Actually, "Assault" can be the act of threatening to hit someone. "Battery" is when you actually hit them. IANAL and INW (I'm Not Wikipedia), but I did take a criminal law class in college, and the difference between Assault and Battery were covered, as were the terms Mens Rea (Criminal Intent) and Actus Reus (Criminal Act).
The basis for determining what is and is not a crime falls largely on the existence and extent of the Mens Rea. It's why there are different degrees of Murder and Manslaughter. It's also why the threat to rap and kill a family can, in one case, be totally legal, and in another case, be Assault.
Let's not forget that the accuracy at major, respectable news organizations is often crap. In an article on the Washington Post's "newsbytes" news service, back in the '90s, they said my name was Dave (it's Greg) and that I ran the Internet Movie Database (at the time I was an outside contractor providing a weekly column). It was flattering in that they named my column as one of their top three reasons to get a modem for Christmas, but... Dave's not here.
A few months earlier, I was getting nasty letters from Lee Curreri (the guy who played Bruno in "Fame") because Newsweek had misquoted my interview with him in a way that painted him in an unflattering light. He thought it was my fault, but Newsweek had never contacted me. I found out about the blurb the same day he did, the same way he did (from someone who had seen it picking up the phone and saying "You're in Newsweek!").
Other fun stuff... once I was an employee of IMDb, there was this cool article on its founder, Col Needham, in a major magazine. Only the article named his as Hal Needham (director of "The Cannonball Run"). And that celebrity news they get from World Entertainment News Network... forget fact-checking. When I was editing their feed before it went live on IMDb, I had to occasionally send them corrections because they didn't even proofread. My two favorites were when they claimed Samuel L. Jackson *sang* "Pulp Fiction" and the following phrase they used to describe how a celebrity hurt himself: "accidentally got in an accident." I sent the correction on that last one to their Department of Redundancy Department.
And there were facts they got wrong, like claiming an upcoming project to feature John Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston, would be the first time they'd acted together. Wha? IMDb has a search for just that type of trivia which would have proved them wrong. But I knew it to be wrong because I'd had the bad luck to see them together in "The Experts" (a really terrible "comedy") from the late '80s.
The amount of red-pen marks you could make in many "respectable" sources, such as newspapers, weekly news magazines, and is ridiculous. The reason WikiPedia gets singled out is because of its unique nature. But a lot of the sources that love to crow every time there's an error in WikiPedia would not look very good at all if they subjected themselves to the same level of scrutiny.
I can't set a VCR clock. I can't figure out how which of the 5 remotes to use at my dad's or how to use the universal remote at my mom's. Don't even ask me to figure out how you connect a DVD player, VCR, stereo, digital cable box, and Play Station all to the same tv. All to different tvs? I might be able to figure that out, but not all on one. But I can use Linux (yes, with the command prompt) just fine.
Studies have shown that women are more verbally oriented, so it would follow that a woman might find commandline Linux easier to grasp than a wiring diagram for a home entertainment center or a collection of remotes.
On the other hand, the last 6 words spoken before the universe ends will be a male voice saying "I wonder what this button does."
Eminent domain, if anything, should prove how highly our gubernatores esteem "ownership."
But after the New London, Connecticut case where the Supreme Court ruled that municipalities really could take private property and hand it over to condo developers, there was a huge backlash. Eminent domain laws are mainly at the state level, and that's where citizens took action. A number of states now have laws on the books explicitly forbidding those kinds of eminent domain seizures.
If they'd rise up more often, they could call it exercise.
There is not a broadcaster, a business, a special interest, and any industry that owns one airwave in the United States of America. They belong to you...
Well, if they belong to me, I'd like my airwave now. I'll use it to broadcast Janet Jackson's nipple 24/7. Just as we've been desensitized to violence through the massive amounts of it on TV, it is my dream that, via continuous exposure to Janet Jackson's nipple, we'll soon become desensitized to breasts and let them bounce freely across our screens all day long (not just late at night on Cinemax).
No YOU are creepy for coming up with such ideas;) ! Just how? How did you manage to...?
