radioactive gold kept disappearing. After a while a staff member's wife or fiance turned up and had radiation poisoning to her hand--someone was taking the gold to make a wedding ring, and didn't know it was radioactive.
I'm sure security is a little better than it was then, but small amounts of radioactive material will probably always be gettable.
Actually, you just assumed he was not black based on the idea that a black person would never say what he said. You're generalizing and stereotyping, and while it's admittedly *unlikely* that a black person would say what he said, it's incredibly insulting and demeaning to blacks to say that someone *isn't black* because of taking a particular position. Kind of like saying you're not white if you claim to be, say, a contractor describing his white privilege.
A public consumer buying a laptop is one thing, but I can imagine certain blue chip institutions (banks for example) will be slightly less interested in buying servers from Lenovo as opposed to HP. I have some IBM servers on order right now and there isn't usually a lot in it when deciding whether HP or IBM is better for my use case. If it was Lenovo or HP, that decision would probably only go HPs way.
This was definitely my first thought--a lot of value is in the IBM mark. If Lenovo can't brand the hardware and services and IBM, they're going to lose a lot of business relative to the value of the sold hardware and related services business prior to purchase. I would think a bunch of people would continue to use them for legacy equipment or when they want new hardware to function especially smoothly with legacy equipment, but for a lot of institutional clients, I think you just wouldn't consider Lenovo.
I would think that when you're purchasing a solution to a tech issue for a major institution, you're looking for three things: (1) that the solution will work, (2) that the solution is something you can justify spending money on to your bosses, and (3) that the solution is something that will cover your ass at least somewhat if it fails (i.e. you can point to a major brand name the CEO will know and they are more likely to believe that it should have worked, but if you point to a brand without a reputation or that they feel at all sketchy about they will blame you for picking it).
So they're being too eco-friendly with the bus rides? Or everyone's jealous about the benefits? Or public transportation isn't crowded enough? I don't get it but I have the sneaking suspicion that these people are morons.
They probably just wanted revenue so they decided to tax the buses.
Is it more risky to donate a kidney or work as a logger or deep sea fisherman? I am not sure, but the ethical dilemma is the same in both situations (risking health for a payment).
Not quite, but close. From a logical standpoint, sure, but we have this whole social history of holding self-determination with regards to the human body in high regard--we punish violations of the body like assault, rape, etc... when they are done without consent, we consider restraint of a person to be a very significant intrusion on the individual under the Fourth Amendment, and a good part of the world also sees state interference in abortion as abhorrent because it is (as they see it) the state taking control of women's bodies. The ethical dilemma of risking health for payment exists in both situations, but there are other ethical issues involved in anything that looks like sale of a violation of the human body.
Because it's exploitative, the way the act of performing surgery is not.
It is exploitative if someone is selling an organ to survive--I think nobody wants to see that. A better policy might be that you can donate an organ and be paid for it (or maybe have a donation made to a charity) if you go through a quick credit check to basically make sure you're probably not being exploited. (The downside is the people who couldn't get the money are the ones who most need it, but there's much less risk of exploitation.)
If it complies with the law then how's it a scam? Also, if you don't think the law is correct then the bone you have to pick is with the government - not the employers.
If you live in a country without truth-in-advertising laws (or with poorly enforced ones), you can advertise blatantly untrue claims, comply with the law, and it's still a scam.
Kind of like how the holocaust can still be murder/genocide even if Hitler makes it legal.
The last I checked, no cash was being given away to oil companies.
Not sure what direct subsidies they're talking about, but depreciation is going to be one--I bet tax depreciation on oil company infrastructure is well above economic depreciation. That means FEDGOV is giving them a subsidy.
For example, if they can depreciate a piece of infrastructure over 20 years and it lasts 40, they get to write off (i.e. not pay taxes) on more than their actual loss as a business expense, in effect getting a tax subsidy from the government. (Lowering taxes is the same as giving a subsidy--the only difference is flipping a sign to confuse laypeople; tax subsidies are just a way of giving Congress political cover when they give money to special interest). The effect is increased the fact that after 20 years, they probably sell individual pieces of infrastructure between subs or otherwise adjust ownership so that they can take the depreciation again.
Recommended practices are easier to pass than law. Industry is okay with them because they can ignore them; Congress, agencies, or industry groups can pass them and pretend to be doing something. Occasionally they're even a little bit helpful.
Congress also does less with each passing year because, as it turns out, doing things in politics means people can paint you as against something, so the safest course of action for most politicians is to do nothing.
