There is still no excuse. Making sure you have one should be part of your routine when preparing for a date with a new potential partner, much like getting a haircut, or picking out what you're going to wear, etc. Between that and always having a backup in your wallet, there is really no reason for the situation you describe to ever come up.
There are two reasons why in the real world it does come up. The first is education. Abstinence only education is a terrible relic and should have been abolished wholesale ever since the invention of condoms. People getting pregnant didn't start with the AIDS era, and so we should've been ahead of the problem but weren't. The second, pure and simple, is laziness. If one were to cause an unplanned pregnancy or get an STD due to laziness, I have very little sympathy for your situation.
If you consciously know this is something that one should worry about, then any lack of preparation is simply laziness that has been rationalized as "well we were in the moment" or "well I wasn't raised that way."
Having a condom omnipresent represents a trivial effort.
When I was single, and on some occasions ended up someone new at her place or mine, yes, I did always have a condom on me, in my wallet so I always knew where it was. I also always had a morning after pill in my car, in case something unexpected happened or the condom failed and she was not on birth control. Precautions like these took little to no effort. There really is no excuse in a civilized society.
I'm convinced that the fact that this level of preparation is somehow unusual as opposed to the standard is due to the prevalence of abstinence only sex education in the U.S.
"I think the real application will be "test the other person". If it becomes socially acceptable to ask for a saliva sample before having sex, this could put a real dent in STD rates."
Yeah, like that won't kill the moment.
[rolls eyes]
Hell, in the heat of the moment, it is hard enough to stop and think about putting on a freakin' condom, must less getting someone to stop, and pee on a small target.
I mean, ok, some people might be doing a golden showers thing, but that's still pretty edge of the norm, eh?
Ahem, if it's hard enough, neither putting on a condom nor peeing on a chip should get in the way.
But seriously, if there's enough reluctance on either side such that pausing to put on a condom is "difficult", perhaps the proper question is to consider whether the "let's hurry up and put this thing in there before she changes her mind" strategy is really a good idea. In a situation where both sides actually want to have sex for more than "the moment", you can take the time to get back into the mood after taking responsible precautions.
>>"Kim Dong-cheol is a North Korean with 'a double life'
Not anymore.
For all you know, the name Kim Dong-cheol may be the American equivalent of John Smith. We too readily apply our local expectations to foreign situations.
The average/. user who works in IT probably has later hours on the average compared to corporate America across the board. If you're the exception to this and have to wake up super early, we have positions open here, feel free to submit a resume.
Given how they approached the reception problems by giving away bumper cases, I would have fully expected them to give away black cases to cover up the white plastic.
With how heroics work now, getting 5k gear score can be done relatively quickly. And no, you can't level up to 80 and join an ICC raid on your first day. But you know what, ICC isn't the first tier of raid instances. It's the last tier. When the weekly raid is Patchwork, no one is checking your gear score. You CAN do VOA with crappy gear. He never claimed you can do ALL raid content while wearing all green sub-80 gear.
Making it easier to get into raiding and trivializing the requirements for the final raid instance in the game are not the same thing.
I was really looking forward to SC2. I was busy when it first came out, but I was going to pick it up least week until I saw the stories about Blizzard banning users for cheating in the single player campaign. I believe it was a story on/. as well. Frankly, I'm tired of software developers doing an end around on copyright laws by basically renting you software instead of selling it to you.
I'm boycotting SC2 and Diablo 3 until Blizzard stops acting like an asshat.
Wow, what an overheated headline. Jobs did not "lash out". He gave very reasoned response and delineated the significant differences in the philosophy and design of the 2 platforms. It wasnt an angry rant by any means.
You must own an iPhone:).
But seriously, the idea that "integrated" gives the app developer the ability to be more innovative is simply not true when the reality is Apple is the gatekeeper and any app they don't like they just remove from their "integrated" marketplace. His response was not reasoned, it was a marketing ploy. A "reasoned response" would be "We at Apple feel like the users get a better experience when we have full control over what you can and can't do with a device. Since most people are idiots, the average user is happier when we make decisions for them. True freedom results in a worse experience, so we don't believe in freedom." At least that would be intellectually honest.
