84%. Think about that for a minute. Do any of these politicians look like they give a shit? Do any of them look like they understand that their constant bullshit--on both sides--is an utter failing of their responsibility and a complete letdown of the American people? I don't see it. And why should they? Incumbent re-election rates (for only seats in play in a given election, we're not giving free passes to the 66% of Senators who aren't up for it) remains around 90%. Now it's possible that the majority of Americans of every stripe, in every nook and cranny of the country and with every possible set of politics all hates every congressman but their own, but I doubt it. To me, that screams "failure of the electoral system."
Seats get districted by the party in power at a given time, just a lovely recipe for success. The lines are deliberately drawn in such a way as to not only secure the seat for one party or another, but to waste as many votes as possible on the other side. The votes against you simply do not matter if you draw the lines such that you still win. In fact they're preferable; it means they're not being cast somewhere that can actually make a difference. That's not to mention the value of the incumbents' war chests, which are being supplied by corporations with agendas in unlimited amounts and have absolutely no bearing on what the people think.
We're screwed whether we vote for a Democrat or a Republican, yet screwed even harder if we vote for an independent or other third-party. His odds of winning border on nothing, and voting for him is (quite sadly) the fastest way to ensure that the person you least want to represent you gets elected, making it a wasted vote in the most horrible sense. The odds of these people getting on a ballot are decent; their odds of getting into a debate or any coverage in the media close to nil. Once they get in, the parties have managed to polarize the nation so much (despite being more alike than different!) that short of violating a core principle or two, they can do anything they want and not lose votes. Think of the average Republican. How many things can you think of that their Republican representative can do where a significant number of voters respond "screw it, I'd rather have a democrat?" Same for the Democrats with a democratic representative. None of this has any bearing on whether these people care about the issues, nor whether they agree with any specific position. The question is with essentially no viable middle ground, are they are willing to fly to the opposite extreme and pick somebody who likely agrees with them on even less issues over their current representative because of the disagreement? Most of the time that answer is no, and with the Good Old Boys political clubs primary challenges are largely unheard of. The most successful attempt in decades
Really? You're going to pretend that a member of a warez group who cracks software is the same as somebody who reverse engineers a communications protocol for interoperability?
I don't buy it. The idea that the geeks of Slashdot don't know about Apple's restrictions in advance, or are somehow incapable of evaluating the technical merits of products based on their specifications and only realize some technical inferiority after their purchase just doesn't wash. The average consumer, maybe; geeks, no. Not any deserving of the description.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple. The artificial restrictions and closed nature of so many of their products are certainly one; the premium one pays for that Apple logo is certainly another; and there are more besides. But no, it's not because they're somehow hoodwinked. They're just pissed off that a company doesn't operate the way they want it to, exacerbated by the fact that by and large they are unable to convince others that these things are major issues, and thus everything Apple does must be met with derision.
In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them.
Maybe. Or maybe it's going to piss them off when somebody they have had a business relationship with for years goes "hey, just because we have a deal and you give us tens of millions of dollars and like 90% of our revenue, we'll still find ways to make pretty much the same deal with somebody else at the same time."
If somebody had grabbed the source, changed the default and offered it up, that's one thing. Mozilla doing it because Microsoft slid them a suitcase full of money is another. The value of exclusivity is higher than the value of... whatever this is that is left.
Google will probably still pay them; they obviously feel they're getting value for it. But if you don't think they're going to bring this up the next time the amounts come up for negotiation, you're crazy.
Well, I actually agree with your point that skill marketability does not degrade so quickly. Perhaps more importantly, I think that good employers recognize that it is far more important to be able to quickly learn new skills than it is to already possess them; being largely self-taught and having a fairly wide skill set has impressed employers more than any single point on my resume in my experience.
I do have to take some exception with one of your points though:
Java has outlasted the fads of Ruby and Rails.
It has "outlasted" it because it existed first, but you make it sound as though Ruby and Ruby on Rails have died out. On the contrary, they are going quite strong. I can't speak to how many websites actually get written in it, but I can tell you after a recent job search that it remains a very much in demand skill that people are willing to pay for.
Seriously, if you think that people WANT government to be so involved in their lives that they NEED an app to handle their DAILY interaction with it... fuck you.
