...I mean, they didn't call it "The Vulgate" for no reason.
I think what is at issue is that with the rise of universal education, we've demanded that everyone speak, read and write at a level of education that has not commonly existed but for the last century, really, just the last few decades. If you took random samples of 18yos in the early 19th century and today, no doubt you would be far more horrified at the former's ability to communicate than the latter.
I remember reading an article recently which argued that the distressing thing about the intellectual state of civilization isn't that we aren't producing great minds the way we used to, it's that there are now so many, in so many highly specialized fields, that people have a hard time keeping track of those outside their field of specialization (arguably, even within), ergo, everyone is under the illusion that all is going to hell simply because they can't grasp the volume of advances that are being made.
I was merely responding to the silly puzzlement and placement of quotation marks around the use of the term "US Code" and statement of "I assume you mean 'federal law'" as if the former was not 100% the latter, even if the latter is not 100% the former. To say "US Code" is to be more precise than to say "federal law," even if the US Code does not in fact contain that which the previous poster is under the impression it does.
...I didn't disagree that the problem exists. However, the "real" damage occurs offline and it does take a willful act to get there.
I think what people disagree about here is that teenagers are in fact willfully pursuing these things and that if they had a nice, clean, safe on-line environment, the urge to pursue these things would magically disappear. On the contrary, I think it's pretty likely that for those who are willfully engaging in these things, the more they know they're being policed, the more likely they'll be to go somewhere else... just like in the "real world."
"First, there is no "U.S. Code" (I assume you mean federal law)"
"Federal law" is officially referred to as "The United States Code." This is why federal laws are always referred to in the form $TitleUSC$Section e.g. 15USC144.
..."think of the children" is the tiredest mantra for controlling everything and anything.
They're looking for the thrill. Kids are reckless. The kids that get in trouble on the internet are the same ones that would get in trouble at the mall or wherever. If they end up as drug-addicted sex slaves because of some chatroom troll, they'd probably end up there anyway with some dude they met at the local foodcourt. People don't like admitting that because it implies they're bad parents, so they run off and try to sterilize the entire world--and won't do a damned bit of good because it's a moving target. Teenagers are in it for the thrill. Remove it and both they and the predators will move somewhere else. Education is the only answer and, sadly, no matter how much you try to protect the children and control the adults that prey on them, many will still get into trouble.
It was not flamebait as that implies INTENT. There is a stigma--often deserved--around certain areas of Washington and when you are setting up an event, no matter how much you think said stigma is b.s., you have to consider it when it will keep people away. I find the sorts of people who won't venture past 14th street rather ridiculous, however, I recognize the fact that the demographic they're shooting for with this event happens to be almost entirely populated by such people. For that reason, this venue was a terrible, terrible choice. U Street, 13th Street or Adams Morgan are not markedly "safer" than H street, however, it would have been infinitely more appropriate to hold the event in one of those neighborhoods for all the reasons they state they are holding it in the first place.
Essentially, your comment and mine boil down to precisely the same statement about the situation, yet somehow you take the high ground? Puzzling. I think, perhaps, you read quite a bit into the statement, laying on all the frustrations with pretentious Washingtonians and were responding to quite a different person than the one who wrote the original post, ignoring for the moment that that post was, at base, merely a statement of fact.
...not that Adams Morgan is much better, but seriously, if they want this to be taken seriously in a town like Washington, certainly if they want to attach themselves to the "burgeoning art community," they'd best locate themselves somewhere remotely near it, say the U-Street corridor or 13th street or something. Hell, Landover has more going on than H street.
Bottom line is that not even people who live in NE (like, me for instance) want to hang on H Street, certainly not those who can shell-out $25 for a "happening." Since there are SOOOOO many locations in Washington that this would work in, this choice of venue makes me think "easy money, no cred."
Too bad this "happening" is in a corner of town most people wouldn't set foot in at gunpoint...or if they did, likely would be. Sorry, twenty-five bucks to loiter around a coffee-house next to a shooting gallery to watch someone's laptop screen projected on the wall?
...generally have plenty of it and, ergo, it was obviously important enough at some point to hoard it in such quantity so as to obviate any need to add to it.
Yes, and the United States has an incarceration rate worse than Stalinist Russia, but the best someone can up with for an example of "repression" is the government slapping a multi-billion-dollar corporation on the hand for doing business with one of our largest creditors and trading partners in a lame attempt to look like it could care less about human rights.
...is that roughly 0.000000001% of the public can function without multiple of government and private ID cards, nearly all of which (certainly, all that are of any use) are searchable by every conceivably interested government entity and just about any private entity as well under many circumstances, most of which are verified after the fact, not prior to search. That is, you affirm that you are searching lawfully--you generally don't have to prove it until someone complains. The bottom line is that the collection of numbers and cards that the vast, vast majority of us already need in order to function are effectively a de facto national ID.