If you look at China's achievements, they are mainly construction achievements. They build massive skyscrapers (Shanghai for example, already has a 100 story building, and is in the middle of constructing a 128 story one). Any Chinese citizen living in a major city in China will brag about their city's skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, subways, railways, etc. And, having visited a lot of those cities, I will admit they are really impressive.
The primary reason for this though, is that China is taking the massive amount of money flowing into the country and they're choosing to spend it on improving the economy through public works projects. Building skyscrapers, subways, etc. require lots of unskilled manpower, something that China has in abundance. Any problem, like digging a hole, laying pipe, or other manual labor tasks, that can be accomplished in greater scale by simply throwing raw manpower at it.... well, China is unsurpassed in its ability to throw raw manpower at something.
Why can infrastructure like this not be built in the U.S.? Because we don't have 300 million unskilled laborers who will work their ass off for a few bucks a day. We don't have a government that has the authority to just displace hundreds of people in order to build a subway station without going through a lot of red tape. In order to keep up with China in this area, we'd have to give up a lot of the values we treasure for the sake of progress, which is something most of us here on./. wouldn't do.
You can like or hate the policies in China all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that their massive overpopulation of unskilled labor is getting employed and their infrastructure is developing extremely fast.
Health concerns have scientifically been oput to rest. There isn't really anything you can do about peple who just make shit up and ignore facts.
I have no doubt that they've been put to rest as far as we know, but when it comes to medicine and health, our science has always been imprecise. Something that is good and safe this year will be bad and will kill you the next. This is the problem when half the conclusions being drawn are along the lines of "We have no idea how or why this works, but in a double blind trial of 300 people, we show a 15% improvement."
Not that I believe there are health concerns with wireless technology, just saying that there was a time the people were convinced the world was flat.
You're comparing cost versus retail price of two things massively different in scale in terms (cost per MB) that is completely meaningless in the world of SMS. Could you possibly have made a more pointless comparison?
My computing time is 4x more valuable analyzing Seti@home data as opposed to loading this article up on/.
I had to look, but China does surprisingly have a version of the "eminent domain" clause in their Constitution - See #6 of "Amendment Fourth" down the page. Note it doesn't say "just compensation"... it just says they can take private property, and pay you something for it. Somehow I don't think, unless you are a Communist party big-wig, that value is decided by an impartial tribunal in a court of law.
That's unfounded. While I'm sure that this provision has been abused, from my personal experience the people I've known in China to be displaced due to eminent domain ended up in comparable (or better) housing. Location-wise it was generally less convenient, but they made an effort not to leave people homeless. Besides, in China they don't really own their own land anyways, the government does. You purchase the "exclusive, transferable, right to use the land".
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the system is better than our system here. I'm not saying it shouldn't be changed. But it's not really fair to assume the worst case. Most of the time the system works as intended. The big difference is that when the power does get abused, the people there get screwed worse and have less recourse.
When I looked at the title of this/. article, I read "The Symantec Guide to Homeland Security." Given how Homeland Security has performed since its inception, it sounded very believable that Symantec would be writing a guide to it.
I donated the very first day they opened up the Give One Get One program and got my XO Laptop the Friday before Christmas (they sent an e-mail November 28th saying they were prioritizing first day donors and was trying to make delivery by Christmas).
The machine itself is really neat. The battery life and outdoors readability is much better than my personal laptop and it covers 90% of what I use my laptop for when I'm on the go anyways (Web browsing and using ssh to connect to boxes at work/home). If it weren't for the fact that the keyboard is too small for an adult for long periods of use, I might have replaced my laptop with an OLPC one.
I envy the programmers who had the foresight to program their application using a 2 digit year field. They won't have to worry have to worry about this problem until 2099, and by then we won't be using the same systems we do today anyways!
Seized property is typically sold by the states in Surplus Property auctions, where it can be bid on by the public at large, or in some cases the airports themselves sell the stuff in lots on eBay. The government is making a buck on the battery it confiscates from you. If it makes it to the end of the shift. I have seen on multiple occasions screeners at security checkpoints simply pocket what they confiscate. A few months ago, someone near me in line had a bottle of expensive moisturizer in a gift box. They told her it was a liquid and would have to be confiscated. As she picked up the rest of her belongings the TSA employee put it in her purse.
