It's a word almost as old as religion, usually a hindu god living as a person. IIRC its not much like the Christian myth as avatars don't seem that powerful and come by pretty frequently. Meher 'Don't worry be happy' Baba who was Pete Townshend's deity of choice, was considered an avatar.
What's with this 'he was the first guy to use it this context crapola?' That's exactly as impressive as saying, 'Bob here was the first guy in accounting to use cascading reports for our widget department.' Give people credit on things they've created not recycled.
It starts off with a Tipper Goresque situation where little daughter buys a Prince album with a song about making love and naughty words. *gasp*
Then the laws get passed, but only to get their foot into the congressional door and into the tiny space between the ears of the public. Nothing wrong with ratings right? Wrong. Its just a gateway into passing the ideal that lives deep in their heart of hearts, what they don't ever talk about in public - Complete Censorship of anything the moral-masters of this country don't like.
This is just another means to thier final end. Now they're playing the 'this doesn't work either' card. Hey it was YOUR idea, not the game-playing public's.
Yeah, I'm thinking about the children, thinking how pissed they're gonna be after we take away all their games.
FamilyPC can sit around with their loyal members all day, for all I care, spouting about the good old days and how the devil is in every modern mind, game, or CD. Trying to educate their readership is going to redefine futile. We don't get together and complain about how the Amish need educating do we? We are upset because they are encrouching on the rights of the rest of us.
Obviously, the innumerable hard fought battles for the freedom of speech/creativity will never be enough. If you're inclined to do something, write them some mail, inform the public, and keep up their reputation as a lousy news source. Maybe, they might learn the lesson of the Amish - do their moralistic thing without pushing it the the rest of the world like a hard-up crack dealer.
Maybe they should have named it PC(polcorrect) Family instead.
Am I the only one who is slightly sickened by what Gates keeps feeding the public? Its like watching a well established politician give a speech in an area where she especially needs votes. All PR, spin, and empty promises. Except Gates, of course, is gaining economic votes.
A Gates interview is not a interview with Bill Gates, its a microsoft ad. So would be a slashdot Gates interview. The questions would be forwarded to the proper PR guys and gals and you'd get a reply from some temporary bgates email box. Not that Gates can't give us propaganda on his own he's probably too important to hand out many real interviews. I can do the PR's job just using old Mirosoft press releases. Send your questions to me and I'll take care of the rest. Maybe Microsoft will offer me a job in PR if I do it well enough.
Scary Thought- long after MS collapses Bill has a great future in politics. "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States..."
Yes, it is dramatization and cinematography at work here and something completely different. Seemingly, screenwriters and directors just aren't aware of how *boring* it is to watch someone use a computer. It's like watching someone pee, to the pee-er its wonderful, to you its uninteresting.
Using my piss poor analogy you don't see many pee scenes yet you see tons of 'I'm sitting in front of my powermac scenes.' Literary-type devices are developed to make it work, like the programmer who talks to herself or a big countdown in the background till detonation/end of the world/widget-tension-builder. These are very condescending, and I'm sure non-technical people feel its cheesy too. "Hey my windows98 doesn't do that!"
The solution is to quit producing scenes watching someone use a computer for dramatic effect. Have the user in the background or off to the side and leave other characters talking about what she is doing, play with time lapse, and let computer use be assumed i.e. "I downloaded the virus last night when the movie was showing you getting away from the terrorists!" They are about as exciting and dramatic as a wrench, to the non-initiated. Thats why movies like Hackers are doomed to look cheesy. Computers only really look cool in alternate-type realities and in the future. Tron tries to play on both ordinary and extraordinary and does really well in one and really bad in another - you can guess which is which.
Wargames cleverly uses videogames and voice-synthesizing to make its computer fun and easy to comprehend. Take tick-tac-toe, global nuclear warfare and a creepy robot voice and you got yourself a great digital villian. Two points for using a war-dialer and one more point for not making it a dramatic element. Now compare this movie to the ridiculous computer scenes of Weird Science.
The problem isn't technical expertise vs. the lowest common denominator as much as failing at proper storytelling. Now that computers are 'mainstream-hip,' expect more of this from lackluster writers and directors.
