Just this week I was looking for a cellphone game to waste some time while waiting around, and the interface was almost completely useless. For reference this is the Verizon Get-It-Now network. The categories - and there are many of them - aren't what you see at online gaming stores or sites, plus if a game falls into two categories it's still only listed in one place. There is no search feature to find out if the game you want is even offered, forcing you to look through every catergory since it might be in a different one than you expect.
Plus who is writing the descriptions for these games? They tell you almost nothing about them, and since the trial version is usually $2 to $4 it's a pretty big expense just to see if you even like the game. A screenshot at the very least would be extremely helpful, but perhaps a 5 second demo clip, or even a [gasp!] free 10 minute trial would entice people to buy more games since it wouldn't be such a shot in the dark.
Also I don't know about what other carriers offer but I just don't understand how the widely popular PopCap games aren't offered. I believe they license to Microsoft, but either way someone is missing out on a lucrative phone game market on that end. I think popcap games would be perfect for a phone - quick, colorful, insanely addictive, and completely a temporary distraction, easy to pick up and no need to desperately save your place.
Who knows? Maybe all of those games and more ARE available right now, but I'll never know because I'm never going to pay $4 just to find out if SuperUltraMegaShapeBlaster is something I'd like to play.
While your 3 points were indeed informative I find the moderation of your post as "Informative" kind of ironic giving that you admit in the last few lines that you're withholding your true inferences.;)
BTW: for anyone else who cares to connect the dots, jbeaupre's point that the spyed-upon covnersations are referred to as "communications" + they presumably may not fall under (phone) wiretapping laws + the recent revelation that AT&T likely set up a massive internet tap for the NSA points to his likely un-spoken conclusion: through a simple technical wording loophole the NSA is massively spying on internet communications without warrants. Sorry for the run-on sentence.
Yea. It was so unexpected too. No one could have foreseen that I'd use this argument or that it'd work.
What are you talking about? You didn't make an argument, nor did it "work" you haven't proven anything past making a statement that a nuclear terrorist attack will most likely result in more restrictions on our freedoms. Um, yeah, it likely will, but my point is that this is not desirable, nor neccesarily an effective strategy. If your point is merely to say that the government can be counted upon to overreact and restrict freedoms in the face of terrorist attacks, then bravo you have stated what amoutns to the obvious. and you have still managed to completely ignore this challange I gave you. If you don't feel like answering it then why are you even still responding other than to troll? Here it is again, feel free to provide a reasoned argument instead of "I said something, not even necessarily on topic, therefore I'm right."
"Now for an encore please explain how a nuclear terrorist event would justify a national ID card become mandatory to own and carry at all times under penalty of arrest, along with random soviet/nazi style "papers please" spot checks for them." - I'm not asking if you think this will happen, I'm asking why you think it would be justified. Justified - as in the correct response that would lead to the desired outcome of preventing such attacks.
OTOH, are you saying that in the wake of such an attack, that the freedom-restricting response is going to be a real surprise. For anyone?
No, I don't think it will be a surprise, mainly because the government - Bush admin especially - has already demonstrated after 9-11 that it is going to overreact and pump out bad legislation in an effort to seem like it is solving the problem when in fact prudence would suggest taking a bit more time and crafting a soilution that works and also doesn't reduce freedom. And you quoted a huge block of my response and somehow drew from that I was saying we would be surprised by this. did you read that paragraph? I was saying this and only this - such draconian measures will not effectively stop such a large scale terrorist attack as the nuclear scenario you proposed. I neither said nor implied anything in that entire paragraph about anyone being surprised at the response such an attack would provoke. I am begining to think you're trying to argue some completely different point about the repressive nature of government. Well duh! Governments increase their power when given the opportuinty, however it seems the public needs to start thinking for themselves and not accept the reasons they are being given for these power grabs because they are patently false and can be shown to be ineffective measures against anything other than controlling the population.
The point is that terrible tragedies and surprise attacks happen. The response is quite predictable. So yes, I think most people would have expected it given the circumstances. Well then you are more cynical than most people I know. Sure, it's easy now to say we all expected the government to flip out and restrict liberties, but I don't think half a decade or so (or more) before 9-11 people would have truly believed that we'd all just roll over and let it happen. Hell people are still cheering it on to the tune of "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear." A statment which itself overlooks the fact that one has already given up their liberty if the only thing you're worried about is whether or not you did something wrong. It shouldn't matter that I have nothing to hide, it still doesn't justify the government poking its nose into every miniscule detail of our lives. And yes, it does create a chilling effect. What if you jsut aren't sure abotu something? What if you want to go peacefully protest some bad piece of legislation but you fear being rounded up and carted off to jail for a few days? Now instead of petitioning your government and letting it be heard that people disagree with this po
You glossed over the entire point of the post to bring up an unrelated mushroom cloud scenario. Brilliant! You have done just like the Bush admin and shifted the conversation from an actual debate on policy to a fear-mongering nuke scenario. Now for an encore please explain how a nuclear terrorist event would justify a national ID card become mandatory to own and carry at all times under penalty of arrest, along with random soviet/nazi style "papers please" spot checks for them.
Are you seriously saying that a group that is able to acquire and orchestrate a nuclear detonation would not have the smarts and capability to forge, or acquire professionally forged, National ID cards? Come on now. There is so much planning and effort that would have to go into getting a nuke, concealing it, transporting it into Manhattan or DC (your example targets) and not being caught at any of these steps and you really think the thing that's gonna trip this group up is someone having a smeary faked ID card at a checkpoint? HA! Get real. Mandatory ID cards will not stop mega-terror events, they only stop the little guys who can be (and are) detected and caught perfectly well using current measures without resorting to clamping down the freedoms of 300 million other people.
And getting back to your original rebuttle, no, I still don't think most people ('anyone' was too broad a term for your pedantic nature I suppose) would have believed the Patriot act with all its nefarious original clauses would have passed. National Security Letters without judicial oversight? Searching of public library records? Automatic gag orders on all who see the warrants which also blocked them from questioning the legality or legitimacy of them? No, these are freedom stifling bits that any redblooded American would have cried foul against back in '95. It wasn't until a terrible tragedy occurred and then politicians whipped up so much frenzy about terrorists that the public was blinded by fear and the congress did pretty much anything to look like they were doing something about it, throwing to the wind their oath to uphold the Constituion in the process. We can fight terrorists (terrorism cannot be fought, it is a method of fighting, an abstract term) and still retain our essential liberties, these are not incompatible.
