Is your claim that they did what they did at Lori's request? That Lori told them to write hateful things to Megan? Where did you get that from? Lori wasn't even THERE when they did that.
Or was it setting up the account with false information that was illegal? Because the legality of that has not been tested in court yet. Are you always 100% truthful when you go online? I'm certainly not (I will usually put a false middle-name on any form; if I get spam or junk mail with that name, I know who sold my information)
Please point me to the specific action that Lori took that was clearly illegal. I'm serious.
The fact of the matter is, Sarah is a kid, and kids can be cruel. I'm sure she had no idea the potential damage she was doing to Megan at the time. I don't know how old the babysitter was (although I'm pretty sure she was a minor as well); she probably should have known better. But they did something stupid, and someone has to pay, and the scapegoat chosen appears to be Lori.
Shouldn't this whole trial be hinged on whether she has used her prior knowledge of the girl's emotional distress to talk her into suicide, rather than whether or not she commited computer fraud?
You say that as if it's a proven fact that she talked the girl into suicide. It isn't; Lori wasn't the one doing the talking.
According to the original story, Lori asked her kids' babysitter to set up the account, so she could get a picture of Megan's friendship with her daughter, Sarah.
It was then Sarah and the babysitter that psychologically tortured Megan. Lori was not part of that, but everyone is being led to believe she was.
Read the articles again:
It is alleged that she killed herself after receiving several cruel messages from a fictitious 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, including one saying the world would be better off without her.
Messages from a fictitious boy, not messages from Lori. They don't even say that she was the one who sent the messages, but they are certainly trying to imply it. Successfully, apparently.
After a few weeks of chatting, "Josh Evans" began to send Megan nasty messages via the MySpace account, ending with one that suggested "the world would be a better place" without her.
Again, messages sent from the fictitious account, but they do not say sent from Lori because they weren't.
The thing is, the prosecutors already KNOW that Lori wasn't the one who sent the messages! But, they have to be seen doing something.
Most of the comments on here are about what a terrible person Lori must be, based on this misinformation. Be sure you have the right perpetrator before you grab your torch and pitchfork, folks.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Speaking of "Wuster" sauce, when I lived in Japan my co-workers told me about a sauce they called "uster" sauce. Thinking that it was just another mispronunciation, and they really meant worcestershire sauce, I said I'd try it.
Turns out, it was oyster sauce. Made with real oysters.
Have I mentioned the part where I can't eat shellfish?:-(
It wasn't a fire. Or, it wasn't an uncontained fire.
One of my roommates was microwaving a burrito, set the time too high, got a phone call and left to go to the store. Forgetting the burrito.
The house stinks of smoke, the microwave may be toast, and it's getting cold with all these windows open. At least the smoke detectors have stopped going off.
you've forgotten for a moment what a boring life you lead
I keep hearing about this 'boring life' that people are talking about, and I have to say, I'd like to try it.
I'm stuck in an interesting life. I didn't realize this until recently, but apparently, not everyone was kidnapped as a child, or had a roommate who tried to kill them, or were accidentally mistaken for a terrorist and caused a bomb-scare. I had no idea that boring was even an option!
Man, I had more but (I can't believe I'm saying this) the house is filling with smoke. There may be a fire.
Sorry, from here it sounds as if you don't know much about Yahoo or business.
Yahoo is a lot more than search and search advertising. That is such a tiny, tiny part of Yahoo, and you make it sound like the whole kit. I understand that, as an American, your view of Yahoo may be limited. Here in the US, Google is our lord and master, and Yahoo is the has-been. In Japan, Yahoo is our lord and master (much more so than Google is in America), and Google is mostly non-existent. Do a search for YahooBB (with your search engine of choice). Basically, every home in Japan that doesn't have FTTH has YahooBB. It is absolutely everywhere. You think that Mission College is the whole world. You are just unaware of the big picture.
