With a game as ubiquitous as WoW, how do you ban a dynamic IP (what most home IP addresses still are) without banning a large number of innocent subscribers? You really can't. You can ban accounts though, and require that any interaction with the game or the forums require a valid account, and that is far easier to enforce and eliminates most of the collateral damage.
I don't understand why this is the only way they are dealing with the problem. What I wish they would do is implement a change so that any player with a level lower than 10 who tries to say a URL (i.e. using/say, or/yell, or talking in any channel) is either flagged so that ANYONE can kill them, even the same faction, OR is just outright disconnected and banned for one hour. Or perhaps they could make it so that trial accounts, which is what spammers use, cannot communicate to anyone in-game except by private message.
Would these measures completely and perfectly stop all spamming while having absolutely no impact on non-spammers? Of course not. But considering how quickly you can level a character to level 10, and how much more difficult it would be to spam users on any sort of large scale, I would consider this an effective trade-off.
Remember that with spam, you don't need a perfect solution; all you need is a solution that makes it difficult enough that it's no longer profitable. The first method would require every spammer to actually play the game and fight mobs and do quests long enough to get to level 10, only to spam for a little while and quickly get that account banned. The second method would make them register a full account (and they could be prosecuted for fraud if they use fake credit card numbers or other false information) which I imagine spammers don't want to do. Either way, it would significantly raise the cost of spamming and I am surprised they don't already do something like this.
Blizzard has a cheat monitor process calls the Warden which scans the active process list for known cheat programs. Hiding from a process scanner is "rootkit-like". It is indeed a war zone out there. I wonder if these guys ever play core-wars.
My process list is not available to WoW's monitoring process, and I do not use any kind of rootkit-style techniques to arrange that.
I play WoW on Linux via WINE. Warden isn't the reason why I do it, but I run WoW in its own user account that is never used for anything else. I also use a grsecurity kernel which, among other things, does not allow a regular user to see the running processes of any other user. This has the effect that Warden will see only the WoW client running and cannot snoop on anything I am doing with my main user account.
I don't do this because I think Blizzard is going to try to spy on me, although when it comes to things like that I am not satisfied that they won't, I am satisfied that they can't. I just generally administer my system from a least-privilege point of view because I consider this to be good practice.
While the game is running, Warden uses API function calls to collect data on open programs on the user's computer and sends it back to Blizzard servers as hash values to be compared to those of known cheating programs.[1] Privacy advocates consider the program to be spyware.
This is my way of avoiding such privacy concerns and it appears to be mutually satisfying for both myself and Blizzard. They can run their little cheat scanner and receive a negative result, while I can be confident that it doesn't access anything it has no business accessing.
I would be interested in knowing whether Windows has a similar option.
You have a right to whatever you're willing to pay for. I'm sure you'll be able to find someone willing to sell you non cloned meat.
And my exact point is that such a right sounds great, but it does not exist if you do not have enough information to make a choice. You're going a long way towards making my point for me.
You managed to spew six paragraphs of verbal diarrhoea without addressing the real issue. Why should your superstition about biotech carry more weight than kosher superstitions?
I suppose that your definition of "verbal diarrhoea" is "any argument that you can't rebut". Well I've said at least twice now that I am not making any statement about whether cloned meat is safe, nor have I said anything about whether or not I would buy it. I simply have a problem with restricting economic freedom, whether such restrictions are in the name of science, non-superstition, safety, or whatever. I feel that a customer should have the right to refuse to buy something for any reason or for no reason at all, for the same reason that you can tell someone to leave your property for any reason or no reason at all. Apparently some people (willfully) have a hard time listening when they are unable to address the point I'm making. I see more name-calling is the best that you can come up with. Sad, because you're apparently a lot more intelligent than this -- I honestly expected better.
Obviously this isn't going anywhere, so feel free to have the last word if that pleases you. I'm about done with this thread; you just can't reason with someone who effectively sticks his fingers in his ears and says "NYAA NYAA NYAA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Labelling it implies there's something wrong with it? Yet you said yourself only "superstition" would make someone think so. So, this is again about depriving people of the choice. If people want to be superstitious you aren't going to solve that by not telling them how their food was raised. How much funding does it really require to add two or three words to a label, and how much of that was I asking you to come up with?
Again if the problem is that people don't understand cloning, this is an educational issue. You don't generally solve educational issues by refusing to call things what they are. You really begin to resemble religious people who want to use legislation to make others comply with their beliefs, because what you are saying is that someone who doesn't trust the safety of cloned meat should be kept ignorant so that they are, effectively, not allowed to make a choice. Why is that tactic acceptable when you want to do it and unacceptable when wanna-be theocrats want to do it?
I never asked you to "fund my superstitions" but you must claim this since you apparently have no real argument. If your position is fact-based and scientific, let it win out by virtue of its truth. It should, after all, have that ability where a more religious position would not. You seem to be very insecure about its ability to do so which is the only reason why you would want to remove the element of choice. All I am saying is that making someone buy something that they do not want to buy is never okay, whether you think their reason for not wanting to buy it is valid or not -- that is not for anyone but the buyer to decide.