Not that any of this is new, car chases and crashes still look bad, you can almost see where the wire is connected to the car to pull it away right after the collision and this is after almost 100 years of cars in cinema.
First off, this would be reunion number 19 for the who, I might be wrong cause I stopped counting in the 80's. They've really been together since that mid 80's reunion, they're just lazy about playing anywhere. Still, I can't see how its a reunion without Keith.
What many "I'm an internet savvy rocker" types are doing is little more than a waste of effort. The promise of the net has moved from global access to the coolest buzz-word in ten years. NetAid is a perfect example, they really could have named it anything but because its going to be available digitally its NetAid (how about eAid?), yet it was a available on VH1 with about 20 times the resolution.
David Bowie, sure he's respectable in many geek-approved ways, but his downloadable Hours cd is nothing other than a marketing ploy. Its like both parties, marketers and Bowie, have fooled each other with this pathetic compromise. Bowie is glad his stuff is available, yet not aware(caring?) that its easier to drive to BestBuy and pick it up, cheaper too AND you get a CD and a case. Marketers love the aura of hipness they think surrounds them by being on-line. You have mail alright, its 74 megabytes and costs $16.95.
Now its the Who's turn to disapoint us. Stick with cable or payperview and leave the net for low-fi access like porn and Slashdot. Slashdot porn anyone?
"you could debunk the laws of gravity if you wanted to, and since gravity can't argue back, you aren't likely to get much of a fight doing so."
Gravity is constantly arguing back as it pulls you down as hard as it can. They're called facts, any semi-literate linux user isn't getting 'pissed off' as much as she is trying to point out the massive errors of this latest Dixonesque prediction. Having seen more of these than we care for does lead to the typical debunking session, but mostly to show the uninitiated the crystal ball that is history.
I don't feel like I'm necessarily preaching to the choir as much as informing each other for our mutual benefit. Think of it more like bible study than anything else. *wink*
I can already picture the conversation with the brain-donor you get when you call Gartner or Microsoft. You really think they want to have an intelligent discussion defending their work with you?
The whole cybersquating (am I the only person who hates any word starting with cyber that's used by the media) debate is a complete non-issue. Your average web session involves about.001% typing in URLs and 99.999% clicking links and bookmarks. What the difference between www.brucewillis.com and www.bruce.willis.com is beyond me. I can keep coming up with alternatives all night www.bwillis.com, www.actor.bruce.willis.com. At $100 bucks a pop I doubt any of your *cough* cybersquaters will be able to keep their little game going long.
But lawyers need something to do and people now believe www.brucewillis.com should belong to the actor or *maybe* some other guy named Bruce Willis and www.bruce.willis.com might as well be a porn site. One of those domains is magical because it has none of those dashes or extra periods us nobodys use!
So what happens when Bruce Willis does get his way? Will Willis engineering have to fire anyone named Bruce so he doesn't create a machine named bruce.willis.com or make bruce@willis.com? Court order to change your username anyone?
If you really wanted to get to the Bruce Willis site, make your flipper type in a decent search engine and be done with it. I don't see why the online community should let anyone with enough cash demand their name/trademark between the magical www. and the holy.com. Its now become a yuppie trophy to get these domains and the law will follow the money.
Solution? Quit paying them a million dollars a pop and they will slowly disappear. Then we can do the same to the paparazzi and make Bruce really happy.
"The parents of the 90% of the children of the world that are born in third world countries will not have access to this technology."
Exactly, mix social mating habits with economic reality and people with the cash to make this work and the patience not to get pregnant the old fashioned way and that'll leave you with a few thousand? hundred? dozen? people ready to buy into the eugenic future.
An expensive unproven technology offered to the idle rich with no guarentee of success isn't exactly the beanie-babie craze. Add about 20 years before you can be sure the genetic magic worked or didn't. "My son didn't even get into Yale!" I'm sure genticists would be able to skirt the issue with, "wait a few years, we didn't promise a child genius."
If it does manage to filter down a ways to the yuppie class will it even have a real impact on society? Johnnie the star quarterback now can throw an extra meter. I'm not weeping because in the irrational world of athletic competivness someone is better through unnatural means. Oh and did Muffy do 130 on her IQ test? So? She wants to study communications at school and her parents have friends in the industry. She could have scored a 99 and the results would be the same.
