The issue I have with the "mythology" and "stone age views" comments is that they add nothing to the discussion beyond being pejorative. You claim the Boy Scouts are not a tolerant enough organization to be worthy of your support, yet in your post you set the bar quite low on tolerance with unnecessary denigration of their religion.
As for your "homophobia" claim, people have different standards as to what sort of sexual activities are good or bad. The way people categorize things largely comes down to one's own values and morality. To claim that any values that do not align perfectly to your own are "a mental failing", "outright dangerous", "irrational", and so on is absurd. Even among people who share your view of homosexuality as good, you would get differing views when it comes to other practices (polygamy, incest, a dead goat, etc.).
So you arbitrarily decide that one set of values about which practices are good and which are bad is the right conclusion, and that anyone who holds a different one must have a "mental failing". Congratulations, this puts you about as enlightened as the people who used to categorize homosexuality as a mental illness.
Also, I do not see how the BSA "tell you what your personal sexual interests or activities should [be]". They have an organization for people with a particular set of beliefs. People who share those beliefs are welcome to join, and as for people who don't... it's not like the BSA are attacking them or anything. The best thing you could come up with to accuse them of is "denying them the same opportunities" to join the group. So what? If you wanted to form a group for gay atheist kids, or bisexual Shinto kids, or whatever, no one is stopping you. Not all groups are a match for all people. Should I be mad at vegan groups for not doing enough to make meat-eaters feel welcome?
They're almost as intolerant as you are. You managed to dismiss religious faith as "mythology" and "stone age views", and equate moral criticism of homosexuality with irrational phobias (no one could possibly have different values than you unless they're being irrational, right?). The Boy Scouts don't even begin to approach your level of bigotry, so what is it you feel the need to "hold them accountable for"?
Why is the 1st amendment more important than the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th let alone them combined? Other than showing respect for the Constitution, why is the 1st useful? In other words, why not overturn it? Your blog isn't really going to allow you to compete with the US government's propaganda capabilities, and every idiot cannot be trusted with a TV station, so any free press argument is crap. And while I believe in free speech for idle chit-chat and In Soviet Russia jokes, there are a lot of restrictions that you can place on speech that people seem to think violate the 1st amendment without getting close to either one of those.
I'm really trying to figure out why anyone cares about this issue.
If I was driving a truck I'd just rent stuff from Redbox. It's a fifth the price, and you can return movies at other locations. Wherever the trucking life takes you, it's a pretty safe bet you'll be passing by a McDonalds or Wal-Mart.
Wow software is free, and always has been. YES, you pay for the pretty book and the pretty package, but you can always just borrow your friends for the install instead. Where you pay is for the account on their servers.
You can install WoW from your friend's disks, but when you go to create an account, it makes you enter your own CD key (plus the key for any expansion you want to activate). They could remove this requirement and it would indeed work as you describe, but for now Blizzard expects to get money for both the software and the account fees.
As a human born on planet Earth, I have a right to a plot of land for sustenance and shelter, in reasonable proximity to where I was born. This should supersede property rights of the mega-rich, even if my parents bargained away the rights. At most, the land can be loaned from humanity for an exclusive use of one person for a limited time.
So, basically you're arguing for a feudal system where everything is owned by some governmental lord who assigns land to the serfs to use for "sustenance and shelter". The peasants can work the land but not sell it themselves ("bargain away the rights") and the lord can yank it away at any time to give so some other person who he needs to give a plot of land to. If the local lord is cruel and unjust (maybe he assigns all the good land to his buddies?) you can't even move away, since you only have a "right" to land in your barony of birth ("reasonable proximity to where I was born") and serfs in other baronies can't sell you land, as they don't own it.
Ah yes. A "decent" system indeed. A pity we abandoned it and moved on to a system with a land-owning middle class. Maybe we can reverse that "heartless" trend and bring back serfdom on the moon.
While it is true that people, particularly those with psychological problems, sometimes react to situations in ways that are not reasonable, I'm concerned about the way this case tries to hold someone responsible for actions because another party reacted to those actions in a way that was decidedly NOT reasonable.
If I steal a stop sign, a reasonable reaction by someone encountering the situation I set up is to proceed through the intersection without stopping. If they consequently get into a wreck, it could logically be said to be my fault.