You don't like the idea that maybe cloned meat won't sell (and who knows? maybe it will eventually be cheaper/higher quality and sell better)? Start a marketing campaign to inform people that it's safe. Point to the recent FDA decision that it's safe. Give scientific reasons why. All of these are perfectly valid because they rely on persuasion. But if persuasion fails, leave it at that. Be a man and let people make choices you disagree with when they aren't forcing you to do anything you don't want to do. Is that really so tough for you? That's the scary thing about freedom; the more choices people are allowed to make, the more likely it is that they'll do things you don't like. Guess what? That's perfectly acceptable so long as no one is forcing you to do anything you don't want to do, but to insecure people that's very scary indeed.
By calling me superstitious you conveniently ignore the fact that I am making absolutely no claim about whether cloned meat is a good idea or a bad idea, or whether I would buy it or would not buy it. The ability to know what I am buying (be it meat, cars, Internet service, or whatever) and choose whether I want it or not, for any reason or for no reason at all, is far more important to me in the big picture than whether $business_venture makes a profit or not (whether anyone thinks it "deserved" to or not).
Now if you really want to amaze me, you'll actually respond to what I am saying. Tell me why customers of any market, be it food, insurance, cars, entertainment, whatever, don't have a right to know anything they want to know about said product before they buy it. I am taking the position that they do have such a right, whether this enables them to make choices you or I approve of or not. Tell me, without all the hand-waving, why they should be deprived of such a right and you will have actually addressed what I said. I'll give you a hint since you seem to be having difficulty with this: talking about luddites and superstition, or the cloning process, or food safety, means that you are failing to answer my very simple point.
I'm not talking about a reason to regulate anything. Regulating would be a question of banning or not banning it. All I am saying is let the market decide that, and in order for that to happen accurate labels are needed. That is all. It is that simple.
Organic products are labeled as such because you're willing to pay more for them -- it's only sensible marketing to use that fact, but there's nothing forcing an organic product to be labeled as such. Similarly, meat from "non-cloned" sources will probably be labeled as "clone-free" to earn them the extra dollar.
You may have missed my point. My point wasn't based on why such labels exist or do not exist, only that we already have a market where such distinctions are often noted. This was actually a very predictable response; I considered adding some extra little sentence just to prevent such a predictable response but decided I'm tired of doing "pre-emptive strikes" against the obvious.
If I had my way, all food products would carry a label specifically identifying whether they are organic or from a factory farm, whether they are cloned or not cloned, and whether the animals were given hormones/antibiotics and anything else I haven't thought of. Let's have full disclosure and let people decide what they want, for whatever reason suits them. I really don't see why cloned vs. not-cloned would be anything special; it would be just one more bit of information about what you're buying. People who care about this would shop accordingly; people who don't care about this would just buy whatever is cheapest. What bothers me are the people who act like they are threatened by such disclosure and want to withhold information to prevent such choices; I simply haven't seen a single good reason for this.
You're asking for a minor and irrelevant part of the meat's history. If you luddites want non-cloned meat, there is absolutely nothing preventing you from paying for it.
Don't try to force sane, reasonable people to do so.
Amazing how defensive people get when all you want is to call things what they are. The only reason why you would feel "forced" to do anything by a label identifying whether meat is cloned or not is because you are afraid that cloned meat might not have a market and thus you won't be able to buy cloned meat. That might be an issue if you own stock in companies that sell cloning technology, but otherwise what's the problem? Sounds like you have zero confidence in your belief that it's just as desirable as non-cloned meat, otherwise you wouldn't use such a word as "forced". Your own argument defeats itself; if it's really so "minor and irrelevant" then what's the harm in acknowledging it? If the real problem is that the public is not known for making informed, logical decisions, do you really think that selling more cloned meat is going to fix this? There's a game you might be interested in, it's called Whack-a-mole, and it's what happens when you address symptoms and not underlying causes.
All I am saying is that if keeping people ignorant about what they are buying is the only way that it will sell, then this is not a justification for keeping people ignorant about what they are buying. I don't owe a new industry a profit, nor do you, nor does anyone. Like almost every other successful industry, let them do market research and find out what people really want before they try to sell something. I like that much better than using a lack of disclosure to increase sales of something people might not want. If the problem is a lack of education about the safety/dangers of the meat in question, causing irrational choices that you so fear, then the solution is clearly more information on the subject, not less. The name-calling ("luddite") in response to someone who wants choices to be informed choices does not exactly strenghten your argument, but I hope it made you feel better.
Again, the reason why someone might not buy cloned meat is irrelevant - either the buyer has an absolute right to decide what they will or won't pay for, or, they have no such right and therefore witholding information to get sales is okay. That's the real issue here, not whether the reasons for not buying are valid; that's up to the buyer to decide (my god, freedom means people might do things you really don't like! oh the horror! we better fail to disclose information so they can't make such choices). Concentrating on whether the reasons for not buying suit you or not is a cute and not-so-clever way of sidestepping the real issue here, which is whether or not your wallet is really yours to do with as you see fit because if it isn't, then not letting people decide for themselves is okay. See if you can actually address the point I am raising here, it will be much more convincing than name-calling.
All in all, there's nothing to worry about, and labeling meat as 'CLONED' will just make it easier for consumers to boycott perfectly safe products.
If your strategy for this depends on removing the ability to choose, your strategy is fundamentally flawed. If this is a problem of a lack of education, the solution is... drumroll please... education. That you can talk about instituting a lack of disclosure for the purpose of removing a choice and in the same breath talk about how there's too much mis-information and FUD out there is amazing. You really don't see the contradiction here? If you really want to take the position that FUD-type tactics are wrong, you need to lead by example.
