Woah woah... so you're saying Wikileaks is under no obligation to rise above the likes of FOX News and MSNBC? Really??
I certainly think Wikileaks should have released the whole video from the start along with the edited one, but you're not being realistic. In today's world, for better or worse, you just aren't going to get many people to sit through a video with long boring parts to see the parts you want them to see. You have to release an edited version highlighting what you want them to see that's short enough that people's attention spans won't make them give up before they see the important part(s). Wikileaks should definitely strive to do better than Fox News and MSNBC and make the full unedited version available for all who want it to see as well however.
From what I understand their mission is to expose corruption and abuses by pretty much anyone that does them. While I don't really like some of the sensationalism they've used, I don't believe the whole world would know who and what they were without them. Just publishing leaked documents/videos alone won't cut it, you have to get people's attentions, and attention spans are mighty short nowadays with 24x7 news coming at you from numerous sources.
The taliban don't really care about being accurate.
They're happy to kill anyone as long as it send the message "don't collaborate with the americans"
I think it's more that they just want to kill people and don't give a damn what excuse they use. If it wasn't the US they'd find another reason to kill people.
Adjective: Forbidden by law, rules, or custom: "illicit drugs"; "illicit sex".
Many of us consider the changes made by the PATRIOT act and others to be pretty damn illicit. We've almost to the point where you have to show papers to travel by air inside the country for example, and how many times have we heard that audits show the FBI has abused the national security letters powers the PATRIOT act gave them? Since 9/11 it's become very common practice by law enforcement at all levels to use "combating terrorism" as an excuse to restrain civil liberties. Check out Carlos Miller's Photography is not a Crime blog for lots and lots of examples of that. These are things that are most definitely forbidden by custom, some of them by the law. So yeah, typo on the poster's fault, but sadly, it still works. Al Queda used terror to get the US government to introduce lots of illicit changes to the country.
"Bomb threat" isn't a tool; it's a coercion on others by instilling fear, and any form of coercion is an aggression.
By that logic isn't what the US Copyright Group the same thing? Their large-scale lawsuits against file sharers is definitely meant to instill at least some fear (to stop the sharing), and is highly aggressive in nature. They're also using the threat of a massive judgment as a way to coerce as many people as possible into settling to earn money.
That smart-ass bomb threat going to get them classified as a "terrorist group." Then you can bet every agency will want "in" on the action; busting a bunch of (misguided) geeks is a lot safer than going after heavily armed drug dealers and much easier than tracking down serial killers.
While I agree the bomb threat was a hideously bad idea, I think law enforcement going after anonymous full-scale would be an enormous public relations disaster. Even if you discount the bad publicity of hauling lots and lots of college students and high school students into court (and if they do raids, being taken at gunpoint) for downloading and running an application, I don't think it's guaranteed they'd be able to get convictions. No one person individually is denying the attacked sites' services, it's only in aggregate that it's a problem and becomes a DDoS. The only people they might be able to prosecute for this would be if only a handful of people was deciding the attack targets and times, then those people would be easy targets for law enforcement and since they were organizing the attacks, definitely prosecutable (and they could win the case). But I kinda doubt anon's that organized, it's probably just whoever manages to convince enough people to go along who decides each target, and it's probably new people every time.
Besides, I'm quite sure if law enforcement started trying to crack down on anon that some of them would start finding open proxies and stuff to add lots of false positives into the IPs being used in the attacks. Trying to sort out the real attackers versus open-proxies/hacked PCs would be a total nightmare.
I agree with you for the most part, but I'm not sure this is a given. There's plenty of people who think pot is horribly dangerous, and there's many of those people who more or less make it their life's work to spread terror about how bad marijuana is to the public at large.
That said, most people are starting to see that the current policy (no pot for anyone, it's has no medicinal value) is totally out of line with reality. The government continuing to insist marijuana is so dangerous it can't have medicinal uses is hurting them in their efforts to keep it banned. Any rational person realizes after even a bit of thinking that nearly every drug has medicinal value in some settings. Hell look at Thalidomide, even it has beneficial uses and if there was ever a drug that strikes fear in people's hearts it's that one. I think if the people had their say marijuana would be legal with prescription, or at least legal to grow yourself as long as you had a doctor's prescription allowing it.
I really don't get why Internet connection limits are so often so low. The fraction of the price you pay which actually goes to cover Internet bandwidth costs in a normal Internet connection is miniscule.