Sure, if you're holed-up in a shack somewhere in the woods of Montana, this is a massive intrusion into your life. My vagabond uncle was duly pissed-off when he was trapped in some backwoods town trying to get on an Amtrak, but didn't have "proper I.D." I doubt highly that anyone on/. falls into that category.
What people should be more concerned about is the fact that--sans national ID--some dude like me can with just one number (pick any government issued number save for your auto license plates, say, your current address) can easily dig up every piece of registered property, corporate officer status, DBA filing, address, line of credit, criminal and civil judgments, arrest and incarceration history ever associated with you over the last decade, often more, as well as the names of your children... in every state. All from the comfort of my living room.
Frankly, I find it far scarier that all of the above information can be sourced _privately_ than any big-brother fears of a national ID, which would scarcely exacerbate the existing situation, but rather would probably clean it up considerably.
Your definition of "spam" does not matter in any legal sense, nor does anyone else's. What matters IS the legal definition, which _must_ be defined in law for it to have any relevance in law. I didn't write the law, I was simply pointing out that the submitter's statement of this action being in violation of the law was self-contradictory, idiotic and, sadly, rather typical.
violating CAN-SPAM with impunity. Apparently so-called 'political speech' e-mails do not fit he legal definition of spam, even if they are wholly unsolicited and unwanted
So, uhm, how would they be in violation? Far more than merely "not fitting the legal definition of spam," 'Political speech' emails--particularly from elected officials--IIRC, were explicitly excepted precisely so litigious morons who can't grok that a thing must meet some required legal definition before it can be in violation of a law referencing that defintion don't flood the courts with frivolous lawsuits every time their representatives send out a flyer informing them of how they're doing their damned job.
"It's just as strange for someone in the UK to hear that you might be asked to pay in advance for emergency hospital treatment."
Contrary to popular belief, it is not only uncommon to expect payment in advance for emergency hospital treatment in the United States -- IT IS ILLEGAL.
I always picture a sarcastic David Spade and that fat dude in the yellow shirt on the other end when tech support types use emoticons. Do they at all disambiguate emotions?
...that any reference to heterosexuality or, say, steak-eaters would be frowned upon as well?
It's a difficult task to really nail down where the line between "real world" and "fantasy" lies in a heavily anthropomorphized fantasy, that is, most of it drawn from reality--humanoid characters, clothing and weapons, trees, lions and tigers and bears oh my--frankly, pretty piss-poor "fantasy" if all it entails is putting on Elf shoes and tossing glitter. Sure, "the clan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer" should be out because it references a product, but I don't see how, say, goofing on "Bugbears" into making a clan of "Buggery Bears" would be any different than the typically insipid riffs on Wicca and the Ren Faire that are all too nauseatingly recognizable from the local check-out line at Hot Topic. But, people would shreik that "Buggery Bears" are an attempt to inject real-world politics into their fantasy world as if discussions and representations of Wicca aren't equally political--and offensively so to many.
If you have a _residential_ contract, you are distinctly _NOT_ being given an unlimited, dedicated 4.5Mb/s connection for $49. If you want to run a 24/7 hog like Bittorrent, purchase a business plan with guaranteed bandwidth and uptime, no port blocking and no QoS throttling--all stated clearly in the contract and available from all major ISPs.
They are well within their rights to ensure that everyone paying a certain price is given the same level of service. They're rolling out FIOS here. It can handle 622Mb/s and at $50/month, you get, basically, 1% of that. To not have to implement some kind of QoS throttling on your bandwidth-hogging butt, they'd have to run a separate backbone to every 100 houses and, guess what, that would cost a ton of money. So, voila, tiered pricing.
"The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid."...they could just be creating "a giant processing and storage grid" that will not be hindered by any other traffic and will not necessarily have anything whatsoever to do with the search engine and more to do with making a distributed supercomputer that will make Blue Gene look like a TRS/80. The biggest one has 131,072 processors. Consider that you could conceivably stuff 5000 processors in each of those shipping containers (assuming damn near cryogenic cooling), it would only take 40 of them to best the biggest BlueGene installation by 50% in terms of processors. Now, imagine they drop a few thousand of them down, all connected by private, dedicated fiber and rollout a 20-million CPU grid.
Slashdot Mirror
...I mean, they didn't call it "The Vulgate" for no reason.
I think what is at issue is that with the rise of universal education, we've demanded that everyone speak, read and write at a level of education that has not commonly existed but for the last century, really, just the last few decades. If you took random samples of 18yos in the early 19th century and today, no doubt you would be far more horrified at the former's ability to communicate than the latter.
