Grand larceny includes a requirement of intent. You didn't have the intent to commit grand larceny, therefore you didn't. Nice try, but ain't no criminal.
Darn it, I'll have to try harder next time. I keep trying to become a hardened criminal, but it never quite works. (:
Certain classes of laws, maybe, but "laws in general"?
I'm pretty sure that I haven't engaged in wire fraud, sexual assault, or breaking and entering in the past month. But don't you hate it when you accidentally commit grand larceny during a brief lapse of attention? And they never cut you any slack for the fact that you didn't mean to...
...OK, I was being sarcastic, but I just remembered, that I did accidentally commit what may technically have been a grand larceny once. I had unlocked the door to "my" car, got in, turned the ignition, and started to back out of the parking place-- before I noticed my upholstery had changed to a similar, yet definitely different, color. Huh? I pulled back into the parking space, got out of the car that was the same make, model, and color as my car --and somehow had the EXACT SAME lock/key-- looked around sheepishly, re-locked that car, and got into my own car two parking-spaces down. So, I um, think I've just defeated my own snark here.
Never mind, nothing to see here. Please move along.
There should be no sympathy for those who pose as fictitious characters only to create malice and havoc in others lives, whether it's online or in real life. I'm unsure if this woman will have charges brought upon her, but it wouldn't be unreasonable, imo. The simple fact she even did this shows that she's not even mature enough to have kids. Unfortunately, she'll probably plead "insanity" and get away with it.
There are two different issues here:
the woman who created the fake profile
the bloggers who outed her personal information.
As to the first: any adult who would intentionally bait a severely depressed 13-year-old in that way is a despicable excuse human being and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. There is no excuse.
As to the second: the first point does not justify the second. Vigilante justice doesn't help anyone. People sometimes seem to have this attitude that the worse the crime, the less we should worry about due process. So, the worse the crime, the less we should worry about making sure we have the right person, and the less we should worry about innocent people getting hurt in the process? Posting people's personal information on the internet is just a call for vigilantism. People have gotten violent and gruesome death threats for far less than this, when a blogger has complained about them. I fail to see what publishing her personal information on the internet is going to accomplish, other than catching innocent people in the cross-fire that is certain to result.
I was hoping someone would mention that.
The expert who was first and most quoted as saying the figure sounded "unrealistic" or some-such when it first came out was quoted based on a reporter calling him and asking him for his first reaction without having read the report.
After reading the report and the methodology, he changed his mind and decided that it was solid. That didn't stop the talking heads from quoting his original off-the-cuff remark and citing him as an "expert" that had "disproved" the original study.
Actually, I HAVE been in a situation where I couldn't afford to quit. I could, however, begin looking for another job while still working. It's utterly exhausting and miserable to look for a job while still going to an unhealthy job at the same time-- but the option is there to at least TRY to get into a healthier situation. And in the long run, it is well worth it.
Adults, if they feel their workplace is mentally, emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive towards them can quit and go someplace else. If it's bad enough, they can press charges or sue.
A kid in school can't leave. They just have to either put up with it, or lash out.
How the heck does that prepare someone for the real, grown-up world? The only part of the real-world where the bullying dynamic works the way it does in school is prison. And maybe, to a lesser extent, the army-- but nowhere else.
He does not claim that playing violent video-games make people violent.
He does not claim that violent video games should be banned
He acknowledges that there is a witch-hunt mentality about violent video games, and condemns this.
He plays violent video-games himself.
He does say that doing something over and over again-- whether it's a video game move or a cross-stitch pattern-- clearly affects the way we think. He acknowledges that this does NOT have to affect how we behave, and usually doesn't. But these things DO have a cognitive effect. His argument is that if we can only ever talk about this effect-or-lack-there-of in the context of condemning or defending violent video games, we are not going to be able to explore what is really happening.
