The only one he is actually using to justify his position (that bikes should pay road tax) is the former, the second point is refuting the point that bikes are environmentally friendly. The second point is debatable: it's a question of what the basic comparison is.
Roads are not paid for by drivers. They're paid for by the public, overwhelmingly via property taxes. Everyone who walks, takes public transit, or bicycles is subsidizing drivers. People who walk or ride bicycles don't impact the road surface at all (bicycles exert so little force on the road that they don't cause any wear at all.) Every person who gets out of their car and onto a bike saves the government in road maintenance, and saves their healthcare company in health costs.
Furthermore, the gas tax hasn't been adjusted in decades for increasing fuel economy standards; as cars have become far more efficient, drivers have been paying less per mile for road costs. Politicians won't increase the pittance of a gas tax because it's political suicide.
The issue isn't that the trucks are running repeaters. The issue is that they're running repeaters that are incompetently configured.
1)Too high a gain on the interior side = amplified noise outside. 2)Too much signal strength on the amp (probably in both directions)
For a phone inside the trailer, you should need very, very little gain. If the area otherwise has good coverage, the amp should be putting out no more than an average cell phone.
Sounds to me like someone thought Bigger was Better.
The tradeoffs with stereolithography: it requires toxic, expensive, smelly resins and can't do very enclosed spaces because the uncured resin would be trapped. The parts have to be washed - again, smelly/toxic chemicals are involved. The resins also usually have a limited lifespan, with some of them practically melting over time.
By the way: "machining" is not the proper term for anything in the class of Additive Manufacturing, which is what both FDM and stereolithography are.
Too bad Intel gave a fix to them (a fix they ultimately couldn't use), but hasn't to anyone else.
Too bad Intel has also apparently known about the problem for months now.
"Intel has been aware of this issue for several months. They also have a fix. However, they haven't publicized it because they don't know how widespread it is."
Bullshit. I bet they were hoping to very quietly roll it into a driver update and have it all go away.
It's done deliberately to drive discussion into the ground and ensure that a possibly useful conversation does not take place simply because there are people far more concerned about spreading hatred of the man than doing something useful.
Right, because everyone who mentions RMS's flaws is doing it to "drive discussion into the ground". It couldn't possibly be that those people are tired of RMS representing their movement, or that there are other reasons. Nice try, though.
It is not "hatred of the man" to point out the extensive personality flaws he possesses and refuses to do anything about. Again: nice try.
Only in the context of discussing him in his role of "spokesman" and "figurehead."
...and his lack of personal hygiene, confrontational nature, total lack of empathy or ability to understand or identify with any viewpoint except his own, complete obliviousness to how he comes off to others (remember the pages-long travel missives?)...
...I'm modded "flamebait" or "troll." Heaven forbid there are people who point out the man's numerous flaws. Ordinarily it'd be ad hominem, but he's a spokesman and figurehead, which makes every single one of the points above completely relevant.
I get pretty ambivalent about moderating; I get mod points and half the time they expire or go unused. I'm sincerely pissed I have no mod points right now for you.
And not just because some other jackhole moderator modded your +1 funny *down*.
Whatever happened to metamoderation? I feel like I haven't seen links in a while for it.
A prosecutor can get an indictment from a grand jury, if he wants one, in just about any case: of the circa 20,000 cases brought to a grand jury per year, fewer than 100 will result in a "no bill" (refusal to indict), for an indictment rate of around 99.5%.
And your point is what, exactly?
I could just as easily say "Because prosecutors know they have to convince a grand jury that the case is worth it, they're very careful about what they bring to the grand jury."
Several friends have served on grand juries. None of them described any of the cases as jokes or questionable. Both said the same thing: the criminals were incredibly stupid, leaving substantial evidence behind.
No matter where I go, most any clerk who has asked for my number or email address has not blinked an eye when I've declined by saying "No thank you." The typical response is a polite or even cheerful "No problem."
So, Australian citizenship or not (I assume he has it by now), it's kind of a stretch to accurately describe the guy as Australian.
So then the only people who are Australian are the native aborigine folks? Because in case you forgot, Australia was a prison island for Britain starting around 1788, and it wasn't until the late 1930's that Australia severed government ties with Britain.
No? Okay, then how many generations of your family have to be from Australia for you to be Australian? 1? 2? 4?
If he has Australian citizenship, he is Australian. 10 years and marriage to someone whose family goes back a generation or two is more than enough for most. As an American, I consider someone an American when they get their citizenship. So do they.