They shouldn't have the same rights as individuals if they cannot express the same social responsibility.
Agreed. Moreover the point I like to make is that corporations are rarely - if ever! - punished in the same way as an individual. When a corporation is caught breaking a law - say dumping toxic chemicals into a lake - they are usually fined, have to clean up the mess, and maybe the exec who ok'd it gets some jail time. But nothing has changed really, another exec could authorize the same behavior and if the dollar cost of the penalty is less than the value gained by the illegal act then it is in fact in the coroporation's favor to do it again.
Now an individual person who was caught committing the exact same crime might be fined and imprisoned for years! This A) effectively removes the person from society entirely, and B) nearly ensures that the person has a very limited effectiveness after release since many companies won't hire convicted felons, etc.
The problem here is that the corporation is not only getting all the advantages of being a person, but it totally escapes the disadvantages of legal punishment. Until a corporation can be "put in jail" by, say suspending/revoking its charter for the length of the jailterm, then there will always be a huge disparity between the rights of a corporation and the rights of an individual. I say if corporations want to have the same legal standing then they need to have the same standing across the board, including the way the justice system treats them as an entity.
Now of course this is unpopular for many reasons, if Ford Motor Co were suddenly convicted of a jailable offense then tens to hundreds of thousands of people would be without jobs during the charter suspension, and could cause huge economic problems. So this is not something that has an easy solution, but I think there is certainly a lot more that can be done then simply fining corporations. A person fears breaking the law because the sentence will remove a sginificant part of their useful (and limited) lifetime, a corporation can not only afford massive fines, but it can survive in the red for decades and is near immortal! Which means, yeah sure, the company on paper my not be profitable, but the execs and workers are still getting paychecks in the meantime so there's really no fear there. (The fear-of-law-as-a-deterrant argument to be settled in another debate!)
When the legal penalties do the same level of damage for the same crimes to a corporation as they would to an individual, then we will see more social responsibilty from them.
I've carried a state ID for over 20 years, and I've never had anyone ask to see my papers.
This would be where the proverbial 'slippery slope" argument comes in. Sure, the administrations for the last 20 years haven't mandated such a thing, but what about the administration 20 years from now? Do you trust them too? It probably won't take much more than another terrorist attack on even half the scale of 9-11 plus a ready-to-grab-more-power administration to switch on the emergency legislation that will mandate having an ID at all times and random spot checks to prove your identity. That's the point, just because it's not being abused now, doesn't mean it won't be in the future.
Now as to this point: Once you cross state lines, your ID is no longer familiar to those who may want to look at it (airport ticket counter, liquor store cashier, hotel clerk, police officer, EMT) and thus becomes easier to forge. What makes you think that having a single ID card to fake would make that any harder? Now all you're doing is getting rid of the crappy forgeries. It's like using antibacterial agents that kill only 99.8% of the bacteria. The other 0.2% survive and repopulate with stronger immunity. In lots of states they just plain won't accept IDs from halfway across the country, simply because they don't know what it's supposed to look like. And also most liquor stores (all?) have a book distributed by the federal government with an example of each state ID so they can be checked. (This was actually a problem for me in Pittsburgh in college when MA updated their IDs 6 months ahead of schedule and the bar book no longer matched what I carried.) Now forgers have a single point of entry for creating a fake ID accepted everywhere. Although I grant that new anti-counterfitting techniques are getting extremely intricate - take a look at the new $10 bill, that orange miasma on the back is actually thousands of tiny swirl lines. Still, the main point is: if the infrastructure of the national ID is put in place, it is ripe for abuse by a government we cannot currently imagine. Would anyone in 1995 have belived that in 10 years the USA PATRIOT Act would be allowed to pass? A nationally unified ID may be useful, but with that legislation there needs to be an unalterable provision that says it will never be mandatory to carry under penalty of arrest, and generally cannot be used in a "papers please" way. Same as with all the other abused laws: if the politicians tell you the law "will never be used like that" but refuse to encode that limitation into the law, then it's likely that absue is part of their intention.
Instead, go ahead and boot into a command line and delete WgaTray.exe and the dll file out of windows/system32 and that will take care of it.
This technique will work fine until in SP5 or Vista they tie it to some core system DLL and cripple all your dirves if it's not found.;)
For those that are scoring along at home, when the slashdot crowd warned that Microsoft's statement that "Windows Genuine Advantage won't be adversely affecting unlicensed copies" needs a big 'Yet!' added to it, well that 'yet' just happened. Phase 2: Simply report the offending IP back to MS for "account processing" RIAA style. Phase 3: Profit!
The TankChair won't necessarily go up and down stairs (though I bet it handles wide outdoor concrete steps just fine) but it is the best offroad wheelchair solution I've ever seen. This guy built it for his wife to be able to go hiking with her family after she was paralyzed in an accident. Kudos to his unwaivering effort and a successful solution!
FYI: I found this on the web last week and have no affiliation with the site.
Oh, and while the videos are very cool, let's try not to kill this guy's bandwidth. Perhaps someone with experience setting them up can post a reply with a coral cache or other mirror to prevent any slashdotting. I'd rather his money go to helping other people get these chairs than to a bunch of nerds hogging bandwidth.;)
I hate to say it but mod parent AC up. It is not at all hypocritical to say certain behavior (like I dunno, smoking or drinking alcohol) is not allowed before age 18, but after age 18/21 such behavios IS allowed. That's not being hypocritical, that's assigning rights according to a meaure of maturity - you can argue whether simply aging a year is a useful measure as a seperate issue.
The GP poster also implied that the law allowing those with proper gun permits to actually carry their weapons somehow promotes the use of guns. In that case the friggin US Constitution "promotes the use of guns" by making it a right for all citizens to bear arms. So laws that help clarify and regulate that right are somehow promoting gun use? Technically such laws are inhibiting that right by putting more restrictions on it. Mod down GP post, they were close, but no cigar.
Given the choice of inferior products with greater risk, or superior products with little or no risk, societies always choose the inferior path.
While your observation seems to be generally true it completely ignores the reason for this behavior, which usually somes down to cost & convenience. Society is not choosing the riskiest and most inferior path because that is somehow a Good Thing, it "chooses" these paths because the riskier/inferior option is often cheaper and/or more convenient. That is the problem. People in general do not understand how to do a risk analysis or long term cost analysis on their everyday choices. We want it now and for $10 less than that guy paid for it, regardless of whether that is the best choice in the long run.