His point is that the cognitive effects-- positive, negative, and/or neutral-- are worth exploring, and cannot be explored when every exploration begins with an agenda of "for" or "against", setting out to prove that games are/are not harmful. Is this really such an outlandish suggestion?
Don't worry, South Station has several fast-food restaurants that people can use to more than recoup the calories they involuntarily donated to the "crowd farm".
"Why is it so hard to get a computer to do something that a die can do easily? Please 'splain to the non-comp-sci/math person. No, 'splaining would take too long... sum up."
While most computer languages have some sort of get-random-number function, someone had to write the function. And computers are dumb-- they only do exactly what they are told to do. You have to tell the computer exactly how you want it to come up with a "random" number.
Most of the algorithms I'm aware of begin by asking the system clock something like "how many milliseconds has it been since midnight?". Then mathematical equations are used to play a "one-potato-two-potato" game on steroids with the millisecond count
The method is entirely deterministic, but the result is indistinguishable from random for casual use (such as "shuffling" a deck of cards in an online card-game). But just like kids that play "one-potato-two-potato" too often start to notice the pattern in how it comes out, scientists running billions and trillions of sensitive calculations based on the pseudo-random number start to see patterns and biases in their results. That's why a true random number generator is so exiting.
"the extinction of fear learned in a particular context."
Fear learned in a particular context? That makes this actually useful: for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Panic Attacks, and Phobias.
Something that eliminated fear indiscriminately would clearly be problematic, since fear is a key part of our self-preservation instinct. I haven't RTFA, but from that sentence, it sounds like this could potentially be used more selectively, to cure debilitating fear that comes up in contexts where it is not helpful. I'm sure there is a lot of research that needs to be done before this information could be applied clinically, but if this is the direction it's heading, it could make a huge difference in the lives of many people.
"And note, this doesn't preclude broadcasters from securing rights from the artists themselves... it's just a pain in the ass...The bands are free to secure their royalties from SoundExchange at any point. The CRB website has links to the necessary forms, IIRC."
So what's needed is some healthy competition. A second clearing house that artists and record labels can sigh up with, and internet radio can negotiate with this second clearinghouse instead. If the artist/label wishes, the second clearing house can also broker the removing of their copyright from SoundExchange as well. Given the exorbitant fees SoundExchange is charging, (they aren't trying to make a profit on Internet Radio but rather destroy it), this second clearing house could probably beat their rates by a lot, while still paying the artists a fair fee AND making a fair profit.
They could even bootstrap by checking people registered at Creative Commons-- I'm sure some of those licenses would allow such a thing? It's win-win-win for artist, listener, and second clearing house: the only "losers" are RIAA and SoundExchage-- and that's their own fault for lacking the vision to do this themselves, since they certainly had the first opportunity.
I don't have the industry knowledge/contacts to start this thing myself, but surely someone else out there does? Anyone? Anyone? Beuler? Beuler?
"It seems fair to start charging, but odd that they're just shutting it off. They say they're willing to license to other companies,..."
The infrastructure required to sell to businesses/institutions and the infrastructure required to sell to individuals is completely different.
In one model, salespeople develop personal relationships with contacts at the customer locations, discuss their needs with them, put together a custom package, and then make a small number of large transactions. Also, in the B2B model you don't need to provide the front-line "my computer's coffee holder broke" level of support to end-users: the customer deals with their users first, and only passes on to you the customer support they can't solve easily. In this model you advertise in trade journals, trade shows, and relevant conferences.
In another model you are advertising via mass media, processing a very large number of much smaller transactions. You have to keep track of a lot more customer data-- and if you offer online purchasing, then you don't have the easy answer of keeping customer data secure by just not connecting it to the internet. You have to offer a much higher volume of customer service calls from a much less technical variety of enduser.
Switching from B2B to B2C (or vice-versa for that matter) is a huge expense in terms of money, time, and energy, but generally not much chance of reward.If you're good at one of these two models, then you have no reason to switch to the other; if you're bad at the one you're doing now, then you aren't very likely to survive the costs and turmoil of the switch.