As a result, agencies and functionaries are left without the ability to legislate change, which means that "recommended practice" may be their best option to influence policy.
My guess is they are going to start classifying various crimes as terrorist acts. Thus the FBI will still get to go after them but with better funding and the ability to say they are protecting America from "terrorists".
Starting? They're doing it. "Terroristic threatening" is a crime now, and "Weapons of mass destruction" now include grenades and IEDs and the like.
You're looking at having to dissapate 1000's of MT of energy somehow.
Sounds like the next cheap energy source--1 MT would be the yearly electricity consumption of greenland as of 2008; 1000 MT would be just one order of magnitude under the annual worldwide consumption. (Enough to power, say, South Korea for a year.)
Yeah, I kind of thought it was a dick thing to do for the summary to talk about who has to pay for it at all--when someone breaks down at sea, you rescue them. If there's money, great, but you don't talk money *before* you've rescued them, because it implies you would be leaving them out there to die. Like how the fire department in ancient Rome would settle the price with you as your house burned down...
Do you really not see the difference between Frodo Baggins and Dagny Taggart? Frodo is a fantastical character - he's a short-statured member of a race of hairy-footed little men who live in hills, have eleventy-first birthday parties and possess a strange resistance to magic....
Dagny Taggart is a fantastical caricature - she's a human, but not as we know it Jim. Everything she ever wanted sort of just happened to her, and she just does random insane shit because that's what the author needs her to do in order to move the plot along.
This. The Lord of the Rings was very much a Romantic work, in the capital-R sense. Not escapism, but something that reflects on the way the world should be and how we respond to challenge. Game of Thrones rejects Romanticism outright, and damns it--it has this sort of Victorian-esque sense of both rejection of and yearning for that Romanticism. There's a reason for that beheading in Game of Thrones, and that Resurrection in LOTR.
LOTR is best before you "grow up," or after you really grow up.
The government defines "The Border" as being within a hundred miles of an airport, not just a line in the Mexican sand. There is very little land you can stand on and not get searched without probable cause now.
Bullshit. If someone detains you without reasonable suspicion or searches you without a warrant and in the absence of an exception to the warrant requirement, they have violated the constitution, can't use evidence against you in court, and you can sue the pants off them. It may not get you anywhere--notably if a jury doesn't like you, and you have a credibility issue--but the government does *not* get to use the border search doctrine to justify searches anywhere "within a hundred miles of an airport."
It applies at places that are "the functional equivalent of the border." So in the airport, sure--and there is probably some diminished expectation of privacy in the *immediate* area around the airport. Maybe. But they don't get to ransack your home and car and take all your stuff just because there's an airport within a hundred miles of you.
As you can see, within seconds of connecting the new USB device to the computer, a report is sent to watson.microsoft.com in HTTP (clear text). This report includes a considerable amount of information that is URL encoded into the request. This information includes:
Every time you plug in a device to USB port, a di-ding bell sounds. It is of utmost importance to Microsoft to know a bell has rung, so that it can promote an angel second class to angel first class with wings.
See? There is an innocent explanation for it after all.
When an angel gets his wings, a Venture Capital firm gets demoted...
Millions of crash reports aren't acted up, from what I see. I doubt anyone reads them.
They're used for two things. One, to figure out which bugs are actually impacting customers. Two, when there's a bug Microsoft has decided they care about. Either way, by never sending them in you're not voting for your bugs to be fixed.
This. It's true lots of crash reports aren't acted on--it's also true that something like 5% of users generate 90%+ of crash reports. But they give great information on "this is affecting umpteen million people so we should fix it because it will save lots of man-years" or "someone's having a problem and we should see if any of the data we have will help us fix it."
The US liability system enriches lawyers and insurance companies at everyone else's expense.
The liability system should still be there, it should just be easier and faster to resolve the disputes. The theory behind it is that if you cause harm you should have to pay for the harm, and an industry is only worth having if its profits are substantial enough to pay for the harm it causes. There are some obvious holes in the theory which arise from overly disincentivizing nonnegligent behavior (stuff you're not actually liable for) because of the cost of getting sued at all and because of the risk that a jury won't believe the behavior is nonnegligent.
There's also a problem when you have a new industry like robotics--a disproportionate amount of the liability obviously arises when the field is not yet mature, because it may be that the field is profitable enough in the long run to pay for the harms it causes but not profitable enough in the short run.