This is the same reason many consumer products have woefully short functional lives, they are made with thin and cheap plastics and designed to take the minimum amount of abuse. You want a good quality product? Well, it will cost you more, pehaps twice as much as the Walmart version, but if you look at expected lifetimes and quality etc you'll see the higher quality product will last longer and eventually end up saving you money when it doesn't have to be replaced. The same goes for these new methods of payment, people want to be able to just carry their phone and not six credit cards, they want to be able to swipe the phone over a pad, not have to wait to sign or remember a pin, and they really don't care about what kind of privacy concerns this may raise because they got their instant gratification.
Looking ten years down the road and thinking about what it really means to give the government or a corporation a minutely detailed list of your every transaction is mroe effort than most people care to exert. Society is following the path of least resistance, sloth I suppose, and as the saying goes: Fast, Cheap, Good - pick any two!
For example, something that always gets me is the muon. Identical to the electron in virtually every way (charge, apparent point-like non-structure, lepton) except is has a mass roughly 207 times as great. Why? What does it have 207 times more of than the electron does to make it 207 times more efficient at curving space? What kind of goo is there that makes it 207 times more resistant to acceleration? And if it's truly a fundamental particle, as we suspect for leptons, why 207-point-something?
It nags at me.
Man, and I thought *I* had inane shit bouncing about my head keeping me awake. You, sir, totally win. Good luck with those migraines.;)
Who's talking content? We own the hardware. That includes the remote and the controls on the TV.
Who owns my remote? Me, or the content provider? If I want to change the channel and watch something else, that's my right.
All good points. The problem is that if you buy a TV with this feature enabled it's not simply a matter of working your TV the way you like. With DRM'd music files people have found ways around the DRM, or just broken it completely or convert it to a new format. Usually this consists of one or a few coders reverse-engineering the DRM and then you, the user, download a program to ignore the DRM and/or convert the files. This is a bit different with a TV being a hardware + software solution. So now even if someone reverse engineers this and posts a how-to you're gonna have to do a LOT more than just d/l and run a simple executable with a few clicks. Likely you'll have to do some soldering, flash a ROM, maybe even buy a mod chip and install it. In other words, so much work that they know for sure most users will either just give up and live with it or pay the (extortion) fee. With the barrier set so high they pretty much know it's in their favor.
Until then let's hope that this gets labeled prominently on the new TVs with the feature and Joe Consumer actually votes with his dollar. I can't imagine anyone seeing this "option" and saying 'oh hell yes, that feature is just what I wanted!' Or, more likely, it will not be on the box, or in tiny tiny print in a corner under some random warehouse tracking numbers, and then when people get home and think their remote is broken they will return them en-mass and perhaps file a lawyer-feeding class action suit where Phillips agrees to use size 10 fonts and everyone gets a 5% coupon on a new Phillips TV. Rediculous, but I think unless this stupid feature somehow becomes standard across every TV no one is going to pay extra money to remove an unwanted feature that isn't present on a set of comparable price from a different manufacturer.
The people who were willing to sit around for ages either have no self-respect, or need the job too badly.
Wait, how can someone need the job TOO badly? People often have obligations that need to be met, car loan/insurance, rent/mortage, FOOD. If you were laid off from let's say one of the recent big tech company mergers and after three months of applying all around you'd found that no tech-related company within an affordable commuting distance was hiring then why wouldn't you be willing to commit an extra hour waiting in a lobby to possibly get a job so you could stave off eviction, or hell, eat something other than ramen noodles that week? Yes, dignity and self-respect are important but let's face it, people do have NEEDS that can only be met with money, preferably from gainful employment. Unfortunately not everyone is lucky enough to have a network of friends or family that can help them over such rough patches, so yeah, this is a completely likely scenario. And in the grand scheme of things hanging out for an extra hour to wait for an interview barely registers on the degrading treatment to get a job scale.
So yeah, this job they're willing to wait for could be their last choice, but it could also be their A+ #1 choice. I was plenty willing to wait for a few hours if it meant getting to do the work I do now with military robots, that's not lack of self-respect, that's commitment to one's goals.
With software-freq-hopping, it won't be a concern.
As cheap as adding microprocessors and the like to devices is, it IS still an increased cost. You're advocating that we mandate across the board use of ONLY freq-hopping radios in all devices. As an engineer I can tell you this is A) impossible - some applications simply cannot support this feature, B) how are we going to retrofit every transmitting device that exists today? That is a MASSIVE effort and cost and C) how will you mandate this switch and enforce it? Oh that's right, you'd need a large agency with the power to actually compel people to enact the switch to freq-hop devices where non-hopping devices are too expensive or too bulky/complicated for their device. Honestly man, I'm Libertarian too, but you can't just scream "take down this agency" at every chance and expect a workable solution from the market instantly, or at all in some cases. You're completely against government regulation, I get that, but who in the hell is going to mandate and enforce the switch to 100% freq-hop radios? If even a few people DON'T use them then yes, there will be ham radio operators who are blasting out whole portions of the local spectrum. And yes, I use normal data radios and multipoint freq-hop radios in my work as a robotics engineer, and even with freq-hopping if there is a large source of interference in one section of the spectrum it will adversely affect performance. Adding the ability to sense and route around that in the radio increases costs and complexity again. Yes, bandwidth is being wasted, and the American public is not really benefitting from the ways most of it is being rented out, but let's fix those issues for what they are and not try to push some agenda that is unworkable and will cause similar problems. Oh and the Somalia comparison only works to a point, check out the population and technology densities of the US vs Somalia and realize that above a certain level anarchic spectrum allocation and use WILL cease to function reliably. Now apply the same scenario to Japan which is even more tech-dense and uses massive amounts of the spectrum and see that the argument wouldn't stand. And no, a self-regulating industry body won't work either unless adherence is cumpulsory and then guess what? You're back to an unaccountable agency forcing regulations on businesses, except now it is controlled by the top guns in that business instead of the government.
I like your solution, it helps fund the patent office - which many admit is a source of some of the problems - and also removes the incentive to use a patent portfolio soley for litigation income. Nice and direct, and yeah, therefore unlikely to ever be used.
Ok, troll, why don't *you* try to pass the patent bar?
Yes, I'm a troll clearly because I have come up with something I wanted to patent and found that to patent it would cost nearly as much in lawyer/patent company consultation fees as would starting a business from scratch! The point is not that patent attornies aren't needed at all, there are valid times to use the legal system to protect a patent. The problem is that so much lawyering has been introduced into the system that right off the bat an engineer with a detailed production-level diagram of a new and novel invention can't fill out a patent form along with that diagram and have a reasonable expectation of getting the patent, or having the patent actually protect the invention. Patent applications need to be done a certain way, I expect one to have to do some research, read a book or two, but you should still be able to use the system without having to pay thousands of dollars to a third party. Having looked into it I have found - and in the past others here have agreed - that this is simply not the case.
