I am big into mathematics, but I am not a fanatic. I am just someone with an honest and, dare I say it, somewhat experienced opinion on how the exponential function should be presented. If you take a glance at the section I removed you will see that it does not take much experience of mathematics to see that the introduction could have been a lot better.
It wasn't about my edit, or my attitude. It was about a group of people so caught up in their own bureaucracy that they had lost sight of their original mission.
No. It's the encyclopedia you may edit so long as you have "consensus".
I recently decided to edit out a particularly rambling and circular introduction to the Exponential Function. Needless to say, my excision was not taken too kindly. I found myself in a protracted and frankly, surreal struggle to make the article in some way useful for the people who come to read it.
Long story short, my opinions on how best to present the exponential function were labeled a POINT OF VIEW, a major no-no contrary to the higher WP:PRINCPLES. Having found myself lumped in with Holocaust deniers and cranks of every degree, my chances of making further edits to the article were in fact pretty slim. What debate there once again was petered out without any "consensus", which meant I couldn't alter the status quo.
This is at least the fourth time this has happened to me on Wikipedia.
The usual routine is that someone who "owns" the article with throw up a mountain of WP:RULES and WP:TRADITIONS, each more underhanded in intent than the last, in an effort to stonewall you for as long as they can. They can keep this up for months. Any "debates" with the aim to achieve consensus are farcical to begin with, as everyone involved knows that they never, ever reach consensus on anything. Good men get frustrated, demoralised and bored, and leave, letting evil triumph. I do not use evil in a rhetorical way. I firmly believe that the great majority of wiki-lawyers have petty malice and megalomania as their primary motivations rather than concern for the quality of articles.
The Wikipedia page for World War 2 had the start date for the conflict as "Late 1930s" for over 5 months. Five months with a totally incorrect date for one of the most important events of human history because one editor felt things needed to be more "inclusive". I'm all for inclusivity, but stupidity is where I draw the line. The usual farce ensued. The editors set up a Mediation Cabal to reach "consensus" on the issue(Their discussion once again petered out impotently), all while the the obscenity of a start date sat, unmolested for 5 months on one of the most visited pages on the site, no, on the internet. The thought of how its precence may have shifted general human knowledge and understanding of the conflict saddens me.
There is a deep and by now, inoperable rot and the centre of how things are run and done at Wikipedia. The rot began with Jimbo Wales and his simple inability and unwillingness to properly run a project of this scope and importance. As time went by, only the most devious, duplicitous and underhanded of editors prospered and gained control. Now, as the site enters its consolidation phase, the altruism and effort of millions of honest editors has been crushed under the weight of one of the most corrupt and intransigent bureaucracies in the world today.
Wikipedia is rotten from the Top to the Bottom and cannot be trusted for anything, by anyone, for any reason. Even as a reference section. Not even the chemistry and astronomy pages can be relied upon these days,. Things will only get worse as the Wikicrats, Wikilawyers and Wikiticians assume total oligarchical control.
Well, alright then. The Rayleigh effect is caused by the movement of Lord Rayleigh's argon filled glass bicycle as he rushes through the atmosphere, held aloft by a flight of noisy seagulls. As the Baron passes across the sky, the prism-like spokes of the bicycle absorb the lower wavelengths of light in preference to higher wavelengths, like blue. The shape of the spokes also causes the blue light to scatter and sparkle brilliantly in all directions. This all happens so fast that the sky appears smeared with blue.
When his Lordship retires to his manor for the evening, stowing the bicycle carefully in his garden shed, and letting the seagulls roost in the hayloft, the sky returns to its usual red colour. The sky is also red in the morning because although the Baron rises early, he prefers to take a brisk morning stroll and a swim, and reset his moustache.
In fact, rainbows are also the result of this process. They are caused when the Baron's brightly coloured spoke reflectors become accidentally detached in rain, and continue to rotate an enormous velocities. The rainbow we see is in fact the blur as the reflector circles wildly.