But suppose I mod someone down on Slashdot or call them a "stupidhead". This person flips out with furious rage and goes and burns down a Kindergarten. Even though I precipitated the chain of events, should I really be held responsible for their actions? Also, would the answer be different if I knew beforehand that this person had a violent temper?
In collecting evidence for those takedown notices, Media Sentry investigators do not usually download suspect music files. Instead, the company uses special software to check the "hash," a sort of unique digital fingerprint, of each offered file to verify that it is identical to a copyrighted song file in the RIAA's database.
What is this all about? It makes it sound like they have a checksum for the digital recording of each RIAA song, and compare it against the files on the P2P system. But there are an unlimited number of files that a given song might be made into, by using different formats, bitrates, encoders settings, ID3 tags, and so on. What exactly are these hashes of?
So who's accountable for damages as a direct result of such a problem? If I were using such software to run my business, and this sort of security problem became more than just a threat, what sort of recourse do I have? Which programmer do I get to sue?
As opposed to the closed source world? If a security bug were discovered in Windows, would Microsoft would compensate you for your damages instead of just disavow any liability in a EULA?
Words and expressions often have multiple meanings. In this case, both the definition you cite, and the way the summary uses the phrase, are correct, and which is meant is discerned from the context. While I laud your ability to get +5 Informative by lacking the ability to do so, it begs the question as to whether you also post on topics about gay rights insisting that gay can only mean cheerful and not homosexual.
I hope this doesn't turn out like Battle Angel. A big-shot American director (Cameron) decides he likes the Anime and buys up all the rights, halting domestic distribution of the original animated show. Plans for a movie based on the franchise turn out to be vaporware.
Let's see, first you claim that intruders are always there to commit theft, and never rape anyone. Presumably people who have had such a thing happen to them are lying.
Then, having dismissed defending one's home with a gun as a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality, you state that using a lesser weapon in its stead makes one a "frothing at the mouth idiot".
Next, you describe how if you detected someone breaking into your house, you would rather they come in while you are talking on the telephone instead of ready to fend your attacker off. This despite the fact that if the police response time in your area is longer than an encounter with an intruder is expected to last, the police won't be there until after the fact anyway.
Finally, you conclude your post by indicating that someone who protects against dangers that befall only one household per 100,000 annually are not just overly wary, but a "clown".
Ah, yes. I can certainly see how you got +5 Insightful with that post.
A gun in your home is 22 times more likely [nih.gov] to kill a member of your family than an intruder.
There are several flaws with this supposed statistic. First, the "22 times" ratio is way off, and even Kellerman, the principal author of the study, later revised this to much lower numbers.
Second, it is phrased to give the impression that a gun in the house is 22 times more likely to be a negative than a positive. But unless you are Chuck Norris, most positive outcomes don't involve killing intruders. If you get your gun and the intruder leaves the premises or is held at gunpoint until the police arrive, those are even better outcomes that the statistic deliberately ignores.
Also, while the soundbite makes it seem that a gun in the house is likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, less than 10% of the shootings in the study were of this category. The rest were guns in the households of criminal or suicidal people that skew the statistics and do nothing to predict what effect on safety a gun in the house of a rational, lawful person would have.
The Kellerman study has been thoroughly debunked to the point that repeating it is about as responsible as stating "Al Gore claims to have singlehandedly invented the Internet."
brethalyzer is an "approved" devise for measuring blood alcohol. This was set by the lawmakers
There's an important distinction to be made here between whether the lawmakers have stated that using a device to measure the alcohol on a suspect's breath is a valid way to make a case against them, or whether the specific apparatus in question has been declared by the lawmakers as suitable for said purpose. If it's the former, that breath evidence is an appropriate way to make a case, the question of whether the device being used produces reliable breath evidence is important to still resolve. I can't just randomly wave a dowsing rod at someone and say, "This thing says there's alcohol on his breath, and alcohol on his breath means he's guilty, so he's guilty, your honor."
In the RIAA situation, this type of discovery is even more relevant, since neither the techniques they are using to build their case nor the suitability of their software for carrying out those techniques has already been well established.
"After a few months, CNN found out about it and ended up letting him go because his 'name was "attached to some, uh, 'opinionated' blog posts" circulating around the internet.'" So in the last sentence of the summary, we have ScuttleMonkey quoting dangerz quoting Chez Pazienza quoting Ed Litvak quoting whoever described the blog posts as opinionated. And now I've quoted ScuttleMonkey.