This is the kind of people who work for the TSA. God forbid someone who's actually a threat finds one of these morally shady people and bribes them to let something actually dangerous through. If you're going to subject people to this kind of scrutiny as they pass through the airport, the least you can do is hire people who aren't security risks themselves. As it is, the TSA is little more than a joke.
CBC Marketplace video explains. These are not geeks or nurds, they are modern day snake oil salesmen.
I saw that video when it was posted to/. a while back. There are a number of things in that video that bother me about the reporter. For example, even the companies that diagnosed and repaired his problem correct, the reporter bitches about how the stores charge him $50 for a part he could get for $30 online. Well, no shit. You're going to pay more for someone who has the part on hand and is offering instant delivery than you will from an internet discounter. While I agree that the reporter pointed out some very shady individuals, bitching about the rest of them for their parts pricing only took away from his credibility.
It's not that rare. By claiming ownership of the posts you open yourself up to legal consequences of those posts. For example, if someone posts the source code to Vista on/., after we were all done laughing, the poster would be responsible for the infringement, not/. OTOH, if/. claimed ownership on the content, then it would be/. who was responsible. In fact, I would say that the majority of sites that are commercial in nature and likely to be the subject of such issues tend to make it clear they are not in fact responsible for the content of their comments/forums section.
However, even the poorest Chinese was busting butt to better their circumstances and even the most ignorant understood that education for the children was the best way to better the entire family. That's generally true, but part of the reason is that in Chinese culture, you are expected to take care of your parents to a much greater degree than we are expected to here in the U.S. While any decent parent would want their child to have better than what they themselves had, that part of the culture motivates the less decent ones as well.
I am somehow not convinced... how many TB of data would a major provider like that move in a day? Those would have to be some moby servers... That's true, but what if they only kept a record of the text data? If you strip away all the audio/video content from today's web pages, the resulting data isn't that bad. Combine that with some sort of filter (it wouldn't even have to be very sophisticated, even if it's relatively basic and only cuts out like half the traffic) before they store it to disk, and I'm willing to bet it's completely feasible to keep say, a 30 day history of all domestic traffic.
We don't communicate with water, we use it as a basic need for survival. Thus a problem with our water supply will make Person in government look real bad real soon. Internet communication is a luxury. Human Kind survived for a lot time without it. So a failure in setting up a good Internet system will not harm government officials as much. There are many services that municipal governments provide with great efficiency that are not necessary for survival. Sorry, but it's simply a fallacy of logic to generalize all government as bad at handling luxuries. When we're talking about municipal governments, the fact of the matter is, it depends on what municipality you're talking about. There are clear examples of townships that have successfully implemented muni-wifi. Just read the rest of the comments and you'll find a few references. Our federal government may be a shining example of how wasteful and ineffective government can be, but applying that as a generalization to local governments is simply unfair. Many local governments consist of the business leaders of the community who have a vested interest in the communities well being and who are a small enough entity to get things done efficiently with less waste than your average corporation. Being anti-government for the sake of being anti-government is pointless. At the end of the day, I want whoever can provide me with the services I want at the best service/cost ratio for my needs. If the local government can do that, then great.
Comcast's TOS explicitly disallow running any form of public server or P2P services, so I really don't see why people are complaining about it. If you want to run P2P, subscribe to a plan or provider that permits it.
Or, if you think that people should be permitted to run any service they like, then stand up for government regulations that force all providers to let them do this.
But I'm tired of this pseudo-libertarian bullshit where people complain about evil big business writing restrictive contracts on the one hand, and whine about big bad government on the other. You must be new here. Just because they can do more active things doesn't mean the complaint isn't legitimate. You're correct. It is both the fault of Comcast and the fault of the government for the current state of affairs. However, until things get fixed, stories like this being posted on/. raises awareness.
Slashdot Mirror
There is still no excuse. Making sure you have one should be part of your routine when preparing for a date with a new potential partner, much like getting a haircut, or picking out what you're going to wear, etc. Between that and always having a backup in your wallet, there is really no reason for the situation you describe to ever come up.
