The fact that we're being asses about trying to export our laws outside our own borders wrt/ Kim Dotcom and Julian Assange does't make France any less despicable for its attempt to do the same. The practice is wrong, no matter who does it. And every instance deserves the same contempt and derision.
Even accepting that point, it's only reasonable if the fine is applied only against the subsidiary that operates in France. It IS absolutely unreasonable to apply it to global revenues from countries that operate under laws different than France's. This overreach is disgusting, and if it were the US doing it, people would be raising holy hell over it.
So, basically, we've convinced ourselves somehow that we're the Protoss. But we've forgotten that the last time we won a war... as in seriously and definitively winning the war and not leaving a DMZ or cesspool of sectarian conflict behind... we won it by being the Zerg.
The problem with that analogy is that, in the case of the F-35; the military does, in fact, want to go off-roading on that steep, rugged, slippery trail in the middle of nowhere. But they think that they can take the Corvette, raise its suspension a bit and give it off-road tires, and it'll be better than the Jeep.
A decade later than you. Mid '90s. Before 9/11, but definitely well after the Lockerbie bombing and the wave of aircraft and cruise ship hijackings by Yasser Arafat's minions in the '80s.
And I'll point out that in both of your examples, the student was non-white. So i'll concede that we could be talking not about Islamophobia, per se, but just plain old racism. After all, one of your examples takes place in a state that, like Texas, is fairly notoriously racist. And the other takes place in a city that enjoys the same reputation, on top of over-the-top Keystone Cops overreactions to non-threats like Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters.
I'll also point out that I have, in fact, worn t-shits with das blinkenlights on them... in public, not just at raves and Burning Man... and never been arrested or had submachine guns pointed at me.
> The Islamophobia angle is what irritates me. Anyone > who brought something like that into a school > unannounced would raise a concern, no matter what > their ethnicity/religion may be.
Bullocks.
I brought electronics projects into school when I was a kid. Remember when Radio Shack existed and still carried electronics components tested of just trying to resell cellular plans? I was all over those when I was young. "Electronics Discovery Sets", crystal radio kits, potato-battery clocks, morse code keys attached to adjustable tone generators, the lot of them. I devoured as many as my parents would let me get my hands on; and brought a decent number of them into school to show off. Yeah, I was a hella nerd. But it was never an issue.
Hell, in my sophomore year, I actually made honest-to-god explosives in the school itself. I had a really cool chemistry teacher who, amongst other things, thought me how to make nitrocellulose and nitrogen triiodide. Eventually on we even built our own model rocket engines and used them to fire off rockets in the fields out back. And it was never an issue.
But I'm white. And I'm not a muslim. So no one looked at me with suspicion and assumed was a criminal by default.
Thing is, there's a lot of good speciality channels that are hurt by this. Because now instead of subscribers, they have to compete for eyeballs. Which means instead of producing good programming, they have to produce popular programming. Which means what shows were previously just about certain subjects now have to add in "drama" and "conflict" because that stuff gets the eyeballs. (Think lowest common denominator).
Those specialty channels are still part of packages so far. But they've degenerated into a wasteland of reality garbage. Have you looked at the lineup of The Learning Channel lately? I dare you to justify those shows as educational or informational in any way. Pretty much all the the Discovery channel shows are junk not; as are those on the other channels owned by discovery. The Science Fiction channel is now Syfy and produces Sharknado and ECW wrestling instead of Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG1. And you can't even make the joke that the History Channel should really be called the Hitler Channel anymore... not unless the Ice Road Truckers are really searching for a secret outpost of the Third Reich up in northern Canada.
Basically, the bleak future you describe is already here. So why not go ahead and decouple the packages and put those channels out of our misery?
Or they could just stop being assholes with obnoxious-as-hell ads that degrade my experience, slow my computer, eat an inordinate amount of bandwidth, require plug-ins, or inject malware. When web ads were just a static gif banner, or even an image in the sidebar; I never used to block them. Google AdWords are also fine. And I have a fairly large whitelist on my desktop ad-blocker of sites I do want to support and, critically, are not scumbags about their advertising. But the first time I see any of:
- pop-ups - pop-unders - overlays - interstitials - automatically-playing audio or video - any sort of graphic that follows, or is triggered by, the movement of my mouse pointer - Some of the other rage-inducing stupid javascript or HTML5 tricks - Flash or Java for any reason
I have no hesitation whatsoever to pull the site from my whitelist and let its ads goto the devil.