Attacks with suicide bombers are limited by the number of volunteers willing to die. Cheap robots do not have the same limitation. Once Al Qaeda masters robotics, we will be in big trouble.
Actually, the number of volunteers willing to die is really not the limiting factor, although I'll admit it's a limiting factor in certain areas of the world. Terrorist groups manipulate people into suicide bombing with specific and effective methods. Martyr propaganda videos, lessons on what the target of the bombing does to the culture's women (including videos of rapes by people who look western), etc...
If you can't obtain financial backing then you probably don't have a worth while product in the first place.
Worthwhile can mean a lot of things. There are plenty of products people want that aren't available on the marketplace for reasons that don't really have to do with the value of those products to the consumer. Privately funded jumbo reverse mortgages, for example, are unavailable in at least a number of states, primarily because they're politically unpopular and banks get a lot of bad P.R. for underwriting them.
I don't know, it seems like this is a fairly complicated question, it might be worth at least formally clarifying some boundaries.
Lets say we have industrial robots designed specifically to be user-programmable, as I believe most of them are. If there is a defect in the hardware that causes an accident then the company making the hardware is at fault. If however it was a defect (or intentional nefariousness) in the user programming, then it is clearly the programmer who is at fault, not the hardware manufacturer.
And the decision as to who was at fault will ultimately be made by a lay jury...
Yes, that is the status quo. Are we not allowed to be scandalized by it?
In America we're not scandalized by it because most Americans never leave the country, so they don't care. And most of those that do leave the country are generally treated okay at the border. (Which is understandable--if you were a border guard, why would you make your day worse by being mean?)
You're crossing a border. Is there seriously a real border anywhere in the world where a country does not claim the right to regulate what you bring into the country?
Searching laptops creates a much greater invasion of privacy in some ways than classic border searches, but countries generally claim an absolute right to regulate what (and who) comes into them. There is sometimes a very tiny bit of legal pushback--like I think you need reasonable suspicion at the US border to do *destructive* searches, for example--but not much.
We live in a world where there is such a thing as a suitcase nuke. Countries will always be very expansive in what they are *allowed* to search at the border, even though they don't usually waste their time going through your stuff.
Meh. There are a few times when certification that are useful--certification for certain contractors makes it more likely they follow certain safety rules, but you can also deal with that just by making inspections common, cheap, and painless. For the most part, certification processes are really about excluding people from local markets--rampant protectionism by people in power. (Like any institution, you become a part of it, gain its advantages, and then it begins to seem hunkey-dorey, if it didn't already. You drink the cool-aid.)
The way the bar works, for example, is much more of an impediment to good representation than it should be. There are some good things it does, like requiring a minimum continuing legal education and making it impossible for some of the people who steal from clients to represent clients. But it also divvies up the market absurdly, on a state-by-state basis, which artificially keeps the price of lawyers higher than it would otherwise be; and it makes their careers much more tenuous than most careers because of the disciplinary system.
Similarly, the way plumbers are licensed divvies up the market absurdly and artificially inflates prices. On the upside, it tends to mean that licensed plumbers at least know how things are supposed to be done and that they have an incentive (keeping their license) to do it the right way. But it costs everyone a fortune.
There's some stuff you could do intelligently on the software side--you could just have a test in a couple of programming languages or concepts to show basic competency--but the idea of requiring a certification with training is nothing short of ridiculous. It's just shooting money to a company that manages the cert process. Seriously, if you want people to not learn a subject, the surest way to do that is to require them to take a class in it. Think about the difference between student participation in optional classes and core classes.
Well. As a last resort. 1) Change all of your user data that you can. Edit your profile so that all of the data is either blank, or not yours at all. 2) Edit your age down to below 13 years old. This may kick in automatic account privacy settings. 3) If none of this works, then look at the TOS and find things that they don't want you to do. (ie, Wikipedia freaks out if you mention suing them on any forum. A TOS might make it a violation to badmouth the parent company, or to solicit other users. You might think of creating a couple of throwaway accounts, and getting into a royal flamewar with your invisible clones. Call them really bad names. Threaten to sue them.) 4) Do not let number three go into the realm of anything illegal. Don't post porn in public fora. You simply want to make yourself unwelcome at this location.
This may actually be a felony. (I.e. it is arguably a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act, limiting the use of a computer to that which is authorized, IIRC).
Slashdot Mirror
radioactive gold kept disappearing. After a while a staff member's wife or fiance turned up and had radiation poisoning to her hand--someone was taking the gold to make a wedding ring, and didn't know it was radioactive.