The doomsayers *might* have a point if the world was this cold calculating place where those with merit get the rewards, but it isn't. When it comes to economic competition it'll always be your conformist status + who you know + your experience + lastly your education, and never how well you can do on an IQ test, as this will be the only way geneticists could defend their work.
As for athletic competition, it might force the mouth breathers to realize that they've always been rooting for the guy with the best genes in the first place. Go team!
I'd rather have the computer illiterate use simple 'my first computer' devices like WebTV than a full blown $1500 system. The customer-base is, from whom I've met, people very uninterested in learning anything about PCs than the proper way to double-click.
How many trojans are there for webtv? Go ahead and try to format my cablebox. I'm willing to bet that 80% of computers sold today are entertainmnt boxes running only some form of internet client and videogames for the kids. It's a lot like buying a Ferrari to drive to church once a week. Too much power and too much specialized knowledge. Yeah I said specialized knowledge, to the lowest common denominator having a decent understanding of windows requires more time than they're trying to put in. Most of the internet revolution is people wandering out of their trailer homes and buying the Compaq AOL machine, but thats an argument for another day.
I don't see the 'they will learn in time' argument going anywhere. Its like expecting a car-owner to magically become a mechanic after a few years, heh, there are people out there who have no idea how to change a tire and this is OLD technology. So instead of knocking webtv, we should be encouraging them to purchase no-brainers like WebTV or the new Dreamcast, for their own good and for the sanity of tech support.
My ol' pal gets the Oscar we deserve, my country is finally at peace, and worst of all X new technology will solve almost all our problems.
I love how naive and optimistic Clarke seems to be in a world controlled by big business whose goal is never for the public good. Think of all the tech we have readily available now that will never be offered as a consumer good because the profit margin on X is greater than the margin on Y. Sure X is old and unsafe but who's going to stop us? The government? Heh, guess again.
Clarke makes this very sweet effort to assume everyone is just like he is, and not people so wrapped up in consumerism to really care about future advances not brought to their attention by some marketing team. If we, and by we I mean the public, wanted it we could make a very smart shift towards solar/wind power in a matter of months with only a slight loss in convienance. Some futurist could have easily predicted that a while ago, but market forces and apathy rule the earth.
There is probably 100 catastrophic lists for every utopian list produced, but that wouldn't be CNNewsworthy. As fantastic as this list is I don't blame Clarke, he is a writer, he writes fiction.
Amphigory (patrick at extremehope dot organization) took this opportunity to not only provide us with a quote that basicaly states atheists are ignorant but continues to post a rationalization of his faith in a reply to his own thread.
Pat, thanks for again providing the non-religious more ammo for our 'the overly-religous take almost ANY opportunity to proselytize' argument.
In the future please stick to the topic and if you want to criticise something you don't approve of feel free to use your own words, it's a bit more convincing.
Perpetrator? Hoax? Jeez, get out of your ivory-tower once in a while and you'll see the humor in this. Jesux was and is funny, what's funnier is how a simple joke can make the author sound like a malicious virus writer.
Posting his handle and p/w is just childish and in bad taste. If anything was done wrong it was rob's inability to separate reality and humor.
Vindictively posting his private info makes Slashdot the 'bad guys.' Enjoy it guys, you've earned it.
I wasn't suggesting that only the murders of yuppie teenagers and the constant shifting of the earth's surface deserve press.
This falls so below the threshold of common sense and reality that there's no reason to post it. I'm sure we are all aware the there are stupid lawsuits in the US.
You think this story is for fun? Next time read what Hemos wrote, not to mention the comments. No one's laughing, its just more "*GRUMBLE* Evil american lawyers!" I say No shit and quit Jenny Jonsing up Slashdot.
I don't care what self styled "Nerds" think, or your opinion of what they think is "News" but most intelligent people just roll their collective eyes at the obiqitious stupidity of cashing-in lawsuits like this one.
Is it completly lost on the Finnish legislators that 99.999% of the people who use and distribte virii do it not only against their will but usually without knowing it until everything comes crashing down. There must be a finn word for irony.