Mostly it's due to two reasons: 1. the ISPs don't want to actually spend any money upgrading their networks, because that'd lower their profits in the short term (although they're going to pay for this dearly at some point in the future) and 2. it's an easy way to make more money off your customers both without upgrading, and most importantly, without raising the regular fees. By hiding the extra costs in overage charges, and marketing it so it sounds like only evil people (pirates, bandwidth hogs, etc.) will go over their limits, they can charge people more without raising the basic fees.
The really, really sad thing is, when karma finally comes to bite them on the ass over the lack of network upgrades, they'll probably go whine to congress and manage to get them to pay for most of it. So we get screwed along the way (by being charged more and having lower connection speeds/bad latency/etc.) and then we'll get screwed again by having to pay for what should have been done all along with some of those profits. Meanwhile the people who actually pocketed all the profits will have moved on to pillage another industry (or two, or three...)
Don't worry, with the advent of Netflix streaming, soon you'll be an evil video-watcher.
No he won't, they'll still claim those going over their quotas are evil pirates because that's easier to justify publicly than saying they just watch too much online video. Limits as small as Rogers is using have nothing to do with stopping the top 1% of users (another saying ISPs are fond of trotting out) "abusing" their bandwidth and everything to do with padding the company's bottom line while trying to make it look like they aren't raising the actual monthly bill. (Since all the extra money gets hidden in overages, but the basic amount charged is the same.)
What will probably happen is that in a year or two so many people will be going over their quotas thanks to online video, and raising such a fuss about it, that Rogers will be forced to raise their caps. But even then they won't say that's why they're raising them. No, it'll be something about "improving our service" or some other marketing twist.
Warrants are used for entry and seizure of property. He didn't "own" any of the things the company was hosting for him: the hosting company had a right to terminate him as a customer on a moment's notice. And they did.
The hosting company told him they weren't allowed to give him his data. So it's been seized by the government, they're the only ones that could order the hosting company not to give him a copy of his data. And no, it's unlikely that the hosting company simply didn't want to bother doing so, they'd just have said that (every hosting company I've dealt with has policies where they don't have to give you a copy of your data if you're terminated for TOS violations, although most of them will still do so).
It's very unusual for a domain to be taken down like this. Even in cases of definite, repeated long-term copyright violations the government doesn't order the site taken down, order the hosting company that they can't give the customer a copy of the data and also order them to not tell the customer why they took it down in the first place (beyond a "we had no choice"). Even the recent domain seizures the US government did against sites that were streaming new-release movies illegally they got warrants for. And the court gave them the power to seize the domain names as well as the servers in those cases.
The value of being "Privacy Certified" by the ESRB just went to zero.
And their ability to deal with a technology industry like videogames is put into serious question. If they can't handle basic E-mail technology, how can they understand videogames?
It's as public as YOU make it. Those people opted to share their E-mail address with ESRB, NOT with those other 900+ people they've probably never heard of before.
Not to mention that this probably violated the ESRB's own privacy policy, in the process of talking about how companies should... obey their privacy policies.
If you've ever seen a Blizzard forum, they're some of the worst trolled forums I've ever seen. Blizzard needs to do something. Blizzard looks to be grasping at straws though. What Blizzard really needs is a moderation system like Slashdot.
Then perhaps Blizzard should do something like... hire more forum moderators, or look at using community volunteers as moderators to help keep the trolls in check. But those would cost money, whereas forcing all your innocent customers to give out their real names to every potential psychotic online doesn't cost them anything.
There are lots of ways to deal with trolling that doesn't involve forcing people to give out their real names. Besides, Blizzard already knows the forum posters real names. Despite that it's not stopping people from being total jerks on their forums, so how they think making those names public will stop it is beyond me. All it's going to do is run off the non-trolls who value their privacy.
The obvious solution to this, of course, is to not act like a dickhole.
No, that's not the solution. There are people out there, and I'm sure you've encountered a few, that take any disagreement with them, no matter how polite as an attack on their person and respond like insane psychotics. (Which they probably are.) Being polite is certainly a good idea, but it won't protect you from the lunatics of the world who are either unstable or actively looking for reasons to get offended.
Anonymity isn't just useful to protect the assholes of the world, it's also useful to protect the normal people from the assholes of the world.
And yet everyone gives out their real name on Facebook when they have the choice to give a fake one.
I have two Facebook accounts, both use fake names. Said names are based on anime characters I like. I've gotten tons of friend requests on them.... all from other accounts using anime characters names.