I'm sure security is a little better than it was then, but small amounts of radioactive material will probably always be gettable.
I'm black
No, you're not. You're a racist AC...
Actually, you just assumed he was not black based on the idea that a black person would never say what he said. You're generalizing and stereotyping, and while it's admittedly *unlikely* that a black person would say what he said, it's incredibly insulting and demeaning to blacks to say that someone *isn't black* because of taking a particular position. Kind of like saying you're not white if you claim to be, say, a contractor describing his white privilege.
A public consumer buying a laptop is one thing, but I can imagine certain blue chip institutions (banks for example) will be slightly less interested in buying servers from Lenovo as opposed to HP. I have some IBM servers on order right now and there isn't usually a lot in it when deciding whether HP or IBM is better for my use case. If it was Lenovo or HP, that decision would probably only go HPs way.
This was definitely my first thought--a lot of value is in the IBM mark. If Lenovo can't brand the hardware and services and IBM, they're going to lose a lot of business relative to the value of the sold hardware and related services business prior to purchase. I would think a bunch of people would continue to use them for legacy equipment or when they want new hardware to function especially smoothly with legacy equipment, but for a lot of institutional clients, I think you just wouldn't consider Lenovo.
I would think that when you're purchasing a solution to a tech issue for a major institution, you're looking for three things: (1) that the solution will work, (2) that the solution is something you can justify spending money on to your bosses, and (3) that the solution is something that will cover your ass at least somewhat if it fails (i.e. you can point to a major brand name the CEO will know and they are more likely to believe that it should have worked, but if you point to a brand without a reputation or that they feel at all sketchy about they will blame you for picking it).
Of course, YMMV
So they're being too eco-friendly with the bus rides? Or everyone's jealous about the benefits? Or public transportation isn't crowded enough? I don't get it but I have the sneaking suspicion that these people are morons.
They probably just wanted revenue so they decided to tax the buses.
Is it more risky to donate a kidney or work as a logger or deep sea fisherman? I am not sure, but the ethical dilemma is the same in both situations (risking health for a payment).
Not quite, but close. From a logical standpoint, sure, but we have this whole social history of holding self-determination with regards to the human body in high regard--we punish violations of the body like assault, rape, etc... when they are done without consent, we consider restraint of a person to be a very significant intrusion on the individual under the Fourth Amendment, and a good part of the world also sees state interference in abortion as abhorrent because it is (as they see it) the state taking control of women's bodies. The ethical dilemma of risking health for payment exists in both situations, but there are other ethical issues involved in anything that looks like sale of a violation of the human body.
Because it's exploitative, the way the act of performing surgery is not.
It is exploitative if someone is selling an organ to survive--I think nobody wants to see that. A better policy might be that you can donate an organ and be paid for it (or maybe have a donation made to a charity) if you go through a quick credit check to basically make sure you're probably not being exploited. (The downside is the people who couldn't get the money are the ones who most need it, but there's much less risk of exploitation.)
If it complies with the law then how's it a scam? Also, if you don't think the law is correct then the bone you have to pick is with the government - not the employers.
If you live in a country without truth-in-advertising laws (or with poorly enforced ones), you can advertise blatantly untrue claims, comply with the law, and it's still a scam.
Kind of like how the holocaust can still be murder/genocide even if Hitler makes it legal.
The last I checked, no cash was being given away to oil companies.
Not sure what direct subsidies they're talking about, but depreciation is going to be one--I bet tax depreciation on oil company infrastructure is well above economic depreciation. That means FEDGOV is giving them a subsidy.
For example, if they can depreciate a piece of infrastructure over 20 years and it lasts 40, they get to write off (i.e. not pay taxes) on more than their actual loss as a business expense, in effect getting a tax subsidy from the government. (Lowering taxes is the same as giving a subsidy--the only difference is flipping a sign to confuse laypeople; tax subsidies are just a way of giving Congress political cover when they give money to special interest). The effect is increased the fact that after 20 years, they probably sell individual pieces of infrastructure between subs or otherwise adjust ownership so that they can take the depreciation again.
Why isn't this required by law?
Recommended practices are easier to pass than law. Industry is okay with them because they can ignore them; Congress, agencies, or industry groups can pass them and pretend to be doing something. Occasionally they're even a little bit helpful.
Congress also does less with each passing year because, as it turns out, doing things in politics means people can paint you as against something, so the safest course of action for most politicians is to do nothing.