If the market doesn't want X, finding a way to make them buy X anyway is just plain wrong and akin to fraud, whether their reasons for not wanting X are justified or not. If this is a problem, then it is a marketing and perhaps an education problem; this is not a problem caused by a lack of deception. This type of "ends justify the means" thinking is very dangerous when applied to public policy.
There is simply no way that preventing people from making an informed choice because the result of that choice might be considered silly (by the way, I missed the memo where the cloning industry, or any other, was guaranteed the right to profit) is going to set a good precedent. If you think this is a good precedent, just wait until the same tactics are applied to something you disagree with, or worse, something that really is harmful. Either customers have a right to make an informed choice and buy or not buy for any reason or for no reason at all, or, the industry "knows what's good for you". I know which world I would rather live in, the possibility that some people might make poor decisions be damned.
What you will see is offspring of clones, and milk products from clones. You'll be seeing both without mandatory markings.
And that's exactly the problem I have with this, issues of safety/quality aside. If they are so confident that products from cloned animals are okay, then what's wrong with full disclosure? If they're afraid that cloned products which are labelled as such won't sell, I would argue that the market (customers) has the right to decide whether or not they want to buy it for any reason or for no reason at all.
I just can't think of any good reason why you wouldn't label it (just as organic products are labelled as such) unless the intention is to sell it to people who otherwise would choose not to buy it. If that is the intention, I consider that deceptive and wrong whether the reasons why people won't buy it are sound or not. If food producers come up with something and the market does not want it, that is their problem and preventing this possibility is not the federal government's job.
Shit like this is why I don't exactly have a lot of faith in the industry's willingness to deal with any unforeseen problems that could arise. I notice a lack of that annoying "If you've got nothing to hide..." argument when it comes to vested interests.
our education system is failing us big time. FYI, I was talking about Vota, the statement I made was about Vota and I tried to keep it simple enough for some of you kids to understand. I guess mentioning who he works/worked for just added too many nouns for simple minds to differentiate which was really the subject of the comment. BTW, "he" is a pronoun( subjective personal pronoun ) and it was used in the sentence meaning Mr Vota. Got it?
Again we are brought back to this statement:
he's a marketing man and he is Director of GeekCorps.com which he likely sees OLPC as a competitor.
The reader is left with a choice of interpretation:
Interpretation 1) Vota sees OLPC as a competitor because he's "a marketing man". Well, organizations of every sort have "marketing men"; OLPC is not unique in this respect. If this was your intended meaning, then it sure is strange that you did not mention any other organizations that Vota would view as a competitor.
Interpretation 2) Vota sees OLPC as a competitor in his capacity of Director of GeekCorps.com, which certainly does reflect a company position on the part of GeekCorps.com. Likewise, I would expect that the Vice President of Marketing at Coca-Cola does, in fact, see Pepsi-Cola as a competitor. Am I to believe that you mention someone's position at a company, mention how he feels about another (potentially competing) organization, and are now claiming that this is entirely coincidence?
So once again I ask you, is this pathetic attempt to save face REALLY easier than admitting that you failed to say what you meant to say? You can talk about what is and is not a pronoun, or the educational system, or why George Bush won an election nearly four years ago, etc., but you seem to have failed to notice that none of this answers my simple yes/no question. Your superior education and more sophisticated culture aren't defeated by such a simple question, are they?
What you are showing here is that when you make the mistake of getting your ego involved with your argumentation, then it becomes far easier to concoct a bunch of absurd justifications than to admit "hmm, maybe I didn't do a very good job of making whatever point I was trying to make." The fact that you didn't deliberately set out to handle it this way does not automatically prove that this isn't what you are doing -- usually you have to take a step back and view things objectively before you can see yourself doing this.
Sorry to put it bluntly, your point is completely absurd, who gives criticism is completely relevant, since their position has a grand impact on how they themselves perceive events.
There are actually two separate issues here and they seem to be getting confused.
Issue 1: Whether you should ever believe anything you see or read without either verifying that it is true or making damned sure that it's consistent with what you already know to be true. If you read something just for entertainment then of course this is not necessary, but if the truth of something is important to you, then yes you are failing to perform due diligence if you don't think critically about what is presented. The source of the information is irrelevant in this case; either they made factual assertions that can be evaluated, or it's an opinion piece with which you agree or disagree. If they are factual assertions, then any decent attempt to cross-check them will reveal any such bias (people who lie or cherry-pick which facts they present and do not tell the whole story are especially easy to notice). If you can't be bothered to do a little research and you decide to believe something just because it's written on a Web page or in a newspaper, then you take a risk of being mislead.
Issue 2: Whether the fact that this Intel employee's failure to disclose an obvious potential bias reflects poorly on him/her and on Intel. Personally, I believe that such a failure shows either a high degree of negligence, or, deliberate deception. Neither one looks very good to me, for either the employee or the company. If I were looking to buy, say, a new CPU and I could not otherwise decide whether I wanted Intel or AMD, this sort of shit would make me buy AMD.
How someone "perceives events" is not really very important; either they are making a falsiable claim or they are giving an opinion. What worldview they possess or what belief system they entertain might explain their motivation for choosing a particular topic over all other possible topics of discussion but these won't help you determine truth unless you're impressed by appeals to authority.