Good luck enforcing it - Oh no, someone must have sent me this virus, I swear I didn't know I was passing it around! says the guilty virus writer.
If we *HAVE* to move into a fascist state I'd rather they handle someone's complaint on getting a virus by administering a ruthless beating for not using decent virus protection on their windoze machine. Heil!
Why does/. fall into the same lame journalism that Television news does? There is no reason to bring out an inane lawsuit to the attention of the public with the assumption that its socialy important or is represtative of any sane person.
There are probably 100 wacky lawsuits filed a day. Why? Mainly because there are too many lawyers from your local dim-witted law school dying to make SUV payments.
This *MIGHT* have been news if AOL won the suit after losing its "You've got mail" rights. You guys even recognize it as being less than flame/troll bait but post it anyways.
I'm still waiting for the 'I wanna patent my daughter's virginity' lawsuit. Hillbillies of the world don't let me down!
Historians will look back and categorize the 90's as a paranoid decade ruled by the iron fist of the self-righteous. Where only those who constantly patronize others are free from the collective scorn and those who want to speak freely, especially about the rights the majority are freely giving away, are censored.
Of all the places on the net, the semi-progressive/. is the last place I'd expect tofind censorship along with a helpless cry for government intervention. Sad guys, really sad.
I won't even begin to discuss the double standard of who is allowed to say nigger which is in its own way racist and hypocritical.
Suck.com is just too hip for its own good. Sure, its a nice place for hipsters to log on to and make believe good writing has to be 4.3 words per line with retro graphics. Oh, how I can see them holding their mouse in one hand and a martini in the other.
Its not like formating that can be classified somewhere between wacky and stupidass is so bad, I mean this IS the WWW. Its that once you remove the pretentious air, arrogant attitude, and bad webdesign theres just no content.
The facts show that the guy that rapes your boy scout isn't openly gay Bruce, but tough straight Scoutmaster Bob who does his best to hide his tendencies. I dont see how you can make pedophilia == homosexuality as most child offenders go both ways on kids, depending on what they can find. Not to mention how heavily watched a gay scoutmaster would be.
In the US all child porn is illegal, even possesion. Its a lot like drugs, except drugs make every feel good...
All these 'chat room' cases stink of so much entrapment. Open flirting, more lies than you can shake a child-sized dildo at, charges filed before any real crime is commited, imo.
Whats the charge at this point - soliciting sex? Where's his pedophilia sexual history? What are they going to use in court other than some lame chat room transcript that really can't be used to prove age. Most 13 year old girls on the web are 30+ year old men. Maybe he just wanted some anal action.
If your get convicted for soliciting sex from someone pretending to be a minor, then you should goto a pretend jail.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending pedophilia, but I am going to critisize the fed's methods and integrity and very fine walk across the entrapment line. This guy may be the biggest perv of them all, but catching him in a pretend crime is BS. You can't call it a crime in progress if there isn't a real victim.
Big Brother doesn't just watch us, he teases us , plays with us, and then takes us down.
How is this news? There are patents for horse powered cars, no not buggies, but cars with a horse in 'em. I don't see the zealous and all too irrational PETA people freaking out about it, yet slashdot seems to think because something is a patent its on its way. Don't hold your collective breaths.
Ob-its-already-happened: Somewhere Henry Rollins is say 'its about they caught up!'
Slashdot Mirror
What's with this 'he was the first guy to use it this context crapola?' That's exactly as impressive as saying, 'Bob here was the first guy in accounting to use cascading reports for our widget department.' Give people credit on things they've created not recycled.
Hello humorless moderation!
Then the laws get passed, but only to get their foot into the congressional door and into the tiny space between the ears of the public. Nothing wrong with ratings right? Wrong. Its just a gateway into passing the ideal that lives deep in their heart of hearts, what they don't ever talk about in public - Complete Censorship of anything the moral-masters of this country don't like.
This is just another means to thier final end. Now they're playing the 'this doesn't work either' card. Hey it was YOUR idea, not the game-playing public's.
Yeah, I'm thinking about the children, thinking how pissed they're gonna be after we take away all their games.