Thus, as someone that works for a company that sells to institutions but not to individuals, it doesn't surprise me in the least that they aren't changing their entire business model.
Actually, floating ice displaces exactly as much water as it would take up melting: e.g. the net effect of all the floating ice in the world melting would not result in any change in sea level (though it would result in a change in the salinity of the ocean water, which could affect currents).
However, the glaciers in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Europe and Asia (not to mention the entire continent of Antarctica) are not over water, but over land that empties into the ocean. It is from this ice-melt that rising ocean levels is possible.
There is a certain kind of designer that doesn't care about good design, but does care about anything that's new and "exiting" enough to generate buzzwords. There is another kind of designer that cares about good design and comes to new technology more thoughtfully.
Thus when ANYTHING is new and buzz-wordy, it will be thrown randomly at websites helter-scelter but the first type of designer. Meanwhile, thoughtful designers look for positive and useful ways to incorporate it.
If you go into a room full of people showing proper decorum except for one loud, obnoxious person, it is the loud obnoxious person that will stand out. Thus, at first, the throw-the-buzzword-at-the-screen examples of the new technology/trend will stand out.
Eventually, the buzzword people move onto the next buzzword. At this point, either the thoughtful designers have figured out how to incorperate the technology/trend into good design (in which case it just becomes part of the basic fabric of the web, like CSS)-- or else they haven't, and it goes the way of the BLINK tag and those animated-gif "under construction" things.
The fact that bad designers use the "next new thing" in really bad designs doesn't say anything one way or the other about what value the "next new thing" has to the web as a whole.
"Let me be one of the first to say that this story is so off-base that it will likely never be referenced by anyone in the future."
I disagree.
After all, "640k ought to be enough for anybody" and "we predict a world market for, maybe, five computers" and "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." are still referenced frequently.
Well, a temperature map is still a map =^)
Jupiter.google.com, for instance, could show prevailing wind directions, approximate boundaries of bands between different atmospheric or meteorological compositions, etc.
I read that the winds on that exoplanet are killer, too keep the temperature as close to evenly distributed as it is. (Haven't read TFA, but I saw a newstory about it someplace else on Friday.)
To be fair, the original point of F was to be a temperature scale that you could calibrate yourself, which made a lot of sense for scientific-types back before you could buy an accurately pre-calibrated thermometer in any dime store.
The idea was that 0-degrees was ice-water (e.g. the temperature where water can exist simultaneously as a liquid and a solid. The freezing temperature of water is actually lower than this, and plain old h20-ice can get a lot colder than the freezing temperature.) and 100-degrees was body-temperature (which Mr. Fahrenheit got wrong by about 2-degrees.)
Granted, that doesn't leave any reason (other than habit) where it should still be in use today, since Celsius makes a lot more conceptual sense, and pre-calibrated thermometers are no longer hard to come by.
To me, reading is just... thought. Pure meaning. Very abstract.
I used to think I was the same way-- but then I realized that in my case, there was a definite spatial component to the abstractness. (And it's definitely spatial, NOT visual-- they're not the same thing, though people who are neither sometimes conflate them.)
"The only downside I can see (if this gets used in print) is the waste of paper compared to current methods."
Well, I didn't RTFA, but according to TFTitle, this method was developed specifically for online reading-- so hopefully people would have the foresight to use a different stylesheet for printing.
Some people think primarily in sounds (can you hear what I'm sayin?), which is aural thinking.
Others think primarily visually (can you see what I mean?) Some think spatially (do you need to organize your thoughts? Seeing this from a different angle? Wrapping your mind around it?). Some think tactilely (can you feel what I'm getting at here? Getting a grip on it?). Some think kinetically (am I moving you at all? Finding common ground?) I'm sure there are others which I'm forgetting.
Any means of processing incoming information, is going to be affected by your thinking style. I agree with you that the GP's demonstration of how "bad" the style is is far faster and easier to read than the original paragraph-- but then, I'm a spatial thinker, not an aural one.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough.