I remember reading an article recently which argued that the distressing thing about the intellectual state of civilization isn't that we aren't producing great minds the way we used to, it's that there are now so many, in so many highly specialized fields, that people have a hard time keeping track of those outside their field of specialization (arguably, even within), ergo, everyone is under the illusion that all is going to hell simply because they can't grasp the volume of advances that are being made.
I was merely responding to the silly puzzlement and placement of quotation marks around the use of the term "US Code" and statement of "I assume you mean 'federal law'" as if the former was not 100% the latter, even if the latter is not 100% the former. To say "US Code" is to be more precise than to say "federal law," even if the US Code does not in fact contain that which the previous poster is under the impression it does.
...I didn't disagree that the problem exists. However, the "real" damage occurs offline and it does take a willful act to get there.
I think what people disagree about here is that teenagers are in fact willfully pursuing these things and that if they had a nice, clean, safe on-line environment, the urge to pursue these things would magically disappear. On the contrary, I think it's pretty likely that for those who are willfully engaging in these things, the more they know they're being policed, the more likely they'll be to go somewhere else... just like in the "real world."
...just clarifying it for you, sparky.
"First, there is no "U.S. Code" (I assume you mean federal law)"
"Federal law" is officially referred to as "The United States Code." This is why federal laws are always referred to in the form $TitleUSC$Section e.g. 15USC144.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/
I'd think that would come up somewhere in your "quite a bit of research." Puzzling why anyone with a clue would balk at the use of that term.
..."think of the children" is the tiredest mantra for controlling everything and anything.
They're looking for the thrill. Kids are reckless. The kids that get in trouble on the internet are the same ones that would get in trouble at the mall or wherever. If they end up as drug-addicted sex slaves because of some chatroom troll, they'd probably end up there anyway with some dude they met at the local foodcourt. People don't like admitting that because it implies they're bad parents, so they run off and try to sterilize the entire world--and won't do a damned bit of good because it's a moving target. Teenagers are in it for the thrill. Remove it and both they and the predators will move somewhere else. Education is the only answer and, sadly, no matter how much you try to protect the children and control the adults that prey on them, many will still get into trouble.
It was not flamebait as that implies INTENT. There is a stigma--often deserved--around certain areas of Washington and when you are setting up an event, no matter how much you think said stigma is b.s., you have to consider it when it will keep people away. I find the sorts of people who won't venture past 14th street rather ridiculous, however, I recognize the fact that the demographic they're shooting for with this event happens to be almost entirely populated by such people. For that reason, this venue was a terrible, terrible choice. U Street, 13th Street or Adams Morgan are not markedly "safer" than H street, however, it would have been infinitely more appropriate to hold the event in one of those neighborhoods for all the reasons they state they are holding it in the first place.
Essentially, your comment and mine boil down to precisely the same statement about the situation, yet somehow you take the high ground? Puzzling. I think, perhaps, you read quite a bit into the statement, laying on all the frustrations with pretentious Washingtonians and were responding to quite a different person than the one who wrote the original post, ignoring for the moment that that post was, at base, merely a statement of fact.
...not that Adams Morgan is much better, but seriously, if they want this to be taken seriously in a town like Washington, certainly if they want to attach themselves to the "burgeoning art community," they'd best locate themselves somewhere remotely near it, say the U-Street corridor or 13th street or something. Hell, Landover has more going on than H street.
Bottom line is that not even people who live in NE (like, me for instance) want to hang on H Street, certainly not those who can shell-out $25 for a "happening." Since there are SOOOOO many locations in Washington that this would work in, this choice of venue makes me think "easy money, no cred."
Too bad this "happening" is in a corner of town most people wouldn't set foot in at gunpoint...or if they did, likely would be. Sorry, twenty-five bucks to loiter around a coffee-house next to a shooting gallery to watch someone's laptop screen projected on the wall?
LAME.
...generally have plenty of it and, ergo, it was obviously important enough at some point to hoard it in such quantity so as to obviate any need to add to it.
Yes, and the United States has an incarceration rate worse than Stalinist Russia, but the best someone can up with for an example of "repression" is the government slapping a multi-billion-dollar corporation on the hand for doing business with one of our largest creditors and trading partners in a lame attempt to look like it could care less about human rights.
THAT was what I was getting at, smartypants.
...is that roughly 0.000000001% of the public can function without multiple of government and private ID cards, nearly all of which (certainly, all that are of any use) are searchable by every conceivably interested government entity and just about any private entity as well under many circumstances, most of which are verified after the fact, not prior to search. That is, you affirm that you are searching lawfully--you generally don't have to prove it until someone complains. The bottom line is that the collection of numbers and cards that the vast, vast majority of us already need in order to function are effectively a de facto national ID.
/. falls into that category.