This is a good thing: Every time some little company pisses off some big player like Microsoft, IBM or Apple with some inane patent thing, it pushes the big companies (and their army of Washington lobbyists) one step closer to realizing just how screwed up the American patent system is.
And you really think that if it's these huge corporations that finally push for patent reform it will be a kind of reform that puts the small inventor on equal footing with them? Everytime this sort of patent suit comes up someone posts "Oh goody, when the big players feel the sting they will change the system!" This is kind of a circular defeatist argument. You admit that the status quo won't change until the big companies that in reality hold the power push for change, but at the same time think that change will benefit anyone other than those big companies? The attitude needs to be that the patent system is broken, we ALL are feeling it and WE THE PEOPLE whom it is supposed to serve, not "we the corporations" need to revise it to work for everyone.
And more than anything else what the patent system needs is a way to successfully use it without having to spend thousands to millions of dollars on third party consulatations and lawyers. Forget all the actual lawsuits you're seeing, those come after a patent is granted; the fact is just to apply for and receive a patent you practically have to feed a family of lawyers. What a joke. I don't need a personal attorney with me at the RMV to successfully apply for a new drivers license, why should I need to do the same just to use the patent system with any chance of success up front?
Efficiency is not directly correlated to emissions. Though they're both ideals pushed for by environmentalists and conservationists, they often oppose each other.
In most cases better efficiency results in fewer emmisions. This is true of almost any system. Why? Because running the system for the same amount of time now consumes less fuel and therefore expels fewer emissions. Explain to me how getting 40 mpg from your car does not result in less emissions than getting 20 mpg from your car assuming you're driving the about the same amount. And no one I know of drives proportionally more linearly with costs just because it's suddenly cheaper to drive more, their transportation routine (work, school, etc) is mostly set.
True, new activity would be present. However, most of it would be because of higher overhead costs for companies. They then raise their prices to account for it, and inflation ensues. Also, higher energy costs hurt the little guy, even if he has kept his job this far.
Um, and gas increasing by $1/gallon in 18 months (not there yet but soon!) isn't an increase in energy costs? Home heating - be it from natural gas or oil - increasing by 30% in one year isn't an increase in costs? The US dependance on foriegn oil sources requiring us to play policeman in the middle east to ensure a ready supply of a limited resource and costing us nearly a trillion dollars per year in military spending to do so isn't an increase in costs? Our current practices aren't sustainable and they are leading to massive cost increases and inflation NOW. How does changing to renewable/alternative/or just plain local energy sources make that any worse? Self-sufficiency used to be part of the American mindset, relying on massive amounts of energy imports and huge deficits funded by other countries is not a valid method of being self-sufficient. I'm not advocating pure isolationism, but we're well past any sort of balance between relying on our own sources of energy and those of other countries.
BTW, how does the military lose? What the hell are you talking about.
S/he was talking about the fact that if we don't need oil from the middle east we have fewer political reasons to be deploying such huge forces there. Thus the trillions of dollars of military spending can be scaled back, ergo military would lose, assuming it actually allowed such scaling back to occur. The shift from Cold War to War Against Terror is an example of how a new threat is found/manufactured to keep justifying the huge costs of the military/industrial complex. Those industries are in it for profit, not altruism, they will push to keep their industry alive, not rejoice in closing down because it might mean more peace in the world. However in theory if you reduce the need to have the largest standing military in the world with the most bases in the most countries, then you can also reduce military spending, whether or not the establishment would allow that to happen is a different issue.
just as superbowl beer commercials and Zima are proof that keeping people interested in old drugs costs a lot of money.
You're a bit off base with that last sentence there. You're confusing branding with the wider market of the generic product itself. Budweiser is not spending millions of dollars on advertising to keep people intersted in drinking beer, they're doing it to keep people interested in drinking Budweiser! Even if beer commercials went off the air tomorrow you wouldn't see a significant drop in the beer drinking population. It's still going to be the alcohol of choice for many people because as compared to hard alcohol it has a more pleasant taste, and is also relatively easy to produce - including in one's own home with nothing more than some clean carboys and some yeast and wort.
The other question that is begged by the GP poster's circular argument that alcohol and ciggarettes are legal because the government never made them illegal, is why were the other substances banned in the early 20th century not also kept legal? People don't remember that in the early 1900s just about anyone could walk into the local pharmacy and pick up some cocaine or heroine. Indeed, Coca-Cola was so named for containing cocoa - a cocaine product. But the government decided these were "bad" but alcohol and tobacco were "good". There are tomes written on the how's and why's of this but a lot of it comes down to tradition, tobacco and beer had been staples for centuries - millenia in the case of beer - whereas these other drugs were somewhat newer in the states(opium doesn't fit that statement I know). There's also the potency issue - much harder to overdose on booze and tobacco as compared to stronger substances. (sure you could die from one night of drinking, but it would take you a while and your body may pass out before you can ingest too much, whereas with pure cocaine a single large dose could kill you right away)
Tell you what, why don't you try applying that logic to words like "nigger", "wop", "kike", "chink", and so on. Get on WoW and complain about Blizzard being "jew cheap" about loot. Does the idea make you uncomfortable? It should. It makes me uncomfortable writing about it. But if using "gay" in a derogatory manner doesn't make you just as uncomfortable then you've got a problem.
Wow, just shooting from the hip aren't you. You just assumed from the start I was trying to advocate the use of gay as a derogatory term. did you even read my whole comment? I specifically said that in the given context not only was it not being used as a derogatory term for homosexuals, but that it had a different meaning altogether unrelated to sexual orientation. Why can't people understand that? I even gave you two examples of other words - 'wicked', and 'mad' - and how regional slang uses them to mean 'very' but without any relation to the other meanings of those words. I was pointing out that in the context it was being used, the term 'gay' meant stupid or perhpas absurd, but not in any relation to someone being gay. Or that the person using it that way thinks gays are stupid or absurd. If you ever encounter someone who says something like "that rule is gay" and you confront them on it they'll always point out they don't mean it as a derogatory homosexual remark, and not because they're just some backpedaling racist, most kids don't even realize someone would take offense at it because to them it's wholly unrelated in their mind. It's unrelated to gays and gay culture! You personally seem to to think that because they use gay to mean 'absurd' they are therefore making some larger political statement that they believe all homosexuals to be absurd, but it's not the case. The racial terms you listed above are purely racial slurs (except for chink, see your other replies). So if I say "there's a chink in your defenses! we will surely destroy you!" Does that mean I am implying there is either an actual asian in your defenses and that is why they are weak, because I believe asians to be weak? You don't concede that it's entirely possible the word could have an alternate non-deragatory meaning? For fuck's sake, I know gay rhode island kids who themselves have exclaimed "that's wicked gay!" and they weren't talking about their boyfriend.