See, I'm not worried about that. I don't think the president -any president- has the power to do that.
An anti-gun president hasn't managed to push a sweeping gun ban through Congress since... well, since Bill Clinton. And even if you are correct that "there's no way [Congress] are going to" do that again, presidents use executive orders to direct BATF do enforce existing laws in creative new ways, with the end result being the same as new legislation. There's enough ambiguity in laws (what constitutes a "sporting purpose"? How many imported subcomponents can a gun contain before the thing as a whole is considered "imported", etc.) that whether the enforcement of the law is directed by someone sympathetic to or hostile to gun rights has a huge impact on what is legal under it.
While the floating city mentioned in the article is nice, it's interesting to contemplate the more general class of which it is an example of: Arcologies. Huge megastructures that are cities unto themselves. Arcologies are a common thing in sci-fi, but how cool of one could we build if we were limited only by technology and engineering, and money was not the limiting factor?
On TV shows like "Matlock" or "Perry Mason" the defense proves their guy innocent by not just establishing reasonable doubt, but going out and solving the case and dramatically revealing who really committed the crime. Unfortunately for the RIAA, the real world doesn't work that way, and the defense is not under any obligation to figure out for them who the true copyright-infringer is, just to show that the evidence does not support the accusations against the defendant.
Care to enlighten us to this crippling DRM that is dragging Vista down? As I've yet to be stopped doing anything with any media I have. I rip DVDs, I take off DRM from downloaded tracks, everything I've done on XP and Linux.
Okay, so suppose I wanted to install a backdoor on your system (this is more or less what DRM is, a way for hostile third parties to exercise control over a computer that trumps the owner's wishes). It'll only sap your system resources by a few percent; you probably won't even notice it's there. And in return, you'll gain the ability to do something completely useless with your system, like how DRM opens the door for you to enjoy "protected media".
Not a very good deal, is it? Vista's DRM may not be "crippling", but it definitely should be an optional install.
There are some other legitimate "matters of national security" to keep secret. World War II would have gone a bit differently if the government had announced "In the interest of transparency, we just wanted to let everyone know that we've cracked the German and Japanese codes and are listening to everything they say..."
How does this kind of thing work when computers aren't part of the equation? Suppose you take your car in to the shop or have a plumber come to your house or whatever and the repairman finds your drug stash / illegal weapon / plot to overthrow the government / whatever it is you are hiding. Do you have some right to privacy? Are they obligated to report you?
I can get investment advice from stock spam, legal advice from Slashdot, and now medical advice from YouTube... however did people manage to make major life decisions before the Internet?
"Arecibo Observatory Loses Funding" No, it was cut about 25%. If it lost funding, it would have zero funding.
CowboyNeal Loses Weight. No, it was cut about 25%. If he lost weight, he would have zero weight, and be able to fly... Either that, or your argument doesn't quite work.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue I have with the "mythology" and "stone age views" comments is that they add nothing to the discussion beyond being pejorative. You claim the Boy Scouts are not a tolerant enough organization to be worthy of your support, yet in your post you set the bar quite low on tolerance with unnecessary denigration of their religion.
As for your "homophobia" claim, people have different standards as to what sort of sexual activities are good or bad. The way people categorize things largely comes down to one's own values and morality. To claim that any values that do not align perfectly to your own are "a mental failing", "outright dangerous", "irrational", and so on is absurd. Even among people who share your view of homosexuality as good, you would get differing views when it comes to other practices (polygamy, incest, a dead goat, etc.).
So you arbitrarily decide that one set of values about which practices are good and which are bad is the right conclusion, and that anyone who holds a different one must have a "mental failing". Congratulations, this puts you about as enlightened as the people who used to categorize homosexuality as a mental illness.
Also, I do not see how the BSA "tell you what your personal sexual interests or activities should [be]". They have an organization for people with a particular set of beliefs. People who share those beliefs are welcome to join, and as for people who don't... it's not like the BSA are attacking them or anything. The best thing you could come up with to accuse them of is "denying them the same opportunities" to join the group. So what? If you wanted to form a group for gay atheist kids, or bisexual Shinto kids, or whatever, no one is stopping you. Not all groups are a match for all people. Should I be mad at vegan groups for not doing enough to make meat-eaters feel welcome?