Secondly, this is how business works. Yahoo can make MORE MONEY and STRENGTHEN THE COMPANY by using Google's advertising. That doesn't mean that Yahoo must give up its own research into search and advertising models. Quite the opposite, it will now have MORE money to spend on research and development. If they ever do develop better systems, they can switch. Of course, there's not necessarily any motivation to do that research, as the current situation is profitable, and that money can be spent elsewhere in the business.
So, sorry your personal slice of Yahoo pie was outsourced to Google and you were made redundant. It happens. But the rest of Yahoo is stronger for it, and so is Google. Try to get a job with them.
Or continue your uninformed ranting on the Internet. Whatever. I'm not the boss of you.
Google and Yahoo aren't really main competitors, anymore than Google and Microsoft are main competitors. Yahoo and Microsoft are so much more than a search engine/advertising model/free e-email.
When I lived in Japan, for example, Yahoo was my Internet and phone provider. Google doesn't do that. Don't assume that all the Yahoo you personally experience is the extent of the company.
...could spot a bad sector by looking at it... copy all the data from the old sector on to a piece of paper, go to the new sector, type it all back in... notebooks filled with pages and pages of hex numbers...
You're like some kind of super nerd. Like you were built in a laboratory out of parts from lesser nerds.
I disagree!
I didn't have any manuals and couldn't figure out which PEEKs and POKEs would give me the same functionality
I had a cartridge for my C64 that let me do low-level stuff with disks. With it, you could browse around and read the raw sectors, change stuff, lots of fun. It wasn't long until I discovered that most C64 disks followed a certain pattern with regard to which sectors followed which (very rarely were they sequential; I think it was next-track-over+six-blocks-down). The first two bytes (iirc) pointed to the next sector. [This didn't work for copy-protected games that didn't use the standard format. If those disks went bad, you were SOL]
Interestingly, I found that when sectors went bad, they often went bad in exactly the same way: all the bytes for that sector would be shifted back one, and the first and last bytes were the same on every bad sector. I can't remember what they were now (first byte was "M", last was "Z"? Damn 20-years-ago memories...), but you could spot a bad sector by looking at it.
Effectively, only the information about the following sector would have been lost, but you couldn't just put it back in because everything had shifted over by one. And if you manually shifted everything back by one (by retyping it all in, starting from the end), and re-saved, you'd usually fuck up the sector even more, and lose data.
My solution was to browse around on the disk until you found an empty sector. Copy all the data from the old sector on to a piece of paper, go to the new sector, type it all back in, point it at what the next sector should be (following the standard pattern), save it all to make sure it's not a bad sector, go back to what the previous sector should be, and point it away from the bad sector to the new replacement sector.
[The _real_ solution would have been to write a program to do this for you, but I didn't have any manuals and couldn't figure out which PEEKs and POKEs would give me the same functionality as the cartridge]
Sometimes a bunch of sectors were bad, so you'd have to do this many, many times. I remember when I moved out after high school and found my notebooks filled with pages and pages of hex numbers; the raw data for all the sectors I moved around on disks, by hand.
False, though you are not alone in thinking that throwing more money at the problem will make things better...
so many bungled ideas about how to attract quality professionals to education have made it impossible to attract quality applicants
More money is one of those bungled ideas. In the US, we pay a LOT more for teachers than other countries, yet our public education system is much worse.
A bigger reason is the teachers' unions. Districts have a terribly difficult time culling bad teachers. You can't fire them. Even if you get them out of the classroom, you still have to pay them. It's ridiculous.
You have bad/apathetic teachers because there is so little competition between them, there's not a lot of motivation to do better. (Some people really do enjoy teaching, and they'll be good teachers no matter what you pay them. Their motivation comes from within.)
IAA Former Teacher, and a lot of my friends are teachers. The unions have ruined our public education system.
I would have thought that rhetoric does have negative connotations, although not negative denotations, but that's just me being a pedant;)
Yes. Wow. Absolutely correct. ^_^ I keep forgetting that Slashdot is not my normal audience. I'll restate it:
"Rhetoric" has (undeservedly, in my opinion) negative connotations, meaning that some people associate the word with a negative emotion. It does not have a negative denotation, meaning that its actual meaning has no negative slant.