He was offered 6 months. He refused the plea deal.
He trespassed onto MIT property, into an MIT building (while purposefully hiding his face), into a network closet, where he then installed a machine and stole power+data for several months (don't blow this off, people - looked at colo prices lately?) He intentionally avoided identifying himself through MIT's network registration portal. He rotated MAC addresses to prevent being barred from DHCP and from having his equipment located.
JSTOR had to block a range of MIT addresses, which cut off researchers at part of MIT.Aaron worked around it. So JSTOR had to block ALL of MIT.
When they weren't blocking him, he was impacting JSTOR services because he was pulling articles at such a high rate. Even then, it wasn't enough for him - he bought a second machine and used it to also pull down material, which caused JSTOR servers to crash.
Despite this, Aaron kept pushing. He knew he was harming others, he knew he was harming JSTOR, and he selfishly prioritized his 'activism' over it. So the guy who was supposedly for freedom of information was actually crippling access for SEVEN THOUSAND institutions. He was a speed bump for scientific process for three months.
If you plan to do something and act in a way proving you know it's not permitted, cause harm and then continue anyway - yes, you fully deserve to get hauled into court and held accountable. If you can't do the time, don't do the fucking crime. Don't physically trespass, don't steal resources, don't harm system that don't belong to you, don't prevent others from accessing services they paid for, etc.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit, by the way - and they're not a "paywall", they're a library which stores, catalogs, indexes, and makes available electronically, journals. Which costs money, because it involves equipment, power, people, etc. How would you feel if you worked there as a sysadmin, and some activist was crashing your servers to Free Teh Researches? And your boss was pissed because you didn't seem to be able to stop it? And you had to spend money out of a limited budget on equipment? Or time dealing with it, instead of patching servers, or working on deploying a feature, etc?
How about the MIT network people, who were trying to chase down some asshole who was forcing JSTOR to block their researchers?
Congratulations, everyone. You've let Lessig and Aaron's family shift the debate away from all the obnoxious things Aaron did, and play him as the victim.
There were a dozen ways someone with his talent, public platform, and industry connections could have done to improve access to academic literature. He didn't. He did a LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY publicity stunt that harmed thousands and required virtually no effort, talent, thought, or skill - and had virtually no practical application. Vomiting hundreds of gigabytes of academic papers on The Pirate Bay doesn't doesn't solve any of the issues around freeing up academic research or help the flow of information.
19- and 20-nm NAND that should be cheaper to produce, those drives didn't debut at lower prices.
I remember reading at one point that the drives with smaller processes sizes had higher failure rates. Has that been addressed, or are drive makers over-provisioning more to compensate?
True, but there's 1440 minutes in a day, so five minutes to midnight is 99.35% which is a insanely high score.
There's an insanely high number of nuclear weapons in the hands of too many people, some of them involved in very heated disputes. Some people are on the verge of having them.
There's also at least one automated launch system - in Russia. Depending on who you ask, it's been deactivated, or is activated by leadership during extraordinary events, or is active all the time. If it is active and malfunctions, Russia's nuclear arsenal wipes the US and Europe population centers off the map, and probably ends life on the planet.
I think it's an absolute miracle we haven't had any non-test nuclear detonations since WW2 ended, given the capacity for human error. We've pretty handily managed to fuck just about everything else up, so I'm somewhat baffled how we've made it so long except for some crashes+dropped bombs that were not armed (but did explode conventionally, and create enormous messes.)
Expanding sexual diversity in new content is not regressive.
Forcing anyone who isn't hetrosexual into one area is. Decades years ago we declared that separate is not equal.
Also, this is a video game for crying out loud. Chill the fuck out.
No. It's not hard to figure out why GLBT people might be upset about this. For many of them, they've been forced into little 'gardens' all their lives, either out of fear or it being the only option given to them. If you understand why "civil unions" piss off the GLBT community, you'll understand why one planet being The Gay Planet does.
They've made it clear that they want to make it a full option throughout the game, but you can't just snap your fingers and make that happen
Yes, actually. They could disable the gender restrictions with a patch to the game engine, for example. They won't do it because of the raging homophobia in the gaming community.