Sure, if you're holed-up in a shack somewhere in the woods of Montana, this is a massive intrusion into your life. My vagabond uncle was duly pissed-off when he was trapped in some backwoods town trying to get on an Amtrak, but didn't have "proper I.D." I doubt highly that anyone on
What people should be more concerned about is the fact that--sans national ID--some dude like me can with just one number (pick any government issued number save for your auto license plates, say, your current address) can easily dig up every piece of registered property, corporate officer status, DBA filing, address, line of credit, criminal and civil judgments, arrest and incarceration history ever associated with you over the last decade, often more, as well as the names of your children... in every state. All from the comfort of my living room.
Frankly, I find it far scarier that all of the above information can be sourced _privately_ than any big-brother fears of a national ID, which would scarcely exacerbate the existing situation, but rather would probably clean it up considerably.
It's called "sanction." What's ironic is how long China has been free from sanctions.
Would it seem "repressive" to say "State Department moves to block Google from installing servers at Natanz uranium enrichment site in Iran?"
Your definition of "spam" does not matter in any legal sense, nor does anyone else's. What matters IS the legal definition, which _must_ be defined in law for it to have any relevance in law. I didn't write the law, I was simply pointing out that the submitter's statement of this action being in violation of the law was self-contradictory, idiotic and, sadly, rather typical.
violating CAN-SPAM with impunity. Apparently so-called 'political speech' e-mails do not fit he legal definition of spam, even if they are wholly unsolicited and unwanted
So, uhm, how would they be in violation? Far more than merely "not fitting the legal definition of spam," 'Political speech' emails--particularly from elected officials--IIRC, were explicitly excepted precisely so litigious morons who can't grok that a thing must meet some required legal definition before it can be in violation of a law referencing that defintion don't flood the courts with frivolous lawsuits every time their representatives send out a flyer informing them of how they're doing their damned job.
Truly lame.
"It's just as strange for someone in the UK to hear that you might be asked to pay in advance for emergency hospital treatment."
Contrary to popular belief, it is not only uncommon to expect payment in advance for emergency hospital treatment in the United States -- IT IS ILLEGAL.
I always picture a sarcastic David Spade and that fat dude in the yellow shirt on the other end when tech support types use emoticons. Do they at all disambiguate emotions?
"The answer is NO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
I think not. Good times, though...
...that any reference to heterosexuality or, say, steak-eaters would be frowned upon as well?
It's a difficult task to really nail down where the line between "real world" and "fantasy" lies in a heavily anthropomorphized fantasy, that is, most of it drawn from reality--humanoid characters, clothing and weapons, trees, lions and tigers and bears oh my--frankly, pretty piss-poor "fantasy" if all it entails is putting on Elf shoes and tossing glitter. Sure, "the clan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer" should be out because it references a product, but I don't see how, say, goofing on "Bugbears" into making a clan of "Buggery Bears" would be any different than the typically insipid riffs on Wicca and the Ren Faire that are all too nauseatingly recognizable from the local check-out line at Hot Topic. But, people would shreik that "Buggery Bears" are an attempt to inject real-world politics into their fantasy world as if discussions and representations of Wicca aren't equally political--and offensively so to many.
...the issue at hand is for most of the people in question as much a fantasy and escape from reality as slaughtering orcs.
If you have a _residential_ contract, you are distinctly _NOT_ being given an unlimited, dedicated 4.5Mb/s connection for $49. If you want to run a 24/7 hog like Bittorrent, purchase a business plan with guaranteed bandwidth and uptime, no port blocking and no QoS throttling--all stated clearly in the contract and available from all major ISPs.
They are well within their rights to ensure that everyone paying a certain price is given the same level of service. They're rolling out FIOS here. It can handle 622Mb/s and at $50/month, you get, basically, 1% of that. To not have to implement some kind of QoS throttling on your bandwidth-hogging butt, they'd have to run a separate backbone to every 100 houses and, guess what, that would cost a ton of money. So, voila, tiered pricing.
Deal with it.
MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN
But, methinks by Nero your yeant Belshazzar and by Ezekiel you meant Daniel.
like, uhm, makin' war and killin' folk.
"The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid." ...they could just be creating "a giant processing and storage grid" that will not be hindered by any other traffic and will not necessarily have anything whatsoever to do with the search engine and more to do with making a distributed supercomputer that will make Blue Gene look like a TRS/80. The biggest one has 131,072 processors. Consider that you could conceivably stuff 5000 processors in each of those shipping containers (assuming damn near cryogenic cooling), it would only take 40 of them to best the biggest BlueGene installation by 50% in terms of processors. Now, imagine they drop a few thousand of them down, all connected by private, dedicated fiber and rollout a 20-million CPU grid.
Hello, SkyNet...
I'm sure these guys will be squarely on the opposite side of that table with plenty of cashola in hand to boot.
http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2005/05-250.html