He never said they need daily interactions with the government. He said he wants to change the process so that the interactions one does need can be done online in a few minutes instead of needing to haul off to some government office, stand in line for an hour and ultimately make a day of it. And people don't have to want it, government is that involved in their daily lives. That is well beyond his control.
Quite frankly even your cherry-picked quotes are far more valuable than the rest of your post. There is literally not a thing you quoted that is a bad idea or shouldn't be done, you just wanted to try to earn some Slashdot Clever Points by screaming "BUZZWORD! BUZZWORD!" as often as you can, making most of them up as you go and repeating them over and over so it sounds like it's more dense than it is. (Hint: If "open standards" is a buzzword in government to you, you're fucking doing it wrong -- it is EXACTLY what should be happening with our tax dollars.)
Re:There is Always More Work to Do
on
The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 4, Informative
There will always be more work to be done
I think you're begging the question. Even if there was always more work to do in the past, that doesn't necessarily mean there will be in the future. However I don't even agree with that assumption.
Your grandparents were farmers and you are not, but that doesn't mean that machines destroying farming as a job leads to "more work." It just means that you found work elsewhere; somebody else very well may have not. You "took" somebody else's job, the machines didn't magically create it for you out of the rubble of the jobs they replaced.
I do agree with you partially: There is always work to be done, but not necessarily more work. Short of some extremely advanced and downright scary AI, there will always be jobs in this hypothetical world for programming the robots, and always work for mechanics repairing the robots. There will always be work to do in research. There will always be some degree of a service sector -- especially once we decide that those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job. But all these things will shrink. They will not support hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and even if they magically could not everybody is suited for these jobs.
And that's assuming most of the jobs left actually stay in the country, which there is little reason to believe that they will for areas like software.
There will always be work, but there won't always be enough work, and our system of values and economy will have to change in ways I can't even fathom the workings of.
It would, however, create an environment that 5 jackasses with box cutters will never take control of again.
That environment was created on 9/11/2001 -- and no, I don't mean after the attacks. Remember United Flight 93, which heard of plane hijackings being turned into weapons on phone calls and attempted to re-take the plane. Granted, this plane still crashed, but it never accomplished its mission.
By the time cockpit doors were ordered reinforced and locked, the problem was completely solved. I honestly can't think of any changes beyond that that weren't just part of some elaborate security theater. I don't mind pilots having guns; I don't mind air marshalls on random flights; I don't even mind the federalization of screeners per se (though I also don't think it's an improvement relative to its cost) -- but the rest strikes me as both ineffective and invasive.
I wanted to be angry about this. I even had a post written up about how the judge had better eviscerate this woman and her lawyer for such a stupid lawsuit. Then I went against all Slashdot policies and read the article. It is not quite what we think.
She is definitely mad about her age being disclosed, and that is probably the basis for the damage amount -- but her actual claims are about how they got her age. She is claiming that they got her birthdate from a subscription to IMDBPro and is claiming breach of contract and invasion of privacy.
I am not commenting on the merits of that claim, by the way, but it is certainly different than "somebody disclosed a fact about me, sue them!" Much as it pains me, perhaps the calls for evisceration have to be put temporarily on hold. Meh. I guess I have to find a patent story and call for evisceration there instead.
Forgetfulness is certainly one aspect, but spite is another. That's how it goes with the Sears Tower. It hasn't been named that for years, but it's still what almost everybody around here calls it -- including some professional publications. We just sort of pretend the name change never happened.
That's especially likely in this case if the name or the acronym turn out to be especially obnoxious to say.
You're right, of course. There are some people who could easily buy things but still choose to pirate them, and there always will be. The proper response to those people is to ignore them. We just established that they will not be turned into customers, so the only other choice is to turn them into criminals -- which may feel good, but not only reflects badly but probably costs far more than it ever returns.
Rather, the people a company needs to reach are the ones who want to buy the product but can't, either because of some artificial limitation (region issues, as one example) or because of price. Region issues are easy to solve but still complicated, because it usually involves a situation such as where a company sells the rights to merchandise a particular product in a particular market. Short of stopping that, which has its own complications, the solution isn't obvious, at least to me.