Flu shots are mandated for clinical staff by most if not all of the Boston hospitals, and there are a huge number of them - I've counted 11 so far, and I think I'm probably missing one or two:
Childrens, MGH, Brigham & Womens, Faulkner, Beth Israel, Tufts Medical Center, Spaulding Rehab, Shriners, Mass Eye&Ear, New England Baptist, Veterans Administration Boston...and those are just the ones that are actually in Boston proper.
Honestly, I think hospitals are part of the problem. They focus illness and weak populations (same with nursing homes and assisted living facilities.) Also, there tends to be huge pressure on clinical staff to report for work even when sick. The medical profession is astoundingly arrogant when it comes to not doing harm to patients...another good example would be the sloppy handwriting doctors use when filling out prescriptions, injuring or killing thousands.
Just because Fox News was/is used for political propaganda and furthering one person's conservative agenda doesn't mean every news outlet is, even ones owned by people who live in conservative societies.
Furthermore, your comment is also a composition fallacy (or a hasty generalization fallacy, I'm not sure which), like declaring feminists man-haters, or men's rights advocates to be misogynists. Just because SOME are, does not mean ALL are. Just because he's an Sheik doesn't mean he holds certain viewpoints, nor does it mean that he's using his news service to further those beliefs. In fact, many powerful Arabs are using their power to further democracy in their culture and countries.
Just a few examples I found, using site:aljazeera.com in google, all of which seemed pretty straightforward, factual reporting (granted, I read them quickly, but nothing leapt out at me, and none of the topics seemed verboten):
Coverage of anti-gay-conversion-therapy law in California being struck down, which seems pretty balanced in terms of coverage, quoting people on both sides and devoting roughly the same page space (which is a damn sight better than my local city newspaper; they routinely bias a story and then throw 1-2 lines in about the other viewpoint, as a sort of token gesture. I live in a very progressive, liberal city/state): http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/12/2012122223728233995.html
"Although there may be resistance to this process of emancipation, Tahrir Square and Qasaba are now part of the psyche and formative culture of Arab women. Indeed, they are finally given a voice to their long-silenced yearnings for liberation from authoritarianism - both political and patriarchal."
This is one of the places where the story rings false. Given any 30 people involved in full-time spying on dozens of other people, it is _inevitable_ that at least one of them would notify the police of this operation. Not only because the activity is illegal
You only hear about the cases where people blab...
Also: people blab when it's in their perceived interests. If you live in a country where leadership is bumping off political protesters, there is much less self interest in admitting that you've been helping some rich American engage in espionage. The problem with being brutal and corrupt is that a)it makes people hate you b)it is excellent incentive to not blab about things you're doing against the government.
There also can be plenty of blabbing, just not to anyone who is in power or those associated with them. Information doesn't flow freely - it tends to be like the ocean, with thermoclines representing class/power levels, political affiliation, religion, language, etc. Damn near everyone in a city who works as an office cleaner could know that Joe Big Bank Executive is banging his secretary after-hours, for example.
An even better example would probably be DC. I bet there's all sorts of bullshit that everyone in political/diplomatic circles in DC knows about, but your average person off the street doesn't.
I'm having trouble thinking of anything more hypocritical than declaring that other people shouldn't enjoy the right to defend themselves with guns, while defending yourself with guns.
Strawman fallacy. They did not "declare that other people shouldn't enjoy the right to defend themselves with guns"; you invented that to make them easier to attack. They published public lists of gun permit holders.
What would be hypocritical: hiring armed guards and seeking to hide the fact, which they haven't. They've been equally public about hiring the guards as they were publishing the list.
Maybe you could suggest something - I'm at a loss.
You could start by learning the most common logical fallacies, and not using them.
What I find amusing: the gun owners are claiming publishing the list makes them the target of burglaries/robberies, endangering them. Bit odd, considering they own their guns for "home defense", don't you think?
I spent $2000 on a commuter bike and its accessories (high-end tires and snow tires, a lock, rack, waterproof pannier and grocery pannier, fenders, generator hub + lights, upgraded drivetrain components) 2 years ago.
Sounds like a lot, right? If the bike were stolen tomorrow, it would have worked out to $83/month. Because I bought a good bike with a low-maintenance drivetrain (fully enclosed chaincases are ideal, coupled with internal-gear hubs), operational costs are low, so it's getting cheaper every day.
Every few months I need a tube ($5ish) if it's not patchable. About every 6 months I need a set of brake pads, which are about $20. I think in a year or two I'll probably need a new set of tires which will be $140 total if I buy the really fancy ones again. Once in a blue moon I need to bring it to the shop (for example, I once accidentally broke a spoke), which is usually well under $50.