For his services in keeping the sky a pretty shade of blue, His Lordship was knighted by Queen Victoria and given the services of the Royal Navy in order to spread the gift of blue skies throughout the wide breadth of the British Empire, and indeed the world. And that's why the sky is blue now.
You want judges who predictably follow the law--so that the rest of us CAN ORDER OUR LIVES SO THAT WE WILL STAY OUT OF COURT!!!!!
Order your own life? Or order the lives of others? What gives anyone the right to say what others can and cannot do? From where does this power derive? From a simple majority in an election? Is that just? Is it right that the will of the many, no matter what it may be, will override the rights and freedoms of the few? Are there to be no checks and balances within the judicial system?
If we can't predict what judges will do, we can't avoid litigation risk. Litigation risk is a COST. An unnecessary, socially unproductive, cost that should be minimized as much as possible.
What about justice? Is that costly? Is it too expensive? Can we ill afford to have Judges ruling against unfair or ridiculous laws? Is it more productive for use to uphold laws which are unjust, illogical, contradictory or unethical, rather than give judges the power to strike them down? Will this security secure our liberty?
And, as a bonus parting shot: Would you rather have judges rule your life (with unwritten rules) or have legislators write the rules? It's not a hard choice.
And when the rules are unjust and rigged, and the judges complicit in their implementation, what choice will I make then?
If we wanted the laws to be followed to the letter, we would have coded up an Judge system in Lisp by now.
But, we don't want that. We want Judges to make judgments based on both the letter and the spirit of the law. (This applies in sentencing as well as judgments by the way.) We want Judges to be able to spot discrepancies, loopholes and injustices in our current laws and rule against them where it is right to do so.
If you tell me it's legal to rake my lawn, but you then say it's illegal for anyone to give me gardening tools, do you really think that your position is just and logical. It doesn't take a fool to see what is going on here. The law and the legal system are being strained to breaking point, and that's good for neither justice or respect for the rule of law.
Why should anyone respect and uphold a legal system that twists itself into contradictions and connives to deny people the very rights its says they are entitled to? How can anyone go into a courtroom, expecting justice, when they know that the court has no interest in that. When they know the court only cares about an ironclad, rigid and dogmatic interpretation of any rag of a law our legislature see fit to pass; Or worse, only cares about a political interpretation of the law and their rulings within society at large?
In such an environment, why should anyone petition the courts for justice instead of making their own? Our contemporary cinema hails a masked vigilante who goes about beating criminals in the dead of night. What does that say about our respect for the legal system? Judges need to stop being automatons that parse legalease, and start doing their jobs, i.e. delivering justice.
There is a correlation between bad credit and job performance. It might not be a particularly strong correlation, but it is used to justify credit checks by employers.
And I'm sure that, in the US, there's a correlation between being black and being convicted of a crime. And it might not be a particularly strong correlation but it's used to justify racial profiling by law enforcement.
It's also worth noting that skin colour, like gender and age, is technically a cause of outside influences, beyond a persons control.
They are the people that pay for the Canadian Parliament's fancy cars and houses and suits. Why shouldn't they have a say in which Laws the Parliament passes?
The thing is, I see little difference between what they're doing and what Cohen does in Borat and Bruno: Exploiting other people because there's a market for it and he can make a buck/Euro off of it.
Cohen shows people up by exploiting the shallowness and/or hypocrisy implicit in their occupations and/or life in general.
These people showed people up by exploiting the trust and good faith of honest people and to some extent in life in general.
Cohen and Pranknet are in fact, completely opposite both in their methods and in particular their intent.
It's quite clear that fame was the motivation behind a lot of these so-called "pranks". They wanted popularity and didn't care who suffered for it.
Among whom though? I've certainly never heard a pip about this "Pranknet" before today. I'd be willing to be that this is an internet microcommunity, consisting of no more than a few hundred, if that, members with only a few dozen regular members. It's hard to claim "fame" as motivation when you'd get a bigger audience on a bus trip.