Anytime I hear someone used the hack, cliche word "sheeplike," I think, "Wow, someone just finished his first semester at college."
So congrats on finishing your first semester champ! Knowledge is power!
Anytime I see someone use a personal attack that failed at even the relatively simple task of being humorous, I think "Wow, someone has no idea how to actually address what I said." Extra points for the (incorrect) assumption of my age and education level. You really seem like you're desperate to find an excuse (in this case, one word you don't like) for dismissing what I say because you're unable to refute it -- don't you desire something better for yourself than this sort of cowardice?
So while we are in a congratulatory mood, congrats to you on failing to tell me why you think I am wrong and how my ideas could be improved. I guess it's so much easier to react emotionally to something you disagree with rather than decide what you believe and why.
And yes, when an outright privacy violation like this is in the works, and you don't immediately see massive public opposition to it... well, I can use a synonym like "docile" or "complacent" or "bovine" if that suddenly grants you the ability to respond constructively, but I'm honestly not expecting that to happen regardless of the diction used.
My company pays for most of my health insurance. If my health insurance cost varies with my health, which varies with my personal habits, then they would have the right to at least influence my personal habits. For one employee this would not be a whole lot of money, but my company employs a few hundred thousand individuals. It adds up.
For your edification, take a look sometime at the origin of employer-provided health benefits and you will see that this concern is only valid because of a broken system. This is worthy of research but I will give you the short version of the story. During the last World War, the government froze wages. Employers still wanted to offer better compensation to more desirable workers in order to remain competitive. The wage freeze meant that employers could not give such workers a bigger paycheck, so they got around this by offering free benefits that the employee would have had to pay for anyway, and thus they effectively increased the wage while complying with the technical requirements of the wage freeze. Of course, other companies are not going to idly sit by and let one competitor have such an advantage, so it became a widespread practice. Ever since then, it's been very difficult for an individual to purchase affordable health insurance because the bargaining power of an individual is no match for a company that says "we have 200,000 employees, let's talk about rates." Get an individual health insurance quote sometime and compare that to the total amount paid for your employer-provided benefits (what the employer pays plus what you pay - both should be on your paycheck stub) and you will see what I am talking about. The point I am making is, the current system that even allows such concerns is the direct result of government meddling with the economy; it does not follow that further government erosion of privacy is going to fix this.
I don't want them to concern themselves with my person habits, so I think the "when they are paying for my time they may tell me what to do" argument is not a good fit. It just means "They can buy the right to violate my privacy," and privacy should generally be inviolable.
While you are on the clock, they can tell you what kind of work to do, how to do it, what you may or may not say to their customers, and when you may or may not take breaks. When you are in their building using their facilities they can also listen in on your phone calls and monitor your Internet usage. You have no expectation of privacy when you are an employee on the clock using equipment and networks that do not belong to you, which is all I meant by that comment (any other meaning you read into that was in your mind only). This is reasonable and I have no problem with this; the workplace is not your home. In fact, I am glad that (business) phone calls are recorded where I work because you don't want to play "he said, she said" games when real money is involved. However, that lack of privacy ends the moment I clock out and walk out that door; it is the government helping them spy on what I do off the clock that would constitute "buying the right to violate my privacy" and that is what is unacceptable.
So? What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't a company be able to decide such a thing? Should "Bob's Morman Supply" not be able to say something like that? Would about "Bob's Office Supply"?
It may be illegal now (the ACLU would certainly argue for that), but I don't see why a company shouldn't be able to do that.
Allowing corporations to control your lifestyle while away from work is very dangerous. Regarding alcohol, the only legitimate concern of a company I work for is that I am sober when I show up for work and remain sober while I am on the clock. This is the time that they pay for, and they have a right (within limits of course) to determine what I do or don't do during that time. What I do in my private, off-time that they are not paying for is absolutely none of their business. Trying to monitor what I do during my private time away from work is nothing but an invasion of privacy that should never be tolerated for any reason. I honestly can't understand why there is even a discussion about this; it's patently obvious.
This is all fine with me. I can understand why many people wouldn't want this, and I wouldn't push it. But if we keep records to make it easier to convict drunk drivers or people who aren't supposed to be drinking (like perhaps because of some prior conviction where that was made a condition of probation). Those are both fine for me.
Law enforcement is not supposed to be easy. One description I have heard of fascism is when the desire for efficiency of law enforcement outweighs any concern about civil rights. Judges (or whomever) may set a nearly-unenforcable condition for a probation if they choose to do so -- that is not my problem. It certainly does not give them or anyone else the right to invade my privacy for the sake of making their job easier.
Also, this will do nothing or next to nothing to stop drunk drivers. So this database can confirm that someone was at a bar and had an alcoholic beverage. It will not confirm whether they drove to the bar, walked to the bar, took a cab, or had a designated driver. So if a crime is committed, this will tell you even less than what could be learned by old-fashioned policework, i.e. interviewing witnesses.
I wish there were just one politician with the balls to be honest and say "yeah, I could say that this is for your safety or to help make the world a better place, but really we just want to invade your privacy so that we can have a society increasingly under central control." They are too cowardly to be so honest and it's fitting that they are elected by people too cowardly to value freedom more than security.
When are we going to decide that government is on a need-to-know basis, and when it comes to shit like this, they don't need to know?