I sometimes get an itchy trigger finger around anything that seems like an overgeneralization when you look at it sideways
Darn it, I'll have to try harder next time. I keep trying to become a hardened criminal, but it never quite works. (:
Certain classes of laws, maybe, but "laws in general"?
I'm pretty sure that I haven't engaged in wire fraud, sexual assault, or breaking and entering in the past month. But don't you hate it when you accidentally commit grand larceny during a brief lapse of attention? And they never cut you any slack for the fact that you didn't mean to...
...OK, I was being sarcastic, but I just remembered, that I did accidentally commit what may technically have been a grand larceny once. I had unlocked the door to "my" car, got in, turned the ignition, and started to back out of the parking place-- before I noticed my upholstery had changed to a similar, yet definitely different, color. Huh? I pulled back into the parking space, got out of the car that was the same make, model, and color as my car --and somehow had the EXACT SAME lock/key-- looked around sheepishly, re-locked that car, and got into my own car two parking-spaces down. So, I um, think I've just defeated my own snark here.
Never mind, nothing to see here. Please move along.
There are two different issues here:
As to the first: any adult who would intentionally bait a severely depressed 13-year-old in that way is a despicable excuse human being and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. There is no excuse.
As to the second: the first point does not justify the second. Vigilante justice doesn't help anyone. People sometimes seem to have this attitude that the worse the crime, the less we should worry about due process. So, the worse the crime, the less we should worry about making sure we have the right person, and the less we should worry about innocent people getting hurt in the process? Posting people's personal information on the internet is just a call for vigilantism. People have gotten violent and gruesome death threats for far less than this, when a blogger has complained about them. I fail to see what publishing her personal information on the internet is going to accomplish, other than catching innocent people in the cross-fire that is certain to result.
I was hoping someone would mention that. The expert who was first and most quoted as saying the figure sounded "unrealistic" or some-such when it first came out was quoted based on a reporter calling him and asking him for his first reaction without having read the report. After reading the report and the methodology, he changed his mind and decided that it was solid. That didn't stop the talking heads from quoting his original off-the-cuff remark and citing him as an "expert" that had "disproved" the original study.
Actually, I HAVE been in a situation where I couldn't afford to quit. I could, however, begin looking for another job while still working. It's utterly exhausting and miserable to look for a job while still going to an unhealthy job at the same time-- but the option is there to at least TRY to get into a healthier situation. And in the long run, it is well worth it.
Adults, if they feel their workplace is mentally, emotionally, physically, or sexually abusive towards them can quit and go someplace else. If it's bad enough, they can press charges or sue.
A kid in school can't leave. They just have to either put up with it, or lash out.
How the heck does that prepare someone for the real, grown-up world? The only part of the real-world where the bullying dynamic works the way it does in school is prison. And maybe, to a lesser extent, the army-- but nowhere else.
Oops :)
He does say that doing something over and over again-- whether it's a video game move or a cross-stitch pattern-- clearly affects the way we think. He acknowledges that this does NOT have to affect how we behave, and usually doesn't. But these things DO have a cognitive effect. His argument is that if we can only ever talk about this effect-or-lack-there-of in the context of condemning or defending violent video games, we are not going to be able to explore what is really happening.
His point is that the cognitive effects-- positive, negative, and/or neutral-- are worth exploring, and cannot be explored when every exploration begins with an agenda of "for" or "against", setting out to prove that games are/are not harmful. Is this really such an outlandish suggestion?
Don't worry, South Station has several fast-food restaurants that people can use to more than recoup the calories they involuntarily donated to the "crowd farm".
"Why is it so hard to get a computer to do something that a die can do easily? Please 'splain to the non-comp-sci/math person. No, 'splaining would take too long... sum up."