The article makes of lot of how the majority of pranksters are essentially living in their parent's basement and have no life outside the internet. I'd say these pranks has less to do with fame than they had to do with simple boredom and plain malice. These people seem pretty contemptuous of the outside world, and probably wanted to justify that contempt by making other people look foolish.
Basement dwelling is one thing, but these guys had the world wide web at their fingertips, yet they spent their time at an adult equivalent of blowing up frogs and putting spiders in people's hair. There's no celebrity urge here. You're looking at a bunch of fairly twisted losers with too much free time. That is all.
In related news, another reader links to an Australian study indicating that quantum computers "can continue to work perfectly even if half their components, or qubits, are missing."
Being on my 5th 360 and still on my launch PS3 means that your situation might be considered anomalous,
The YLOD is an unfortunately common problem on the 60GB models apparently. Other models are more reliable. Unfortunately, the 60GB model was one of the last which supported backwards compatibility for PS2 titles. Yoy.
I don't know how the PS1 smoothing is on the newer models, though.
No PS3 has ever supported texture smoothing for PS1 titles. It has supported HD upscaling, but that's hardly the same thing. The single best way to play PS1 games remains PS2 emulation with texture smoothing. Later PS1 games like Vagrant Story or Final Fantasy IX gain a whole new lease of life. I would liken it to the effects of the Super2xsai engine for 16 bit titles.
I truthfully don't know why I still support MS after 4 dead Elites
The biggest problem with dead consoles in the current generation is not the repair/replacement process. It's the loss of data. The current generation has moved to hard disc as the primary, and indeed sole method of saving game data of all forms. Unfortunately, they have also moved to full disc encryption as well.
When a PS3 or 360 goes belly up, sending it back for repair means losing your save date entirely. For someone who spends upwards of 200 hours on games they love to play, I can say this is a devastating blow. Losing those saves is like losing old notebooks. Something inside you dies.
The PS3 provides a backup utility, which must be run periodically to be of any use. But who wants to administer their games console like a web server? The current regime of keeping users saves under encryption keys, all while shipping units that go belly up with some frequency is a status quo that needs to change. Save cartridges may have been a pain in the ass, but at least they offer some degree of protection against total data loss.
Just because society expected teenagers to work in the past doesn't mean that there aren't significant mental (physical brain) changes going on during that timeframe.
There are significant physical movements going on in their bowels during that timeframe. I fail to see why this precludes them from participation in adult life.
Unless it has PS2 game emulation, I have no reason whatsoever to upgrade to it from my 60GB model. A 60GB model which Yellow lighted and had to be repaired so I could save my saves. I'm still using the danm thing despite the imminent risk of another YLOD due solely to the fact that it plays PS2 games with upscaling. I don't want to go back to using a regular PS2 if I can help it. The difference is truly is like night and day.
If there's no PS2 backwards compatibility (and ffs PS1 game texture smoothing), I see no reason for prefering the model to the cheaper 80/160GBs.
It will never burst. We have seen scandal after scandal involving patents granted by the USPTO. Companies big and small have all been hit, hard, by patent trolls and anti-competitive litigation. We've seen products sunk and industries mired in doubt. We've seen farcical patents and US supreme court case. If there was an event that could have burst this bubble, it would have happened by now.
The USPTO is not going to stop granting these things. Industry is never going to become so irritated by the cons of the patent system that they give up the pros. Ordinary people are never going to let go of the illusion that one genius invention, with patent protection, will set them up for life. This system is deeplying ingrained, self sufficient and self perpetuating.
The patent system is not going to reform itself. Industry will not reform it. The public will not reform it. The legal system will not reform it. Patent holders will not reform it. Reform must come from an external source, powerful enough to completely reform the system. And so deeply rooted is the current regime that reform will be a very, very painful process. Frankly, I doubt modern America, along with many western nations, has the capacity to implement such a change, given its inability to reach national consensus on anything.
So, don't expect a great event that's going to topple the whole patent system. There's not going to be a some kind of Watergate or Pearl Harbour to shake the system to its foundations. Until reform comes alone, the patent system is going to continue in its current vein, come what may. And it will probably do so for a very, very long time.