Price, though, is relatively easy. I think we're very close on MP3 pricing. I'd say we're still just a touch high, and as evidence I would say that most places still offer a discount for buying a whole album versus buying each of the songs on an album, which says to me there's still a premium for not buying music you don't like. But in any event, it's damn close and it's doing pretty well. Movies, though, still feel expensive. They're very often similar or the same price as a physical copy. It's even worse with e-books. They tend to be the same price as a paperback, and yet without the benefits of one such as the ability to loan it to your friends and family. (Some companies graciously allow you to lend a book exactly one time -- thanks guys, that changes everything!) Games are on one extreme or another; there's the so-called AAA titles that are still extremely expensive, and then games like Magicka priced at impulse-buy levels, so there's lots of room at least on one side of the spectrum.
In other words, there is still a ton of room to turn pirates into customers. One will never get them all converted and shouldn't waste the effort on trying, but there's still a lot of room to play on that old price-demand curve for most products.
I'm not trolling; I'm writing this comment on a Macbook Pro, so I'm not some rabid anti-Apple-ite nor am I a huge Microsoft supporter. But the first thing I did when I got this computer was to install Firefox, and later moved on to installing Chrome. Safari was opened once or twice, mostly to facilitate downloading the other browser.
In fact, while I admit that it is anecdotal and a small sample size, nobody I know of who uses a Mac uses Safari as their browser. That ranges from the highly computer literate (web developers and other programmers who are great with computers) to the semi-computer-literate (enthusiasts who enjoy them but often need help) to old-school salesmen at my dad's business (they can type, anything else they call somebody over for). If even Mac users don't seem to be using Safari, I doubt significant numbers of Windows users are.
Now admittedly, Safari probably gets a boost from use on iPhones, iPads, etc -- but those are different enough mediums that not including them in "who blocks more malware" tests is probably appropriate.
Don't get me wrong: I would have tested Safari, and I would have tested Opera for that matter, but I honestly don't see their exclusion as a huge deal. There are other things I would bring up as issues with the test before that.
As another poster suggested, search anything you want -- get a warrant first.
But honestly, I don't understand the question. The crime is hit and run. Presumably if we're arresting somebody for it, we know (within an acceptable margin of error) that he hit and we know that he ran. What purpose does figuring out if he was texting at the time do other than serve some kind of idle curiosity? If you're suggesting I should care whether or not a person being arrested for hit and run should also get a citation for using a cell phone while driving, I simply don't. I care whether he committed the crime he is accused of, not why.
I frankly don't want this hypothetical officer wasting the time and resources to search this guy's phone at all, warrant or not. Searches should be based on the charges. They no more need to search his cell phone than they need to search his home or rummage through his desk at the office, regardless of what they might turn up. It's not relevant to proving their case.
If this was supposed to be some sort of philosophical head-scratcher to make me reconsider the whole position, boy did it fail.
Oh, please. If people had given a crap that they might be tied to their purchases, they wouldn't have tied themselves to their purchases in the first place. Nobody forces you to get a Borders card. Nobody forces you to give any kind of accurate information that they can track back to you. My mom has never had a problem with saying "I don't have an email address" even though it is complete bunk, just because she doesn't want people (or retailers) emailing her.
The idea that people are out there going "OH MY GOD! I GAVE MY INFORMATION TO BORDERS AND NOW BARNES AND NOBLE IS GOING TO HAVE IT?! AIEEEEEEEEE!" is just naive crap.
The OP was exactly right. The vast majority of people don't care about things like this, at least not enough to actually do anything about it but pay lip service to their outrage. The rest are nerds on sites like Slashdot pretending that they represent any kind of majority opinion (or that anybody who disagrees with them must be too stupid to understand).
But you won't believe any of this anyway, so I'll leave you to your sanctimonious, sarcastic outrage and let the hivemind get around to modding me down.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy was an immature twat, but he was not wrong. You can not simply take somebody else's property, and it does not matter how many memos or advisories you write to the contrary. Seizure of property is simply not within your legal rights.