While most computer languages have some sort of get-random-number function, someone had to write the function. And computers are dumb-- they only do exactly what they are told to do. You have to tell the computer exactly how you want it to come up with a "random" number.
Most of the algorithms I'm aware of begin by asking the system clock something like "how many milliseconds has it been since midnight?". Then mathematical equations are used to play a "one-potato-two-potato" game on steroids with the millisecond count
The method is entirely deterministic, but the result is indistinguishable from random for casual use (such as "shuffling" a deck of cards in an online card-game). But just like kids that play "one-potato-two-potato" too often start to notice the pattern in how it comes out, scientists running billions and trillions of sensitive calculations based on the pseudo-random number start to see patterns and biases in their results. That's why a true random number generator is so exiting.
"the extinction of fear learned in a particular context."
Fear learned in a particular context? That makes this actually useful: for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Panic Attacks, and Phobias.
Something that eliminated fear indiscriminately would clearly be problematic, since fear is a key part of our self-preservation instinct. I haven't RTFA, but from that sentence, it sounds like this could potentially be used more selectively, to cure debilitating fear that comes up in contexts where it is not helpful. I'm sure there is a lot of research that needs to be done before this information could be applied clinically, but if this is the direction it's heading, it could make a huge difference in the lives of many people.
"And note, this doesn't preclude broadcasters from securing rights from the artists themselves... it's just a pain in the ass...The bands are free to secure their royalties from SoundExchange at any point. The CRB website has links to the necessary forms, IIRC."
So what's needed is some healthy competition. A second clearing house that artists and record labels can sigh up with, and internet radio can negotiate with this second clearinghouse instead. If the artist/label wishes, the second clearing house can also broker the removing of their copyright from SoundExchange as well. Given the exorbitant fees SoundExchange is charging, (they aren't trying to make a profit on Internet Radio but rather destroy it), this second clearing house could probably beat their rates by a lot, while still paying the artists a fair fee AND making a fair profit.
They could even bootstrap by checking people registered at Creative Commons-- I'm sure some of those licenses would allow such a thing? It's win-win-win for artist, listener, and second clearing house: the only "losers" are RIAA and SoundExchage-- and that's their own fault for lacking the vision to do this themselves, since they certainly had the first opportunity.
I don't have the industry knowledge/contacts to start this thing myself, but surely someone else out there does? Anyone? Anyone? Beuler? Beuler?
"It seems fair to start charging, but odd that they're just shutting it off. They say they're willing to license to other companies,..."
The infrastructure required to sell to businesses/institutions and the infrastructure required to sell to individuals is completely different.
In one model, salespeople develop personal relationships with contacts at the customer locations, discuss their needs with them, put together a custom package, and then make a small number of large transactions. Also, in the B2B model you don't need to provide the front-line "my computer's coffee holder broke" level of support to end-users: the customer deals with their users first, and only passes on to you the customer support they can't solve easily. In this model you advertise in trade journals, trade shows, and relevant conferences.
In another model you are advertising via mass media, processing a very large number of much smaller transactions. You have to keep track of a lot more customer data-- and if you offer online purchasing, then you don't have the easy answer of keeping customer data secure by just not connecting it to the internet. You have to offer a much higher volume of customer service calls from a much less technical variety of enduser.
Switching from B2B to B2C (or vice-versa for that matter) is a huge expense in terms of money, time, and energy, but generally not much chance of reward.If you're good at one of these two models, then you have no reason to switch to the other; if you're bad at the one you're doing now, then you aren't very likely to survive the costs and turmoil of the switch.
Thus, as someone that works for a company that sells to institutions but not to individuals, it doesn't surprise me in the least that they aren't changing their entire business model.
Actually, floating ice displaces exactly as much water as it would take up melting: e.g. the net effect of all the floating ice in the world melting would not result in any change in sea level (though it would result in a change in the salinity of the ocean water, which could affect currents).
However, the glaciers in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Europe and Asia (not to mention the entire continent of Antarctica) are not over water, but over land that empties into the ocean. It is from this ice-melt that rising ocean levels is possible.