During a recent bout of insomnia, I watched a movie where a urinal in a guy's apartment did that for him every morning and reported the results to a central computer. With the current existence of ad kiosks targeting bluetooth phones as you walk by, it wasn't too hard to combine the two into something that gave off a good creepy sense of invaded privacy.
I'm torn as to whether this is cool or creepy. On the one hand, it sounds pretty cool because it's so individualized and personalized. On the other hand, if I was the target of this kind of marketing ploy, I might feel like I had a well-connected, well-financed stalker.
People talk about how advertising is becoming more invasive. It's everywhere. But what about when it knows who you are and maybe knows a little too much about you? Imagine a urinal that got your ID from your phone via bluetooth, analyzed your urine, and then said: "Hi, Bob. Noticed a high level of sodium in your urine. Ask your doctor about Gronkaflix XP. Better yet, I see that Doctor Finkelberg is your doctor of record. Say 'yes' if you'd like me to e-mail him the results of my analysis of your urine, Bob."
I don't know. While this Unisys campaign will impress some people as cool, it just makes me feel we're one step closer to nosy urinals.
My first thought on this was that one of the criteria of granting a patent is that the concept is "non-obvious". And when I saw that one of the patents was "Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue", I thought "that's very obvious!".
Based on the number, it's the earliest one, and the article summary says the patents go back to the '80s. TFA says it was filed in 1990. Was it so non-obvious then? If we think back to the "dawn of the public Internet", and realize this was before the general public was let loose on it, it might seem so.
But, while the Internet was still the domain of geeks, academics, and scientists, and not open to the public, there were still lots of online services like Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL back then, and IIRC, they had some nascent e-commerce going on, including catalog ordering, back then and before that. It would be interesting to see if that patent could be challenged on the basis of prior art and how that prior art evidence could be gathered.
Who collects the postage? Who does it go to? Are they obligated to use it for something constructive, or would the penny-per-e-mail just fatten the bottom line of AOL and Nerflink?
All we need to do is two things:
1: Link spamming to terrorism. Convince people that when they do business with spammers, they're funding global terrorism.
2: If Bush can put a "wanted dead or alive" price on the heads of top terrorists, then we can have a spam czar using the penny per e-mail tax to put a price on the heads of top spammers.
Suuuure, it's worked so well to get Americans to give up their SUVs and take public transit to slow the flow of all the oil money that supports terrorists. And those bounties have helped us get Osama Bin Laden in custody. Right?
What TFA doesn't address is what they'll do with the mailboxes. Will they auction them off to collectors, recycle the metal, or will there just be a huge stack of retired mailboxes three rows over from the Ark of the Covenant in some warehouse somewhere?
I think the main problem with the U.S. system is the judge can't impose sanctions like making the plaintiff's counsel get a Cleveland Steamer from Courtney Love.
If you risked that evert time you filed a frivolous lawsuit, you'd think twice, wouldn't you?
If you filter out content based on profanity, isn't that also censorship?
First, censoring is more than just putting up a warning that the content might not be suitable for certain viewers, which is all YouTube did, according to TFA.
Second, also according to TFA, the warning was automatically added once someone offended by the content flagged it as offensive. The warning wasn't permanent, but was just tacked on until YouTube could have a real person review the video to check if it was accurately flagged. Once reviewed, the warning could removed, left in place, or the video could be deleted.
When I just went to watch, there was no warning. This means either the video got to the head of the review queue by normal processes and was determined to have been improperly flagged, or the tempest in a teapot got it jumped to the head of the queue where the determination was made.
As for users flagging it as offensive... I made a political joke in one post at Slashdot and had so many people hitting it with downmods and upmods, I lost my posting privileges for three weeks (a "timeout") for getting too many downmods in a specific time period (almost all from that ONE post). So it's VERY believable that enough left-leaning people would flag such a video as offensive as to trip whatever limit was needed to get the warning placed. I'm also sure something equally offensive to right-leaning people would be equally flagged.
But in the long run, the warning gets on, the video goes into a reviewing queue, and a human at YouTube eventually reviews it. But with the size of their staff, the size of their traffic, and the potential number of videos getting flagged daily, it's highly probable that they'd take a couple of days for it to reach the top of the queue.