In olden times, if a great Lord or noble commited a crime against a common man, he would not be held to the same account that nother common man would. For maiming or murdering or robbing a common man, a Lord could expect to perhaps pay a modest fine or simply make a small apology, that is, if it was even legal to bring to to trial at all.
We've returned to that system. A corporation could send men to bulldoze your house, killing everyone in it, and the most you could ever expect to see done to them is a modest fine for your trouble. They would go right on operating just as they did before.
This is the exact opposite situation. Companies are astroturfing to create a scientific consensus instead of paying for bogus studies to discredit real scientists.
They willfully defrauded people into buying their products by lying to them about the risks.
Defrauded. Falsified. Lied. But what does that even mean anymore?
The reality is our society is so mired in exaggeration, misrepresentations, doublespeak, non-denial denials, irrelevant conclusions, marketing lies, cover your ass language and general bullshit that we, as a culture, have probably lost the ability or even the inclination to discriminate truth and lies.
And by discriminate, I don't mean being able to tell one from the other. I mean we have actually lost much of our capacity to actually care whether anyone is telling the truth or lying to us. Truthfulness is no longer rewarded. Indeed it is often punished. Falsehood is conversely rarely, if at all punished and is most often rewarded. This is the culture we live in, so why should people recognize any intrinsic ethic in telling the truth or unethical in lying? Even organizations that are supposed to deal in disclosing the truth are widely recognized and accepted to be mostly peddling lies.
Did Wyeth actually lie? Do you think you would be able to "prove" in a court of law that a single thing they paid to have printed was in fact a lie, rather than a simple massaging of data or a case of being liberal with the truth. The latter won't be enough to secure a conviction as well the Wyeth layers know. And besides, who care if people lie anyway.
Companies don't have honor or morals or ethics. If they break their word, even on a signed contract, no one is going to come after them. There's not going to be a permanent black mark on their reputations. With the world the size it is, the same holds true for people as well. Sure, some of us might get indignant about it all, but most people will never even hear about it, and most of those that do will forget about it by the next morning.
This is the society we, as democracies, have chosen for ourselves. The fruits of our decision should come as no surprise to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I am big into mathematics, but I am not a fanatic. I am just someone with an honest and, dare I say it, somewhat experienced opinion on how the exponential function should be presented. If you take a glance at the section I removed you will see that it does not take much experience of mathematics to see that the introduction could have been a lot better.
It wasn't about my edit, or my attitude. It was about a group of people so caught up in their own bureaucracy that they had lost sight of their original mission.
No. It's the encyclopedia you may edit so long as you have "consensus".
I recently decided to edit out a particularly rambling and circular introduction to the Exponential Function. Needless to say, my excision was not taken too kindly. I found myself in a protracted and frankly, surreal struggle to make the article in some way useful for the people who come to read it.
Long story short, my opinions on how best to present the exponential function were labeled a POINT OF VIEW, a major no-no contrary to the higher WP:PRINCPLES. Having found myself lumped in with Holocaust deniers and cranks of every degree, my chances of making further edits to the article were in fact pretty slim. What debate there once again was petered out without any "consensus", which meant I couldn't alter the status quo.
This is at least the fourth time this has happened to me on Wikipedia.
The usual routine is that someone who "owns" the article with throw up a mountain of WP:RULES and WP:TRADITIONS, each more underhanded in intent than the last, in an effort to stonewall you for as long as they can. They can keep this up for months. Any "debates" with the aim to achieve consensus are farcical to begin with, as everyone involved knows that they never, ever reach consensus on anything. Good men get frustrated, demoralised and bored, and leave, letting evil triumph. I do not use evil in a rhetorical way. I firmly believe that the great majority of wiki-lawyers have petty malice and megalomania as their primary motivations rather than concern for the quality of articles.