Please don't report me to the Former English Teacher's Union, or I might have to turn in my Former English Teacher's badge and quit being a Former English Teacher.:-/
What was that you were saying about "faith" and "science?"
Nothing? Did you mean to reply to someone else?
Newsflash: Everything about Obama's a fraud. Science just proved it. Don't let that confuse your faith.
Science really had little (or nothing) to do with the article or my post. What faith am I confused about?
Disclaimer: I'm not a Republican and I'm not voting for either of the clowns the bi-factional ruling party has given us this year. I don't give my consent to be governed to bad liars.
I initially thought that the Obama-smear was just a poorly written summary (and was going to tag "badsummary") but the actual article itself is slanted. I propose we start tagging these kinds of things "badarticle", since they seem to be cropping up more and more on Slashdot.
Anyway.
There are so many things that bug me about this "article", let's just go through it together.
The expression of disgust on former US president Bill Clinton's face during his speech to the Democratic National Convention as he says "Obama" lasts for just a fraction of a second.
First off, associating disgust with Obama. Paul Ekman says he saw it on Clinton's face. Did any of the other millions of people watching see it?
So how are we to know when they are lying?
Got it, spin = lying. OK. That's the definition we'll be using as we read.
Software programs that analyse a person's speech, voice or facial expressions are building upon the work of researchers like Ekman to help us discover when the truth is being stretched, and even by how much.
Again, spin = lying. I'm with you so far.
The algorithm counts usage of first person nouns - "I" tends to indicate less spin than "we", for example. It also searches out phrases that offer qualifications or clarifications of more general statements, since speeches that contain few such amendments tend to be high on spin. Finally, increased rates of action verbs such as "go" and "going", and negatively charged words, such as "hate" and "enemy", also indicate greater levels of spin.
I... what? "I" vs "we"? What does that have to do with lying? I thought spin = lying, since that's stated twice at the beginning of the article. Suddenly spin = rhetoric.
In general though, Obama's speeches contain considerably higher spin than either McCain or Clinton.
First, spin = lying, and then spin = rhetoric, but we don't call it that, and then Obama's speeches have the most spin. Which by the new definition means that he is the most effective speaker, but by the original definition means that he is the biggest liar.
McCain is the purported to have the least spin, implying that he is the most truthful (except by their definition of spin, it really means he is the least effective speaker). Hands up, who thinks McCain is the most truthful candidate?
And hey, let's talk about Jeremiah Wright some more, because it's not like that story is history or anything. But hey, any chance there is to remind people that he's associated with Obama...
"When you see these crises come along, the spin goes up," Skillicorn says. "Obama is very good at using stirring rhetoric to deal with the issues."
Ah! Now they even call it rhetoric! Perhaps hoping that the intended audience doesn't know the meaning of the word? (Many people mistakenly think the word rhetoric has negative connotations.)
Indeed, Bill Clinton's fleeting facial slip was the only clear example that Ekman could recount of a politician saying something that they did not mean during both the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
Seriously, did anyone else besides Ekman see it? Did this facial slip actually exist? Where's the screencap?
This entire article is ridiculous. Decrying "spin", they use it themselves as an anti-Obama device. Absurd.
I got 3D shutter glasses about 5 years ago, and they worked fantastically. I would play fps games until the sun came up. I was quite disappointed when I switched to laptops and didn't have 3D capabilities anymore.
I wondered why they never caught on. I never felt nausea using them (though I do get actual on-ocean seasick very easily), and I adjusted to them very quickly. Then again, I can see those magic-eye things almost effortlessly, so maybe my eyes are just messed up.
Are you American (and therefore assume the rest of the world is as religious as Americans are)? Or are you proposing a hypothetical situation?
Nowhere near 90% of the human population believes in a God. I lived in Japan for three years, worked in a school with thousands of people. In three years I met a total of two (2) people that believed in God.