I use the transit pass when the weather is miserable (I hate cold rain, and sub-25-degree-F air temps); otherwise, it's the bike.
The best fuel is the kind you eat. Love to eat? Buy and use a bike for transport (and don't cheap out. And DON'T BUY A MOUNTAIN BIKE FOR RIDING IN THE CITY!)
You're assuming that only one person watches the TV, and that every movie goer lives in walking distance of the theatre. Face it, we have a TV anyhow. Then subtract the cost of going to a movie theatre, including tickets, concession prices versus home prices, travel, and extra time.
You're assuming that "we" have a TV. I don't, and I'm hardly alone; many people have a junky old CRT TV, mostly for news. Many don't have any sort of cable TV beyond the minimum included with internet service (mostly the local broadcast stations.) It costs me nothing to travel to the theater, because I already have a monthly transit pass I use for commuting. It's a 30 minute trip each way, but only because I live in one of the outlying areas; if I lived in almost any other part of the city, it'd be a 15 minute trip.
I spend less than $200/year on movies, and that's seeing at least one film a month. I estimate I'd have to see nearly 50 movies a year for two years to match the cost of a home system, and I'd piss off the neighbors if I turned it up as loud as a theater.
If you're short on money, stop wasting it dreaming about putting people on the moon again, or going to Mars with a human crew.
1)There is no practical purpose in placing humans on the moon; certainly nothing that justifies the tenfold jump in complexity. There wasn't back in the 60's, either - it was done for patriotism and xenophobia.
2)We have real problems right now, like the lack of replacements for aging weather satellites, in an era of accelerating climate change and instability. In case you all hadn't noticed, the last hurricane hit one of the largest economic centers of our country AND our eastern ports. In case you hadn't noticed, the midwest suffered the worst drought since the dust bowl.
I've been saying it for more than ten years, any time Slashdot starts getting romantic about human space flight: Stop eating your dessert and start eating your vegetables.
What's really pathetic is that we make fun of North Korea for lofting a satellite while people starve. We live in a country where 20% of our students go hungry, even more don't have enough textbooks to go around, and teachers are spending personal money on supplies...but hey, they get to watch some video of an incredibly privileged, elite person floating around on a space station doing science that nowhere near justifies its cost (NIH's budget is about 3x the annual spending of the ISS, but yet the NIH manages to fund more distinct disciplines than the number of ISS research projects.)
Our public transit system is pathetic, our court systems are vastly underfunded, our retirement system is essentially a pyramid scheme, we have a huge homeless population, the world's largest (both by percentage and total headcount) prison population, and we're one of a shrinking pool of countries which doesn't provide health care services for all.
We need to at least get to the point where we're not damaging the environment and climate further, and maybe even starting to restore it. THEN, and ONLY THEN, you can have your rocketships for human space exploration. Don't give me that "we'll use space technology to escape our doomed planet" bullshit - we have a population of 7 BILLION. Even if you think we have any hope of lifting even just 1% of the world's population, how do you morally justify screwing over everyone else to save those 1%? Further, if we can't co-habitate with this planet's ecosystem, why should we just start fucking up another planet?
Yep. And 10 years ago, my father and I tried turning on a laptop inside the single-engine plane on the ground, during engine-warmup/preflight checks.
Buzzing on the intercom, and the RDF/VOR both went bonkers, even when set to local beacons where there was strong signal. Turns out the cheap laptop was unbelievably poorly shielded, leaking RF coming from the screen's backlight and the various major clocks.
Do you really want your life to be endangered by the guy who brings some crappy laptop that isn't FCC/ECC certified onto the plane you're on?
I find it funny that plenty of Slashdotters are HAM operators or 'get' interference, but are absolutely RIPSHIT that they have to turn off their devices while flying. Grow up, and recognize that you have an addiction and entitlement issues. Read a damn book, take a nap, meditate, strike up a conversation. You're not ENTITLED to sit there and surf the net.
Slashdot Mirror
"what they've managed to put together has been inefficient (even the most recent one) and dirty."
Why do you think they wouldn't be thrilled to blow up a low-yield dirty nuclear weapon over a major US city?
The only one he is actually using to justify his position (that bikes should pay road tax) is the former, the second point is refuting the point that bikes are environmentally friendly. The second point is debatable: it's a question of what the basic comparison is.