The Wikipedia page for World War 2 had the start date for the conflict as "Late 1930s" for over 5 months. Five months with a totally incorrect date for one of the most important events of human history because one editor felt things needed to be more "inclusive". I'm all for inclusivity, but stupidity is where I draw the line. The usual farce ensued. The editors set up a Mediation Cabal to reach "consensus" on the issue(Their discussion once again petered out impotently), all while the the obscenity of a start date sat, unmolested for 5 months on one of the most visited pages on the site, no, on the internet. The thought of how its precence may have shifted general human knowledge and understanding of the conflict saddens me.
There is a deep and by now, inoperable rot and the centre of how things are run and done at Wikipedia. The rot began with Jimbo Wales and his simple inability and unwillingness to properly run a project of this scope and importance. As time went by, only the most devious, duplicitous and underhanded of editors prospered and gained control. Now, as the site enters its consolidation phase, the altruism and effort of millions of honest editors has been crushed under the weight of one of the most corrupt and intransigent bureaucracies in the world today.
Wikipedia is rotten from the Top to the Bottom and cannot be trusted for anything, by anyone, for any reason. Even as a reference section. Not even the chemistry and astronomy pages can be relied upon these days,. Things will only get worse as the Wikicrats, Wikilawyers and Wikiticians assume total oligarchical control.
Well, alright then. The Rayleigh effect is caused by the movement of Lord Rayleigh's argon filled glass bicycle as he rushes through the atmosphere, held aloft by a flight of noisy seagulls. As the Baron passes across the sky, the prism-like spokes of the bicycle absorb the lower wavelengths of light in preference to higher wavelengths, like blue. The shape of the spokes also causes the blue light to scatter and sparkle brilliantly in all directions. This all happens so fast that the sky appears smeared with blue.
When his Lordship retires to his manor for the evening, stowing the bicycle carefully in his garden shed, and letting the seagulls roost in the hayloft, the sky returns to its usual red colour. The sky is also red in the morning because although the Baron rises early, he prefers to take a brisk morning stroll and a swim, and reset his moustache.
In fact, rainbows are also the result of this process. They are caused when the Baron's brightly coloured spoke reflectors become accidentally detached in rain, and continue to rotate an enormous velocities. The rainbow we see is in fact the blur as the reflector circles wildly.
For his services in keeping the sky a pretty shade of blue, His Lordship was knighted by Queen Victoria and given the services of the Royal Navy in order to spread the gift of blue skies throughout the wide breadth of the British Empire, and indeed the world. And that's why the sky is blue now.
Since there are clearly a great many basement dwelling perverts among us, yes, that does make Slashdot a social network.
Order your own life? Or order the lives of others? What gives anyone the right to say what others can and cannot do? From where does this power derive? From a simple majority in an election? Is that just? Is it right that the will of the many, no matter what it may be, will override the rights and freedoms of the few? Are there to be no checks and balances within the judicial system?
What about justice? Is that costly? Is it too expensive? Can we ill afford to have Judges ruling against unfair or ridiculous laws? Is it more productive for use to uphold laws which are unjust, illogical, contradictory or unethical, rather than give judges the power to strike them down? Will this security secure our liberty?
And when the rules are unjust and rigged, and the judges complicit in their implementation, what choice will I make then?
If we wanted the laws to be followed to the letter, we would have coded up an Judge system in Lisp by now.
But, we don't want that. We want Judges to make judgments based on both the letter and the spirit of the law. (This applies in sentencing as well as judgments by the way.) We want Judges to be able to spot discrepancies, loopholes and injustices in our current laws and rule against them where it is right to do so.
If you tell me it's legal to rake my lawn, but you then say it's illegal for anyone to give me gardening tools, do you really think that your position is just and logical. It doesn't take a fool to see what is going on here. The law and the legal system are being strained to breaking point, and that's good for neither justice or respect for the rule of law.
Why should anyone respect and uphold a legal system that twists itself into contradictions and connives to deny people the very rights its says they are entitled to? How can anyone go into a courtroom, expecting justice, when they know that the court has no interest in that. When they know the court only cares about an ironclad, rigid and dogmatic interpretation of any rag of a law our legislature see fit to pass; Or worse, only cares about a political interpretation of the law and their rulings within society at large?