Hey, maybe that's just Japan, or just that part of Japan, or just that school, anecdotal evidence and sample-size and all that.
Mind-control powers? That doesn't sound good. We actually deal with tardigrades at work and you're raising some serious concerns. I plan to... hold on, someone's at the door.
IT WAS NO ONE. TARDIGRADES ARE NOT DANGEROUS. TARDIGRADES ARE OUR FRIENDS.
You have been modded +5 by people who have never lived in Japan and think you are joking.
I don't know whether to pity them for never witnessing the wonder that is Japanese television, or envy them for never witnessing the horror that is Japanese television...
Slashdot Mirror
What?
Is your claim that they did what they did at Lori's request? That Lori told them to write hateful things to Megan? Where did you get that from? Lori wasn't even THERE when they did that.
Or was it setting up the account with false information that was illegal? Because the legality of that has not been tested in court yet. Are you always 100% truthful when you go online? I'm certainly not (I will usually put a false middle-name on any form; if I get spam or junk mail with that name, I know who sold my information)
Please point me to the specific action that Lori took that was clearly illegal. I'm serious.
The fact of the matter is, Sarah is a kid, and kids can be cruel. I'm sure she had no idea the potential damage she was doing to Megan at the time. I don't know how old the babysitter was (although I'm pretty sure she was a minor as well); she probably should have known better. But they did something stupid, and someone has to pay, and the scapegoat chosen appears to be Lori.
You say that as if it's a proven fact that she talked the girl into suicide. It isn't; Lori wasn't the one doing the talking.
According to the original story, Lori asked her kids' babysitter to set up the account, so she could get a picture of Megan's friendship with her daughter, Sarah.
It was then Sarah and the babysitter that psychologically tortured Megan. Lori was not part of that, but everyone is being led to believe she was.
Read the articles again:
Messages from a fictitious boy, not messages from Lori. They don't even say that she was the one who sent the messages, but they are certainly trying to imply it. Successfully, apparently.
Again, messages sent from the fictitious account, but they do not say sent from Lori because they weren't.
The thing is, the prosecutors already KNOW that Lori wasn't the one who sent the messages! But, they have to be seen doing something.
Most of the comments on here are about what a terrible person Lori must be, based on this misinformation. Be sure you have the right perpetrator before you grab your torch and pitchfork, folks.
Not to be confused with Rooster Sauce.
Speaking of "Wuster" sauce, when I lived in Japan my co-workers told me about a sauce they called "uster" sauce. Thinking that it was just another mispronunciation, and they really meant worcestershire sauce, I said I'd try it.
Turns out, it was oyster sauce. Made with real oysters.
Have I mentioned the part where I can't eat shellfish? :-(
As opposed to turn-based?
Project Red Dog = RED (obviously)
Windows Midori = GREEN
Windows Azure = BLUE
So that's RGB taken care of. Or, are we on the Red-Yellow-Blue system? What's yellow that we can associate with Microsoft's products? Suggestions?
It wasn't a fire. Or, it wasn't an uncontained fire.
One of my roommates was microwaving a burrito, set the time too high, got a phone call and left to go to the store. Forgetting the burrito.
The house stinks of smoke, the microwave may be toast, and it's getting cold with all these windows open. At least the smoke detectors have stopped going off.
I really, really, REALLY wish I were joking. :-(
I keep hearing about this 'boring life' that people are talking about, and I have to say, I'd like to try it.
I'm stuck in an interesting life. I didn't realize this until recently, but apparently, not everyone was kidnapped as a child, or had a roommate who tried to kill them, or were accidentally mistaken for a terrorist and caused a bomb-scare. I had no idea that boring was even an option!
Man, I had more but (I can't believe I'm saying this) the house is filling with smoke. There may be a fire.
Just 10 dollars a month? Wow, who is your ISP?
A bad article? On slashdot? But it was posted by kdawson...