As to the going on WoW and complaing about something being "jew cheap" you're not even giving some alternate meaning of jew there, you're using it as a classic deragatory slur against jews and the falsehood they are miserly, so how does that even work as an example? In addition you're trying to take words which have exclusively been used as slurs (jew, nigger, wop) and sticking them into a context in which they cannot fit because of the huge stigma attached to those words. My point also was based on the fact that gay has been used widely in our recent cultural history with a completely different meaning that has no such stigma. So just because 'gay' or some other word may be transmutable, that doesn't mean any old slur with a history behind it could be. I'm not gay bashing here, I'm not advocating racism, it's stupid and useless and based on utter falsehoods. But for a group of people to change the meaning of a word and use it to represent themselves and somehow think they then have exclusive control over the future evolution of that word is a ludicrous assertion. Language is an amorphus thing, and it will continue to change, it IS POSSIBLE for two words to have DIFFERENT AND UNRELATED meanings.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus who is writing the descriptions for these games? They tell you almost nothing about them, and since the trial version is usually $2 to $4 it's a pretty big expense just to see if you even like the game. A screenshot at the very least would be extremely helpful, but perhaps a 5 second demo clip, or even a [gasp!] free 10 minute trial would entice people to buy more games since it wouldn't be such a shot in the dark.
Also I don't know about what other carriers offer but I just don't understand how the widely popular PopCap games aren't offered. I believe they license to Microsoft, but either way someone is missing out on a lucrative phone game market on that end. I think popcap games would be perfect for a phone - quick, colorful, insanely addictive, and completely a temporary distraction, easy to pick up and no need to desperately save your place.
Who knows? Maybe all of those games and more ARE available right now, but I'll never know because I'm never going to pay $4 just to find out if SuperUltraMegaShapeBlaster is something I'd like to play.
BTW: for anyone else who cares to connect the dots, jbeaupre's point that the spyed-upon covnersations are referred to as "communications" + they presumably may not fall under (phone) wiretapping laws + the recent revelation that AT&T likely set up a massive internet tap for the NSA points to his likely un-spoken conclusion: through a simple technical wording loophole the NSA is massively spying on internet communications without warrants.
Sorry for the run-on sentence.
What are you talking about? You didn't make an argument, nor did it "work" you haven't proven anything past making a statement that a nuclear terrorist attack will most likely result in more restrictions on our freedoms. Um, yeah, it likely will, but my point is that this is not desirable, nor neccesarily an effective strategy. If your point is merely to say that the government can be counted upon to overreact and restrict freedoms in the face of terrorist attacks, then bravo you have stated what amoutns to the obvious. and you have still managed to completely ignore this challange I gave you. If you don't feel like answering it then why are you even still responding other than to troll? Here it is again, feel free to provide a reasoned argument instead of "I said something, not even necessarily on topic, therefore I'm right."
"Now for an encore please explain how a nuclear terrorist event would justify a national ID card become mandatory to own and carry at all times under penalty of arrest, along with random soviet/nazi style "papers please" spot checks for them." - I'm not asking if you think this will happen, I'm asking why you think it would be justified. Justified - as in the correct response that would lead to the desired outcome of preventing such attacks.
OTOH, are you saying that in the wake of such an attack, that the freedom-restricting response is going to be a real surprise. For anyone?
No, I don't think it will be a surprise, mainly because the government - Bush admin especially - has already demonstrated after 9-11 that it is going to overreact and pump out bad legislation in an effort to seem like it is solving the problem when in fact prudence would suggest taking a bit more time and crafting a soilution that works and also doesn't reduce freedom. And you quoted a huge block of my response and somehow drew from that I was saying we would be surprised by this. did you read that paragraph? I was saying this and only this - such draconian measures will not effectively stop such a large scale terrorist attack as the nuclear scenario you proposed. I neither said nor implied anything in that entire paragraph about anyone being surprised at the response such an attack would provoke. I am begining to think you're trying to argue some completely different point about the repressive nature of government. Well duh! Governments increase their power when given the opportuinty, however it seems the public needs to start thinking for themselves and not accept the reasons they are being given for these power grabs because they are patently false and can be shown to be ineffective measures against anything other than controlling the population.
The point is that terrible tragedies and surprise attacks happen. The response is quite predictable. So yes, I think most people would have expected it given the circumstances.
Well then you are more cynical than most people I know. Sure, it's easy now to say we all expected the government to flip out and restrict liberties, but I don't think half a decade or so (or more) before 9-11 people would have truly believed that we'd all just roll over and let it happen. Hell people are still cheering it on to the tune of "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear." A statment which itself overlooks the fact that one has already given up their liberty if the only thing you're worried about is whether or not you did something wrong. It shouldn't matter that I have nothing to hide, it still doesn't justify the government poking its nose into every miniscule detail of our lives. And yes, it does create a chilling effect. What if you jsut aren't sure abotu something? What if you want to go peacefully protest some bad piece of legislation but you fear being rounded up and carted off to jail for a few days? Now instead of petitioning your government and letting it be heard that people disagree with this po
Are you seriously saying that a group that is able to acquire and orchestrate a nuclear detonation would not have the smarts and capability to forge, or acquire professionally forged, National ID cards? Come on now. There is so much planning and effort that would have to go into getting a nuke, concealing it, transporting it into Manhattan or DC (your example targets) and not being caught at any of these steps and you really think the thing that's gonna trip this group up is someone having a smeary faked ID card at a checkpoint? HA! Get real. Mandatory ID cards will not stop mega-terror events, they only stop the little guys who can be (and are) detected and caught perfectly well using current measures without resorting to clamping down the freedoms of 300 million other people.