Roads are not paid for by drivers. They're paid for by the public, overwhelmingly via property taxes. Everyone who walks, takes public transit, or bicycles is subsidizing drivers. People who walk or ride bicycles don't impact the road surface at all (bicycles exert so little force on the road that they don't cause any wear at all.) Every person who gets out of their car and onto a bike saves the government in road maintenance, and saves their healthcare company in health costs.
Furthermore, the gas tax hasn't been adjusted in decades for increasing fuel economy standards; as cars have become far more efficient, drivers have been paying less per mile for road costs. Politicians won't increase the pittance of a gas tax because it's political suicide.
The issue isn't that the trucks are running repeaters. The issue is that they're running repeaters that are incompetently configured.
1)Too high a gain on the interior side = amplified noise outside.
2)Too much signal strength on the amp (probably in both directions)
For a phone inside the trailer, you should need very, very little gain. If the area otherwise has good coverage, the amp should be putting out no more than an average cell phone.
Sounds to me like someone thought Bigger was Better.
The tradeoffs with stereolithography: it requires toxic, expensive, smelly resins and can't do very enclosed spaces because the uncured resin would be trapped. The parts have to be washed - again, smelly/toxic chemicals are involved. The resins also usually have a limited lifespan, with some of them practically melting over time.
By the way: "machining" is not the proper term for anything in the class of Additive Manufacturing, which is what both FDM and stereolithography are.
Too bad Intel gave a fix to them (a fix they ultimately couldn't use), but hasn't to anyone else.
Too bad Intel has also apparently known about the problem for months now.
"Intel has been aware of this issue for several months. They also have a fix. However, they haven't publicized it because they don't know how widespread it is."
Bullshit. I bet they were hoping to very quietly roll it into a driver update and have it all go away.
It's done deliberately to drive discussion into the ground and ensure that a possibly useful conversation does not take place simply because there are people far more concerned about spreading hatred of the man than doing something useful.
Right, because everyone who mentions RMS's flaws is doing it to "drive discussion into the ground". It couldn't possibly be that those people are tired of RMS representing their movement, or that there are other reasons. Nice try, though.
It is not "hatred of the man" to point out the extensive personality flaws he possesses and refuses to do anything about. Again: nice try.
Only in the context of discussing him in his role of "spokesman" and "figurehead."
Which is precisely how I mentioned him this time.
...and his lack of personal hygiene, confrontational nature, total lack of empathy or ability to understand or identify with any viewpoint except his own, complete obliviousness to how he comes off to others (remember the pages-long travel missives?)...
...I'm modded "flamebait" or "troll." Heaven forbid there are people who point out the man's numerous flaws. Ordinarily it'd be ad hominem, but he's a spokesman and figurehead, which makes every single one of the points above completely relevant.
I get pretty ambivalent about moderating; I get mod points and half the time they expire or go unused. I'm sincerely pissed I have no mod points right now for you. And not just because some other jackhole moderator modded your +1 funny *down*. Whatever happened to metamoderation? I feel like I haven't seen links in a while for it.
A prosecutor can get an indictment from a grand jury, if he wants one, in just about any case: of the circa 20,000 cases brought to a grand jury per year, fewer than 100 will result in a "no bill" (refusal to indict), for an indictment rate of around 99.5%.
And your point is what, exactly?
I could just as easily say "Because prosecutors know they have to convince a grand jury that the case is worth it, they're very careful about what they bring to the grand jury."
Several friends have served on grand juries. None of them described any of the cases as jokes or questionable. Both said the same thing: the criminals were incredibly stupid, leaving substantial evidence behind.
Look son, I've been going into Radio Snack since the early 90's.
There was a big fuss about the whole demanding-your-phone-number/address thing, and they stopped with it, almost a decade ago. Hey look, a site called Slashdot even covered it: http://news.slashdot.org/story/02/11/25/1846245/radioshack-stops-being-nosy
No matter where I go, most any clerk who has asked for my number or email address has not blinked an eye when I've declined by saying "No thank you." The typical response is a polite or even cheerful "No problem."
So, Australian citizenship or not (I assume he has it by now), it's kind of a stretch to accurately describe the guy as Australian.
So then the only people who are Australian are the native aborigine folks? Because in case you forgot, Australia was a prison island for Britain starting around 1788, and it wasn't until the late 1930's that Australia severed government ties with Britain.
No? Okay, then how many generations of your family have to be from Australia for you to be Australian? 1? 2? 4?
