That's the way my county does it in Florida, they had the foresight to replace their punch cards with optical scan machines a few years before the 2000 election fiasco. Sometimes I think I live in the only county in the state that's not entirely corrupt and incompetent.
In a country like China, where everybody has mobile phones but not everyone has computers, a service like Twitter can be immensely useful in helping the free-flow of information. For me, Twitter is a way for me to let friends and family know what I'm up to while I'm living halfway around the world from them, and it's a handy way to keep up with breaking news, but not having it isn't a big deal, I've got plenty of other sources of information. For my friends in China, losing Twitter is losing an important connection to the outside world.
This seems like something that should be nothing but a joke, but it looks like it is going to be around after the first. I suppose this is where I should whine about websites messing with a good thing.
"I took a two week vacation to Sydney (from LA) and brought along a backpack and a dufflebag. Worked out just fine."
You don't even need that much. I took a 3 week vacation through 4 countries with nothing but a carryon and a purse. It makes it so much easier, especially when you're trying to get through customs. No need to dress like a slob either, you just pack intelligently.
I often think I don't get carded because I'm usually buying 4 beers where a single beer that costs more than a 12-pack of "normal" beer. No way I could be under 21 and spending close to $20 on 4 beers.
That's probably true. Someone I know asked the clerk at the convenience store where he normally buys his beer why it was that he'd get carded there some times and not others, and was told that it was pretty much based on how expensive the beer was.
I can't figure out why I've almost never gotten carded even though I'm under 30, people usually think I'm even younger than I actually am, and to top it off I still get carded sometimes for R-rated movies.
Look at it from the cop's point of view, if this person is not cooperating then they have something to hide.
Except that obviously wasn't the case here. Asserting your legally protected rights is NEVER an admission of guilt. Unfortunately, uneducated toerags like yourself and the police officer in this case don't believe that's the case. I have, on more than one occasion, flat out refused to even give my name to the police on the grounds that asking for my identity without probable cause fell under unlawful search and seizure. Basically told them that the only way I would provide that information was if I was under arrest, and since I was not under arrest, then I wasn't going to give it to them. Of course, they then suggested that maybe they could arrest me, but when push came to shove, there wasn't any valid reason for them to do so.
I had absolutely nothing to hide, I just don't particularly feel that the police should be allowed to go around asking me for my name when all I'm doing is exercising free-speech rights and protesting on a public sidewalk. It's the principle of the thing, and it's high time that American citizens started standing up for our rights while we still have them.
I'm 26, I get carded half the time when I try to go to an R-rated movie, so I must look reasonably young, yet more often than not, when I try to buy alcohol, I don't get carded. A while back, I was out with friends and the first person to order alcohol got carded, none of the rest of us did. After stewing for a while about being the only one carded, when the waitress came he asked why no one else got carded, she told him that if one person's legal, she figures the whole table is. At that point, the 15 and 17 year old who were there suddenly realized that if their older siblings hadn't been there to stop them, they wouldn't have had to get the virgin drinks.
I agree. I'm all for Second Amendment rights, and even though I don't want to have anything to do with guns myself I support the right for others, but some gun owners downright scare me. The worst that I've come in contact with was the guy who would leave handguns laying around on end tables, with no trigger locks or anything, despite the fact that he had a young grandchild, and despite the fact that he gave the aforementioned young grandchild realistic looking toy handguns to play with. I had a hard time telling the toy gun from the real gun just looking at them, yet a three-year-old apparently was supposed to. People who are that stupid shouldn't be allowed to own deadly weapons, because it's usually not themselves that they manage to kill with their stupidity.
Not every user-created political ad. However, this particular user-created political ad was created by someone with close connections with the Obama campaign. Someone who was pretending to be a random outsider but who turned out to be anything but. If people want to make grassroots ads, then go right ahead, but don't try and make me think that something is grassroots when it was made by a partisan political operative with connections to a candidate's campaign.