And getting back to your original rebuttle, no, I still don't think most people ('anyone' was too broad a term for your pedantic nature I suppose) would have believed the Patriot act with all its nefarious original clauses would have passed. National Security Letters without judicial oversight? Searching of public library records? Automatic gag orders on all who see the warrants which also blocked them from questioning the legality or legitimacy of them? No, these are freedom stifling bits that any redblooded American would have cried foul against back in '95. It wasn't until a terrible tragedy occurred and then politicians whipped up so much frenzy about terrorists that the public was blinded by fear and the congress did pretty much anything to look like they were doing something about it, throwing to the wind their oath to uphold the Constituion in the process. We can fight terrorists (terrorism cannot be fought, it is a method of fighting, an abstract term) and still retain our essential liberties, these are not incompatible.
Agreed. Moreover the point I like to make is that corporations are rarely - if ever! - punished in the same way as an individual. When a corporation is caught breaking a law - say dumping toxic chemicals into a lake - they are usually fined, have to clean up the mess, and maybe the exec who ok'd it gets some jail time. But nothing has changed really, another exec could authorize the same behavior and if the dollar cost of the penalty is less than the value gained by the illegal act then it is in fact in the coroporation's favor to do it again.
Now an individual person who was caught committing the exact same crime might be fined and imprisoned for years! This A) effectively removes the person from society entirely, and B) nearly ensures that the person has a very limited effectiveness after release since many companies won't hire convicted felons, etc.
The problem here is that the corporation is not only getting all the advantages of being a person, but it totally escapes the disadvantages of legal punishment. Until a corporation can be "put in jail" by, say suspending/revoking its charter for the length of the jailterm, then there will always be a huge disparity between the rights of a corporation and the rights of an individual. I say if corporations want to have the same legal standing then they need to have the same standing across the board, including the way the justice system treats them as an entity.
Now of course this is unpopular for many reasons, if Ford Motor Co were suddenly convicted of a jailable offense then tens to hundreds of thousands of people would be without jobs during the charter suspension, and could cause huge economic problems. So this is not something that has an easy solution, but I think there is certainly a lot more that can be done then simply fining corporations. A person fears breaking the law because the sentence will remove a sginificant part of their useful (and limited) lifetime, a corporation can not only afford massive fines, but it can survive in the red for decades and is near immortal! Which means, yeah sure, the company on paper my not be profitable, but the execs and workers are still getting paychecks in the meantime so there's really no fear there. (The fear-of-law-as-a-deterrant argument to be settled in another debate!)
When the legal penalties do the same level of damage for the same crimes to a corporation as they would to an individual, then we will see more social responsibilty from them.
This would be where the proverbial 'slippery slope" argument comes in. Sure, the administrations for the last 20 years haven't mandated such a thing, but what about the administration 20 years from now? Do you trust them too? It probably won't take much more than another terrorist attack on even half the scale of 9-11 plus a ready-to-grab-more-power administration to switch on the emergency legislation that will mandate having an ID at all times and random spot checks to prove your identity. That's the point, just because it's not being abused now, doesn't mean it won't be in the future.
Now as to this point: Once you cross state lines, your ID is no longer familiar to those who may want to look at it (airport ticket counter, liquor store cashier, hotel clerk, police officer, EMT) and thus becomes easier to forge.
What makes you think that having a single ID card to fake would make that any harder? Now all you're doing is getting rid of the crappy forgeries. It's like using antibacterial agents that kill only 99.8% of the bacteria. The other 0.2% survive and repopulate with stronger immunity. In lots of states they just plain won't accept IDs from halfway across the country, simply because they don't know what it's supposed to look like. And also most liquor stores (all?) have a book distributed by the federal government with an example of each state ID so they can be checked. (This was actually a problem for me in Pittsburgh in college when MA updated their IDs 6 months ahead of schedule and the bar book no longer matched what I carried.) Now forgers have a single point of entry for creating a fake ID accepted everywhere. Although I grant that new anti-counterfitting techniques are getting extremely intricate - take a look at the new $10 bill, that orange miasma on the back is actually thousands of tiny swirl lines. Still, the main point is: if the infrastructure of the national ID is put in place, it is ripe for abuse by a government we cannot currently imagine. Would anyone in 1995 have belived that in 10 years the USA PATRIOT Act would be allowed to pass? A nationally unified ID may be useful, but with that legislation there needs to be an unalterable provision that says it will never be mandatory to carry under penalty of arrest, and generally cannot be used in a "papers please" way. Same as with all the other abused laws: if the politicians tell you the law "will never be used like that" but refuse to encode that limitation into the law, then it's likely that absue is part of their intention.
This technique will work fine until in SP5 or Vista they tie it to some core system DLL and cripple all your dirves if it's not found. ;)
For those that are scoring along at home, when the slashdot crowd warned that Microsoft's statement that "Windows Genuine Advantage won't be adversely affecting unlicensed copies" needs a big 'Yet!' added to it, well that 'yet' just happened.
Phase 2: Simply report the offending IP back to MS for "account processing" RIAA style.
Phase 3: Profit!
FYI: I found this on the web last week and have no affiliation with the site.
Oh, and while the videos are very cool, let's try not to kill this guy's bandwidth. Perhaps someone with experience setting them up can post a reply with a coral cache or other mirror to prevent any slashdotting. I'd rather his money go to helping other people get these chairs than to a bunch of nerds hogging bandwidth. ;)
The GP poster also implied that the law allowing those with proper gun permits to actually carry their weapons somehow promotes the use of guns. In that case the friggin US Constitution "promotes the use of guns" by making it a right for all citizens to bear arms. So laws that help clarify and regulate that right are somehow promoting gun use? Technically such laws are inhibiting that right by putting more restrictions on it. Mod down GP post, they were close, but no cigar.
While your observation seems to be generally true it completely ignores the reason for this behavior, which usually somes down to cost & convenience. Society is not choosing the riskiest and most inferior path because that is somehow a Good Thing, it "chooses" these paths because the riskier/inferior option is often cheaper and/or more convenient. That is the problem. People in general do not understand how to do a risk analysis or long term cost analysis on their everyday choices. We want it now and for $10 less than that guy paid for it, regardless of whether that is the best choice in the long run.
This is the same reason many consumer products have woefully short functional lives, they are made with thin and cheap plastics and designed to take the minimum amount of abuse. You want a good quality product? Well, it will cost you more, pehaps twice as much as the Walmart version, but if you look at expected lifetimes and quality etc you'll see the higher quality product will last longer and eventually end up saving you money when it doesn't have to be replaced. The same goes for these new methods of payment, people want to be able to just carry their phone and not six credit cards, they want to be able to swipe the phone over a pad, not have to wait to sign or remember a pin, and they really don't care about what kind of privacy concerns this may raise because they got their instant gratification.