If he has Australian citizenship, he is Australian. 10 years and marriage to someone whose family goes back a generation or two is more than enough for most. As an American, I consider someone an American when they get their citizenship. So do they.
He was offered 6 months. He refused the plea deal.
He trespassed onto MIT property, into an MIT building (while purposefully hiding his face), into a network closet, where he then installed a machine and stole power+data for several months (don't blow this off, people - looked at colo prices lately?) He intentionally avoided identifying himself through MIT's network registration portal. He rotated MAC addresses to prevent being barred from DHCP and from having his equipment located.
JSTOR had to block a range of MIT addresses, which cut off researchers at part of MIT.Aaron worked around it. So JSTOR had to block ALL of MIT.
When they weren't blocking him, he was impacting JSTOR services because he was pulling articles at such a high rate. Even then, it wasn't enough for him - he bought a second machine and used it to also pull down material, which caused JSTOR servers to crash.
Despite this, Aaron kept pushing. He knew he was harming others, he knew he was harming JSTOR, and he selfishly prioritized his 'activism' over it. So the guy who was supposedly for freedom of information was actually crippling access for SEVEN THOUSAND institutions. He was a speed bump for scientific process for three months.
If you plan to do something and act in a way proving you know it's not permitted, cause harm and then continue anyway - yes, you fully deserve to get hauled into court and held accountable. If you can't do the time, don't do the fucking crime. Don't physically trespass, don't steal resources, don't harm system that don't belong to you, don't prevent others from accessing services they paid for, etc.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit, by the way - and they're not a "paywall", they're a library which stores, catalogs, indexes, and makes available electronically, journals. Which costs money, because it involves equipment, power, people, etc. How would you feel if you worked there as a sysadmin, and some activist was crashing your servers to Free Teh Researches? And your boss was pissed because you didn't seem to be able to stop it? And you had to spend money out of a limited budget on equipment? Or time dealing with it, instead of patching servers, or working on deploying a feature, etc?
How about the MIT network people, who were trying to chase down some asshole who was forcing JSTOR to block their researchers?
Congratulations, everyone. You've let Lessig and Aaron's family shift the debate away from all the obnoxious things Aaron did, and play him as the victim.
There were a dozen ways someone with his talent, public platform, and industry connections could have done to improve access to academic literature. He didn't. He did a LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY publicity stunt that harmed thousands and required virtually no effort, talent, thought, or skill - and had virtually no practical application. Vomiting hundreds of gigabytes of academic papers on The Pirate Bay doesn't doesn't solve any of the issues around freeing up academic research or help the flow of information.
19- and 20-nm NAND that should be cheaper to produce, those drives didn't debut at lower prices.
I remember reading at one point that the drives with smaller processes sizes had higher failure rates. Has that been addressed, or are drive makers over-provisioning more to compensate?
True, but there's 1440 minutes in a day, so five minutes to midnight is 99.35% which is a insanely high score.
There's an insanely high number of nuclear weapons in the hands of too many people, some of them involved in very heated disputes. Some people are on the verge of having them.
There's also at least one automated launch system - in Russia. Depending on who you ask, it's been deactivated, or is activated by leadership during extraordinary events, or is active all the time. If it is active and malfunctions, Russia's nuclear arsenal wipes the US and Europe population centers off the map, and probably ends life on the planet.
I think it's an absolute miracle we haven't had any non-test nuclear detonations since WW2 ended, given the capacity for human error. We've pretty handily managed to fuck just about everything else up, so I'm somewhat baffled how we've made it so long except for some crashes+dropped bombs that were not armed (but did explode conventionally, and create enormous messes.)
Aaron had no connection to MIT. He was trespassing, physically, and stealing network resources, power, and space he had no right to.
Expanding sexual diversity in new content is not regressive.
Forcing anyone who isn't hetrosexual into one area is. Decades years ago we declared that separate is not equal.
Also, this is a video game for crying out loud. Chill the fuck out.
No. It's not hard to figure out why GLBT people might be upset about this. For many of them, they've been forced into little 'gardens' all their lives, either out of fear or it being the only option given to them. If you understand why "civil unions" piss off the GLBT community, you'll understand why one planet being The Gay Planet does.
They've made it clear that they want to make it a full option throughout the game, but you can't just snap your fingers and make that happen
Yes, actually. They could disable the gender restrictions with a patch to the game engine, for example. They won't do it because of the raging homophobia in the gaming community.