They're almost as intolerant as you are. You managed to dismiss religious faith as "mythology" and "stone age views", and equate moral criticism of homosexuality with irrational phobias (no one could possibly have different values than you unless they're being irrational, right?). The Boy Scouts don't even begin to approach your level of bigotry, so what is it you feel the need to "hold them accountable for"?
Why is the 1st amendment more important than the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th let alone them combined? Other than showing respect for the Constitution, why is the 1st useful? In other words, why not overturn it? Your blog isn't really going to allow you to compete with the US government's propaganda capabilities, and every idiot cannot be trusted with a TV station, so any free press argument is crap. And while I believe in free speech for idle chit-chat and In Soviet Russia jokes, there are a lot of restrictions that you can place on speech that people seem to think violate the 1st amendment without getting close to either one of those. I'm really trying to figure out why anyone cares about this issue.
If I was driving a truck I'd just rent stuff from Redbox. It's a fifth the price, and you can return movies at other locations. Wherever the trucking life takes you, it's a pretty safe bet you'll be passing by a McDonalds or Wal-Mart.
You can install WoW from your friend's disks, but when you go to create an account, it makes you enter your own CD key (plus the key for any expansion you want to activate). They could remove this requirement and it would indeed work as you describe, but for now Blizzard expects to get money for both the software and the account fees.
So, basically you're arguing for a feudal system where everything is owned by some governmental lord who assigns land to the serfs to use for "sustenance and shelter". The peasants can work the land but not sell it themselves ("bargain away the rights") and the lord can yank it away at any time to give so some other person who he needs to give a plot of land to. If the local lord is cruel and unjust (maybe he assigns all the good land to his buddies?) you can't even move away, since you only have a "right" to land in your barony of birth ("reasonable proximity to where I was born") and serfs in other baronies can't sell you land, as they don't own it.
Ah yes. A "decent" system indeed. A pity we abandoned it and moved on to a system with a land-owning middle class. Maybe we can reverse that "heartless" trend and bring back serfdom on the moon.
While it is true that people, particularly those with psychological problems, sometimes react to situations in ways that are not reasonable, I'm concerned about the way this case tries to hold someone responsible for actions because another party reacted to those actions in a way that was decidedly NOT reasonable.
If I steal a stop sign, a reasonable reaction by someone encountering the situation I set up is to proceed through the intersection without stopping. If they consequently get into a wreck, it could logically be said to be my fault.
But suppose I mod someone down on Slashdot or call them a "stupidhead". This person flips out with furious rage and goes and burns down a Kindergarten. Even though I precipitated the chain of events, should I really be held responsible for their actions? Also, would the answer be different if I knew beforehand that this person had a violent temper?
What is this all about? It makes it sound like they have a checksum for the digital recording of each RIAA song, and compare it against the files on the P2P system. But there are an unlimited number of files that a given song might be made into, by using different formats, bitrates, encoders settings, ID3 tags, and so on. What exactly are these hashes of?
As opposed to the closed source world? If a security bug were discovered in Windows, would Microsoft would compensate you for your damages instead of just disavow any liability in a EULA?
All I ever find in thorium are star rubies, blue sapphires, huge emeralds, and Azerothian diamonds.
Words and expressions often have multiple meanings. In this case, both the definition you cite, and the way the summary uses the phrase, are correct, and which is meant is discerned from the context. While I laud your ability to get +5 Informative by lacking the ability to do so, it begs the question as to whether you also post on topics about gay rights insisting that gay can only mean cheerful and not homosexual.
I hope this doesn't turn out like Battle Angel. A big-shot American director (Cameron) decides he likes the Anime and buys up all the rights, halting domestic distribution of the original animated show. Plans for a movie based on the franchise turn out to be vaporware.
Let's see, first you claim that intruders are always there to commit theft, and never rape anyone. Presumably people who have had such a thing happen to them are lying.
Then, having dismissed defending one's home with a gun as a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality, you state that using a lesser weapon in its stead makes one a "frothing at the mouth idiot".
Next, you describe how if you detected someone breaking into your house, you would rather they come in while you are talking on the telephone instead of ready to fend your attacker off. This despite the fact that if the police response time in your area is longer than an encounter with an intruder is expected to last, the police won't be there until after the fact anyway.