Little known facts hidden in the HTML source of the official rules:
1. Your method of breaking this cypher will become property of and patented by amazon.com.
2. If the winner is under 18 he or she will not recieve any of the grand prizes but a copy of the Bruce Willis vehicle Mercury Rising.
3. The lego instructions only come in japanese.
4. The signatures on the books are also encrypted.
Obviously, the innumerable hard fought battles for the freedom of speech/creativity will never be enough. If you're inclined to do something, write them some mail, inform the public, and keep up their reputation as a lousy news source. Maybe, they might learn the lesson of the Amish - do their moralistic thing without pushing it the the rest of the world like a hard-up crack dealer.
Maybe they should have named it PC(polcorrect) Family instead.
A Gates interview is not a interview with Bill Gates, its a microsoft ad. So would be a slashdot Gates interview. The questions would be forwarded to the proper PR guys and gals and you'd get a reply from some temporary bgates email box. Not that Gates can't give us propaganda on his own he's probably too important to hand out many real interviews. I can do the PR's job just using old Mirosoft press releases. Send your questions to me and I'll take care of the rest. Maybe Microsoft will offer me a job in PR if I do it well enough.
Scary Thought- long after MS collapses Bill has a great future in politics. "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States..."
Using my piss poor analogy you don't see many pee scenes yet you see tons of 'I'm sitting in front of my powermac scenes.' Literary-type devices are developed to make it work, like the programmer who talks to herself or a big countdown in the background till detonation/end of the world/widget-tension-builder. These are very condescending, and I'm sure non-technical people feel its cheesy too. "Hey my windows98 doesn't do that!"
The solution is to quit producing scenes watching someone use a computer for dramatic effect. Have the user in the background or off to the side and leave other characters talking about what she is doing, play with time lapse, and let computer use be assumed i.e. "I downloaded the virus last night when the movie was showing you getting away from the terrorists!" They are about as exciting and dramatic as a wrench, to the non-initiated. Thats why movies like Hackers are doomed to look cheesy. Computers only really look cool in alternate-type realities and in the future. Tron tries to play on both ordinary and extraordinary and does really well in one and really bad in another - you can guess which is which.
Wargames cleverly uses videogames and voice-synthesizing to make its computer fun and easy to comprehend. Take tick-tac-toe, global nuclear warfare and a creepy robot voice and you got yourself a great digital villian. Two points for using a war-dialer and one more point for not making it a dramatic element. Now compare this movie to the ridiculous computer scenes of Weird Science.
The problem isn't technical expertise vs. the lowest common denominator as much as failing at proper storytelling. Now that computers are 'mainstream-hip,' expect more of this from lackluster writers and directors.
Not that any of this is new, car chases and crashes still look bad, you can almost see where the wire is connected to the car to pull it away right after the collision and this is after almost 100 years of cars in cinema.
What many "I'm an internet savvy rocker" types are doing is little more than a waste of effort. The promise of the net has moved from global access to the coolest buzz-word in ten years. NetAid is a perfect example, they really could have named it anything but because its going to be available digitally its NetAid (how about eAid?), yet it was a available on VH1 with about 20 times the resolution.
David Bowie, sure he's respectable in many geek-approved ways, but his downloadable Hours cd is nothing other than a marketing ploy. Its like both parties, marketers and Bowie,
have fooled each other with this pathetic compromise. Bowie is glad his stuff is available, yet not aware(caring?) that its easier to drive to BestBuy and pick it up, cheaper too AND you get a CD and a case. Marketers love the aura of hipness they think surrounds them by being on-line. You have mail alright, its 74 megabytes and costs $16.95.
Now its the Who's turn to disapoint us. Stick with cable or payperview and leave the net for low-fi access like porn and Slashdot. Slashdot porn anyone?
wanted to, and since gravity can't argue back, you aren't likely to get much of a fight doing so."
Gravity is constantly arguing back as it pulls you down as hard as it can. They're called facts, any semi-literate linux user isn't getting 'pissed off' as much as she is trying to point out the massive errors of this latest Dixonesque prediction. Having seen more of these than we care for does lead to the typical debunking session, but mostly to show the uninitiated the crystal ball that is history.