The facts have a liberal bias, and should thus be ignored: truly intelligent people reach firm conclusions without consulting them.
There is a certain kind of designer that doesn't care about good design, but does care about anything that's new and "exiting" enough to generate buzzwords. There is another kind of designer that cares about good design and comes to new technology more thoughtfully.
Thus when ANYTHING is new and buzz-wordy, it will be thrown randomly at websites helter-scelter but the first type of designer. Meanwhile, thoughtful designers look for positive and useful ways to incorporate it.
If you go into a room full of people showing proper decorum except for one loud, obnoxious person, it is the loud obnoxious person that will stand out. Thus, at first, the throw-the-buzzword-at-the-screen examples of the new technology/trend will stand out.
Eventually, the buzzword people move onto the next buzzword. At this point, either the thoughtful designers have figured out how to incorperate the technology/trend into good design (in which case it just becomes part of the basic fabric of the web, like CSS)-- or else they haven't, and it goes the way of the BLINK tag and those animated-gif "under construction" things.
The fact that bad designers use the "next new thing" in really bad designs doesn't say anything one way or the other about what value the "next new thing" has to the web as a whole.
"Let me be one of the first to say that this story is so off-base that it will likely never be referenced by anyone in the future."
I disagree.
After all, "640k ought to be enough for anybody" and "we predict a world market for, maybe, five computers" and "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." are still referenced frequently.
Well, a temperature map is still a map =^) Jupiter.google.com, for instance, could show prevailing wind directions, approximate boundaries of bands between different atmospheric or meteorological compositions, etc. I read that the winds on that exoplanet are killer, too keep the temperature as close to evenly distributed as it is. (Haven't read TFA, but I saw a newstory about it someplace else on Friday.)
To be fair, the original point of F was to be a temperature scale that you could calibrate yourself, which made a lot of sense for scientific-types back before you could buy an accurately pre-calibrated thermometer in any dime store.
The idea was that 0-degrees was ice-water (e.g. the temperature where water can exist simultaneously as a liquid and a solid. The freezing temperature of water is actually lower than this, and plain old h20-ice can get a lot colder than the freezing temperature.) and 100-degrees was body-temperature (which Mr. Fahrenheit got wrong by about 2-degrees.)
Granted, that doesn't leave any reason (other than habit) where it should still be in use today, since Celsius makes a lot more conceptual sense, and pre-calibrated thermometers are no longer hard to come by.
"(Checking for press release announcing Google Space)"
http://mars.google.com/
http://moon.google.com/
I really, really hope that they do add exoplanets.google.com to this list. (or even just other planets/moons within our own solar system...)
To me, reading is just... thought. Pure meaning. Very abstract.
I used to think I was the same way-- but then I realized that in my case, there was a definite spatial component to the abstractness. (And it's definitely spatial, NOT visual-- they're not the same thing, though people who are neither sometimes conflate them.)
"The only downside I can see (if this gets used in print) is the waste of paper compared to current methods."
Well, I didn't RTFA, but according to TFTitle, this method was developed specifically for online reading-- so hopefully people would have the foresight to use a different stylesheet for printing.
(But then again-- maybe pigs will fly?)
Some people think primarily in sounds (can you hear what I'm sayin?), which is aural thinking.
Others think primarily visually (can you see what I mean?) Some think spatially (do you need to organize your thoughts? Seeing this from a different angle? Wrapping your mind around it?). Some think tactilely (can you feel what I'm getting at here? Getting a grip on it?). Some think kinetically (am I moving you at all? Finding common ground?) I'm sure there are others which I'm forgetting.
Any means of processing incoming information, is going to be affected by your thinking style. I agree with you that the GP's demonstration of how "bad" the style is is far faster and easier to read than the original paragraph-- but then, I'm a spatial thinker, not an aural one.
Ah, good point-- thanks for the correction.