Seems that this is more a deliberate publicity ploy. By fooling people who don't actually pay close attention to the facts, they made it sound like the video was unfairly censored by YouTube itself (or its staff) as opposed to going through a standard process. Then those people, with a sense of moral outrage, tell everyone they know... getting the video hundreds of thousands of future viewings.
I've seen a number of news stories over the years where parents had a rude awakening when their out of control teens did something really bad and they ended up on the other side of a lawsuit.
The end result seems that common law holds, by precedent, that parents have a legal duty to teach their children right from wrong. Unless it can be proved, by reason of obvious mental defect, that the child is incapable of learning this, then why not hold the parent liable when the kid does something bad enough to warrant criminal or civil proceedings?
Kids will be kids, to be sure, and there's only so much you can do. But the bar of "only so much" is one it seems many parents fail to clear. Wrapped up in their own issues, they don't stop and say: "I'm responsible for this kid and I need to put a few of my needs on hold so I can make sure this kid turns out okay."
The negligence that caused these kids to end up doing what they did was not recent, but systematic. I hope the principal wins a significant judgement, it holds up on appeal, and that the kids spend the rest of their lives being reminded how their own selfishness (likely learned from their parents) ruined the lives of their families.
Hurum reckoned the reptiles had not all died at the same time in some Jurassic-era cataclysm but had died over thousands of years in the same area, then become preserved in what was apparently a deep layer of black mud on the seabed.
Interesting, a sort of elephant graveyard for sea monsters.
Of course, the scary part will be when Kim Jong Il sets off North Korea's nuclear tests, waking up the big brother of one of these things. Then it attacks Tokyo.
People are flipping on the news, thinking they somehow got a monster movie instead, but it's on every channel. Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer are fighting over who gets the first interview with it, but then they get scooped by Deborah Norville and Inside Edition. Millions tune in, hoping to see Deb get chomped by a giant prehistoric monster... and they're not disappointed.
Simultaneous Farking, Digging, and Slashdotting cause the clip to shoot to #1 on YouTube. Someone puts up a fake MySpace page for the monster. Within 24 hours it has 896,327 MySpace friends, a garish background, and all of the 86 "dancing monster" animated.gifs that have started circulating around.
Wannabe BotNet masters start the SeaMonsterAV.32 virus, which is an e-mail promising never-before-seen footage of the Sea Monster. 3 million people are infected, and the "Get a SeaMonster Powerful Penis" spams flood out by the billions...
Sometimes, when your imagination wants to take you for a ride, just say no.
If you replace the processors in a Mac Pro with quad-core ones, what do you do with the old processors? It seems wasteful just to sell them as secondhand on Ebay, shouldn't Apple buy them back or something?
Nah, you just buy a 1U case, dual woodcrest mobo, and build yourself a *buhlazing* little server. Rent a partial rack somewhere, plug in a 10 Mbps line, and serve up a million pageviews a day without breaking a sweat.
Why did everyone told me to rush on Core2 Duo when it got released saying it's the perfect time buying CPU..... now quad core get released a few months after.
I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw years back, where a computer salesman is showing a customer a selection of computers: "Here we have the ones that will be obsolete in 6 months, and over here are the ones that will be obsolete in 9 months."
Thing is, that though Intel is releasing a consumer grade quad soon, they're only releasing the "Extreme" version, which will be their highest-priced CPU. You won't see reasonably priced quads for 4-6 months after the Extreme version hits the supply chain. Unless you're doing hardcore 3d or video, a moderately-priced Core 2 Duo *should* be good enough to handle most of your tasks for the next 2-3 years before you start feeling the irresistable upgrade itch.
I'd hate to use a quad core system on just 2gb RAM - that's an average of 512mb for use per core.
But Windows XP is supposed to run just fine on a system with 512mb (ducks, runs for cover).
Seriously, though, AFAIK, the cores don't balkanize the RAM, staking out a 1/cores share and then fencing it off to prevent incursion by other cores, shouting MINE like a 2 year old on steroids. I believe they were taught how to share before Intel sent them off into the big bad world.