I don't feel like I'm necessarily preaching to the choir as much as informing each other for our mutual benefit. Think of it more like bible study than anything else. *wink*
I can already picture the conversation with the brain-donor you get when you call Gartner or Microsoft. You really think they want to have an intelligent discussion defending their work with you?
The whole cybersquating (am I the only person who hates any word starting with cyber that's used by the media) debate is a complete non-issue. Your average web session involves about .001% typing in URLs and 99.999% clicking links and bookmarks. What the difference between www.brucewillis.com and www.bruce.willis.com is beyond me. I can keep coming up with alternatives all night www.bwillis.com, www.actor.bruce.willis.com. At $100 bucks a pop I doubt any of your *cough* cybersquaters will be able to keep their little game going long.
But lawyers need something to do and people now believe www.brucewillis.com should belong to the actor or *maybe* some other guy named Bruce Willis and www.bruce.willis.com might as well be a porn site. One of those domains is magical because it has none of those dashes or extra periods us nobodys use!
So what happens when Bruce Willis does get his way? Will Willis engineering have to fire anyone named Bruce so he doesn't create a machine named bruce.willis.com or make bruce@willis.com? Court order to change your username anyone?
If you really wanted to get to the Bruce Willis site, make your flipper type in a decent search engine and be done with it. I don't see why the online community should let anyone with enough cash demand their name/trademark between the magical www. and the holy .com. Its now become a yuppie trophy to get these domains and the law will follow the money.
Solution? Quit paying them a million dollars a pop and they will slowly disappear. Then we can do the same to the paparazzi and make Bruce really happy.
Exactly, mix social mating habits with economic reality and people with the cash to make this work and the patience not to get pregnant the old fashioned way and that'll leave you with a few thousand? hundred? dozen? people ready to buy into the eugenic future.
An expensive unproven technology offered to the idle rich with no guarentee of success isn't exactly the beanie-babie craze. Add about 20 years before you can be sure the genetic magic worked or didn't. "My son didn't even get into Yale!" I'm sure genticists would be able to skirt the issue with, "wait a few years, we didn't promise a child genius."
If it does manage to filter down a ways to the yuppie class will it even have a real impact on society? Johnnie the star quarterback now can throw an extra meter. I'm not weeping because in the irrational world of athletic competivness someone is better through unnatural means. Oh and did Muffy do 130 on her IQ test? So? She wants to study communications at school and her parents have friends in the industry. She could have scored a 99 and the results would be the same.
The doomsayers *might* have a point if the world was this cold calculating place where those with merit get the rewards, but it isn't. When it comes to economic competition it'll always be your conformist status + who you know + your experience + lastly your education, and never how well you can do on an IQ test, as this will be the only way geneticists could defend their work.
As for athletic competition, it might force the mouth breathers to realize that they've always been rooting for the guy with the best genes in the first place. Go team!
How many trojans are there for webtv? Go ahead and try to format my cablebox. I'm willing to bet that 80% of computers sold today are entertainmnt boxes running only some form of internet client and videogames for the kids. It's a lot like buying a Ferrari to drive to church once a week. Too much power and too much specialized knowledge. Yeah I said specialized knowledge, to the lowest common denominator having a decent understanding of windows requires more time than they're trying to put in. Most of the internet revolution is people wandering out of their trailer homes and buying the Compaq AOL machine, but thats an argument for another day.
I don't see the 'they will learn in time' argument going anywhere. Its like expecting a car-owner to magically become a mechanic after a few years, heh, there are people out there who have no idea how to change a tire and this is OLD technology. So instead of knocking webtv, we should be encouraging them to purchase no-brainers like WebTV or the new Dreamcast, for their own good and for the sanity of tech support.
I love how naive and optimistic Clarke seems to be in a world controlled by big business whose goal is never for the public good. Think of all the tech we have readily available now that will never be offered as a consumer good because the profit margin on X is greater than the margin on Y. Sure X is old and unsafe but who's going to stop us? The government? Heh, guess again.