So no, everyone does NOT give their real name out on Facebook. In fact I will never do so. Just because a lot of stupid people do it doesn't mean everyone does it.
#2. Are there other situations which would yield the same results?
The answer is - yes. Having a stress reaction to a question (even if you're telling the truth) will produce the same results as lying.
Notably, being falsely accused of a crime can be enough to cause a stress reaction on questions about the crime, simply because the person's scared half to death from the accusation and/or investigation. So the sheer fact that you've been accused of a crime can be enough to make you fail a polygraph trying to prove your innocence, thus bringing more suspicion against you.
Never, ever, take a polygraph as part of a police investigation. At best you'll have wasted time, at worst you'll make them even more convinced you're guilty even if you're totally innocent.
I think this is why the media is making a big deal out of the situation. I know here in Portland that one school required all the parents to purchase laptops, but they went with Windows like all good citizens. That this school has the gall to require its students to use the commie infested Macs is reason enough for news sites to sound the alarm for the good of the nation.
After all, only Microsoft deserves to be a requirement, tight?
Actually, in this type of situation, going with Windows would be better. If students already have Mac laptops, they could run Windows using bootcamp on them, and they'd only have to buy a copy of Windows, not a whole new laptop. By going with Mac laptops it forces parents of students who already have a Windows laptop to either need a loaner, or buy a second laptop.
Basically, Windows works better here because it's more open in the sense you can install it on any supported hardware. Mac OSX can only legally be installed on Mac hardware, making it less open. Linux would also work since Linux can run on both Wintel and Mac hardware.
Ideally they should only use cross-platform software so what type of laptop a student has doesn't matter, but this may be largely out of their control. There's quite a bit of K-12 software out there that has only Mac versions, or only Windows versions. Sometimes there are no viable alternatives for the software in question, or it would cost too much for the school system to switch to another software. (Or, to be completely honest, there's considerable resistance to changing the status quo and the IT department's not allowed to change, because too many teachers and/or staff don't want to have to learn new software.)
That said, the price that the manufacturers charge for ink is still outrageous. Yes, it may be technologically complex to formulate a printer ink. However, that's a one-time cost, and economies of scale mean that it's more cost-effective to produce a printer ink in railroad tank car quantities than it is to produce it in demijohn quantities, and it's perfectly possible to design a printhead to feed ink from large bottles outside the printer -- one of the 'continuous flow' systems, generally with 8 fluid ounces of ink in each ink tank mounted away from the print head, so that there is no need to keep the quantity of ink low to improve print head response.
I recently got one of those continuous ink systems for my inkjet, and it works like a charm. For less than it would have cost me to replace all four cartridges with generic ones, I now have an ungodly amount of ink available. And if I ever do manage to run out, I can just refill the reservoirs for less than the system cost me to start with. It works perfectly well for the printing I do, which includes almost no pictures. For pictures I just go get the digital prints turned into real photos, and they'll last much longer than anything I could print at home, even using HP's "premium" inks. (Although I actually have an Epson printer.)
I think what's going on here is that HP is treating this as "everyone wants to print photos", and thus they assume everyone needs super high-quality premium ink. (Or at least that's the argument they're trying to make to justify their ink costs.) But the reality is, most people don't print that many photos, they print out stuff to read, or maybe a cute graphic, or a spreadsheet to reference, and so on. Stuff that doesn't need high quality inks, it just needs to be good enough to read it. And the cheap generic inks you can get for continuous ink systems more than meets those requirements. But HP and company doesn't want you to know that.
Now I've seen suggestions that the ink may eventually cause deterioration of internal parts of the printer, but by the time I run into that problem, I'll have saved enough money from not buying the expensive ink cartridges to buy at least 3-4 printers to replace it with. Even if I have to buy a new continuous ink system for the replacement printer, I'll still come out ahead. The printer companies know this, and they really don't want all consumers to find out about it, because then their entire business model (practically give away the printers, charge out the wazoo for the ink) will collapse and they'll be screwed.
I hate Bush as much as the next guy but I don't understand why so many harass him for Katrina. Why not place blame on the people who were supposed to be running the state? They live below sea level for fuck sake. Did they not anticipate that something bad may happen?
As I recall, it's the Army Corps of Engineers who were (and still are) responsible for the levee system that protects New Orleans. So that would make it pretty plainly a federal failure from that standpoint.