It's a shame that most people are so docile and sheeplike that they will shrug their shoulders and say "well I got nothing to hide." Of course, that's not a complete thought. The complete thought is "well I got nothing to hide, so something as prone to abuse as unnecessary surveillance of a legal activity is OK by me!"
That's probably fair to say, but the only entitlement that really exists in this scenario is the entitlement of the scholarship providers to make decisions as to who receives their scholarships. If they revoke a scholarship because, for instance, your kid posted a picture of himself drinking underage on Facebook for all the world to see, that's their choice. They will deal with the consequences of that choice. (Which are likely to include showing the people who donate the money that backs the scholarship that they care about the character of the people who get their money and giving the money to an equally meritorious applicant who happened to think about the consequences of his actions carefully enough to decide not to show off his lawbreaking activities.)
You make a very good point. There are indeed two sides to this issue, and there is something to be said about encouraging people to think about the consequences of their actions.
The only real issue I have with this situation is that this was caused by pictures of underage drinking, not fraud or violence or some other crime that really does have a victim. I realize our state legislatures feel differently about this, but I do not consider anything a person does with their own body to be a crime at all, whether said activity is actually in that person's best interests or not. Government is the only entity that is legally allowed to use force to further its goals, and deciding whether what you do with yourself and your own property is really in your best interests is not a proper use for the police power of government in a supposedly "free" country. If you harm no one but possibly yourself (the one person you have the right to harm if that's what you want to do) then why should you feel ashamed for what you did? What is the good (non-arbitrary) reason why you should have to hide this?
There are natural consequences and there are artificial consequences. If you bang your head into a brick wall and feel pain, this is simple cause-and-effect, unwise action and unpleasant reaction. If you buy more house than you can actually afford and end up losing the house, this is also an unwise action with a perfectly natural reaction. If you drink a beer at the age of sixteen, or eighteen (an act that is legal in many countries) and someone decides that this should cost you your education, this is not at all an inevitable cause-and-effect relationship; it's an arbitrary and artificial consequence imposed by people who could have chosen differently. Because they could have chosen differently and because they are able to enforce their decision on others, I question their judgment and their sense of justice, national climate of drug hysteria (legal or otherwise) be damned.
I really wish that people who object to things like drug use or underage drinking would start believing in the power of their own message, rather than looking for ways to use the establishment to force their views on other people. Doesn't anyone else see the contradiction between saying "we believe this not in your best interests" and in the same breath saying "so don't do things we dislike or we will find ways to make you suffer"? Which is it? Do they want to remedy what they view as self-destructive behavior by the most counterproductive means possible, which is by making it much more destructive? Or do they want to take revenge against behavior that personally offends them in the name of saving us from ourselves? I really cannot support either viewpoint, and this is independent of whether the students in question should have seen it coming or not.
"Disagreeable" is a word of many meanings. Let's be more specific: If you break the law, there are consequences. If you take pride in having broken the law, there are additional consequences. Also, if you show your appreciation for people who are giving you free money to go to college by speaking negatively about them at every turn, you may end up forfeiting that free money. Why is this so difficult to deal with? Are we really such an entitlement society that our responsibility for our actions ends the minute someone says that one of the consequences will be forfeiture of the free money we feel entitled to?
I agree that people need to lose any entitlement mentality that they have. However, let's not pretend that scholarships are a pure act of charity. They generally happen because either the student is very strong academically and is therefore more likely to improve that college's performance and graduation rate, or because the student has athletic ability and is an asset to their sports team. Colleges are not for-profit businesses and they need successful students and popular sports teams if they wish to maintain the financial contributions (to which they, too, are not entitled) that help maintain them.
Viewed in that way, the scholarship is not truly "free"; the student is merely exchanging something else of value other than cash in return for an education. If this were not so, then scholarships would not have criteria that determine who qualifies, but would be more like a random lottery.
There is also the idea that revoking a scholarship worth tens of thousands of dollars for "talking trash" is a bit like breaking someone's arms and legs because they were wearing a tie you didn't like. The consequences are quite harmful, while the act being punished causes no real material harm to anyone. As I have mentioned elsewhere, this isn't a judge and a jury imposing a legal penalty in response to formal charges and with due process, and if it were, the punishment would fit the crime. This is a bunch of bureaucrats adversely affecting the rest of someone's life over silly shit because they didn't play ball.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I did want to add one more thing. If your goal is to give out a reasonable punishment with the idea that a youth can learn from his/her mistake and go on to grow up and lead a productive life, denying a scholarship is the most counterproductive thing you could do. We're not talking about gang violence here; we're talking about drinking alcohol while underage. If you are going to talk about law and what the legal punishment would prescribe for said offense, I can point out that there is a good reason why "denying scholarship for which student would otherwise qualify" is NOT what the law would call for.
There is no justification (other than the very weak "because we can") for government school personnel to be able to impose more severe and more far-reaching penalties than what legal due-process would call for. That is the problem I have with this whole concept, and pointing out the legality or illegality of said behavior does absolutely nothing to address this point.
From what the parent post seems to say isn't "disagreeable" or saying "school sucks" or the "principal is a weenie", but it's illegal activity that was going on. And usually there are fines and punishments attached to illegal activity.
What you seem to have trouble distinguishing is the difference between a one-time fine or even a one-time jail/community service sentence, and the loss of a scholarship which might adversely affect the rest of someone's life. One of those is a punishment that fits the "crime" (in quotes because there is no victim here), while the other is excessive and occurs with no charges, no judge, and no jury of one's peers. You can see that there is a difference here, can't you?