Clarke makes this very sweet effort to assume everyone is just like he is, and not people so wrapped up in consumerism to really care about future advances not brought to their attention by some marketing team. If we, and by we I mean the public, wanted it we could make a very smart shift towards solar/wind power in a matter of months with only a slight loss in convienance. Some futurist could have easily predicted that a while ago, but market forces and apathy rule the earth.
There is probably 100 catastrophic lists for every utopian list produced, but that wouldn't be CNNewsworthy. As fantastic as this list is I don't blame Clarke, he is a writer, he writes fiction.
provide us with a quote that basicaly states atheists are ignorant but continues to post a rationalization of his faith in a reply to his own thread.
Pat, thanks for again providing the non-religious more ammo for our 'the overly-religous take almost ANY opportunity to proselytize' argument.
In the future please stick to the topic and if you want to criticise something you don't approve of feel free to use your own words, it's a bit more convincing.
Gadzuki!
Posting his handle and p/w is just childish and in bad taste. If anything was done wrong it was rob's inability to separate reality and humor.
Vindictively posting his private info makes Slashdot the 'bad guys.' Enjoy it guys, you've earned it.
This falls so below the threshold of common sense and reality that there's no reason to post it. I'm sure we are all aware the there are stupid lawsuits in the US.
You think this story is for fun? Next time read
what Hemos wrote, not to mention the comments. No one's laughing, its just more "*GRUMBLE* Evil american lawyers!" I say No shit and quit Jenny Jonsing up Slashdot.
I don't care what self styled "Nerds" think, or your opinion of what they think is "News" but most intelligent people just roll their collective eyes at the obiqitious stupidity of cashing-in lawsuits like this one.
Good luck enforcing it - Oh no, someone must have sent me this virus, I swear I didn't know I was passing it around! says the guilty virus writer.
If we *HAVE* to move into a fascist state I'd rather they handle someone's complaint on getting a virus by administering a ruthless beating for not using decent virus protection on their windoze machine. Heil!
There are probably 100 wacky lawsuits filed a day. Why? Mainly because there are too many lawyers from your local dim-witted law school dying to make SUV payments.
This *MIGHT* have been news if AOL won the suit after losing its "You've got mail" rights. You guys even recognize it as being less than flame/troll bait but post it anyways.
I'm still waiting for the 'I wanna patent my daughter's virginity' lawsuit. Hillbillies of the world don't let me down!
Of all the places on the net, the semi-progressive
I won't even begin to discuss the double standard of who is allowed to say nigger which is in its own way racist and hypocritical.
Sure, its a nice place for hipsters to log
on to and make believe good writing has
to be 4.3 words per line with retro graphics.
Oh, how I can see them holding their mouse
in one hand and a martini in the other.
Its not like formating that can be classified
somewhere between wacky and stupidass is so bad,
I mean this IS the WWW. Its that once you
remove the pretentious air, arrogant attitude,
and bad webdesign theres just no content.
Scoutmaster Bob who does his best to hide his tendencies. I dont see how you can make pedophilia == homosexuality as most child offenders go both ways on kids, depending on what they can find. Not to mention how heavily watched a gay scoutmaster would be.
The joys of camping...
All these 'chat room' cases stink of so much entrapment. Open flirting, more lies than you can shake a child-sized dildo at, charges filed before any real crime is commited, imo.
Whats the charge at this point - soliciting sex? Where's his pedophilia sexual history? What are they going to use in court other than some lame chat room transcript that really can't be used to prove age. Most 13 year old girls on the web are 30+ year old men. Maybe he just wanted some anal action.
If your get convicted for soliciting sex from someone pretending to be a minor, then you should goto a pretend jail.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending pedophilia, but I am going to critisize the fed's methods and integrity and very fine walk across the entrapment line. This guy may be the biggest perv of them all, but catching him in a pretend crime is BS. You can't call it a crime in progress if there isn't a real victim.
Big Brother doesn't just watch us, he teases us , plays with us, and then takes us down.
Poor Rob, it was a tough decision.
Ob-its-already-happened: Somewhere Henry Rollins is say 'its about they caught up!'
God could have made us immune to NAME ANY DISEASE
or Buy a medical book and make a LONG list.
Think about that if you think 'God did a pretty good job.'
Not that I believe in that religious mumbo jumbo/