Not to be a spoilsport, but if you do drop in a couple of clovertowns, you'll void your warranty. I've had a lot of Mac-owner friends tell me it's a bad idea.
Me, I might try it anyway, but if I do, I definitely won't shell out $249 for an AppleCare warranty I'll be voiding soon after purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but there's video proof that bears shit in the woods.
- Greg
Actually, "Assault" can be the act of threatening to hit someone. "Battery" is when you actually hit them. IANAL and INW (I'm Not Wikipedia), but I did take a criminal law class in college, and the difference between Assault and Battery were covered, as were the terms Mens Rea (Criminal Intent) and Actus Reus (Criminal Act).
The basis for determining what is and is not a crime falls largely on the existence and extent of the Mens Rea. It's why there are different degrees of Murder and Manslaughter. It's also why the threat to rap and kill a family can, in one case, be totally legal, and in another case, be Assault.
- Greg
Let's not forget that the accuracy at major, respectable news organizations is often crap. In an article on the Washington Post's "newsbytes" news service, back in the '90s, they said my name was Dave (it's Greg) and that I ran the Internet Movie Database (at the time I was an outside contractor providing a weekly column). It was flattering in that they named my column as one of their top three reasons to get a modem for Christmas, but... Dave's not here.
A few months earlier, I was getting nasty letters from Lee Curreri (the guy who played Bruno in "Fame") because Newsweek had misquoted my interview with him in a way that painted him in an unflattering light. He thought it was my fault, but Newsweek had never contacted me. I found out about the blurb the same day he did, the same way he did (from someone who had seen it picking up the phone and saying "You're in Newsweek!").
Other fun stuff... once I was an employee of IMDb, there was this cool article on its founder, Col Needham, in a major magazine. Only the article named his as Hal Needham (director of "The Cannonball Run"). And that celebrity news they get from World Entertainment News Network... forget fact-checking. When I was editing their feed before it went live on IMDb, I had to occasionally send them corrections because they didn't even proofread. My two favorites were when they claimed Samuel L. Jackson *sang* "Pulp Fiction" and the following phrase they used to describe how a celebrity hurt himself: "accidentally got in an accident." I sent the correction on that last one to their Department of Redundancy Department.
And there were facts they got wrong, like claiming an upcoming project to feature John Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston, would be the first time they'd acted together. Wha? IMDb has a search for just that type of trivia which would have proved them wrong. But I knew it to be wrong because I'd had the bad luck to see them together in "The Experts" (a really terrible "comedy") from the late '80s.
The amount of red-pen marks you could make in many "respectable" sources, such as newspapers, weekly news magazines, and is ridiculous. The reason WikiPedia gets singled out is because of its unique nature. But a lot of the sources that love to crow every time there's an error in WikiPedia would not look very good at all if they subjected themselves to the same level of scrutiny.
- Greg
Studies have shown that women are more verbally oriented, so it would follow that a woman might find commandline Linux easier to grasp than a wiring diagram for a home entertainment center or a collection of remotes.
On the other hand, the last 6 words spoken before the universe ends will be a male voice saying "I wonder what this button does."
- Greg
"You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
- greg
But after the New London, Connecticut case where the Supreme Court ruled that municipalities really could take private property and hand it over to condo developers, there was a huge backlash. Eminent domain laws are mainly at the state level, and that's where citizens took action. A number of states now have laws on the books explicitly forbidding those kinds of eminent domain seizures.
- Greg
If they'd rise up more often, they could call it exercise.
Well, if they belong to me, I'd like my airwave now. I'll use it to broadcast Janet Jackson's nipple 24/7. Just as we've been desensitized to violence through the massive amounts of it on TV, it is my dream that, via continuous exposure to Janet Jackson's nipple, we'll soon become desensitized to breasts and let them bounce freely across our screens all day long (not just late at night on Cinemax).
- Greg
During a recent bout of insomnia, I watched a movie where a urinal in a guy's apartment did that for him every morning and reported the results to a central computer. With the current existence of ad kiosks targeting bluetooth phones as you walk by, it wasn't too hard to combine the two into something that gave off a good creepy sense of invaded privacy.