Then again, once that happens, Facebook'll probably just turn into the crazy ex. I can see the popup ads: "I MISS YOU! WHAT ABOUT THE 235 FRIENDS WE HAD IN COMMON? ALL THE 21 LITTLE NOTES YOU LEFT ME?! I STILL HAVE 45 PICTURES OF US ON MY WALL!!!"
Too late, they already have that behavior down. I get a couple of E-mails a month from Facebook reminding me that various people I barely know invited me to join. I don't even bother reading them, and there's probably a way to opt-out of receiving them, but damn it, if I wanted to deal with Facebook I would have created an account already. How do they justify sending out those reminders for months and months and months? (It's been going on for over a year.) Needless to say this behavior's made me less inclined to sign up for Facebook than I was to start with. I don't particularly like Facebook's crusade to remove privacy for everyone but themselves (how many FB employees share everything they seem to want to force their userbase to share?), but sending me spammy "reminders" month and month just makes me think of them as... total scum.
Giganews advertises itself as a gateway to copyright infringement.
Giganews has never advertised themselves as a gateway to copyright infringement. Their advertising has always focused on their retention (which has almost always been higher than any competing provider), their completion (ditto), and other features (like encryption being available). Their DMCA policy is easy as hell to find, linked off the site from the footer. They not only honor DMCA takedowns for stuff posted by their own users, they will remove stuff posted by users at other providers from their servers. Giganews has also been around long enough that it will be difficult to claim their retention is solely to benefit binary groups. Back when they started binaries weren't anywhere near as big as they are now.
Now some other providers have, and still do, advertise themselves as ways to get copyrighted music/movies/software for cheap, and some day they're going to be royally screwed. But Giganews has always been more of a premium service, even among all the other paid Usenet providers, even back when all paid providers were premium services because most ISPs provided their own servers. Their pricing is also in line with that, you can get Usenet access much cheaper than Giganews, but you'll have to settle for less retention, lower completion, and so on.
I don't think Usenet's in much trouble, it's just that the huge level of traffic, and usage relative minority among all Internet denizens is making it into a more specialized area that you have to pay to access. Take for example Giganews, they've been around for quite some time, and they keep upping their retention. Right now they offer 650 days binary retention, 2,522 days text retention, 109,000+ newsgroups and have servers in North America, Europe and Asia. They also just recently added a VPN service free for the top tier accounts, which also get unlimited downloads and SSL encrypted Usenet traffic. All that for $30 a month, the VPN alone is probably worth that, much less all the other stuff. To pull all that off they have to have invested tremendous amounts of money into storage alone, so they're apparently not hurting for money any.
And Giganews isn't alone in offering paid access to Usenet, there's tons of other companies doing it, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. So I think saying Usenet's dying is premature. It may die eventually, but it's not happening now.
I don't know about the rest of my state, but there is a large amount of Texans I know that are also upset over this. He's already been voting out, but it's too late. He's still in office till his term ends, which is enough to allow him enough time to do it.
Well it's good to hear he's already been voted out. Perhaps something could be done to stall, like a lawsuit brought by Texas citizens. Just a temporary injunction on implementing the changes would probably be enough since it sounds like you'll be OK once his term ends. I have no idea if that's possible, but it seems government's sued over laws all the time, I can't see why suing over educational textbook standards would be much different.
Should the police "stop anyone off-white"? I don't think so. But shouldn't they be more suspicious when they see a nervous Pakistani paying his ticket in cash, or when they see young white men in militia uniforms driving around federal buildings in a white Econoline? I mean, at some point one has to stop being self-righteous and let some common sense take over.
There's a difference there, it's not pure racial profiling when you add in the factors "paying for his ticket in cash" and "nervous" to the Pakistani part. Then you have 3 things saying "this guy should get more scrutiny". Very few people are going to call that racial profiling because two out of the three things that triggered the extra scrutiny had nothing at all to do with his race. Racial profiling is where you go "hmm, this guy looks Pakistani, we should give him extra scrutiny" absent any other warning flags.
And frankly, even if it was a "grandmother in [a] wheelchair" buying a ticket with cash and acting nervous, even if she's white, she should get extra scrutiny. Because, you know, terrorists/criminals aren't always young or non-white. If you just focus on the non-whites, well, the terrorists will just start recruiting some white lunatics to do their dirty work.
Slashdot Mirror
Woah woah... so you're saying Wikileaks is under no obligation to rise above the likes of FOX News and MSNBC? Really??