Looking ten years down the road and thinking about what it really means to give the government or a corporation a minutely detailed list of your every transaction is mroe effort than most people care to exert. Society is following the path of least resistance, sloth I suppose, and as the saying goes: Fast, Cheap, Good - pick any two!
Thanks! Damn there's a lot of info on that site. Your mindless link propagation is much appreciated. :)
Man, and I thought *I* had inane shit bouncing about my head keeping me awake. You, sir, totally win. Good luck with those migraines. ;)
All good points. The problem is that if you buy a TV with this feature enabled it's not simply a matter of working your TV the way you like. With DRM'd music files people have found ways around the DRM, or just broken it completely or convert it to a new format. Usually this consists of one or a few coders reverse-engineering the DRM and then you, the user, download a program to ignore the DRM and/or convert the files. This is a bit different with a TV being a hardware + software solution. So now even if someone reverse engineers this and posts a how-to you're gonna have to do a LOT more than just d/l and run a simple executable with a few clicks. Likely you'll have to do some soldering, flash a ROM, maybe even buy a mod chip and install it. In other words, so much work that they know for sure most users will either just give up and live with it or pay the (extortion) fee. With the barrier set so high they pretty much know it's in their favor.
Until then let's hope that this gets labeled prominently on the new TVs with the feature and Joe Consumer actually votes with his dollar. I can't imagine anyone seeing this "option" and saying 'oh hell yes, that feature is just what I wanted!' Or, more likely, it will not be on the box, or in tiny tiny print in a corner under some random warehouse tracking numbers, and then when people get home and think their remote is broken they will return them en-mass and perhaps file a lawyer-feeding class action suit where Phillips agrees to use size 10 fonts and everyone gets a 5% coupon on a new Phillips TV. Rediculous, but I think unless this stupid feature somehow becomes standard across every TV no one is going to pay extra money to remove an unwanted feature that isn't present on a set of comparable price from a different manufacturer.
Ill Peasant: I'm new and improved! I don't want to go on the cart.
Peasant #2: You're not fooling anyone y'know!
Wait, how can someone need the job TOO badly? People often have obligations that need to be met, car loan/insurance, rent/mortage, FOOD. If you were laid off from let's say one of the recent big tech company mergers and after three months of applying all around you'd found that no tech-related company within an affordable commuting distance was hiring then why wouldn't you be willing to commit an extra hour waiting in a lobby to possibly get a job so you could stave off eviction, or hell, eat something other than ramen noodles that week? Yes, dignity and self-respect are important but let's face it, people do have NEEDS that can only be met with money, preferably from gainful employment. Unfortunately not everyone is lucky enough to have a network of friends or family that can help them over such rough patches, so yeah, this is a completely likely scenario. And in the grand scheme of things hanging out for an extra hour to wait for an interview barely registers on the degrading treatment to get a job scale.
So yeah, this job they're willing to wait for could be their last choice, but it could also be their A+ #1 choice. I was plenty willing to wait for a few hours if it meant getting to do the work I do now with military robots, that's not lack of self-respect, that's commitment to one's goals.
As cheap as adding microprocessors and the like to devices is, it IS still an increased cost. You're advocating that we mandate across the board use of ONLY freq-hopping radios in all devices. As an engineer I can tell you this is A) impossible - some applications simply cannot support this feature, B) how are we going to retrofit every transmitting device that exists today? That is a MASSIVE effort and cost and C) how will you mandate this switch and enforce it? Oh that's right, you'd need a large agency with the power to actually compel people to enact the switch to freq-hop devices where non-hopping devices are too expensive or too bulky/complicated for their device. Honestly man, I'm Libertarian too, but you can't just scream "take down this agency" at every chance and expect a workable solution from the market instantly, or at all in some cases. You're completely against government regulation, I get that, but who in the hell is going to mandate and enforce the switch to 100% freq-hop radios? If even a few people DON'T use them then yes, there will be ham radio operators who are blasting out whole portions of the local spectrum. And yes, I use normal data radios and multipoint freq-hop radios in my work as a robotics engineer, and even with freq-hopping if there is a large source of interference in one section of the spectrum it will adversely affect performance. Adding the ability to sense and route around that in the radio increases costs and complexity again. Yes, bandwidth is being wasted, and the American public is not really benefitting from the ways most of it is being rented out, but let's fix those issues for what they are and not try to push some agenda that is unworkable and will cause similar problems. Oh and the Somalia comparison only works to a point, check out the population and technology densities of the US vs Somalia and realize that above a certain level anarchic spectrum allocation and use WILL cease to function reliably. Now apply the same scenario to Japan which is even more tech-dense and uses massive amounts of the spectrum and see that the argument wouldn't stand. And no, a self-regulating industry body won't work either unless adherence is cumpulsory and then guess what? You're back to an unaccountable agency forcing regulations on businesses, except now it is controlled by the top guns in that business instead of the government.
I like your solution, it helps fund the patent office - which many admit is a source of some of the problems - and also removes the incentive to use a patent portfolio soley for litigation income. Nice and direct, and yeah, therefore unlikely to ever be used.
Yes, I'm a troll clearly because I have come up with something I wanted to patent and found that to patent it would cost nearly as much in lawyer/patent company consultation fees as would starting a business from scratch! The point is not that patent attornies aren't needed at all, there are valid times to use the legal system to protect a patent. The problem is that so much lawyering has been introduced into the system that right off the bat an engineer with a detailed production-level diagram of a new and novel invention can't fill out a patent form along with that diagram and have a reasonable expectation of getting the patent, or having the patent actually protect the invention. Patent applications need to be done a certain way, I expect one to have to do some research, read a book or two, but you should still be able to use the system without having to pay thousands of dollars to a third party. Having looked into it I have found - and in the past others here have agreed - that this is simply not the case.
And you really think that if it's these huge corporations that finally push for patent reform it will be a kind of reform that puts the small inventor on equal footing with them? Everytime this sort of patent suit comes up someone posts "Oh goody, when the big players feel the sting they will change the system!" This is kind of a circular defeatist argument. You admit that the status quo won't change until the big companies that in reality hold the power push for change, but at the same time think that change will benefit anyone other than those big companies? The attitude needs to be that the patent system is broken, we ALL are feeling it and WE THE PEOPLE whom it is supposed to serve, not "we the corporations" need to revise it to work for everyone.