If you want to terminate the employee for it, you are welcome to do so. If you want to force them to remove the property you are welcome to do so. You might even be able to dock their pay for the time they spend running back home to get rid of it, or take it out of their vacation hours or some such -- that much I am not certain about and it probably would vary from state to state and situation to situation. "It's mine now!" will not hold up in any courtroom in the country, and quite frankly the attempt would likely cause far more and far bigger problems than the device itself ever would have. Giving back their property would become the least your concerns.
I actually tend to agree with most of what you have said. I framed the difference as one of religion (organized belief) versus faith (belief), but believe much the same. (Ultimately, if you're curious, I still come out as an unbeliever.)
One thing confuses me, however. How can you make that distinction and yet still turn to Christ? I can understand somebody reaching a decision that they believe in a god. Absent the influence of religion, that god can take any shape and any form the believer wishes, can have whatever history the believer wishes -- in essence, it is a belief that is unburdened with all the nonsense that makes religion such a joke to most atheists. But that being the case I see no reason to involve Jesus. Other than the Bible, and the teachings of Christianity, there is little reason to believe he was much more than a man.
Selective belief in a religion's dogma is, I suppose, a step improved from unconditional belief, but I also can't see it as the free pursuit of truth you espouse. You are a Christian, if only a weak one. I'd hardly say that puts you in some elite 10% of believers who understand "true religion."
Yeah man, it must be because everybody on this website is too dumb to recognize your brilliance.
It couldn't be because you're some anti-social, self-important twat who spends the first paragraph of his post calling people names, the second paragraph insulting their intelligence and gushing about yourself and how there is literally nobody in a two-million-plus person community who could possibly know what you know, and have a signature that--just in case somebody missed it--does it all again.
Perhaps you have problems with troll mods because, I don't know, you go out of your way to troll people?
I don't think it is an issue of being ignored, I think it is an issue of being circumvented.
The First Amendment is a good example, but probably a simpler one would be the second. Think of all the Constitution debate over the placement of a comma. Is the right to bear arms only guaranteed to members of a well-regulated militia? What, exactly, is a militia? Is it simply the National Guard, or is it something more? What does "well-regulated" mean? What, exactly, constitutes "arms?" Guns would be a pretty obvious one. Cannons? They had those at the time of the founding. Tanks? Modern-day cannons mounted on a vehicle. Missiles? Obviously there are other equally huge interpretational issues involved elsewhere, such as the Commerce Clause.
My point being, it's exceptionally easy to look at the first amendment text and parse it in a way that Internet access does not apply. It is equally easy to parse it in a way that does, and perhaps unsurprisingly I've seen it done at least two different ways so far on Slashdot; is Internet access a free speech right or a freedom of assembly right, both or neither? The purpose of an amendment would be to spell the restriction out in as clear a term as possible to do what we can to ensure it is not interpreted around. This is probably moreso valuable to the courts. Politicians will still, almost certainly, pass laws they know are unconstitutional so that they can paint people who didn't vote the way they want as terrorists or whatever the buzzword of the day is. A painfully clear amendment would be hard for courts to ignore, however, and it would also serve to overturn any contrary precedents that have been set thus far -- whether that is an intended consequence or not. If desired, it could also spell out the closure of loopholes that people may use to circumvent it beyond that; as an example, "you are not permitted to use the Internet" is not an atypical punishment for some computer-related crimes. It would not be difficult to spell out, if only for clarity's sake, that you can not sign away your the right as part of a probation agreement or other such.
The fact that you do not like their position (which you then hilariously misinterpret and set up... good god, is that five strawmans?) is not an indication that it is not important. If nothing else, the debate is staggeringly important.
Having to explain and defend your beliefs is important, even if you come away believing the exact same thing as you did going in.
Your entire post is nothing but self-rightouesness. I particularly enjoy how a friend who acts hurt or annoyed that you don't use Facebook is because they're not a real friend and can't respect your making decisions for yourself, yet people who choose to use Facebook must be because they don't have a clue, care about privacy or make their own decisions. Somehow "not use Facebook" is a decision and "use Facebook" is peer pressure conformity by weak-willed clueless people. Okay then.