I certainly think Wikileaks should have released the whole video from the start along with the edited one, but you're not being realistic. In today's world, for better or worse, you just aren't going to get many people to sit through a video with long boring parts to see the parts you want them to see. You have to release an edited version highlighting what you want them to see that's short enough that people's attention spans won't make them give up before they see the important part(s). Wikileaks should definitely strive to do better than Fox News and MSNBC and make the full unedited version available for all who want it to see as well however.
From what I understand their mission is to expose corruption and abuses by pretty much anyone that does them. While I don't really like some of the sensationalism they've used, I don't believe the whole world would know who and what they were without them. Just publishing leaked documents/videos alone won't cut it, you have to get people's attentions, and attention spans are mighty short nowadays with 24x7 news coming at you from numerous sources.
The taliban don't really care about being accurate. They're happy to kill anyone as long as it send the message "don't collaborate with the americans"
I think it's more that they just want to kill people and don't give a damn what excuse they use. If it wasn't the US they'd find another reason to kill people.
il-lic-it/i`lisit/
Adjective: Forbidden by law, rules, or custom: "illicit drugs"; "illicit sex".
Many of us consider the changes made by the PATRIOT act and others to be pretty damn illicit. We've almost to the point where you have to show papers to travel by air inside the country for example, and how many times have we heard that audits show the FBI has abused the national security letters powers the PATRIOT act gave them? Since 9/11 it's become very common practice by law enforcement at all levels to use "combating terrorism" as an excuse to restrain civil liberties. Check out Carlos Miller's Photography is not a Crime blog for lots and lots of examples of that. These are things that are most definitely forbidden by custom, some of them by the law. So yeah, typo on the poster's fault, but sadly, it still works. Al Queda used terror to get the US government to introduce lots of illicit changes to the country.
"Bomb threat" isn't a tool; it's a coercion on others by instilling fear, and any form of coercion is an aggression.
By that logic isn't what the US Copyright Group the same thing? Their large-scale lawsuits against file sharers is definitely meant to instill at least some fear (to stop the sharing), and is highly aggressive in nature. They're also using the threat of a massive judgment as a way to coerce as many people as possible into settling to earn money.
That smart-ass bomb threat going to get them classified as a "terrorist group." Then you can bet every agency will want "in" on the action; busting a bunch of (misguided) geeks is a lot safer than going after heavily armed drug dealers and much easier than tracking down serial killers.
While I agree the bomb threat was a hideously bad idea, I think law enforcement going after anonymous full-scale would be an enormous public relations disaster. Even if you discount the bad publicity of hauling lots and lots of college students and high school students into court (and if they do raids, being taken at gunpoint) for downloading and running an application, I don't think it's guaranteed they'd be able to get convictions. No one person individually is denying the attacked sites' services, it's only in aggregate that it's a problem and becomes a DDoS. The only people they might be able to prosecute for this would be if only a handful of people was deciding the attack targets and times, then those people would be easy targets for law enforcement and since they were organizing the attacks, definitely prosecutable (and they could win the case). But I kinda doubt anon's that organized, it's probably just whoever manages to convince enough people to go along who decides each target, and it's probably new people every time.
Besides, I'm quite sure if law enforcement started trying to crack down on anon that some of them would start finding open proxies and stuff to add lots of false positives into the IPs being used in the attacks. Trying to sort out the real attackers versus open-proxies/hacked PCs would be a total nightmare.
If the people had any say pot would be legal
I agree with you for the most part, but I'm not sure this is a given. There's plenty of people who think pot is horribly dangerous, and there's many of those people who more or less make it their life's work to spread terror about how bad marijuana is to the public at large.
That said, most people are starting to see that the current policy (no pot for anyone, it's has no medicinal value) is totally out of line with reality. The government continuing to insist marijuana is so dangerous it can't have medicinal uses is hurting them in their efforts to keep it banned. Any rational person realizes after even a bit of thinking that nearly every drug has medicinal value in some settings. Hell look at Thalidomide, even it has beneficial uses and if there was ever a drug that strikes fear in people's hearts it's that one. I think if the people had their say marijuana would be legal with prescription, or at least legal to grow yourself as long as you had a doctor's prescription allowing it.
I really don't get why Internet connection limits are so often so low. The fraction of the price you pay which actually goes to cover Internet bandwidth costs in a normal Internet connection is miniscule.
Mostly it's due to two reasons: 1. the ISPs don't want to actually spend any money upgrading their networks, because that'd lower their profits in the short term (although they're going to pay for this dearly at some point in the future) and 2. it's an easy way to make more money off your customers both without upgrading, and most importantly, without raising the regular fees. By hiding the extra costs in overage charges, and marketing it so it sounds like only evil people (pirates, bandwidth hogs, etc.) will go over their limits, they can charge people more without raising the basic fees.