Now if you can respond to what I actually said, which was that the punishment should fit the "crime" and should not be excessive, I would like to hear what you have to say. If you prefer to make shit up that I never implied, you would be better served by debating a mirror.
If their child told them that they first sexually abused someone and then murdered them and dumped them in the river, should they not report this? I think you'll immediately say they should report this, but how do you draw the line? What objective standard of what crime is bad enough that it warrants reporting?
It's pretty simple, really. If that "crime" has a victim, report it. If not, then let people make their own mistakes, especially if you're talking about something like drinking a beer. The most severe action that is warranted in that case is informing the parents. To compare that to sexual abuse and murder is absurd; to put it (very) mildly, this is comparing an apple to an orange.
I know this idea is very scary to all of you law-enforcement-fantasy types who really think you can legislate morality, but controlling behavior is the least of your problems. If you really believe that putting a substance into your own body that someone else might disapprove of is morally wrong, what you need to improve is the power of your message and the reasoning behind it, not the government school's power to manipulate behavior by means of sanctions. The first option might actually persuade people to see things your way; the second option will drive said behavior underground and result in people who are better at not getting caught (namely, by not posting evidence on a public network).
We caught a bunch of kids doing some really stupid shit because they updated their myspace pages from school. I believe some of them lost scholarships over it.
So much for that idea of "the punishment should fit the crime". Hmm, what you are saying or portraying is disagreeable.. sooo, we're going to cause you real personal harm and financial loss because of it, because we want you to grow up respecting authority of course.
Why in the world was defrag set to not give the user a choice on what drive it ran on? Also, why should defrag take an admin password to run???
A better question: why are they still using a filesystem that needs to be routinely defragmented? Ext2 (and 3) hasn't been that way for how many years now? I think of things like this when I hear Microsoft talk about "innovation".
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I don't understand why this is the only way they are dealing with the problem. What I wish they would do is implement a change so that any player with a level lower than 10 who tries to say a URL (i.e. using
Would these measures completely and perfectly stop all spamming while having absolutely no impact on non-spammers? Of course not. But considering how quickly you can level a character to level 10, and how much more difficult it would be to spam users on any sort of large scale, I would consider this an effective trade-off.
Remember that with spam, you don't need a perfect solution; all you need is a solution that makes it difficult enough that it's no longer profitable. The first method would require every spammer to actually play the game and fight mobs and do quests long enough to get to level 10, only to spam for a little while and quickly get that account banned. The second method would make them register a full account (and they could be prosecuted for fraud if they use fake credit card numbers or other false information) which I imagine spammers don't want to do. Either way, it would significantly raise the cost of spamming and I am surprised they don't already do something like this.
My process list is not available to WoW's monitoring process, and I do not use any kind of rootkit-style techniques to arrange that.
I play WoW on Linux via WINE. Warden isn't the reason why I do it, but I run WoW in its own user account that is never used for anything else. I also use a grsecurity kernel which, among other things, does not allow a regular user to see the running processes of any other user. This has the effect that Warden will see only the WoW client running and cannot snoop on anything I am doing with my main user account.
I don't do this because I think Blizzard is going to try to spy on me, although when it comes to things like that I am not satisfied that they won't, I am satisfied that they can't. I just generally administer my system from a least-privilege point of view because I consider this to be good practice.
This is my way of avoiding such privacy concerns and it appears to be mutually satisfying for both myself and Blizzard. They can run their little cheat scanner and receive a negative result, while I can be confident that it doesn't access anything it has no business accessing.
I would be interested in knowing whether Windows has a similar option.
And my exact point is that such a right sounds great, but it does not exist if you do not have enough information to make a choice. You're going a long way towards making my point for me.
I suppose that your definition of "verbal diarrhoea" is "any argument that you can't rebut". Well I've said at least twice now that I am not making any statement about whether cloned meat is safe, nor have I said anything about whether or not I would buy it. I simply have a problem with restricting economic freedom, whether such restrictions are in the name of science, non-superstition, safety, or whatever. I feel that a customer should have the right to refuse to buy something for any reason or for no reason at all, for the same reason that you can tell someone to leave your property for any reason or no reason at all. Apparently some people (willfully) have a hard time listening when they are unable to address the point I'm making. I see more name-calling is the best that you can come up with. Sad, because you're apparently a lot more intelligent than this -- I honestly expected better.
Obviously this isn't going anywhere, so feel free to have the last word if that pleases you. I'm about done with this thread; you just can't reason with someone who effectively sticks his fingers in his ears and says "NYAA NYAA NYAA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Labelling it implies there's something wrong with it? Yet you said yourself only "superstition" would make someone think so. So, this is again about depriving people of the choice. If people want to be superstitious you aren't going to solve that by not telling them how their food was raised. How much funding does it really require to add two or three words to a label, and how much of that was I asking you to come up with?
Again if the problem is that people don't understand cloning, this is an educational issue. You don't generally solve educational issues by refusing to call things what they are. You really begin to resemble religious people who want to use legislation to make others comply with their beliefs, because what you are saying is that someone who doesn't trust the safety of cloned meat should be kept ignorant so that they are, effectively, not allowed to make a choice. Why is that tactic acceptable when you want to do it and unacceptable when wanna-be theocrats want to do it?