Finally, you conclude your post by indicating that someone who protects against dangers that befall only one household per 100,000 annually are not just overly wary, but a "clown".
Ah, yes. I can certainly see how you got +5 Insightful with that post.
There are several flaws with this supposed statistic. First, the "22 times" ratio is way off, and even Kellerman, the principal author of the study, later revised this to much lower numbers.
Second, it is phrased to give the impression that a gun in the house is 22 times more likely to be a negative than a positive. But unless you are Chuck Norris, most positive outcomes don't involve killing intruders. If you get your gun and the intruder leaves the premises or is held at gunpoint until the police arrive, those are even better outcomes that the statistic deliberately ignores.
Also, while the soundbite makes it seem that a gun in the house is likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, less than 10% of the shootings in the study were of this category. The rest were guns in the households of criminal or suicidal people that skew the statistics and do nothing to predict what effect on safety a gun in the house of a rational, lawful person would have.
The Kellerman study has been thoroughly debunked to the point that repeating it is about as responsible as stating "Al Gore claims to have singlehandedly invented the Internet."
There's an important distinction to be made here between whether the lawmakers have stated that using a device to measure the alcohol on a suspect's breath is a valid way to make a case against them, or whether the specific apparatus in question has been declared by the lawmakers as suitable for said purpose. If it's the former, that breath evidence is an appropriate way to make a case, the question of whether the device being used produces reliable breath evidence is important to still resolve. I can't just randomly wave a dowsing rod at someone and say, "This thing says there's alcohol on his breath, and alcohol on his breath means he's guilty, so he's guilty, your honor."
In the RIAA situation, this type of discovery is even more relevant, since neither the techniques they are using to build their case nor the suitability of their software for carrying out those techniques has already been well established.
That's cool and all, but how about a version of your post that includes an ASCII-art Tux
An anti-gun president hasn't managed to push a sweeping gun ban through Congress since... well, since Bill Clinton. And even if you are correct that "there's no way [Congress] are going to" do that again, presidents use executive orders to direct BATF do enforce existing laws in creative new ways, with the end result being the same as new legislation. There's enough ambiguity in laws (what constitutes a "sporting purpose"? How many imported subcomponents can a gun contain before the thing as a whole is considered "imported", etc.) that whether the enforcement of the law is directed by someone sympathetic to or hostile to gun rights has a huge impact on what is legal under it.
While the floating city mentioned in the article is nice, it's interesting to contemplate the more general class of which it is an example of: Arcologies. Huge megastructures that are cities unto themselves. Arcologies are a common thing in sci-fi, but how cool of one could we build if we were limited only by technology and engineering, and money was not the limiting factor?
On TV shows like "Matlock" or "Perry Mason" the defense proves their guy innocent by not just establishing reasonable doubt, but going out and solving the case and dramatically revealing who really committed the crime. Unfortunately for the RIAA, the real world doesn't work that way, and the defense is not under any obligation to figure out for them who the true copyright-infringer is, just to show that the evidence does not support the accusations against the defendant.
Okay, so suppose I wanted to install a backdoor on your system (this is more or less what DRM is, a way for hostile third parties to exercise control over a computer that trumps the owner's wishes). It'll only sap your system resources by a few percent; you probably won't even notice it's there. And in return, you'll gain the ability to do something completely useless with your system, like how DRM opens the door for you to enjoy "protected media".
Not a very good deal, is it? Vista's DRM may not be "crippling", but it definitely should be an optional install.
There are some other legitimate "matters of national security" to keep secret. World War II would have gone a bit differently if the government had announced "In the interest of transparency, we just wanted to let everyone know that we've cracked the German and Japanese codes and are listening to everything they say..."
How does this kind of thing work when computers aren't part of the equation? Suppose you take your car in to the shop or have a plumber come to your house or whatever and the repairman finds your drug stash / illegal weapon / plot to overthrow the government / whatever it is you are hiding. Do you have some right to privacy? Are they obligated to report you?
I can get investment advice from stock spam, legal advice from Slashdot, and now medical advice from YouTube... however did people manage to make major life decisions before the Internet?
CowboyNeal Loses Weight. No, it was cut about 25%. If he lost weight, he would have zero weight, and be able to fly... Either that, or your argument doesn't quite work.