-Greg
I'm torn as to whether this is cool or creepy. On the one hand, it sounds pretty cool because it's so individualized and personalized. On the other hand, if I was the target of this kind of marketing ploy, I might feel like I had a well-connected, well-financed stalker.
People talk about how advertising is becoming more invasive. It's everywhere. But what about when it knows who you are and maybe knows a little too much about you? Imagine a urinal that got your ID from your phone via bluetooth, analyzed your urine, and then said: "Hi, Bob. Noticed a high level of sodium in your urine. Ask your doctor about Gronkaflix XP. Better yet, I see that Doctor Finkelberg is your doctor of record. Say 'yes' if you'd like me to e-mail him the results of my analysis of your urine, Bob."
I don't know. While this Unisys campaign will impress some people as cool, it just makes me feel we're one step closer to nosy urinals.
- Greg
My first thought on this was that one of the criteria of granting a patent is that the concept is "non-obvious". And when I saw that one of the patents was "Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue", I thought "that's very obvious!".
Based on the number, it's the earliest one, and the article summary says the patents go back to the '80s. TFA says it was filed in 1990. Was it so non-obvious then? If we think back to the "dawn of the public Internet", and realize this was before the general public was let loose on it, it might seem so.
But, while the Internet was still the domain of geeks, academics, and scientists, and not open to the public, there were still lots of online services like Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL back then, and IIRC, they had some nascent e-commerce going on, including catalog ordering, back then and before that. It would be interesting to see if that patent could be challenged on the basis of prior art and how that prior art evidence could be gathered.
- Greg
Suuuure, it's worked so well to get Americans to give up their SUVs and take public transit to slow the flow of all the oil money that supports terrorists. And those bounties have helped us get Osama Bin Laden in custody. Right?
Ask the doctor. He should be able to explain it.
What TFA doesn't address is what they'll do with the mailboxes. Will they auction them off to collectors, recycle the metal, or will there just be a huge stack of retired mailboxes three rows over from the Ark of the Covenant in some warehouse somewhere?
I think the main problem with the U.S. system is the judge can't impose sanctions like making the plaintiff's counsel get a Cleveland Steamer from Courtney Love.
If you risked that evert time you filed a frivolous lawsuit, you'd think twice, wouldn't you?
- Greg
First, censoring is more than just putting up a warning that the content might not be suitable for certain viewers, which is all YouTube did, according to TFA.
Second, also according to TFA, the warning was automatically added once someone offended by the content flagged it as offensive. The warning wasn't permanent, but was just tacked on until YouTube could have a real person review the video to check if it was accurately flagged. Once reviewed, the warning could removed, left in place, or the video could be deleted.
When I just went to watch, there was no warning. This means either the video got to the head of the review queue by normal processes and was determined to have been improperly flagged, or the tempest in a teapot got it jumped to the head of the queue where the determination was made.
As for users flagging it as offensive... I made a political joke in one post at Slashdot and had so many people hitting it with downmods and upmods, I lost my posting privileges for three weeks (a "timeout") for getting too many downmods in a specific time period (almost all from that ONE post). So it's VERY believable that enough left-leaning people would flag such a video as offensive as to trip whatever limit was needed to get the warning placed. I'm also sure something equally offensive to right-leaning people would be equally flagged.
But in the long run, the warning gets on, the video goes into a reviewing queue, and a human at YouTube eventually reviews it. But with the size of their staff, the size of their traffic, and the potential number of videos getting flagged daily, it's highly probable that they'd take a couple of days for it to reach the top of the queue.
Seems that this is more a deliberate publicity ploy. By fooling people who don't actually pay close attention to the facts, they made it sound like the video was unfairly censored by YouTube itself (or its staff) as opposed to going through a standard process. Then those people, with a sense of moral outrage, tell everyone they know... getting the video hundreds of thousands of future viewings.
- Greg
I've seen a number of news stories over the years where parents had a rude awakening when their out of control teens did something really bad and they ended up on the other side of a lawsuit.