As a result, agencies and functionaries are left without the ability to legislate change, which means that "recommended practice" may be their best option to influence policy.
My guess is they are going to start classifying various crimes as terrorist acts. Thus the FBI will still get to go after them but with better funding and the ability to say they are protecting America from "terrorists".
Starting? They're doing it. "Terroristic threatening" is a crime now, and "Weapons of mass destruction" now include grenades and IEDs and the like.
You're looking at having to dissapate 1000's of MT of energy somehow.
Sounds like the next cheap energy source--1 MT would be the yearly electricity consumption of greenland as of 2008; 1000 MT would be just one order of magnitude under the annual worldwide consumption. (Enough to power, say, South Korea for a year.)
Instead, for some odd reason, people think the federal government is the end all
Corruption. The reason is corruption.
State and local governments tend to be corrupt. Also small-minded.
Yeah, I kind of thought it was a dick thing to do for the summary to talk about who has to pay for it at all--when someone breaks down at sea, you rescue them. If there's money, great, but you don't talk money *before* you've rescued them, because it implies you would be leaving them out there to die. Like how the fire department in ancient Rome would settle the price with you as your house burned down...
Do you really not see the difference between Frodo Baggins and Dagny Taggart? Frodo is a fantastical character - he's a short-statured member of a race of hairy-footed little men who live in hills, have eleventy-first birthday parties and possess a strange resistance to magic. ...
Dagny Taggart is a fantastical caricature - she's a human, but not as we know it Jim. Everything she ever wanted sort of just happened to her, and she just does random insane shit because that's what the author needs her to do in order to move the plot along.
This. The Lord of the Rings was very much a Romantic work, in the capital-R sense. Not escapism, but something that reflects on the way the world should be and how we respond to challenge. Game of Thrones rejects Romanticism outright, and damns it--it has this sort of Victorian-esque sense of both rejection of and yearning for that Romanticism. There's a reason for that beheading in Game of Thrones, and that Resurrection in LOTR.
LOTR is best before you "grow up," or after you really grow up.
The government defines "The Border" as being within a hundred miles of an airport, not just a line in the Mexican sand. There is very little land you can stand on and not get searched without probable cause now.
Bullshit. If someone detains you without reasonable suspicion or searches you without a warrant and in the absence of an exception to the warrant requirement, they have violated the constitution, can't use evidence against you in court, and you can sue the pants off them. It may not get you anywhere--notably if a jury doesn't like you, and you have a credibility issue--but the government does *not* get to use the border search doctrine to justify searches anywhere "within a hundred miles of an airport."
It applies at places that are "the functional equivalent of the border." So in the airport, sure--and there is probably some diminished expectation of privacy in the *immediate* area around the airport. Maybe. But they don't get to ransack your home and car and take all your stuff just because there's an airport within a hundred miles of you.
As you can see, within seconds of connecting the new USB device to the computer, a report is sent to watson.microsoft.com in HTTP (clear text). This report includes a considerable amount of information that is URL encoded into the request. This information includes:
Every time you plug in a device to USB port, a di-ding bell sounds. It is of utmost importance to Microsoft to know a bell has rung, so that it can promote an angel second class to angel first class with wings.
See? There is an innocent explanation for it after all.
When an angel gets his wings, a Venture Capital firm gets demoted...
Millions of crash reports aren't acted up, from what I see. I doubt anyone reads them.
They're used for two things. One, to figure out which bugs are actually impacting customers. Two, when there's a bug Microsoft has decided they care about. Either way, by never sending them in you're not voting for your bugs to be fixed.
This. It's true lots of crash reports aren't acted on--it's also true that something like 5% of users generate 90%+ of crash reports. But they give great information on "this is affecting umpteen million people so we should fix it because it will save lots of man-years" or "someone's having a problem and we should see if any of the data we have will help us fix it."
The US liability system enriches lawyers and insurance companies at everyone else's expense.
The liability system should still be there, it should just be easier and faster to resolve the disputes. The theory behind it is that if you cause harm you should have to pay for the harm, and an industry is only worth having if its profits are substantial enough to pay for the harm it causes. There are some obvious holes in the theory which arise from overly disincentivizing nonnegligent behavior (stuff you're not actually liable for) because of the cost of getting sued at all and because of the risk that a jury won't believe the behavior is nonnegligent.
There's also a problem when you have a new industry like robotics--a disproportionate amount of the liability obviously arises when the field is not yet mature, because it may be that the field is profitable enough in the long run to pay for the harms it causes but not profitable enough in the short run.