No, no, no, this doesn't make any sense at all!
Sorry, from here it sounds as if you don't know much about Yahoo or business.
Yahoo is a lot more than search and search advertising. That is such a tiny, tiny part of Yahoo, and you make it sound like the whole kit. I understand that, as an American, your view of Yahoo may be limited. Here in the US, Google is our lord and master, and Yahoo is the has-been. In Japan, Yahoo is our lord and master (much more so than Google is in America), and Google is mostly non-existent. Do a search for YahooBB (with your search engine of choice). Basically, every home in Japan that doesn't have FTTH has YahooBB. It is absolutely everywhere. You think that Mission College is the whole world. You are just unaware of the big picture.
Secondly, this is how business works. Yahoo can make MORE MONEY and STRENGTHEN THE COMPANY by using Google's advertising. That doesn't mean that Yahoo must give up its own research into search and advertising models. Quite the opposite, it will now have MORE money to spend on research and development. If they ever do develop better systems, they can switch. Of course, there's not necessarily any motivation to do that research, as the current situation is profitable, and that money can be spent elsewhere in the business.
So, sorry your personal slice of Yahoo pie was outsourced to Google and you were made redundant. It happens. But the rest of Yahoo is stronger for it, and so is Google. Try to get a job with them.
Or continue your uninformed ranting on the Internet. Whatever. I'm not the boss of you.
Google and Yahoo aren't really main competitors, anymore than Google and Microsoft are main competitors. Yahoo and Microsoft are so much more than a search engine/advertising model/free e-email.
When I lived in Japan, for example, Yahoo was my Internet and phone provider. Google doesn't do that. Don't assume that all the Yahoo you personally experience is the extent of the company.
I disagree!
Clearly, I fail at nerding.
That takes me back...
I had a cartridge for my C64 that let me do low-level stuff with disks. With it, you could browse around and read the raw sectors, change stuff, lots of fun. It wasn't long until I discovered that most C64 disks followed a certain pattern with regard to which sectors followed which (very rarely were they sequential; I think it was next-track-over+six-blocks-down). The first two bytes (iirc) pointed to the next sector. [This didn't work for copy-protected games that didn't use the standard format. If those disks went bad, you were SOL]
Interestingly, I found that when sectors went bad, they often went bad in exactly the same way: all the bytes for that sector would be shifted back one, and the first and last bytes were the same on every bad sector. I can't remember what they were now (first byte was "M", last was "Z"? Damn 20-years-ago memories...), but you could spot a bad sector by looking at it.
Effectively, only the information about the following sector would have been lost, but you couldn't just put it back in because everything had shifted over by one. And if you manually shifted everything back by one (by retyping it all in, starting from the end), and re-saved, you'd usually fuck up the sector even more, and lose data.
My solution was to browse around on the disk until you found an empty sector. Copy all the data from the old sector on to a piece of paper, go to the new sector, type it all back in, point it at what the next sector should be (following the standard pattern), save it all to make sure it's not a bad sector, go back to what the previous sector should be, and point it away from the bad sector to the new replacement sector.
[The _real_ solution would have been to write a program to do this for you, but I didn't have any manuals and couldn't figure out which PEEKs and POKEs would give me the same functionality as the cartridge]
Sometimes a bunch of sectors were bad, so you'd have to do this many, many times. I remember when I moved out after high school and found my notebooks filled with pages and pages of hex numbers; the raw data for all the sectors I moved around on disks, by hand.
Good times.
False, though you are not alone in thinking that throwing more money at the problem will make things better...
so many bungled ideas about how to attract quality professionals to education have made it impossible to attract quality applicants
More money is one of those bungled ideas. In the US, we pay a LOT more for teachers than other countries, yet our public education system is much worse.
A bigger reason is the teachers' unions. Districts have a terribly difficult time culling bad teachers. You can't fire them. Even if you get them out of the classroom, you still have to pay them. It's ridiculous.