The really, really sad thing is, when karma finally comes to bite them on the ass over the lack of network upgrades, they'll probably go whine to congress and manage to get them to pay for most of it. So we get screwed along the way (by being charged more and having lower connection speeds/bad latency/etc.) and then we'll get screwed again by having to pay for what should have been done all along with some of those profits. Meanwhile the people who actually pocketed all the profits will have moved on to pillage another industry (or two, or three...)
Don't worry, with the advent of Netflix streaming, soon you'll be an evil video-watcher.
No he won't, they'll still claim those going over their quotas are evil pirates because that's easier to justify publicly than saying they just watch too much online video. Limits as small as Rogers is using have nothing to do with stopping the top 1% of users (another saying ISPs are fond of trotting out) "abusing" their bandwidth and everything to do with padding the company's bottom line while trying to make it look like they aren't raising the actual monthly bill. (Since all the extra money gets hidden in overages, but the basic amount charged is the same.)
What will probably happen is that in a year or two so many people will be going over their quotas thanks to online video, and raising such a fuss about it, that Rogers will be forced to raise their caps. But even then they won't say that's why they're raising them. No, it'll be something about "improving our service" or some other marketing twist.
Warrants are used for entry and seizure of property. He didn't "own" any of the things the company was hosting for him: the hosting company had a right to terminate him as a customer on a moment's notice. And they did.
The hosting company told him they weren't allowed to give him his data. So it's been seized by the government, they're the only ones that could order the hosting company not to give him a copy of his data. And no, it's unlikely that the hosting company simply didn't want to bother doing so, they'd just have said that (every hosting company I've dealt with has policies where they don't have to give you a copy of your data if you're terminated for TOS violations, although most of them will still do so).
It's very unusual for a domain to be taken down like this. Even in cases of definite, repeated long-term copyright violations the government doesn't order the site taken down, order the hosting company that they can't give the customer a copy of the data and also order them to not tell the customer why they took it down in the first place (beyond a "we had no choice"). Even the recent domain seizures the US government did against sites that were streaming new-release movies illegally they got warrants for. And the court gave them the power to seize the domain names as well as the servers in those cases.
Here there's apparently no warrant and a seal of secrecy The whole thing sounds like one of the FBI's national security letters, which they don't have a very good track record on using correctly.
The value of being "Privacy Certified" by the ESRB just went to zero.
And their ability to deal with a technology industry like videogames is put into serious question. If they can't handle basic E-mail technology, how can they understand videogames?
Anyway, it's just a e-mail address, it's public.
It's as public as YOU make it. Those people opted to share their E-mail address with ESRB, NOT with those other 900+ people they've probably never heard of before.
Not to mention that this probably violated the ESRB's own privacy policy, in the process of talking about how companies should... obey their privacy policies.
If you've ever seen a Blizzard forum, they're some of the worst trolled forums I've ever seen. Blizzard needs to do something. Blizzard looks to be grasping at straws though. What Blizzard really needs is a moderation system like Slashdot.
Then perhaps Blizzard should do something like... hire more forum moderators, or look at using community volunteers as moderators to help keep the trolls in check. But those would cost money, whereas forcing all your innocent customers to give out their real names to every potential psychotic online doesn't cost them anything.
There are lots of ways to deal with trolling that doesn't involve forcing people to give out their real names. Besides, Blizzard already knows the forum posters real names. Despite that it's not stopping people from being total jerks on their forums, so how they think making those names public will stop it is beyond me. All it's going to do is run off the non-trolls who value their privacy.
The obvious solution to this, of course, is to not act like a dickhole.
No, that's not the solution. There are people out there, and I'm sure you've encountered a few, that take any disagreement with them, no matter how polite as an attack on their person and respond like insane psychotics. (Which they probably are.) Being polite is certainly a good idea, but it won't protect you from the lunatics of the world who are either unstable or actively looking for reasons to get offended.
Anonymity isn't just useful to protect the assholes of the world, it's also useful to protect the normal people from the assholes of the world.
And yet everyone gives out their real name on Facebook when they have the choice to give a fake one.
I have two Facebook accounts, both use fake names. Said names are based on anime characters I like. I've gotten tons of friend requests on them.... all from other accounts using anime characters names.