Have you ever entertained the possibility that people know, at least in simple terms, about the privacy implications of Facebook and simply don't see them as a big deal? Privacy is vastly important as a concept, but the idea that one must lock themselves in a basement to prevent anybody anywhere from knowing anything about them that they don't explicitly tell or else are somehow uninterested in privacy is simply false. I care about privacy, particularly as it pertains to being from government intrusion. I don't particularly care if Facebook knows the information I tell it (or I wouldn't tell it) or that I like baseball, Slashdot and stumble into sites with Like buttons in search results from time to time. And this from somebody who has posted maybe 75 things on Facebook in something around six years (yes, I first registered when it required a .edu email).
If we were talking about some sort of law where a person's lack of concerns about a specific situation involving privacy affected others, I could probably get behind you in calling it clueless. But we're not. It's a personal decision, no matter how you choose to frame it, and choosing to use Facebook is no more or less right than not. It's simply a choice.
Good post.
I mean, other than the part where Microsoft does pay a dividend--that has been increasing--and has done so for years. But other than that...
Perhaps your looks back should involve slightly more on the factual side and slightly less on the "meh, it sounds right to me" side.
Continue to not use... gosh, you couldn't pull your punches or anything? Talk about kicking somebody when they're down, that's just overboard! They'll be devastated!
This is what passes for +5 insightful these days. Awesome.
I think that theory works better when we're talking about middle classes families struggling. They are probably already paying for their home, power, heating, groceries, etc, and have cut back on the more frivolous things: Dinners out, cable, maybe Internet (though I'm seeing that as more of a necessity these days), etc. Most of the extra dollars will go back into those goods and services when they have them, and thus they do trickle back to producers.
The problem is poor people -- and I just heard on the news this morning that the poverty rate has been adjusted and now encompasses 16.1% of Americans, or 49 million people. When I say poverty, I mean poverty that most people here on Slashdot won't understand: A family of four (two adults/two kids) is considered living in poverty if they make less than $24,343. These people will--and rightly so I think--get the bulk of those extra tax dollars in the form of social services like food stamps, and if any actual dollars do make it into their pockets they're going disproportionately to necessities like food, clothing and shelter. That's great if you're in the food, clothing or shelter business, but not nearly as good if you're in any other business. Don't get me wrong, even poor people buy a lot of frivolous shit that they can probably pare back on, but overall they legitimately need help.
All that said, I still feel like taxes should be raised if they can be raised intelligently. I don't want to squeeze poor people; I don't want to squeeze middle income people who are struggling; I just want people who can afford to help them to do so. I make roughly twice the poverty rate myself--a nice salary, but hardly rich by any stretch of the imagination--and I would be willing to pay more.
A friend once said something to that effect to a co-worker and got reamed out: "You're hoodwinked into thinking this will somehow help you." No. Some people just give a shit. I wish people would help on their own and not be forced to do so via taxes, but by and large that is a fallacy. An extra $5 a month from 100,000,000 taxpayers with a tax liability would raise six billion dollars a year. In the scope of the problem, that's not much -- but giving each of those poor families an extra $372 a year amounts to about an extra 1.5% money in their pockets. Combine that with some decent government management (I know, I know) and you can provide more value than that in services.
Your point is fair enough, but I can't help but notice you fully avoided the question. What would you have said and to what effect? "Beware Arabs?"
The purpose of the system isn't to inform, it is to alert to action. "Tornado coming, duck!" is an actionable alert. The more probable intent at the time of invention, "incoming bombers" or "incoming missile, get to a shelter" is an actionable alert. You would have told people on 9/11 what? At any point in the situation?
Once we knew what was going on, planes were grounded. Fighters were in the air. For all the terrible injury and death that occurred I can't think of hearing about a single case that was because the police hadn't properly cordoned off the area around the towers, or any other such issue where action might actually be feasible. The only things we might have said we didn't know to say.
There may well be problems with the Emergency Alert System, but I would hardly call 9/11 an example of a failure.
I don't think vestigial organs are a good case against creationism per se, but this one is actually easy to explain:
Because you're playing with the definition of "flawed." Evolutionarily speaking, "flawed" does not mean "imperfect;" flawed means reduces your ability to survive to reproduce and pass on your genes. If there is no negative selector against the vestigial organs, they may or may not evolve away. It's kind of like eye color; there is no survival advantage or disadvantage to one color versus another, so there is no reason to believe one eye color will ever simply disappear.