I never asked you to "fund my superstitions" but you must claim this since you apparently have no real argument. If your position is fact-based and scientific, let it win out by virtue of its truth. It should, after all, have that ability where a more religious position would not. You seem to be very insecure about its ability to do so which is the only reason why you would want to remove the element of choice. All I am saying is that making someone buy something that they do not want to buy is never okay, whether you think their reason for not wanting to buy it is valid or not -- that is not for anyone but the buyer to decide.
You don't like the idea that maybe cloned meat won't sell (and who knows? maybe it will eventually be cheaper/higher quality and sell better)? Start a marketing campaign to inform people that it's safe. Point to the recent FDA decision that it's safe. Give scientific reasons why. All of these are perfectly valid because they rely on persuasion. But if persuasion fails, leave it at that. Be a man and let people make choices you disagree with when they aren't forcing you to do anything you don't want to do. Is that really so tough for you? That's the scary thing about freedom; the more choices people are allowed to make, the more likely it is that they'll do things you don't like. Guess what? That's perfectly acceptable so long as no one is forcing you to do anything you don't want to do, but to insecure people that's very scary indeed.
By calling me superstitious you conveniently ignore the fact that I am making absolutely no claim about whether cloned meat is a good idea or a bad idea, or whether I would buy it or would not buy it. The ability to know what I am buying (be it meat, cars, Internet service, or whatever) and choose whether I want it or not, for any reason or for no reason at all, is far more important to me in the big picture than whether $business_venture makes a profit or not (whether anyone thinks it "deserved" to or not).
Now if you really want to amaze me, you'll actually respond to what I am saying. Tell me why customers of any market, be it food, insurance, cars, entertainment, whatever, don't have a right to know anything they want to know about said product before they buy it. I am taking the position that they do have such a right, whether this enables them to make choices you or I approve of or not. Tell me, without all the hand-waving, why they should be deprived of such a right and you will have actually addressed what I said. I'll give you a hint since you seem to be having difficulty with this: talking about luddites and superstition, or the cloning process, or food safety, means that you are failing to answer my very simple point.
I'm not talking about a reason to regulate anything. Regulating would be a question of banning or not banning it. All I am saying is let the market decide that, and in order for that to happen accurate labels are needed. That is all. It is that simple.
You may have missed my point. My point wasn't based on why such labels exist or do not exist, only that we already have a market where such distinctions are often noted. This was actually a very predictable response; I considered adding some extra little sentence just to prevent such a predictable response but decided I'm tired of doing "pre-emptive strikes" against the obvious.
If I had my way, all food products would carry a label specifically identifying whether they are organic or from a factory farm, whether they are cloned or not cloned, and whether the animals were given hormones/antibiotics and anything else I haven't thought of. Let's have full disclosure and let people decide what they want, for whatever reason suits them. I really don't see why cloned vs. not-cloned would be anything special; it would be just one more bit of information about what you're buying. People who care about this would shop accordingly; people who don't care about this would just buy whatever is cheapest. What bothers me are the people who act like they are threatened by such disclosure and want to withhold information to prevent such choices; I simply haven't seen a single good reason for this.
Amazing how defensive people get when all you want is to call things what they are. The only reason why you would feel "forced" to do anything by a label identifying whether meat is cloned or not is because you are afraid that cloned meat might not have a market and thus you won't be able to buy cloned meat. That might be an issue if you own stock in companies that sell cloning technology, but otherwise what's the problem? Sounds like you have zero confidence in your belief that it's just as desirable as non-cloned meat, otherwise you wouldn't use such a word as "forced". Your own argument defeats itself; if it's really so "minor and irrelevant" then what's the harm in acknowledging it? If the real problem is that the public is not known for making informed, logical decisions, do you really think that selling more cloned meat is going to fix this? There's a game you might be interested in, it's called Whack-a-mole, and it's what happens when you address symptoms and not underlying causes.
All I am saying is that if keeping people ignorant about what they are buying is the only way that it will sell, then this is not a justification for keeping people ignorant about what they are buying. I don't owe a new industry a profit, nor do you, nor does anyone. Like almost every other successful industry, let them do market research and find out what people really want before they try to sell something. I like that much better than using a lack of disclosure to increase sales of something people might not want. If the problem is a lack of education about the safety/dangers of the meat in question, causing irrational choices that you so fear, then the solution is clearly more information on the subject, not less. The name-calling ("luddite") in response to someone who wants choices to be informed choices does not exactly strenghten your argument, but I hope it made you feel better.
Again, the reason why someone might not buy cloned meat is irrelevant - either the buyer has an absolute right to decide what they will or won't pay for, or, they have no such right and therefore witholding information to get sales is okay. That's the real issue here, not whether the reasons for not buying are valid; that's up to the buyer to decide (my god, freedom means people might do things you really don't like! oh the horror! we better fail to disclose information so they can't make such choices). Concentrating on whether the reasons for not buying suit you or not is a cute and not-so-clever way of sidestepping the real issue here, which is whether or not your wallet is really yours to do with as you see fit because if it isn't, then not letting people decide for themselves is okay. See if you can actually address the point I am raising here, it will be much more convincing than name-calling.