In such an environment, why should anyone petition the courts for justice instead of making their own? Our contemporary cinema hails a masked vigilante who goes about beating criminals in the dead of night. What does that say about our respect for the legal system? Judges need to stop being automatons that parse legalease, and start doing their jobs, i.e. delivering justice.
Yeah man, bettern' havin' all them dang up danm fancy'bagger $10 spellin' correctin' red word dang 'ol squiggles itellyouwhat.
And I'm sure that, in the US, there's a correlation between being black and being convicted of a crime. And it might not be a particularly strong correlation but it's used to justify racial profiling by law enforcement.
It's also worth noting that skin colour, like gender and age, is technically a cause of outside influences, beyond a persons control.
They are the people that pay for the Canadian Parliament's fancy cars and houses and suits. Why shouldn't they have a say in which Laws the Parliament passes?
First time I ever heard about "kiddy porn", I misheard it for "kitty porn".
For quite a while, I assumed a lot of people were getting steamed up about some weird pink anime thing, or some kind of playboy performers.
Cohen shows people up by exploiting the shallowness and/or hypocrisy implicit in their occupations and/or life in general.
These people showed people up by exploiting the trust and good faith of honest people and to some extent in life in general.
Cohen and Pranknet are in fact, completely opposite both in their methods and in particular their intent.
Among whom though? I've certainly never heard a pip about this "Pranknet" before today. I'd be willing to be that this is an internet microcommunity, consisting of no more than a few hundred, if that, members with only a few dozen regular members. It's hard to claim "fame" as motivation when you'd get a bigger audience on a bus trip.
The article makes of lot of how the majority of pranksters are essentially living in their parent's basement and have no life outside the internet. I'd say these pranks has less to do with fame than they had to do with simple boredom and plain malice. These people seem pretty contemptuous of the outside world, and probably wanted to justify that contempt by making other people look foolish.
Basement dwelling is one thing, but these guys had the world wide web at their fingertips, yet they spent their time at an adult equivalent of blowing up frogs and putting spiders in people's hair. There's no celebrity urge here. You're looking at a bunch of fairly twisted losers with too much free time. That is all.
Namely, their employer's opinions.
Uhhhh....Hmmmmm....
Since Windows 7 Ultimate would probably cost more than the TV, I'll stick with Linux thanks.
The YLOD is an unfortunately common problem on the 60GB models apparently. Other models are more reliable. Unfortunately, the 60GB model was one of the last which supported backwards compatibility for PS2 titles. Yoy.
No PS3 has ever supported texture smoothing for PS1 titles. It has supported HD upscaling, but that's hardly the same thing. The single best way to play PS1 games remains PS2 emulation with texture smoothing. Later PS1 games like Vagrant Story or Final Fantasy IX gain a whole new lease of life. I would liken it to the effects of the Super2xsai engine for 16 bit titles.
The biggest problem with dead consoles in the current generation is not the repair/replacement process. It's the loss of data. The current generation has moved to hard disc as the primary, and indeed sole method of saving game data of all forms. Unfortunately, they have also moved to full disc encryption as well.
When a PS3 or 360 goes belly up, sending it back for repair means losing your save date entirely. For someone who spends upwards of 200 hours on games they love to play, I can say this is a devastating blow. Losing those saves is like losing old notebooks. Something inside you dies.
The PS3 provides a backup utility, which must be run periodically to be of any use. But who wants to administer their games console like a web server? The current regime of keeping users saves under encryption keys, all while shipping units that go belly up with some frequency is a status quo that needs to change. Save cartridges may have been a pain in the ass, but at least they offer some degree of protection against total data loss.
"Do you love me now Daddy?!?!"
There are significant physical movements going on in their bowels during that timeframe. I fail to see why this precludes them from participation in adult life.