I get that many sites rely on ad revenue to pay the bills. And philosophically, I don't object to being advertised at. I don't even mind targeted ads, so long as they're well-targeted and not insulting. (i.e. Don't show me ads for Microsoft or any of its products.) But it's all about respect. If the site respects me, by refraining from the behaviors I enumerated above, then I respect it by not blocking its ads. If the site disrespects me; well, screw 'em.
Pretty much this. I've been confused as to why this was an issue ever since it was. The navy *HATES* to go active on sonar, as it instantly gives away your position at a distance far longer than you'll get any information back. Active sonar is reserved for localizing a target that's close-in immediately before firing a torpedo, and often not even then. They also have a special high-frequency sonar specifically for under-ice operations. But for general searching in the open ocean? It's all passive. (My dad was a sonar guy almost his entire 20; starting out in GUPPYs all the way up through 688s.)
Those other manufacturers are building their (Admittedly less impressive, in theory, than Google's.) autonomous driving technologies into cars that you can, in fact, buy and drive.
iOS is a good gaming platform for what it is. When I have 20 twenty minutes of downtime while I ride BART or MUNI, I would't fire up Arkham Knight, even if my iPhone were capable of running it and had an adequate way to use the touchscreen to control it. But I'll toss around some Angry Birds or Tetris blocks and be happy for the distraction.
Whether or not that translates to the home on the TV, I don't know. I have a PS4 and an iPhone for that to cover both hardcore and casual games. Though it will be interesting to see what other sorts of apps come out for the new AppleTV. The selling point for me so far is having Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, and so on, all wrapped up into a single consistent UI that doesn't suck.
Case in point, I just checked my own health plan's website, and if I wanted to go on Truvada, it would cost me $1762.61 for a 90-day supply.
Rounding to make the math simple... $600 a month is a car payment, for a fairly expensive car. In some places, that could be an entire rent check or even mortgage payment. That's overtly extortionate for a life-saving preventative treatment. And I, at least, would have *some* coverage for it. According to drugs.com, retail pricing runs about $1500 per 30-days. That rises up to a C. Montgomery Burns level of inhumanity.
Now, let's get mandated to be covered as preventative care, or at least part of the tier-1 formularies, under the ACA. As it is, many health care plans refuse to provide Truvada at all. Or, in some cases where they do, they ignore the FDA's approval and claim its use in PrEP to be "off-label" and classify it at their highest tier (non-preferred and brand-name) and highest co-pay; making it prohibitively expansive for many people.
Both the town and area seem just... wrong... for this.
I used to live in Orlando. And it's hardly a bastion of "geek culture". And what it does have is on pretty much the exact opposite side of town from the Florida Mall... in the Winter Park area that connects UCF and Rollins College. South OBT in general is pretty much a wasteland. And the ThinkGeek demographic, unless things have changed dramatically, doesn't go there.
Also, the autonomous cars will probably network themselves together. Once the car in front of you is autonomous as well, your car will not rely on brake lights and optics and radar/lidar to know when the other car brakes. It will be receiving a stream of data and will know exactly when the other car will brake, with how much force, the brake response of the other car (Your car will know if the other's brake pads turn out to be work, reducing its braking ability.), and so on.
Once the technology is mature, the difference in insurance rates will probably be significant enough to remove most non-automated cars from the road, even if the initial outlay is still higher. Even in the experimental stage, the safety record of the Google cars is nothing short of fantastic. And the vast bulk of accidents (and therefore insurance claims) are the result of human error or carelessness. If you take human error out of the picture, and the accident rate (and therefore the insurance payout rate) goes down significantly, the insurance companies will almost certainly set rates such that there is a strong incentive to upgrade to driverless cars (or a strong penalty in the other direction).
What they need to so is re-name it a 1Mbps plan or a 10Mbps plan or a 50Mbps plan or whatever, and STFU about what you use your data for and whether you use it sporadically or 24/7. They're just a dumb pipe to the internet. They need to stop pretending otherwise.
Yeah, but since it's Alaska and he's Obama they'll probably find some reason to be outraged and demonize him for it. Political correctness run amok; or 'cuz he's nothing more than a trumped-up community organizer with no real experience at having actual responsibilities... don'tcha know?
Multiple government officials in the US, including at least one of the current presidential candidates and a former vice-presidential candidate, have called for the extrajudicial kidnapping and/or assassination of Assange. They've made these statements in public and on-record. And that's in addition to the ones that have "merely" called for him to be extradited, tried, and imprisoned or executed.