The end result seems that common law holds, by precedent, that parents have a legal duty to teach their children right from wrong. Unless it can be proved, by reason of obvious mental defect, that the child is incapable of learning this, then why not hold the parent liable when the kid does something bad enough to warrant criminal or civil proceedings?
Kids will be kids, to be sure, and there's only so much you can do. But the bar of "only so much" is one it seems many parents fail to clear. Wrapped up in their own issues, they don't stop and say: "I'm responsible for this kid and I need to put a few of my needs on hold so I can make sure this kid turns out okay."
The negligence that caused these kids to end up doing what they did was not recent, but systematic. I hope the principal wins a significant judgement, it holds up on appeal, and that the kids spend the rest of their lives being reminded how their own selfishness (likely learned from their parents) ruined the lives of their families.
- G
It wasn't time that did it. It was going pterodactyl hunting with Dick Cheney.
Interesting, a sort of elephant graveyard for sea monsters.
Of course, the scary part will be when Kim Jong Il sets off North Korea's nuclear tests, waking up the big brother of one of these things. Then it attacks Tokyo.
People are flipping on the news, thinking they somehow got a monster movie instead, but it's on every channel. Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer are fighting over who gets the first interview with it, but then they get scooped by Deborah Norville and Inside Edition. Millions tune in, hoping to see Deb get chomped by a giant prehistoric monster... and they're not disappointed.
Simultaneous Farking, Digging, and Slashdotting cause the clip to shoot to #1 on YouTube. Someone puts up a fake MySpace page for the monster. Within 24 hours it has 896,327 MySpace friends, a garish background, and all of the 86 "dancing monster" animated
Wannabe BotNet masters start the SeaMonsterAV.32 virus, which is an e-mail promising never-before-seen footage of the Sea Monster. 3 million people are infected, and the "Get a SeaMonster Powerful Penis" spams flood out by the billions...
Sometimes, when your imagination wants to take you for a ride, just say no.
- Greg
Makes for an interesting saying:
Information wants to be free
But the people who produce it want to eat
- Greg
"You're wrong, it doesnt happen to your cellphone, it happens to your brain when she calls."
So you're saying Paris Hilton = Snow Crash?
- Greg
"But when the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists."
- Greg
If you replace the processors in a Mac Pro with quad-core ones, what do you do with the old processors? It seems wasteful just to sell them as secondhand on Ebay, shouldn't Apple buy them back or something?
Nah, you just buy a 1U case, dual woodcrest mobo, and build yourself a *buhlazing* little server. Rent a partial rack somewhere, plug in a 10 Mbps line, and serve up a million pageviews a day without breaking a sweat.
- Greg
Why did everyone told me to rush on Core2 Duo when it got released saying it's the perfect time buying CPU..... now quad core get released a few months after.
I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw years back, where a computer salesman is showing a customer a selection of computers: "Here we have the ones that will be obsolete in 6 months, and over here are the ones that will be obsolete in 9 months."
Thing is, that though Intel is releasing a consumer grade quad soon, they're only releasing the "Extreme" version, which will be their highest-priced CPU. You won't see reasonably priced quads for 4-6 months after the Extreme version hits the supply chain. Unless you're doing hardcore 3d or video, a moderately-priced Core 2 Duo *should* be good enough to handle most of your tasks for the next 2-3 years before you start feeling the irresistable upgrade itch.
- Greg
I'd hate to use a quad core system on just 2gb RAM - that's an average of 512mb for use per core.
But Windows XP is supposed to run just fine on a system with 512mb (ducks, runs for cover).
Seriously, though, AFAIK, the cores don't balkanize the RAM, staking out a 1/cores share and then fencing it off to prevent incursion by other cores, shouting MINE like a 2 year old on steroids. I believe they were taught how to share before Intel sent them off into the big bad world.
- Greg
Not to be a spoilsport, but if you do drop in a couple of clovertowns, you'll void your warranty. I've had a lot of Mac-owner friends tell me it's a bad idea.
Me, I might try it anyway, but if I do, I definitely won't shell out $249 for an AppleCare warranty I'll be voiding soon after purchase.