Enjoy getting metamodded, moderator.
Flu shots are mandated for clinical staff by most if not all of the Boston hospitals, and there are a huge number of them - I've counted 11 so far, and I think I'm probably missing one or two:
Childrens, MGH, Brigham & Womens, Faulkner, Beth Israel, Tufts Medical Center, Spaulding Rehab, Shriners, Mass Eye&Ear, New England Baptist, Veterans Administration Boston...and those are just the ones that are actually in Boston proper.
Honestly, I think hospitals are part of the problem. They focus illness and weak populations (same with nursing homes and assisted living facilities.) Also, there tends to be huge pressure on clinical staff to report for work even when sick. The medical profession is astoundingly arrogant when it comes to not doing harm to patients...another good example would be the sloppy handwriting doctors use when filling out prescriptions, injuring or killing thousands.
Furthermore, your comment is also a composition fallacy (or a hasty generalization fallacy, I'm not sure which), like declaring feminists man-haters, or men's rights advocates to be misogynists. Just because SOME are, does not mean ALL are. Just because he's an Sheik doesn't mean he holds certain viewpoints, nor does it mean that he's using his news service to further those beliefs. In fact, many powerful Arabs are using their power to further democracy in their culture and countries.
Just a few examples I found, using site:aljazeera.com in google, all of which seemed pretty straightforward, factual reporting (granted, I read them quickly, but nothing leapt out at me, and none of the topics seemed verboten):
Coverage of anti-gay-conversion-therapy law in California being struck down, which seems pretty balanced in terms of coverage, quoting people on both sides and devoting roughly the same page space (which is a damn sight better than my local city newspaper; they routinely bias a story and then throw 1-2 lines in about the other viewpoint, as a sort of token gesture. I live in a very progressive, liberal city/state): http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/12/2012122223728233995.html
Coverage of the gay pride parade in India, with a dozen photos, including of someone identified as being transgender: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2012/11/20121126205837449408.html
Coverage of Church of England lifting ban on gay ministers: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/01/2013156028132292.html
Women in the Arab world:
Editorial by Arab woman: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/04/201142412303319807.html
"Although there may be resistance to this process of emancipation, Tahrir Square and Qasaba are now part of the psyche and formative culture of Arab women. Indeed, they are finally given a voice to their long-silenced yearnings for liberation from authoritarianism - both political and patriarchal."
This is one of the places where the story rings false. Given any 30 people involved in full-time spying on dozens of other people, it is _inevitable_ that at least one of them would notify the police of this operation. Not only because the activity is illegal
You only hear about the cases where people blab...
Also: people blab when it's in their perceived interests. If you live in a country where leadership is bumping off political protesters, there is much less self interest in admitting that you've been helping some rich American engage in espionage. The problem with being brutal and corrupt is that a)it makes people hate you b)it is excellent incentive to not blab about things you're doing against the government.
There also can be plenty of blabbing, just not to anyone who is in power or those associated with them. Information doesn't flow freely - it tends to be like the ocean, with thermoclines representing class/power levels, political affiliation, religion, language, etc. Damn near everyone in a city who works as an office cleaner could know that Joe Big Bank Executive is banging his secretary after-hours, for example.
An even better example would probably be DC. I bet there's all sorts of bullshit that everyone in political/diplomatic circles in DC knows about, but your average person off the street doesn't.
I'm having trouble thinking of anything more hypocritical than declaring that other people shouldn't enjoy the right to defend themselves with guns, while defending yourself with guns.
Strawman fallacy. They did not "declare that other people shouldn't enjoy the right to defend themselves with guns"; you invented that to make them easier to attack. They published public lists of gun permit holders.
What would be hypocritical: hiring armed guards and seeking to hide the fact, which they haven't. They've been equally public about hiring the guards as they were publishing the list.
Maybe you could suggest something - I'm at a loss.
You could start by learning the most common logical fallacies, and not using them.
What I find amusing: the gun owners are claiming publishing the list makes them the target of burglaries/robberies, endangering them. Bit odd, considering they own their guns for "home defense", don't you think?
I spent $2000 on a commuter bike and its accessories (high-end tires and snow tires, a lock, rack, waterproof pannier and grocery pannier, fenders, generator hub + lights, upgraded drivetrain components) 2 years ago.
Sounds like a lot, right? If the bike were stolen tomorrow, it would have worked out to $83/month. Because I bought a good bike with a low-maintenance drivetrain (fully enclosed chaincases are ideal, coupled with internal-gear hubs), operational costs are low, so it's getting cheaper every day.