Let's get one thing out of the way: There won't be a revolution because we're too fucking lazy. I give the Occupy folks a lot of credit; they probably represent the best protests we have had in this country since Vietnam. But they're just not big enough to get anything meaningful done.
Beyond that, your post is just simple-minded drivel built on faulty assumptions.
For starters, we are a country that, by and large, doesn't even vote. Something like a third of the nation will stay home on a high-turnout election This is undoubtedly a failure on our part as citizenry, but it is an even larger statement about the value of voting. If these people thought their votes mattered, most of them would storm the polls. It has nothing to do with agreeing with somebody and everything to do with lack of belief in the possibility of change.
A recent New York Times poll puts congressional approval rating at 9% with a disapproval rating of 84%. Think about that for a minute. Do any of these politicians look like they give a shit? Do any of them look like they understand that their constant bullshit--on both sides--is an utter failing of their responsibility and a complete letdown of the American people? I don't see it. And why should they? Incumbent re-election rates (for only seats in play in a given election, we're not giving free passes to the 66% of Senators who aren't up for it) remains around 90%. Now it's possible that the majority of Americans of every stripe, in every nook and cranny of the country and with every possible set of politics all hates every congressman but their own, but I doubt it. To me, that screams "failure of the electoral system."
Seats get districted by the party in power at a given time, just a lovely recipe for success. The lines are deliberately drawn in such a way as to not only secure the seat for one party or another, but to waste as many votes as possible on the other side. The votes against you simply do not matter if you draw the lines such that you still win. In fact they're preferable; it means they're not being cast somewhere that can actually make a difference. That's not to mention the value of the incumbents' war chests, which are being supplied by corporations with agendas in unlimited amounts and have absolutely no bearing on what the people think.
We're screwed whether we vote for a Democrat or a Republican, yet screwed even harder if we vote for an independent or other third-party. His odds of winning border on nothing, and voting for him is (quite sadly) the fastest way to ensure that the person you least want to represent you gets elected, making it a wasted vote in the most horrible sense. The odds of these people getting on a ballot are decent; their odds of getting into a debate or any coverage in the media close to nil. Once they get in, the parties have managed to polarize the nation so much (despite being more alike than different!) that short of violating a core principle or two, they can do anything they want and not lose votes. Think of the average Republican. How many things can you think of that their Republican representative can do where a significant number of voters respond "screw it, I'd rather have a democrat?" Same for the Democrats with a democratic representative. None of this has any bearing on whether these people care about the issues, nor whether they agree with any specific position. The question is with essentially no viable middle ground, are they are willing to fly to the opposite extreme and pick somebody who likely agrees with them on even less issues over their current representative because of the disagreement? Most of the time that answer is no, and with the Good Old Boys political clubs primary challenges are largely unheard of. The most successful attempt in decades
Really? You're going to pretend that a member of a warez group who cracks software is the same as somebody who reverse engineers a communications protocol for interoperability?
I don't buy it. The idea that the geeks of Slashdot don't know about Apple's restrictions in advance, or are somehow incapable of evaluating the technical merits of products based on their specifications and only realize some technical inferiority after their purchase just doesn't wash. The average consumer, maybe; geeks, no. Not any deserving of the description.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple. The artificial restrictions and closed nature of so many of their products are certainly one; the premium one pays for that Apple logo is certainly another; and there are more besides. But no, it's not because they're somehow hoodwinked. They're just pissed off that a company doesn't operate the way they want it to, exacerbated by the fact that by and large they are unable to convince others that these things are major issues, and thus everything Apple does must be met with derision.
Maybe. Or maybe it's going to piss them off when somebody they have had a business relationship with for years goes "hey, just because we have a deal and you give us tens of millions of dollars and like 90% of our revenue, we'll still find ways to make pretty much the same deal with somebody else at the same time."
If somebody had grabbed the source, changed the default and offered it up, that's one thing. Mozilla doing it because Microsoft slid them a suitcase full of money is another. The value of exclusivity is higher than the value of... whatever this is that is left.
Google will probably still pay them; they obviously feel they're getting value for it. But if you don't think they're going to bring this up the next time the amounts come up for negotiation, you're crazy.