There are two reasons why in the real world it does come up. The first is education. Abstinence only education is a terrible relic and should have been abolished wholesale ever since the invention of condoms. People getting pregnant didn't start with the AIDS era, and so we should've been ahead of the problem but weren't. The second, pure and simple, is laziness. If one were to cause an unplanned pregnancy or get an STD due to laziness, I have very little sympathy for your situation.
If you consciously know this is something that one should worry about, then any lack of preparation is simply laziness that has been rationalized as "well we were in the moment" or "well I wasn't raised that way."
Having a condom omnipresent represents a trivial effort.
When I was single, and on some occasions ended up someone new at her place or mine, yes, I did always have a condom on me, in my wallet so I always knew where it was. I also always had a morning after pill in my car, in case something unexpected happened or the condom failed and she was not on birth control. Precautions like these took little to no effort. There really is no excuse in a civilized society.
I'm convinced that the fact that this level of preparation is somehow unusual as opposed to the standard is due to the prevalence of abstinence only sex education in the U.S.
"I think the real application will be "test the other person". If it becomes socially acceptable to ask for a saliva sample before having sex, this could put a real dent in STD rates."
Yeah, like that won't kill the moment.
[rolls eyes]
Hell, in the heat of the moment, it is hard enough to stop and think about putting on a freakin' condom, must less getting someone to stop, and pee on a small target.
I mean, ok, some people might be doing a golden showers thing, but that's still pretty edge of the norm, eh?
Ahem, if it's hard enough, neither putting on a condom nor peeing on a chip should get in the way.
But seriously, if there's enough reluctance on either side such that pausing to put on a condom is "difficult", perhaps the proper question is to consider whether the "let's hurry up and put this thing in there before she changes her mind" strategy is really a good idea. In a situation where both sides actually want to have sex for more than "the moment", you can take the time to get back into the mood after taking responsible precautions.
>>"Kim Dong-cheol is a North Korean with 'a double life' Not anymore.
For all you know, the name Kim Dong-cheol may be the American equivalent of John Smith. We too readily apply our local expectations to foreign situations.
The average /. user who works in IT probably has later hours on the average compared to corporate America across the board. If you're the exception to this and have to wake up super early, we have positions open here, feel free to submit a resume.
Given how they approached the reception problems by giving away bumper cases, I would have fully expected them to give away black cases to cover up the white plastic.
With how heroics work now, getting 5k gear score can be done relatively quickly. And no, you can't level up to 80 and join an ICC raid on your first day. But you know what, ICC isn't the first tier of raid instances. It's the last tier. When the weekly raid is Patchwork, no one is checking your gear score. You CAN do VOA with crappy gear. He never claimed you can do ALL raid content while wearing all green sub-80 gear.
Making it easier to get into raiding and trivializing the requirements for the final raid instance in the game are not the same thing.
I was really looking forward to SC2. I was busy when it first came out, but I was going to pick it up least week until I saw the stories about Blizzard banning users for cheating in the single player campaign. I believe it was a story on /. as well. Frankly, I'm tired of software developers doing an end around on copyright laws by basically renting you software instead of selling it to you.
I'm boycotting SC2 and Diablo 3 until Blizzard stops acting like an asshat.
Wow, what an overheated headline. Jobs did not "lash out". He gave very reasoned response and delineated the significant differences in the philosophy and design of the 2 platforms. It wasnt an angry rant by any means.
You must own an iPhone :).
But seriously, the idea that "integrated" gives the app developer the ability to be more innovative is simply not true when the reality is Apple is the gatekeeper and any app they don't like they just remove from their "integrated" marketplace. His response was not reasoned, it was a marketing ploy. A "reasoned response" would be "We at Apple feel like the users get a better experience when we have full control over what you can and can't do with a device. Since most people are idiots, the average user is happier when we make decisions for them. True freedom results in a worse experience, so we don't believe in freedom." At least that would be intellectually honest.
If you look at China's achievements, they are mainly construction achievements. They build massive skyscrapers (Shanghai for example, already has a 100 story building, and is in the middle of constructing a 128 story one). Any Chinese citizen living in a major city in China will brag about their city's skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, subways, railways, etc. And, having visited a lot of those cities, I will admit they are really impressive.
./. wouldn't do.