He may be a self-important duchebag; but it's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
Actually, if you live in an urban area, carrying around a bag of dog poo can can be a fairly effective way of repelling crackheads, junkies, bums, spangers, petition takers, random crazies, and other assorted riff-raff now that pretty much everyone wears headphones and those are no longer an effective repellant.
Of course, you have to be walking a dog while carrying said bag of poo. Otherwise you become one of the random crazies yourself.
You're missing my point. Jeb won't be spending his own money. Others will be spending their money on Jeb's behalf. And Fox News will turn into a months-long continuous campaign advertisement on his behalf, no compensation required. The usual assortment of AM talk radio jockeys will do the same. You can't even place a dollar value on the the last two, as they wouldn't be available to the Democratic candidate at any price.
Democrat in the heart of democrat territory (San Francisco) here. And the only "support" for Hillary that I've heard expressed by anyone I know has essentially been: "I'm voting for Bernie in the primary. But if he doesn't get the nomination, I'll vote for Hillary in the general. Better her than any of the republicans.". That pretty much sums up my own plans too.
Personal wealth is much less important than the Bush family political machine. Jeb will have the same superPACs thaw W had. He'll also have Darth Cheney, Karl Rove, all of Fox news, and the Koch brothers backing him up when the time comes. Compared to that, Trump's personal fortune is chump change and his campaign theatrics are just bread and circuses.
And that's not "unhealthy" or "libertarian-leaning" or anything. That's freedom of thought, speech, and press, plain and simple. And the concept predates the mass adoption of the internet by decades.
Remember dead-tree bookstores? In the mid-90s, you could walk into pretty much any Barnes & Nobles, find on the shelves, and buy a copy of "The Anarchist Cookbook", Abby Hoffman's "Steal This Book", any number of the Hayduke "Getting Even" books, PIHKAL, TIHKAL, and occasionally they would even have "The Poor Man's James Bond". Any and all of those contain instructions on howto do things that were and are illegal. Some of them actively encourage those actions. And that's in a mainstream chain book store that used to be in every town of any significant population. If you checked out independent "alternative" bookstores or bookstores aimed at activist communities in large cities you'd find stuff even more colorful. And it's all 100% legal, because we punish people for ACTIONS, not writings or thoughts. And there's absolutely no reason whatsoever for that to be different because computers.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that we're being asses about trying to export our laws outside our own borders wrt/ Kim Dotcom and Julian Assange does't make France any less despicable for its attempt to do the same. The practice is wrong, no matter who does it. And every instance deserves the same contempt and derision.
Even accepting that point, it's only reasonable if the fine is applied only against the subsidiary that operates in France. It IS absolutely unreasonable to apply it to global revenues from countries that operate under laws different than France's. This overreach is disgusting, and if it were the US doing it, people would be raising holy hell over it.
So, basically, we've convinced ourselves somehow that we're the Protoss. But we've forgotten that the last time we won a war... as in seriously and definitively winning the war and not leaving a DMZ or cesspool of sectarian conflict behind... we won it by being the Zerg.
Much better than a car analogy. :)
The problem with that analogy is that, in the case of the F-35; the military does, in fact, want to go off-roading on that steep, rugged, slippery trail in the middle of nowhere. But they think that they can take the Corvette, raise its suspension a bit and give it off-road tires, and it'll be better than the Jeep.
> May I ask what years you did this?
A decade later than you. Mid '90s. Before 9/11, but definitely well after the Lockerbie bombing and the wave of aircraft and cruise ship hijackings by Yasser Arafat's minions in the '80s.
And I'll point out that in both of your examples, the student was non-white. So i'll concede that we could be talking not about Islamophobia, per se, but just plain old racism. After all, one of your examples takes place in a state that, like Texas, is fairly notoriously racist. And the other takes place in a city that enjoys the same reputation, on top of over-the-top Keystone Cops overreactions to non-threats like Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters.
I'll also point out that I have, in fact, worn t-shits with das blinkenlights on them... in public, not just at raves and Burning Man... and never been arrested or had submachine guns pointed at me.
> The Islamophobia angle is what irritates me. Anyone
> who brought something like that into a school
> unannounced would raise a concern, no matter what
> their ethnicity/religion may be.
Bullocks.
I brought electronics projects into school when I was a kid. Remember when Radio Shack existed and still carried electronics components tested of just trying to resell cellular plans? I was all over those when I was young. "Electronics Discovery Sets", crystal radio kits, potato-battery clocks, morse code keys attached to adjustable tone generators, the lot of them. I devoured as many as my parents would let me get my hands on; and brought a decent number of them into school to show off. Yeah, I was a hella nerd. But it was never an issue.