Well, I actually agree with your point that skill marketability does not degrade so quickly. Perhaps more importantly, I think that good employers recognize that it is far more important to be able to quickly learn new skills than it is to already possess them; being largely self-taught and having a fairly wide skill set has impressed employers more than any single point on my resume in my experience.
I do have to take some exception with one of your points though:
It has "outlasted" it because it existed first, but you make it sound as though Ruby and Ruby on Rails have died out. On the contrary, they are going quite strong. I can't speak to how many websites actually get written in it, but I can tell you after a recent job search that it remains a very much in demand skill that people are willing to pay for.
He never said they need daily interactions with the government. He said he wants to change the process so that the interactions one does need can be done online in a few minutes instead of needing to haul off to some government office, stand in line for an hour and ultimately make a day of it. And people don't have to want it, government is that involved in their daily lives. That is well beyond his control.
Quite frankly even your cherry-picked quotes are far more valuable than the rest of your post. There is literally not a thing you quoted that is a bad idea or shouldn't be done, you just wanted to try to earn some Slashdot Clever Points by screaming "BUZZWORD! BUZZWORD!" as often as you can, making most of them up as you go and repeating them over and over so it sounds like it's more dense than it is. (Hint: If "open standards" is a buzzword in government to you, you're fucking doing it wrong -- it is EXACTLY what should be happening with our tax dollars.)
I think you're begging the question. Even if there was always more work to do in the past, that doesn't necessarily mean there will be in the future. However I don't even agree with that assumption.
Your grandparents were farmers and you are not, but that doesn't mean that machines destroying farming as a job leads to "more work." It just means that you found work elsewhere; somebody else very well may have not. You "took" somebody else's job, the machines didn't magically create it for you out of the rubble of the jobs they replaced.
I do agree with you partially: There is always work to be done, but not necessarily more work. Short of some extremely advanced and downright scary AI, there will always be jobs in this hypothetical world for programming the robots, and always work for mechanics repairing the robots. There will always be work to do in research. There will always be some degree of a service sector -- especially once we decide that those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job. But all these things will shrink. They will not support hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and even if they magically could not everybody is suited for these jobs.
And that's assuming most of the jobs left actually stay in the country, which there is little reason to believe that they will for areas like software.
There will always be work, but there won't always be enough work, and our system of values and economy will have to change in ways I can't even fathom the workings of.
That environment was created on 9/11/2001 -- and no, I don't mean after the attacks. Remember United Flight 93, which heard of plane hijackings being turned into weapons on phone calls and attempted to re-take the plane. Granted, this plane still crashed, but it never accomplished its mission.
By the time cockpit doors were ordered reinforced and locked, the problem was completely solved. I honestly can't think of any changes beyond that that weren't just part of some elaborate security theater. I don't mind pilots having guns; I don't mind air marshalls on random flights; I don't even mind the federalization of screeners per se (though I also don't think it's an improvement relative to its cost) -- but the rest strikes me as both ineffective and invasive.
I wanted to be angry about this. I even had a post written up about how the judge had better eviscerate this woman and her lawyer for such a stupid lawsuit. Then I went against all Slashdot policies and read the article. It is not quite what we think.
She is definitely mad about her age being disclosed, and that is probably the basis for the damage amount -- but her actual claims are about how they got her age. She is claiming that they got her birthdate from a subscription to IMDBPro and is claiming breach of contract and invasion of privacy.
I am not commenting on the merits of that claim, by the way, but it is certainly different than "somebody disclosed a fact about me, sue them!" Much as it pains me, perhaps the calls for evisceration have to be put temporarily on hold. Meh. I guess I have to find a patent story and call for evisceration there instead.
Forgetfulness is certainly one aspect, but spite is another. That's how it goes with the Sears Tower. It hasn't been named that for years, but it's still what almost everybody around here calls it -- including some professional publications. We just sort of pretend the name change never happened.
That's especially likely in this case if the name or the acronym turn out to be especially obnoxious to say.
You're right, of course. There are some people who could easily buy things but still choose to pirate them, and there always will be. The proper response to those people is to ignore them. We just established that they will not be turned into customers, so the only other choice is to turn them into criminals -- which may feel good, but not only reflects badly but probably costs far more than it ever returns.