The primary reason for this though, is that China is taking the massive amount of money flowing into the country and they're choosing to spend it on improving the economy through public works projects. Building skyscrapers, subways, etc. require lots of unskilled manpower, something that China has in abundance. Any problem, like digging a hole, laying pipe, or other manual labor tasks, that can be accomplished in greater scale by simply throwing raw manpower at it.... well, China is unsurpassed in its ability to throw raw manpower at something.
Why can infrastructure like this not be built in the U.S.? Because we don't have 300 million unskilled laborers who will work their ass off for a few bucks a day. We don't have a government that has the authority to just displace hundreds of people in order to build a subway station without going through a lot of red tape. In order to keep up with China in this area, we'd have to give up a lot of the values we treasure for the sake of progress, which is something most of us here on
You can like or hate the policies in China all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that their massive overpopulation of unskilled labor is getting employed and their infrastructure is developing extremely fast.
Couldn't they just send a rover to like Nevada or something? I read on the internet that's where the moon landings happened, so it must be true.
Health concerns have scientifically been oput to rest. There isn't really anything you can do about peple who just make shit up and ignore facts.
I have no doubt that they've been put to rest as far as we know, but when it comes to medicine and health, our science has always been imprecise. Something that is good and safe this year will be bad and will kill you the next. This is the problem when half the conclusions being drawn are along the lines of "We have no idea how or why this works, but in a double blind trial of 300 people, we show a 15% improvement."
Not that I believe there are health concerns with wireless technology, just saying that there was a time the people were convinced the world was flat.
You're comparing cost versus retail price of two things massively different in scale in terms (cost per MB) that is completely meaningless in the world of SMS. Could you possibly have made a more pointless comparison?
/.
My computing time is 4x more valuable analyzing Seti@home data as opposed to loading this article up on
If it happens in the U.S., that's easy.
Everyone.
That's unfounded. While I'm sure that this provision has been abused, from my personal experience the people I've known in China to be displaced due to eminent domain ended up in comparable (or better) housing. Location-wise it was generally less convenient, but they made an effort not to leave people homeless. Besides, in China they don't really own their own land anyways, the government does. You purchase the "exclusive, transferable, right to use the land".
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the system is better than our system here. I'm not saying it shouldn't be changed. But it's not really fair to assume the worst case. Most of the time the system works as intended. The big difference is that when the power does get abused, the people there get screwed worse and have less recourse.
When I looked at the title of this /. article, I read "The Symantec Guide to Homeland Security." Given how Homeland Security has performed since its inception, it sounded very believable that Symantec would be writing a guide to it.
I donated the very first day they opened up the Give One Get One program and got my XO Laptop the Friday before Christmas (they sent an e-mail November 28th saying they were prioritizing first day donors and was trying to make delivery by Christmas).
The machine itself is really neat. The battery life and outdoors readability is much better than my personal laptop and it covers 90% of what I use my laptop for when I'm on the go anyways (Web browsing and using ssh to connect to boxes at work/home). If it weren't for the fact that the keyboard is too small for an adult for long periods of use, I might have replaced my laptop with an OLPC one.
I envy the programmers who had the foresight to program their application using a 2 digit year field. They won't have to worry have to worry about this problem until 2099, and by then we won't be using the same systems we do today anyways!
I saw that video when it was posted to
It's not that rare. By claiming ownership of the posts you open yourself up to legal consequences of those posts. For example, if someone posts the source code to Vista on /., after we were all done laughing, the poster would be responsible for the infringement, not /. OTOH, if /. claimed ownership on the content, then it would be /. who was responsible. In fact, I would say that the majority of sites that are commercial in nature and likely to be the subject of such issues tend to make it clear they are not in fact responsible for the content of their comments/forums section.
Or, if you think that people should be permitted to run any service they like, then stand up for government regulations that force all providers to let them do this.
But I'm tired of this pseudo-libertarian bullshit where people complain about evil big business writing restrictive contracts on the one hand, and whine about big bad government on the other. You must be new here. Just because they can do more active things doesn't mean the complaint isn't legitimate. You're correct. It is both the fault of Comcast and the fault of the government for the current state of affairs. However, until things get fixed, stories like this being posted on