Hell, in my sophomore year, I actually made honest-to-god explosives in the school itself. I had a really cool chemistry teacher who, amongst other things, thought me how to make nitrocellulose and nitrogen triiodide. Eventually on we even built our own model rocket engines and used them to fire off rockets in the fields out back. And it was never an issue.
But I'm white. And I'm not a muslim. So no one looked at me with suspicion and assumed was a criminal by default.
Those specialty channels are still part of packages so far. But they've degenerated into a wasteland of reality garbage. Have you looked at the lineup of The Learning Channel lately? I dare you to justify those shows as educational or informational in any way. Pretty much all the the Discovery channel shows are junk not; as are those on the other channels owned by discovery. The Science Fiction channel is now Syfy and produces Sharknado and ECW wrestling instead of Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG1. And you can't even make the joke that the History Channel should really be called the Hitler Channel anymore... not unless the Ice Road Truckers are really searching for a secret outpost of the Third Reich up in northern Canada.
Basically, the bleak future you describe is already here. So why not go ahead and decouple the packages and put those channels out of our misery?
Or they could just stop being assholes with obnoxious-as-hell ads that degrade my experience, slow my computer, eat an inordinate amount of bandwidth, require plug-ins, or inject malware. When web ads were just a static gif banner, or even an image in the sidebar; I never used to block them. Google AdWords are also fine. And I have a fairly large whitelist on my desktop ad-blocker of sites I do want to support and, critically, are not scumbags about their advertising. But the first time I see any of:
- pop-ups
- pop-unders
- overlays
- interstitials
- automatically-playing audio or video
- any sort of graphic that follows, or is triggered by, the movement of my mouse pointer
- Some of the other rage-inducing stupid javascript or HTML5 tricks
- Flash or Java for any reason
I have no hesitation whatsoever to pull the site from my whitelist and let its ads goto the devil.
I get that many sites rely on ad revenue to pay the bills. And philosophically, I don't object to being advertised at. I don't even mind targeted ads, so long as they're well-targeted and not insulting. (i.e. Don't show me ads for Microsoft or any of its products.) But it's all about respect. If the site respects me, by refraining from the behaviors I enumerated above, then I respect it by not blocking its ads. If the site disrespects me; well, screw 'em.
Pretty much this. I've been confused as to why this was an issue ever since it was. The navy *HATES* to go active on sonar, as it instantly gives away your position at a distance far longer than you'll get any information back. Active sonar is reserved for localizing a target that's close-in immediately before firing a torpedo, and often not even then. They also have a special high-frequency sonar specifically for under-ice operations. But for general searching in the open ocean? It's all passive. (My dad was a sonar guy almost his entire 20; starting out in GUPPYs all the way up through 688s.)
Yeah.
Brown skin, muslimish-sounding name, Texas... My own first thought was: "Well, at least they didn't just summarily shoot him."
Those other manufacturers are building their (Admittedly less impressive, in theory, than Google's.) autonomous driving technologies into cars that you can, in fact, buy and drive.
As the saying goes: Real artists ship.
iOS is a good gaming platform for what it is. When I have 20 twenty minutes of downtime while I ride BART or MUNI, I would't fire up Arkham Knight, even if my iPhone were capable of running it and had an adequate way to use the touchscreen to control it. But I'll toss around some Angry Birds or Tetris blocks and be happy for the distraction.
Whether or not that translates to the home on the TV, I don't know. I have a PS4 and an iPhone for that to cover both hardcore and casual games. Though it will be interesting to see what other sorts of apps come out for the new AppleTV. The selling point for me so far is having Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, and so on, all wrapped up into a single consistent UI that doesn't suck.
Case in point, I just checked my own health plan's website, and if I wanted to go on Truvada, it would cost me $1762.61 for a 90-day supply.
Rounding to make the math simple... $600 a month is a car payment, for a fairly expensive car. In some places, that could be an entire rent check or even mortgage payment. That's overtly extortionate for a life-saving preventative treatment. And I, at least, would have *some* coverage for it. According to drugs.com, retail pricing runs about $1500 per 30-days. That rises up to a C. Montgomery Burns level of inhumanity.
Great.
Now, let's get mandated to be covered as preventative care, or at least part of the tier-1 formularies, under the ACA. As it is, many health care plans refuse to provide Truvada at all. Or, in some cases where they do, they ignore the FDA's approval and claim its use in PrEP to be "off-label" and classify it at their highest tier (non-preferred and brand-name) and highest co-pay; making it prohibitively expansive for many people.