Wait, you really believe that the Obama campaign didn't have anything to do with this? I thought that Barak and Co. were supposed to be different, but this incident looks like nothing so much as politics as usual, with an internet twist to it. You have enough layers of plausible deniability to allow the Obama campaign to wash their hands of any responsibility, but this episode smells an awful lot like those fake viral videos that have corporate fingerprints all over them even though the corporation won't admit it.
Shame on the Obama campaign, I thought they were supposed to be above this manipulative junk.
I don't think that Americans traveling overseas should pretend to be Canadians because one good way to help improve the image that people have of Americans is for them to meet actual Americans who aren't the stereotypical rude American tourist. This assumes, of course that you aren't a rude American tourist, because in that case, please pick another country and pretend to be from there so you don't give the rest of us a bad name. Be polite and respectful and try to pick up on cultural cues and it's all good.
As for traveling itself, nobody ever said, "man, I wish I had packed more stuff." Half the stuff you think you need, you don't. Cut that half in half again, and you might be close to a decent packing list. It's entirely possible to live indefinitely out of a carry on size piece of luggage, the website onebag.com is your friend. The only thing that I ever left home that I should have packed was a needle and thread, because when you need one, you suddenly can't find a store anywhere that's selling them. Oh, and buy one of those travel clotheslines made from braided surgical tubing, it's handy for all sorts of non-clothes drying related applications.
Even parents who are at their wits end normally show some sort of sadness or something other than the hatred that this stepmother expressed. No wonder the kid turned out to be a sociopath, look at the examples he had of inappropriate emotional response.
And, for what it's worth, I think that video games did play a role in this, but not in the way that people think--I think that maybe if the stepmom spent a little less time playing video games and a little more time playing with the kid, things might have turned out differently.
Back when I was in highschool, I knew a family who adopted two boys who at the ages of 7 and 5 already appeared to be heading down the sort of path this kid took. The 7yo had already had several run-ins with the law, had been arrested for breaking into a neighbor's garage and setting the neighbor's lawnmower on fire, among other things, yet when I see those kids from time to time around town today, they're not anywhere near the messed up angry little boys they were then, they're polite well-adjusted teenagers. I think the reason that they seem to have turned out ok while that kid didn't is because their adoptive parents didn't just discipline them for their anti-social behavior, they also loved them and didn't treat them like they were monsters who were inherently bad.
To add to that, I'm sure that the kid was well aware that his stepmother hated him, knowing that the person who's trying to discipline and control you hates your guts has to to an awful lot psychologically. She says she was with the kid for 7 years, which means the kid was 8 years old when she came on the scene. Eight years old, with a broken family and a new mommy who's response to his acting out and bad behavior is to start hating him. That's a great way to turn a little boy into a messed up sociopath.
Additionally, the fact that the father had custody rather than the mother hints that there was probably more going on with the parents than we're being told. Fathers don't normally get full custody in a divorce case unless there's either some reason why the mother is totally unfit, or if the mother doesn't want the child.
Oh yes, and to top it all off, the stepmother is 29, the kid is now 18, which means that she was 19 when she hooked up with his father, and the fact that maybe, just maybe, she was way too young for his father and to be trying to raise a messed up stepchild just might have contributed to poor disciplinary decisions.
My general opinion is that it's good luck more than anything that our shopping malls and big box stores have not been attacked by terrorists because if they wanted to do it, there's nothing stopping them. We're spending all of our time chasing bogey men when the easiest targets are not only unprotected, they're virtually unprotectable.
When it comes right down to it, we need to be cautious, but we also need to live our lives. The point of terrorism is to disrupt our way of life, and the sort of people who would contemplate attacking us are probably sitting around laughing at how soft we are that there has been only one terrorist attack in 5 1/2 years yet we're behaving as if they were setting off bombs every other week. Our own paranoia is doing their job for them without them having to lift a finger or worry about that nasty blowing-yourself-up bit.