You have bad/apathetic teachers because there is so little competition between them, there's not a lot of motivation to do better. (Some people really do enjoy teaching, and they'll be good teachers no matter what you pay them. Their motivation comes from within.)
IAA Former Teacher, and a lot of my friends are teachers. The unions have ruined our public education system.
Do well in life! Where did you attend school?
Yes. Wow. Absolutely correct. ^_^ I keep forgetting that Slashdot is not my normal audience. I'll restate it:
"Rhetoric" has (undeservedly, in my opinion) negative connotations, meaning that some people associate the word with a negative emotion. It does not have a negative denotation, meaning that its actual meaning has no negative slant.
Please don't report me to the Former English Teacher's Union, or I might have to turn in my Former English Teacher's badge and quit being a Former English Teacher. :-/
Nothing? Did you mean to reply to someone else?
Science really had little (or nothing) to do with the article or my post. What faith am I confused about?
Only good liars, right?
Disclaimer: I AM a Republican. OH SHI-
I initially thought that the Obama-smear was just a poorly written summary (and was going to tag "badsummary") but the actual article itself is slanted. I propose we start tagging these kinds of things "badarticle", since they seem to be cropping up more and more on Slashdot.
Anyway.
There are so many things that bug me about this "article", let's just go through it together.
First off, associating disgust with Obama. Paul Ekman says he saw it on Clinton's face. Did any of the other millions of people watching see it?
Got it, spin = lying. OK. That's the definition we'll be using as we read.
Again, spin = lying. I'm with you so far.
I... what? "I" vs "we"? What does that have to do with lying? I thought spin = lying, since that's stated twice at the beginning of the article. Suddenly spin = rhetoric.
First, spin = lying, and then spin = rhetoric, but we don't call it that, and then Obama's speeches have the most spin. Which by the new definition means that he is the most effective speaker, but by the original definition means that he is the biggest liar.
McCain is the purported to have the least spin, implying that he is the most truthful (except by their definition of spin, it really means he is the least effective speaker). Hands up, who thinks McCain is the most truthful candidate?
And hey, let's talk about Jeremiah Wright some more, because it's not like that story is history or anything. But hey, any chance there is to remind people that he's associated with Obama...
Ah! Now they even call it rhetoric! Perhaps hoping that the intended audience doesn't know the meaning of the word? (Many people mistakenly think the word rhetoric has negative connotations.)
Seriously, did anyone else besides Ekman see it? Did this facial slip actually exist? Where's the screencap?
This entire article is ridiculous. Decrying "spin", they use it themselves as an anti-Obama device. Absurd.
That's unfortunate.
I got 3D shutter glasses about 5 years ago, and they worked fantastically. I would play fps games until the sun came up. I was quite disappointed when I switched to laptops and didn't have 3D capabilities anymore.
I wondered why they never caught on. I never felt nausea using them (though I do get actual on-ocean seasick very easily), and I adjusted to them very quickly. Then again, I can see those magic-eye things almost effortlessly, so maybe my eyes are just messed up.
Indeed. (2:10-2:40, 30 glorious seconds of giant capital 3D Z)
So, not at all like the Holodeck, then?
Are you American (and therefore assume the rest of the world is as religious as Americans are)? Or are you proposing a hypothetical situation?
Nowhere near 90% of the human population believes in a God. I lived in Japan for three years, worked in a school with thousands of people. In three years I met a total of two (2) people that believed in God.
Hey, maybe that's just Japan, or just that part of Japan, or just that school, anecdotal evidence and sample-size and all that.
Mind-control powers? That doesn't sound good. We actually deal with tardigrades at work and you're raising some serious concerns. I plan to... hold on, someone's at the door.
IT WAS NO ONE. TARDIGRADES ARE NOT DANGEROUS. TARDIGRADES ARE OUR FRIENDS.
You have been modded +5 by people who have never lived in Japan and think you are joking.
I don't know whether to pity them for never witnessing the wonder that is Japanese television, or envy them for never witnessing the horror that is Japanese television...