Every few months I need a tube ($5ish) if it's not patchable. About every 6 months I need a set of brake pads, which are about $20. I think in a year or two I'll probably need a new set of tires which will be $140 total if I buy the really fancy ones again. Once in a blue moon I need to bring it to the shop (for example, I once accidentally broke a spoke), which is usually well under $50.
I use the transit pass when the weather is miserable (I hate cold rain, and sub-25-degree-F air temps); otherwise, it's the bike.
The best fuel is the kind you eat. Love to eat? Buy and use a bike for transport (and don't cheap out. And DON'T BUY A MOUNTAIN BIKE FOR RIDING IN THE CITY!)
You're assuming that only one person watches the TV, and that every movie goer lives in walking distance of the theatre. Face it, we have a TV anyhow. Then subtract the cost of going to a movie theatre, including tickets, concession prices versus home prices, travel, and extra time.
You're assuming that "we" have a TV. I don't, and I'm hardly alone; many people have a junky old CRT TV, mostly for news. Many don't have any sort of cable TV beyond the minimum included with internet service (mostly the local broadcast stations.) It costs me nothing to travel to the theater, because I already have a monthly transit pass I use for commuting. It's a 30 minute trip each way, but only because I live in one of the outlying areas; if I lived in almost any other part of the city, it'd be a 15 minute trip.
I spend less than $200/year on movies, and that's seeing at least one film a month. I estimate I'd have to see nearly 50 movies a year for two years to match the cost of a home system, and I'd piss off the neighbors if I turned it up as loud as a theater.
If you're short on money, stop wasting it dreaming about putting people on the moon again, or going to Mars with a human crew.
1)There is no practical purpose in placing humans on the moon; certainly nothing that justifies the tenfold jump in complexity. There wasn't back in the 60's, either - it was done for patriotism and xenophobia.
2)We have real problems right now, like the lack of replacements for aging weather satellites, in an era of accelerating climate change and instability. In case you all hadn't noticed, the last hurricane hit one of the largest economic centers of our country AND our eastern ports. In case you hadn't noticed, the midwest suffered the worst drought since the dust bowl.
I've been saying it for more than ten years, any time Slashdot starts getting romantic about human space flight: Stop eating your dessert and start eating your vegetables.
What's really pathetic is that we make fun of North Korea for lofting a satellite while people starve. We live in a country where 20% of our students go hungry, even more don't have enough textbooks to go around, and teachers are spending personal money on supplies...but hey, they get to watch some video of an incredibly privileged, elite person floating around on a space station doing science that nowhere near justifies its cost (NIH's budget is about 3x the annual spending of the ISS, but yet the NIH manages to fund more distinct disciplines than the number of ISS research projects.)
Our public transit system is pathetic, our court systems are vastly underfunded, our retirement system is essentially a pyramid scheme, we have a huge homeless population, the world's largest (both by percentage and total headcount) prison population, and we're one of a shrinking pool of countries which doesn't provide health care services for all.
We need to at least get to the point where we're not damaging the environment and climate further, and maybe even starting to restore it. THEN, and ONLY THEN, you can have your rocketships for human space exploration. Don't give me that "we'll use space technology to escape our doomed planet" bullshit - we have a population of 7 BILLION. Even if you think we have any hope of lifting even just 1% of the world's population, how do you morally justify screwing over everyone else to save those 1%? Further, if we can't co-habitate with this planet's ecosystem, why should we just start fucking up another planet?
The rule is you have to prove it is not harmful.
Yep. And 10 years ago, my father and I tried turning on a laptop inside the single-engine plane on the ground, during engine-warmup/preflight checks.
Buzzing on the intercom, and the RDF/VOR both went bonkers, even when set to local beacons where there was strong signal. Turns out the cheap laptop was unbelievably poorly shielded, leaking RF coming from the screen's backlight and the various major clocks.
Do you really want your life to be endangered by the guy who brings some crappy laptop that isn't FCC/ECC certified onto the plane you're on?
I find it funny that plenty of Slashdotters are HAM operators or 'get' interference, but are absolutely RIPSHIT that they have to turn off their devices while flying. Grow up, and recognize that you have an addiction and entitlement issues. Read a damn book, take a nap, meditate, strike up a conversation. You're not ENTITLED to sit there and surf the net.