It's not just whispered rumors, it's entirely possible, and as long as you authenticate the phone through Verizon's website instead of calling them or going into the store, they have no way of knowing that you didn't buy it from them. Of course, you do have to find your way to the right websites in order to learn how to flash it, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. It's also possible to flash Verizon phones to other companies' firmware and then use those phones on Verizon's network. At the moment, I've got a RAZR, purchased from Verizon, running Alltell's firmware and operating happily on Verizon's network.
On top of that, diesel engines are far more energy efficient than gasoline engines, so right there you're reducing your fuel consumption. With the new low sulfur diesels that don't clog catalytic converters, you could run an energy efficient, clean vehicle with a fuel made from a renewable resource.
Good point, particularly about the differences between states. Especially considering that I went through far more culture shock going from Florida to rural Georgia for college than I did going to Spain, and in Georgia they at least speak the same language (allegedly)--I'm sure that Sweden and Norway are far more similar than Florida and Georgia, our closest neighbor. Stepped off a plane in Spain having flown from Georgia, felt like I had arrived back home from a foreign country, even though it was the opposite.
Whatever the case, I like the slogan that Lonely Planet had for a while: "Do your country a favor. Leave."
Hey, 7-8 hours to get to another country is still not bad! If you live in Miami, it'll take that long to get out of the state. Of course, you could head south by boat and be in Cuba in a few hours, but most people who are taking boats between Florida and Cuba are trying to get away from Cuba, so that doesn't quite count...
Well, the whole having most of a continent to ourselves with only Canada and Mexico to keep us company tends to contribute to an isolationist attitude. People living in Europe don't have to travel anywhere near the distances to interact with their neighbors than Americans have to. If traffic's good and there aren't any traffic cops to stop me for speeding, it takes me 4 hours just to get out of my own state, and a good 8-10 hour drive for me to get to our state capital (as a matter of contrast, it took about that long to go by bus from Sofia, Bulgaria to Istanbul, Turkey). A European hops in his car and drives 8 or 10 hours, there's a good chance he's in another country. I hop in my car and drive 8 or 10 hours and I end up in Georgia or Alabama. Just the sheer landmass we're talking about and the cost of travel to get outside of the country tends to keep people in a bubble. And, while the cost of transatlantic travel isn't that bad (depending on how you swing it, it's cheaper that a trip to Disney World), the perception of cost is enough to keep people from even considering it, and without the prospect of possibly using a second or third language some day, people don't see the value in putting in the effort. To put it in economic terms, people in the US see the opportunity costs associated with learning a new language to be too high in relation to the benefits.
Good points. I was in Spain for a week and a half, and since the people I was with were all bilingual, about 95% of the time I was hearing nothing but Spanish and in just that week and a half my one year of college Spanish went from so-so to getting by pretty well. My Spanish is rusty again now, but I know if I hung out in an all Spanish environment for any length of time it would all come back. The funny thing on that trip to Spain was the one person in my group was a native Central American Spanish speaker who'd lived in the US for years. The two languages mustn't have been separated in his brain because he'd accidentally use English to answer a question asked in Spanish and not realize why the person he was responding to had a blank look on their face.
It's definitely true that speaking a "small" language helps. When my brother lived in India, pretty much all of his friends were at least trilingual. They spoke their tribal languages, Hindi, and English, and most of them spoke English better than Hindi. My brother is fluent in Hindi (his friends swore up and down that he speaks it better than they do, and it's their country), but living in Delhi about the only times he had to use Hindi was when he helped him in bargaining. His friends all preferred to use English because, as I said, they speak English better than Hindi and their first languages are only spoken in small areas. They have to learn at least three languages to get by, but since the average American doesn't travel beyond US borders, outside of South Florida and parts of Texas and California where speaking Spanish is useful, there's no incentive to bother with a language you're never going to use.
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I'm on Verizon too, I feel your pain.