So no, everyone does NOT give their real name out on Facebook. In fact I will never do so. Just because a lot of stupid people do it doesn't mean everyone does it.
That the first thing I thought when I read he licenses it all under Creative Commons was "Bet ASCAP would be pissed about that".
But this is a wonderful thing he's doing, kudos to him and I wish him luck. Will have to check out some of his lectures sometime.
#2. Are there other situations which would yield the same results? The answer is - yes. Having a stress reaction to a question (even if you're telling the truth) will produce the same results as lying.
Notably, being falsely accused of a crime can be enough to cause a stress reaction on questions about the crime, simply because the person's scared half to death from the accusation and/or investigation. So the sheer fact that you've been accused of a crime can be enough to make you fail a polygraph trying to prove your innocence, thus bringing more suspicion against you.
Never, ever, take a polygraph as part of a police investigation. At best you'll have wasted time, at worst you'll make them even more convinced you're guilty even if you're totally innocent.
I think this is why the media is making a big deal out of the situation. I know here in Portland that one school required all the parents to purchase laptops, but they went with Windows like all good citizens. That this school has the gall to require its students to use the commie infested Macs is reason enough for news sites to sound the alarm for the good of the nation.
After all, only Microsoft deserves to be a requirement, tight?
Actually, in this type of situation, going with Windows would be better. If students already have Mac laptops, they could run Windows using bootcamp on them, and they'd only have to buy a copy of Windows, not a whole new laptop. By going with Mac laptops it forces parents of students who already have a Windows laptop to either need a loaner, or buy a second laptop.
Basically, Windows works better here because it's more open in the sense you can install it on any supported hardware. Mac OSX can only legally be installed on Mac hardware, making it less open. Linux would also work since Linux can run on both Wintel and Mac hardware.
Ideally they should only use cross-platform software so what type of laptop a student has doesn't matter, but this may be largely out of their control. There's quite a bit of K-12 software out there that has only Mac versions, or only Windows versions. Sometimes there are no viable alternatives for the software in question, or it would cost too much for the school system to switch to another software. (Or, to be completely honest, there's considerable resistance to changing the status quo and the IT department's not allowed to change, because too many teachers and/or staff don't want to have to learn new software.)
Or see if you can get a CISS system for your existing printer.
That said, the price that the manufacturers charge for ink is still outrageous. Yes, it may be technologically complex to formulate a printer ink. However, that's a one-time cost, and economies of scale mean that it's more cost-effective to produce a printer ink in railroad tank car quantities than it is to produce it in demijohn quantities, and it's perfectly possible to design a printhead to feed ink from large bottles outside the printer -- one of the 'continuous flow' systems, generally with 8 fluid ounces of ink in each ink tank mounted away from the print head, so that there is no need to keep the quantity of ink low to improve print head response.
I recently got one of those continuous ink systems for my inkjet, and it works like a charm. For less than it would have cost me to replace all four cartridges with generic ones, I now have an ungodly amount of ink available. And if I ever do manage to run out, I can just refill the reservoirs for less than the system cost me to start with. It works perfectly well for the printing I do, which includes almost no pictures. For pictures I just go get the digital prints turned into real photos, and they'll last much longer than anything I could print at home, even using HP's "premium" inks. (Although I actually have an Epson printer.)
I think what's going on here is that HP is treating this as "everyone wants to print photos", and thus they assume everyone needs super high-quality premium ink. (Or at least that's the argument they're trying to make to justify their ink costs.) But the reality is, most people don't print that many photos, they print out stuff to read, or maybe a cute graphic, or a spreadsheet to reference, and so on. Stuff that doesn't need high quality inks, it just needs to be good enough to read it. And the cheap generic inks you can get for continuous ink systems more than meets those requirements. But HP and company doesn't want you to know that.
Now I've seen suggestions that the ink may eventually cause deterioration of internal parts of the printer, but by the time I run into that problem, I'll have saved enough money from not buying the expensive ink cartridges to buy at least 3-4 printers to replace it with. Even if I have to buy a new continuous ink system for the replacement printer, I'll still come out ahead. The printer companies know this, and they really don't want all consumers to find out about it, because then their entire business model (practically give away the printers, charge out the wazoo for the ink) will collapse and they'll be screwed.
I hate Bush as much as the next guy but I don't understand why so many harass him for Katrina. Why not place blame on the people who were supposed to be running the state? They live below sea level for fuck sake. Did they not anticipate that something bad may happen?