Unless it has PS2 game emulation, I have no reason whatsoever to upgrade to it from my 60GB model. A 60GB model which Yellow lighted and had to be repaired so I could save my saves. I'm still using the danm thing despite the imminent risk of another YLOD due solely to the fact that it plays PS2 games with upscaling. I don't want to go back to using a regular PS2 if I can help it. The difference is truly is like night and day.
If there's no PS2 backwards compatibility (and ffs PS1 game texture smoothing), I see no reason for prefering the model to the cheaper 80/160GBs.
Consensual labour is a lot like consensual sex.
Very often it involves a lot of deception, desperation and exploitation, and frequently leads to feelings of fatigue, disappointment and resentment.
It will never burst. We have seen scandal after scandal involving patents granted by the USPTO. Companies big and small have all been hit, hard, by patent trolls and anti-competitive litigation. We've seen products sunk and industries mired in doubt. We've seen farcical patents and US supreme court case. If there was an event that could have burst this bubble, it would have happened by now.
The USPTO is not going to stop granting these things. Industry is never going to become so irritated by the cons of the patent system that they give up the pros. Ordinary people are never going to let go of the illusion that one genius invention, with patent protection, will set them up for life. This system is deeplying ingrained, self sufficient and self perpetuating.
The patent system is not going to reform itself. Industry will not reform it. The public will not reform it. The legal system will not reform it. Patent holders will not reform it. Reform must come from an external source, powerful enough to completely reform the system. And so deeply rooted is the current regime that reform will be a very, very painful process. Frankly, I doubt modern America, along with many western nations, has the capacity to implement such a change, given its inability to reach national consensus on anything.
So, don't expect a great event that's going to topple the whole patent system. There's not going to be a some kind of Watergate or Pearl Harbour to shake the system to its foundations. Until reform comes alone, the patent system is going to continue in its current vein, come what may. And it will probably do so for a very, very long time.
In olden times, if a great Lord or noble commited a crime against a common man, he would not be held to the same account that nother common man would. For maiming or murdering or robbing a common man, a Lord could expect to perhaps pay a modest fine or simply make a small apology, that is, if it was even legal to bring to to trial at all.
We've returned to that system. A corporation could send men to bulldoze your house, killing everyone in it, and the most you could ever expect to see done to them is a modest fine for your trouble. They would go right on operating just as they did before.
This is the exact opposite situation. Companies are astroturfing to create a scientific consensus instead of paying for bogus studies to discredit real scientists.
Defrauded. Falsified. Lied. But what does that even mean anymore?
The reality is our society is so mired in exaggeration, misrepresentations, doublespeak, non-denial denials, irrelevant conclusions, marketing lies, cover your ass language and general bullshit that we, as a culture, have probably lost the ability or even the inclination to discriminate truth and lies.
And by discriminate, I don't mean being able to tell one from the other. I mean we have actually lost much of our capacity to actually care whether anyone is telling the truth or lying to us. Truthfulness is no longer rewarded. Indeed it is often punished. Falsehood is conversely rarely, if at all punished and is most often rewarded. This is the culture we live in, so why should people recognize any intrinsic ethic in telling the truth or unethical in lying? Even organizations that are supposed to deal in disclosing the truth are widely recognized and accepted to be mostly peddling lies.
Did Wyeth actually lie? Do you think you would be able to "prove" in a court of law that a single thing they paid to have printed was in fact a lie, rather than a simple massaging of data or a case of being liberal with the truth. The latter won't be enough to secure a conviction as well the Wyeth layers know. And besides, who care if people lie anyway.
Companies don't have honor or morals or ethics. If they break their word, even on a signed contract, no one is going to come after them. There's not going to be a permanent black mark on their reputations. With the world the size it is, the same holds true for people as well. Sure, some of us might get indignant about it all, but most people will never even hear about it, and most of those that do will forget about it by the next morning.
This is the society we, as democracies, have chosen for ourselves. The fruits of our decision should come as no surprise to anyone.
You're wrong. RFID is an abusive technology, which has only a slight risk of being used in awesome ways.
We're talking about a technology that can wirelessly scan and tag objects and people. How stupid do you have to be to not see where this is going?