That's the way my county does it in Florida, they had the foresight to replace their punch cards with optical scan machines a few years before the 2000 election fiasco. Sometimes I think I live in the only county in the state that's not entirely corrupt and incompetent.
Youtube is already blocked
In a country like China, where everybody has mobile phones but not everyone has computers, a service like Twitter can be immensely useful in helping the free-flow of information. For me, Twitter is a way for me to let friends and family know what I'm up to while I'm living halfway around the world from them, and it's a handy way to keep up with breaking news, but not having it isn't a big deal, I've got plenty of other sources of information. For my friends in China, losing Twitter is losing an important connection to the outside world.
This seems like something that should be nothing but a joke, but it looks like it is going to be around after the first. I suppose this is where I should whine about websites messing with a good thing.
"I took a two week vacation to Sydney (from LA) and brought along a backpack and a dufflebag. Worked out just fine."
You don't even need that much. I took a 3 week vacation through 4 countries with nothing but a carryon and a purse. It makes it so much easier, especially when you're trying to get through customs. No need to dress like a slob either, you just pack intelligently.
I often think I don't get carded because I'm usually buying 4 beers where a single beer that costs more than a 12-pack of "normal" beer. No way I could be under 21 and spending close to $20 on 4 beers.
That's probably true. Someone I know asked the clerk at the convenience store where he normally buys his beer why it was that he'd get carded there some times and not others, and was told that it was pretty much based on how expensive the beer was.
I can't figure out why I've almost never gotten carded even though I'm under 30, people usually think I'm even younger than I actually am, and to top it off I still get carded sometimes for R-rated movies.
Nope, not true. I've been interviewed on camera for news stories and have never been asked to sign any kind of release for the use of my image.
Except that obviously wasn't the case here. Asserting your legally protected rights is NEVER an admission of guilt. Unfortunately, uneducated toerags like yourself and the police officer in this case don't believe that's the case. I have, on more than one occasion, flat out refused to even give my name to the police on the grounds that asking for my identity without probable cause fell under unlawful search and seizure. Basically told them that the only way I would provide that information was if I was under arrest, and since I was not under arrest, then I wasn't going to give it to them. Of course, they then suggested that maybe they could arrest me, but when push came to shove, there wasn't any valid reason for them to do so.
I had absolutely nothing to hide, I just don't particularly feel that the police should be allowed to go around asking me for my name when all I'm doing is exercising free-speech rights and protesting on a public sidewalk. It's the principle of the thing, and it's high time that American citizens started standing up for our rights while we still have them.
I'm 26, I get carded half the time when I try to go to an R-rated movie, so I must look reasonably young, yet more often than not, when I try to buy alcohol, I don't get carded. A while back, I was out with friends and the first person to order alcohol got carded, none of the rest of us did. After stewing for a while about being the only one carded, when the waitress came he asked why no one else got carded, she told him that if one person's legal, she figures the whole table is. At that point, the 15 and 17 year old who were there suddenly realized that if their older siblings hadn't been there to stop them, they wouldn't have had to get the virgin drinks.
I agree. I'm all for Second Amendment rights, and even though I don't want to have anything to do with guns myself I support the right for others, but some gun owners downright scare me. The worst that I've come in contact with was the guy who would leave handguns laying around on end tables, with no trigger locks or anything, despite the fact that he had a young grandchild, and despite the fact that he gave the aforementioned young grandchild realistic looking toy handguns to play with. I had a hard time telling the toy gun from the real gun just looking at them, yet a three-year-old apparently was supposed to. People who are that stupid shouldn't be allowed to own deadly weapons, because it's usually not themselves that they manage to kill with their stupidity.
Not every user-created political ad. However, this particular user-created political ad was created by someone with close connections with the Obama campaign. Someone who was pretending to be a random outsider but who turned out to be anything but. If people want to make grassroots ads, then go right ahead, but don't try and make me think that something is grassroots when it was made by a partisan political operative with connections to a candidate's campaign.