Attacks with suicide bombers are limited by the number of volunteers willing to die. Cheap robots do not have the same limitation. Once Al Qaeda masters robotics, we will be in big trouble.
Actually, the number of volunteers willing to die is really not the limiting factor, although I'll admit it's a limiting factor in certain areas of the world. Terrorist groups manipulate people into suicide bombing with specific and effective methods. Martyr propaganda videos, lessons on what the target of the bombing does to the culture's women (including videos of rapes by people who look western), etc...
If you can't obtain financial backing then you probably don't have a worth while product in the first place.
Worthwhile can mean a lot of things. There are plenty of products people want that aren't available on the marketplace for reasons that don't really have to do with the value of those products to the consumer. Privately funded jumbo reverse mortgages, for example, are unavailable in at least a number of states, primarily because they're politically unpopular and banks get a lot of bad P.R. for underwriting them.
I don't know, it seems like this is a fairly complicated question, it might be worth at least formally clarifying some boundaries.
Lets say we have industrial robots designed specifically to be user-programmable, as I believe most of them are. If there is a defect in the hardware that causes an accident then the company making the hardware is at fault. If however it was a defect (or intentional nefariousness) in the user programming, then it is clearly the programmer who is at fault, not the hardware manufacturer.
And the decision as to who was at fault will ultimately be made by a lay jury...
Yes, that is the status quo. Are we not allowed to be scandalized by it?
In America we're not scandalized by it because most Americans never leave the country, so they don't care. And most of those that do leave the country are generally treated okay at the border. (Which is understandable--if you were a border guard, why would you make your day worse by being mean?)
...i'm not American.
You're crossing a border. Is there seriously a real border anywhere in the world where a country does not claim the right to regulate what you bring into the country?
Searching laptops creates a much greater invasion of privacy in some ways than classic border searches, but countries generally claim an absolute right to regulate what (and who) comes into them. There is sometimes a very tiny bit of legal pushback--like I think you need reasonable suspicion at the US border to do *destructive* searches, for example--but not much.
We live in a world where there is such a thing as a suitcase nuke. Countries will always be very expansive in what they are *allowed* to search at the border, even though they don't usually waste their time going through your stuff.
Meh. There are a few times when certification that are useful--certification for certain contractors makes it more likely they follow certain safety rules, but you can also deal with that just by making inspections common, cheap, and painless. For the most part, certification processes are really about excluding people from local markets--rampant protectionism by people in power. (Like any institution, you become a part of it, gain its advantages, and then it begins to seem hunkey-dorey, if it didn't already. You drink the cool-aid.)
The way the bar works, for example, is much more of an impediment to good representation than it should be. There are some good things it does, like requiring a minimum continuing legal education and making it impossible for some of the people who steal from clients to represent clients. But it also divvies up the market absurdly, on a state-by-state basis, which artificially keeps the price of lawyers higher than it would otherwise be; and it makes their careers much more tenuous than most careers because of the disciplinary system.
Similarly, the way plumbers are licensed divvies up the market absurdly and artificially inflates prices. On the upside, it tends to mean that licensed plumbers at least know how things are supposed to be done and that they have an incentive (keeping their license) to do it the right way. But it costs everyone a fortune.
There's some stuff you could do intelligently on the software side--you could just have a test in a couple of programming languages or concepts to show basic competency--but the idea of requiring a certification with training is nothing short of ridiculous. It's just shooting money to a company that manages the cert process. Seriously, if you want people to not learn a subject, the surest way to do that is to require them to take a class in it. Think about the difference between student participation in optional classes and core classes.
Well. As a last resort.
1) Change all of your user data that you can. Edit your profile so that all of the data is either blank, or not yours at all.
2) Edit your age down to below 13 years old. This may kick in automatic account privacy settings.
3) If none of this works, then look at the TOS and find things that they don't want you to do. (ie, Wikipedia freaks out if you mention suing them on any forum. A TOS might make it a violation to badmouth the parent company, or to solicit other users. You might think of creating a couple of throwaway accounts, and getting into a royal flamewar with your invisible clones. Call them really bad names. Threaten to sue them.)
4) Do not let number three go into the realm of anything illegal. Don't post porn in public fora. You simply want to make yourself unwelcome at this location.
This may actually be a felony. (I.e. it is arguably a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act, limiting the use of a computer to that which is authorized, IIRC).