Both the town and area seem just... wrong... for this.
I used to live in Orlando. And it's hardly a bastion of "geek culture". And what it does have is on pretty much the exact opposite side of town from the Florida Mall... in the Winter Park area that connects UCF and Rollins College. South OBT in general is pretty much a wasteland. And the ThinkGeek demographic, unless things have changed dramatically, doesn't go there.
Also, the autonomous cars will probably network themselves together. Once the car in front of you is autonomous as well, your car will not rely on brake lights and optics and radar/lidar to know when the other car brakes. It will be receiving a stream of data and will know exactly when the other car will brake, with how much force, the brake response of the other car (Your car will know if the other's brake pads turn out to be work, reducing its braking ability.), and so on.
Once the technology is mature, the difference in insurance rates will probably be significant enough to remove most non-automated cars from the road, even if the initial outlay is still higher. Even in the experimental stage, the safety record of the Google cars is nothing short of fantastic. And the vast bulk of accidents (and therefore insurance claims) are the result of human error or carelessness. If you take human error out of the picture, and the accident rate (and therefore the insurance payout rate) goes down significantly, the insurance companies will almost certainly set rates such that there is a strong incentive to upgrade to driverless cars (or a strong penalty in the other direction).
What they need to so is re-name it a 1Mbps plan or a 10Mbps plan or a 50Mbps plan or whatever, and STFU about what you use your data for and whether you use it sporadically or 24/7. They're just a dumb pipe to the internet. They need to stop pretending otherwise.
Yeah, but since it's Alaska and he's Obama they'll probably find some reason to be outraged and demonize him for it. Political correctness run amok; or 'cuz he's nothing more than a trumped-up community organizer with no real experience at having actual responsibilities... don'tcha know?
Multiple government officials in the US, including at least one of the current presidential candidates and a former vice-presidential candidate, have called for the extrajudicial kidnapping and/or assassination of Assange. They've made these statements in public and on-record. And that's in addition to the ones that have "merely" called for him to be extradited, tried, and imprisoned or executed.
He may be a self-important duchebag; but it's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
Actually, if you live in an urban area, carrying around a bag of dog poo can can be a fairly effective way of repelling crackheads, junkies, bums, spangers, petition takers, random crazies, and other assorted riff-raff now that pretty much everyone wears headphones and those are no longer an effective repellant.
Of course, you have to be walking a dog while carrying said bag of poo. Otherwise you become one of the random crazies yourself.
You're missing my point. Jeb won't be spending his own money. Others will be spending their money on Jeb's behalf. And Fox News will turn into a months-long continuous campaign advertisement on his behalf, no compensation required. The usual assortment of AM talk radio jockeys will do the same. You can't even place a dollar value on the the last two, as they wouldn't be available to the Democratic candidate at any price.
Democrat in the heart of democrat territory (San Francisco) here. And the only "support" for Hillary that I've heard expressed by anyone I know has essentially been: "I'm voting for Bernie in the primary. But if he doesn't get the nomination, I'll vote for Hillary in the general. Better her than any of the republicans.". That pretty much sums up my own plans too.
Personal wealth is much less important than the Bush family political machine. Jeb will have the same superPACs thaw W had. He'll also have Darth Cheney, Karl Rove, all of Fox news, and the Koch brothers backing him up when the time comes. Compared to that, Trump's personal fortune is chump change and his campaign theatrics are just bread and circuses.
Bullocks.
And that's not "unhealthy" or "libertarian-leaning" or anything. That's freedom of thought, speech, and press, plain and simple. And the concept predates the mass adoption of the internet by decades.
Remember dead-tree bookstores? In the mid-90s, you could walk into pretty much any Barnes & Nobles, find on the shelves, and buy a copy of "The Anarchist Cookbook", Abby Hoffman's "Steal This Book", any number of the Hayduke "Getting Even" books, PIHKAL, TIHKAL, and occasionally they would even have "The Poor Man's James Bond". Any and all of those contain instructions on howto do things that were and are illegal. Some of them actively encourage those actions. And that's in a mainstream chain book store that used to be in every town of any significant population. If you checked out independent "alternative" bookstores or bookstores aimed at activist communities in large cities you'd find stuff even more colorful. And it's all 100% legal, because we punish people for ACTIONS, not writings or thoughts. And there's absolutely no reason whatsoever for that to be different because computers.