Wait, you really believe that the Obama campaign didn't have anything to do with this? I thought that Barak and Co. were supposed to be different, but this incident looks like nothing so much as politics as usual, with an internet twist to it. You have enough layers of plausible deniability to allow the Obama campaign to wash their hands of any responsibility, but this episode smells an awful lot like those fake viral videos that have corporate fingerprints all over them even though the corporation won't admit it.
Shame on the Obama campaign, I thought they were supposed to be above this manipulative junk.
I don't think that Americans traveling overseas should pretend to be Canadians because one good way to help improve the image that people have of Americans is for them to meet actual Americans who aren't the stereotypical rude American tourist. This assumes, of course that you aren't a rude American tourist, because in that case, please pick another country and pretend to be from there so you don't give the rest of us a bad name. Be polite and respectful and try to pick up on cultural cues and it's all good.
As for traveling itself, nobody ever said, "man, I wish I had packed more stuff." Half the stuff you think you need, you don't. Cut that half in half again, and you might be close to a decent packing list. It's entirely possible to live indefinitely out of a carry on size piece of luggage, the website onebag.com is your friend. The only thing that I ever left home that I should have packed was a needle and thread, because when you need one, you suddenly can't find a store anywhere that's selling them. Oh, and buy one of those travel clotheslines made from braided surgical tubing, it's handy for all sorts of non-clothes drying related applications.
Even parents who are at their wits end normally show some sort of sadness or something other than the hatred that this stepmother expressed. No wonder the kid turned out to be a sociopath, look at the examples he had of inappropriate emotional response.
And, for what it's worth, I think that video games did play a role in this, but not in the way that people think--I think that maybe if the stepmom spent a little less time playing video games and a little more time playing with the kid, things might have turned out differently.
Back when I was in highschool, I knew a family who adopted two boys who at the ages of 7 and 5 already appeared to be heading down the sort of path this kid took. The 7yo had already had several run-ins with the law, had been arrested for breaking into a neighbor's garage and setting the neighbor's lawnmower on fire, among other things, yet when I see those kids from time to time around town today, they're not anywhere near the messed up angry little boys they were then, they're polite well-adjusted teenagers. I think the reason that they seem to have turned out ok while that kid didn't is because their adoptive parents didn't just discipline them for their anti-social behavior, they also loved them and didn't treat them like they were monsters who were inherently bad.
To add to that, I'm sure that the kid was well aware that his stepmother hated him, knowing that the person who's trying to discipline and control you hates your guts has to to an awful lot psychologically. She says she was with the kid for 7 years, which means the kid was 8 years old when she came on the scene. Eight years old, with a broken family and a new mommy who's response to his acting out and bad behavior is to start hating him. That's a great way to turn a little boy into a messed up sociopath.
Additionally, the fact that the father had custody rather than the mother hints that there was probably more going on with the parents than we're being told. Fathers don't normally get full custody in a divorce case unless there's either some reason why the mother is totally unfit, or if the mother doesn't want the child.
Oh yes, and to top it all off, the stepmother is 29, the kid is now 18, which means that she was 19 when she hooked up with his father, and the fact that maybe, just maybe, she was way too young for his father and to be trying to raise a messed up stepchild just might have contributed to poor disciplinary decisions.
There's more to this story than meets the eye.
My general opinion is that it's good luck more than anything that our shopping malls and big box stores have not been attacked by terrorists because if they wanted to do it, there's nothing stopping them. We're spending all of our time chasing bogey men when the easiest targets are not only unprotected, they're virtually unprotectable.
When it comes right down to it, we need to be cautious, but we also need to live our lives. The point of terrorism is to disrupt our way of life, and the sort of people who would contemplate attacking us are probably sitting around laughing at how soft we are that there has been only one terrorist attack in 5 1/2 years yet we're behaving as if they were setting off bombs every other week. Our own paranoia is doing their job for them without them having to lift a finger or worry about that nasty blowing-yourself-up bit.