Rather, the people a company needs to reach are the ones who want to buy the product but can't, either because of some artificial limitation (region issues, as one example) or because of price. Region issues are easy to solve but still complicated, because it usually involves a situation such as where a company sells the rights to merchandise a particular product in a particular market. Short of stopping that, which has its own complications, the solution isn't obvious, at least to me.
Price, though, is relatively easy. I think we're very close on MP3 pricing. I'd say we're still just a touch high, and as evidence I would say that most places still offer a discount for buying a whole album versus buying each of the songs on an album, which says to me there's still a premium for not buying music you don't like. But in any event, it's damn close and it's doing pretty well. Movies, though, still feel expensive. They're very often similar or the same price as a physical copy. It's even worse with e-books. They tend to be the same price as a paperback, and yet without the benefits of one such as the ability to loan it to your friends and family. (Some companies graciously allow you to lend a book exactly one time -- thanks guys, that changes everything!) Games are on one extreme or another; there's the so-called AAA titles that are still extremely expensive, and then games like Magicka priced at impulse-buy levels, so there's lots of room at least on one side of the spectrum.
In other words, there is still a ton of room to turn pirates into customers. One will never get them all converted and shouldn't waste the effort on trying, but there's still a lot of room to play on that old price-demand curve for most products.
Is Safari a significant competitor?
I'm not trolling; I'm writing this comment on a Macbook Pro, so I'm not some rabid anti-Apple-ite nor am I a huge Microsoft supporter. But the first thing I did when I got this computer was to install Firefox, and later moved on to installing Chrome. Safari was opened once or twice, mostly to facilitate downloading the other browser.
In fact, while I admit that it is anecdotal and a small sample size, nobody I know of who uses a Mac uses Safari as their browser. That ranges from the highly computer literate (web developers and other programmers who are great with computers) to the semi-computer-literate (enthusiasts who enjoy them but often need help) to old-school salesmen at my dad's business (they can type, anything else they call somebody over for). If even Mac users don't seem to be using Safari, I doubt significant numbers of Windows users are.
Now admittedly, Safari probably gets a boost from use on iPhones, iPads, etc -- but those are different enough mediums that not including them in "who blocks more malware" tests is probably appropriate.
Don't get me wrong: I would have tested Safari, and I would have tested Opera for that matter, but I honestly don't see their exclusion as a huge deal. There are other things I would bring up as issues with the test before that.
As another poster suggested, search anything you want -- get a warrant first.
But honestly, I don't understand the question. The crime is hit and run. Presumably if we're arresting somebody for it, we know (within an acceptable margin of error) that he hit and we know that he ran. What purpose does figuring out if he was texting at the time do other than serve some kind of idle curiosity? If you're suggesting I should care whether or not a person being arrested for hit and run should also get a citation for using a cell phone while driving, I simply don't. I care whether he committed the crime he is accused of, not why.
I frankly don't want this hypothetical officer wasting the time and resources to search this guy's phone at all, warrant or not. Searches should be based on the charges. They no more need to search his cell phone than they need to search his home or rummage through his desk at the office, regardless of what they might turn up. It's not relevant to proving their case.
If this was supposed to be some sort of philosophical head-scratcher to make me reconsider the whole position, boy did it fail.
Oh, please. If people had given a crap that they might be tied to their purchases, they wouldn't have tied themselves to their purchases in the first place. Nobody forces you to get a Borders card. Nobody forces you to give any kind of accurate information that they can track back to you. My mom has never had a problem with saying "I don't have an email address" even though it is complete bunk, just because she doesn't want people (or retailers) emailing her.
The idea that people are out there going "OH MY GOD! I GAVE MY INFORMATION TO BORDERS AND NOW BARNES AND NOBLE IS GOING TO HAVE IT?! AIEEEEEEEEE!" is just naive crap.
The OP was exactly right. The vast majority of people don't care about things like this, at least not enough to actually do anything about it but pay lip service to their outrage. The rest are nerds on sites like Slashdot pretending that they represent any kind of majority opinion (or that anybody who disagrees with them must be too stupid to understand).
But you won't believe any of this anyway, so I'll leave you to your sanctimonious, sarcastic outrage and let the hivemind get around to modding me down.