And more than anything else what the patent system needs is a way to successfully use it without having to spend thousands to millions of dollars on third party consulatations and lawyers. Forget all the actual lawsuits you're seeing, those come after a patent is granted; the fact is just to apply for and receive a patent you practically have to feed a family of lawyers. What a joke. I don't need a personal attorney with me at the RMV to successfully apply for a new drivers license, why should I need to do the same just to use the patent system with any chance of success up front?
Bingo! A shiny silver dollar for you! Just another example of the establishments wanting to have it both ways.
In most cases better efficiency results in fewer emmisions. This is true of almost any system. Why? Because running the system for the same amount of time now consumes less fuel and therefore expels fewer emissions. Explain to me how getting 40 mpg from your car does not result in less emissions than getting 20 mpg from your car assuming you're driving the about the same amount. And no one I know of drives proportionally more linearly with costs just because it's suddenly cheaper to drive more, their transportation routine (work, school, etc) is mostly set.
True, new activity would be present. However, most of it would be because of higher overhead costs for companies. They then raise their prices to account for it, and inflation ensues. Also, higher energy costs hurt the little guy, even if he has kept his job this far.
Um, and gas increasing by $1/gallon in 18 months (not there yet but soon!) isn't an increase in energy costs? Home heating - be it from natural gas or oil - increasing by 30% in one year isn't an increase in costs? The US dependance on foriegn oil sources requiring us to play policeman in the middle east to ensure a ready supply of a limited resource and costing us nearly a trillion dollars per year in military spending to do so isn't an increase in costs? Our current practices aren't sustainable and they are leading to massive cost increases and inflation NOW. How does changing to renewable/alternative/or just plain local energy sources make that any worse? Self-sufficiency used to be part of the American mindset, relying on massive amounts of energy imports and huge deficits funded by other countries is not a valid method of being self-sufficient. I'm not advocating pure isolationism, but we're well past any sort of balance between relying on our own sources of energy and those of other countries.
BTW, how does the military lose? What the hell are you talking about.
S/he was talking about the fact that if we don't need oil from the middle east we have fewer political reasons to be deploying such huge forces there. Thus the trillions of dollars of military spending can be scaled back, ergo military would lose, assuming it actually allowed such scaling back to occur. The shift from Cold War to War Against Terror is an example of how a new threat is found/manufactured to keep justifying the huge costs of the military/industrial complex. Those industries are in it for profit, not altruism, they will push to keep their industry alive, not rejoice in closing down because it might mean more peace in the world. However in theory if you reduce the need to have the largest standing military in the world with the most bases in the most countries, then you can also reduce military spending, whether or not the establishment would allow that to happen is a different issue.
Whoops! Slip of the keyboard, thanks for the correction though, I was definitely not referring to chocolate.
You're a bit off base with that last sentence there. You're confusing branding with the wider market of the generic product itself. Budweiser is not spending millions of dollars on advertising to keep people intersted in drinking beer, they're doing it to keep people interested in drinking Budweiser! Even if beer commercials went off the air tomorrow you wouldn't see a significant drop in the beer drinking population. It's still going to be the alcohol of choice for many people because as compared to hard alcohol it has a more pleasant taste, and is also relatively easy to produce - including in one's own home with nothing more than some clean carboys and some yeast and wort.
The other question that is begged by the GP poster's circular argument that alcohol and ciggarettes are legal because the government never made them illegal, is why were the other substances banned in the early 20th century not also kept legal? People don't remember that in the early 1900s just about anyone could walk into the local pharmacy and pick up some cocaine or heroine. Indeed, Coca-Cola was so named for containing cocoa - a cocaine product. But the government decided these were "bad" but alcohol and tobacco were "good". There are tomes written on the how's and why's of this but a lot of it comes down to tradition, tobacco and beer had been staples for centuries - millenia in the case of beer - whereas these other drugs were somewhat newer in the states(opium doesn't fit that statement I know). There's also the potency issue - much harder to overdose on booze and tobacco as compared to stronger substances. (sure you could die from one night of drinking, but it would take you a while and your body may pass out before you can ingest too much, whereas with pure cocaine a single large dose could kill you right away)
Wow, just shooting from the hip aren't you. You just assumed from the start I was trying to advocate the use of gay as a derogatory term. did you even read my whole comment? I specifically said that in the given context not only was it not being used as a derogatory term for homosexuals, but that it had a different meaning altogether unrelated to sexual orientation. Why can't people understand that? I even gave you two examples of other words - 'wicked', and 'mad' - and how regional slang uses them to mean 'very' but without any relation to the other meanings of those words. I was pointing out that in the context it was being used, the term 'gay' meant stupid or perhpas absurd, but not in any relation to someone being gay. Or that the person using it that way thinks gays are stupid or absurd. If you ever encounter someone who says something like "that rule is gay" and you confront them on it they'll always point out they don't mean it as a derogatory homosexual remark, and not because they're just some backpedaling racist, most kids don't even realize someone would take offense at it because to them it's wholly unrelated in their mind. It's unrelated to gays and gay culture! You personally seem to to think that because they use gay to mean 'absurd' they are therefore making some larger political statement that they believe all homosexuals to be absurd, but it's not the case. The racial terms you listed above are purely racial slurs (except for chink, see your other replies). So if I say "there's a chink in your defenses! we will surely destroy you!" Does that mean I am implying there is either an actual asian in your defenses and that is why they are weak, because I believe asians to be weak? You don't concede that it's entirely possible the word could have an alternate non-deragatory meaning? For fuck's sake, I know gay rhode island kids who themselves have exclaimed "that's wicked gay!" and they weren't talking about their boyfriend.
As to the going on WoW and complaing about something being "jew cheap" you're not even giving some alternate meaning of jew there, you're using it as a classic deragatory slur against jews and the falsehood they are miserly, so how does that even work as an example? In addition you're trying to take words which have exclusively been used as slurs (jew, nigger, wop) and sticking them into a context in which they cannot fit because of the huge stigma attached to those words. My point also was based on the fact that gay has been used widely in our recent cultural history with a completely different meaning that has no such stigma. So just because 'gay' or some other word may be transmutable, that doesn't mean any old slur with a history behind it could be. I'm not gay bashing here, I'm not advocating racism, it's stupid and useless and based on utter falsehoods. But for a group of people to change the meaning of a word and use it to represent themselves and somehow think they then have exclusive control over the future evolution of that word is a ludicrous assertion. Language is an amorphus thing, and it will continue to change, it IS POSSIBLE for two words to have DIFFERENT AND UNRELATED meanings.