It's not just whispered rumors, it's entirely possible, and as long as you authenticate the phone through Verizon's website instead of calling them or going into the store, they have no way of knowing that you didn't buy it from them. Of course, you do have to find your way to the right websites in order to learn how to flash it, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. It's also possible to flash Verizon phones to other companies' firmware and then use those phones on Verizon's network. At the moment, I've got a RAZR, purchased from Verizon, running Alltell's firmware and operating happily on Verizon's network.
On top of that, diesel engines are far more energy efficient than gasoline engines, so right there you're reducing your fuel consumption. With the new low sulfur diesels that don't clog catalytic converters, you could run an energy efficient, clean vehicle with a fuel made from a renewable resource.
Good point, particularly about the differences between states. Especially considering that I went through far more culture shock going from Florida to rural Georgia for college than I did going to Spain, and in Georgia they at least speak the same language (allegedly)--I'm sure that Sweden and Norway are far more similar than Florida and Georgia, our closest neighbor. Stepped off a plane in Spain having flown from Georgia, felt like I had arrived back home from a foreign country, even though it was the opposite.
Whatever the case, I like the slogan that Lonely Planet had for a while: "Do your country a favor. Leave."
Hey, 7-8 hours to get to another country is still not bad! If you live in Miami, it'll take that long to get out of the state. Of course, you could head south by boat and be in Cuba in a few hours, but most people who are taking boats between Florida and Cuba are trying to get away from Cuba, so that doesn't quite count...
Well, the whole having most of a continent to ourselves with only Canada and Mexico to keep us company tends to contribute to an isolationist attitude. People living in Europe don't have to travel anywhere near the distances to interact with their neighbors than Americans have to. If traffic's good and there aren't any traffic cops to stop me for speeding, it takes me 4 hours just to get out of my own state, and a good 8-10 hour drive for me to get to our state capital (as a matter of contrast, it took about that long to go by bus from Sofia, Bulgaria to Istanbul, Turkey). A European hops in his car and drives 8 or 10 hours, there's a good chance he's in another country. I hop in my car and drive 8 or 10 hours and I end up in Georgia or Alabama. Just the sheer landmass we're talking about and the cost of travel to get outside of the country tends to keep people in a bubble. And, while the cost of transatlantic travel isn't that bad (depending on how you swing it, it's cheaper that a trip to Disney World), the perception of cost is enough to keep people from even considering it, and without the prospect of possibly using a second or third language some day, people don't see the value in putting in the effort. To put it in economic terms, people in the US see the opportunity costs associated with learning a new language to be too high in relation to the benefits.
I think that once you speak a second language and know it can be done, you're more inclined to at least attempt to learn a third.
Good points. I was in Spain for a week and a half, and since the people I was with were all bilingual, about 95% of the time I was hearing nothing but Spanish and in just that week and a half my one year of college Spanish went from so-so to getting by pretty well. My Spanish is rusty again now, but I know if I hung out in an all Spanish environment for any length of time it would all come back. The funny thing on that trip to Spain was the one person in my group was a native Central American Spanish speaker who'd lived in the US for years. The two languages mustn't have been separated in his brain because he'd accidentally use English to answer a question asked in Spanish and not realize why the person he was responding to had a blank look on their face.
It's definitely true that speaking a "small" language helps. When my brother lived in India, pretty much all of his friends were at least trilingual. They spoke their tribal languages, Hindi, and English, and most of them spoke English better than Hindi. My brother is fluent in Hindi (his friends swore up and down that he speaks it better than they do, and it's their country), but living in Delhi about the only times he had to use Hindi was when he helped him in bargaining. His friends all preferred to use English because, as I said, they speak English better than Hindi and their first languages are only spoken in small areas. They have to learn at least three languages to get by, but since the average American doesn't travel beyond US borders, outside of South Florida and parts of Texas and California where speaking Spanish is useful, there's no incentive to bother with a language you're never going to use.