As I recall, it's the Army Corps of Engineers who were (and still are) responsible for the levee system that protects New Orleans. So that would make it pretty plainly a federal failure from that standpoint.
Then again, once that happens, Facebook'll probably just turn into the crazy ex. I can see the popup ads: "I MISS YOU! WHAT ABOUT THE 235 FRIENDS WE HAD IN COMMON? ALL THE 21 LITTLE NOTES YOU LEFT ME?! I STILL HAVE 45 PICTURES OF US ON MY WALL!!!"
Too late, they already have that behavior down. I get a couple of E-mails a month from Facebook reminding me that various people I barely know invited me to join. I don't even bother reading them, and there's probably a way to opt-out of receiving them, but damn it, if I wanted to deal with Facebook I would have created an account already. How do they justify sending out those reminders for months and months and months? (It's been going on for over a year.) Needless to say this behavior's made me less inclined to sign up for Facebook than I was to start with. I don't particularly like Facebook's crusade to remove privacy for everyone but themselves (how many FB employees share everything they seem to want to force their userbase to share?), but sending me spammy "reminders" month and month just makes me think of them as... total scum.
Giganews advertises itself as a gateway to copyright infringement.
Giganews has never advertised themselves as a gateway to copyright infringement. Their advertising has always focused on their retention (which has almost always been higher than any competing provider), their completion (ditto), and other features (like encryption being available). Their DMCA policy is easy as hell to find, linked off the site from the footer. They not only honor DMCA takedowns for stuff posted by their own users, they will remove stuff posted by users at other providers from their servers. Giganews has also been around long enough that it will be difficult to claim their retention is solely to benefit binary groups. Back when they started binaries weren't anywhere near as big as they are now.
Now some other providers have, and still do, advertise themselves as ways to get copyrighted music/movies/software for cheap, and some day they're going to be royally screwed. But Giganews has always been more of a premium service, even among all the other paid Usenet providers, even back when all paid providers were premium services because most ISPs provided their own servers. Their pricing is also in line with that, you can get Usenet access much cheaper than Giganews, but you'll have to settle for less retention, lower completion, and so on.
Those were good times. Thanks guys.
I don't think Usenet's in much trouble, it's just that the huge level of traffic, and usage relative minority among all Internet denizens is making it into a more specialized area that you have to pay to access. Take for example Giganews, they've been around for quite some time, and they keep upping their retention. Right now they offer 650 days binary retention, 2,522 days text retention, 109,000+ newsgroups and have servers in North America, Europe and Asia. They also just recently added a VPN service free for the top tier accounts, which also get unlimited downloads and SSL encrypted Usenet traffic. All that for $30 a month, the VPN alone is probably worth that, much less all the other stuff. To pull all that off they have to have invested tremendous amounts of money into storage alone, so they're apparently not hurting for money any.
And Giganews isn't alone in offering paid access to Usenet, there's tons of other companies doing it, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. So I think saying Usenet's dying is premature. It may die eventually, but it's not happening now.
I don't know about the rest of my state, but there is a large amount of Texans I know that are also upset over this. He's already been voting out, but it's too late. He's still in office till his term ends, which is enough to allow him enough time to do it.
Well it's good to hear he's already been voted out. Perhaps something could be done to stall, like a lawsuit brought by Texas citizens. Just a temporary injunction on implementing the changes would probably be enough since it sounds like you'll be OK once his term ends. I have no idea if that's possible, but it seems government's sued over laws all the time, I can't see why suing over educational textbook standards would be much different.
Should the police "stop anyone off-white"? I don't think so. But shouldn't they be more suspicious when they see a nervous Pakistani paying his ticket in cash, or when they see young white men in militia uniforms driving around federal buildings in a white Econoline? I mean, at some point one has to stop being self-righteous and let some common sense take over.
There's a difference there, it's not pure racial profiling when you add in the factors "paying for his ticket in cash" and "nervous" to the Pakistani part. Then you have 3 things saying "this guy should get more scrutiny". Very few people are going to call that racial profiling because two out of the three things that triggered the extra scrutiny had nothing at all to do with his race. Racial profiling is where you go "hmm, this guy looks Pakistani, we should give him extra scrutiny" absent any other warning flags.
And frankly, even if it was a "grandmother in [a] wheelchair" buying a ticket with cash and acting nervous, even if she's white, she should get extra scrutiny. Because, you know, terrorists/criminals aren't always young or non-white. If you just focus on the non-whites, well, the terrorists will just start recruiting some white lunatics to do their dirty work.