If your strategy for this depends on removing the ability to choose, your strategy is fundamentally flawed. If this is a problem of a lack of education, the solution is
If the market doesn't want X, finding a way to make them buy X anyway is just plain wrong and akin to fraud, whether their reasons for not wanting X are justified or not. If this is a problem, then it is a marketing and perhaps an education problem; this is not a problem caused by a lack of deception. This type of "ends justify the means" thinking is very dangerous when applied to public policy.
There is simply no way that preventing people from making an informed choice because the result of that choice might be considered silly (by the way, I missed the memo where the cloning industry, or any other, was guaranteed the right to profit) is going to set a good precedent. If you think this is a good precedent, just wait until the same tactics are applied to something you disagree with, or worse, something that really is harmful. Either customers have a right to make an informed choice and buy or not buy for any reason or for no reason at all, or, the industry "knows what's good for you". I know which world I would rather live in, the possibility that some people might make poor decisions be damned.
And that's exactly the problem I have with this, issues of safety/quality aside. If they are so confident that products from cloned animals are okay, then what's wrong with full disclosure? If they're afraid that cloned products which are labelled as such won't sell, I would argue that the market (customers) has the right to decide whether or not they want to buy it for any reason or for no reason at all.
I just can't think of any good reason why you wouldn't label it (just as organic products are labelled as such) unless the intention is to sell it to people who otherwise would choose not to buy it. If that is the intention, I consider that deceptive and wrong whether the reasons why people won't buy it are sound or not. If food producers come up with something and the market does not want it, that is their problem and preventing this possibility is not the federal government's job.
Shit like this is why I don't exactly have a lot of faith in the industry's willingness to deal with any unforeseen problems that could arise. I notice a lack of that annoying "If you've got nothing to hide
Again we are brought back to this statement:
The reader is left with a choice of interpretation:
So once again I ask you, is this pathetic attempt to save face REALLY easier than admitting that you failed to say what you meant to say? You can talk about what is and is not a pronoun, or the educational system, or why George Bush won an election nearly four years ago, etc., but you seem to have failed to notice that none of this answers my simple yes/no question. Your superior education and more sophisticated culture aren't defeated by such a simple question, are they?
What you are showing here is that when you make the mistake of getting your ego involved with your argumentation, then it becomes far easier to concoct a bunch of absurd justifications than to admit "hmm, maybe I didn't do a very good job of making whatever point I was trying to make." The fact that you didn't deliberately set out to handle it this way does not automatically prove that this isn't what you are doing -- usually you have to take a step back and view things objectively before you can see yourself doing this.
This is really easier than admitting that you didn't say what you meant?
Why, yes. Yes I would.
I'd laugh even harder if you said you didn't know you were taking that risk when you were, after all, putting a firework up your ass and lighting it.
Who? Um, you did. Do you not remember writing this?
Not sure what other meaning that could have.
Yes, how whimsical.
There are actually two separate issues here and they seem to be getting confused.
Issue 1: Whether you should ever believe anything you see or read without either verifying that it is true or making damned sure that it's consistent with what you already know to be true. If you read something just for entertainment then of course this is not necessary, but if the truth of something is important to you, then yes you are failing to perform due diligence if you don't think critically about what is presented. The source of the information is irrelevant in this case; either they made factual assertions that can be evaluated, or it's an opinion piece with which you agree or disagree. If they are factual assertions, then any decent attempt to cross-check them will reveal any such bias (people who lie or cherry-pick which facts they present and do not tell the whole story are especially easy to notice). If you can't be bothered to do a little research and you decide to believe something just because it's written on a Web page or in a newspaper, then you take a risk of being mislead.
Issue 2: Whether the fact that this Intel employee's failure to disclose an obvious potential bias reflects poorly on him/her and on Intel. Personally, I believe that such a failure shows either a high degree of negligence, or, deliberate deception. Neither one looks very good to me, for either the employee or the company. If I were looking to buy, say, a new CPU and I could not otherwise decide whether I wanted Intel or AMD, this sort of shit would make me buy AMD.
How someone "perceives events" is not really very important; either they are making a falsiable claim or they are giving an opinion. What worldview they possess or what belief system they entertain might explain their motivation for choosing a particular topic over all other possible topics of discussion but these won't help you determine truth unless you're impressed by appeals to authority.
Anytime I see someone use a personal attack that failed at even the relatively simple task of being humorous, I think "Wow, someone has no idea how to actually address what I said." Extra points for the (incorrect) assumption of my age and education level. You really seem like you're desperate to find an excuse (in this case, one word you don't like) for dismissing what I say because you're unable to refute it -- don't you desire something better for yourself than this sort of cowardice?
So while we are in a congratulatory mood, congrats to you on failing to tell me why you think I am wrong and how my ideas could be improved. I guess it's so much easier to react emotionally to something you disagree with rather than decide what you believe and why.
And yes, when an outright privacy violation like this is in the works, and you don't immediately see massive public opposition to it
For your edification, take a look sometime at the origin of employer-provided health benefits and you will see that this concern is only valid because of a broken system. This is worthy of research but I will give you the short version of the story. During the last World War, the government froze wages. Employers still wanted to offer better compensation to more desirable workers in order to remain competitive. The wage freeze meant that employers could not give such workers a bigger paycheck, so they got around this by offering free benefits that the employee would have had to pay for anyway, and thus they effectively increased the wage while complying with the technical requirements of the wage freeze. Of course, other companies are not going to idly sit by and let one competitor have such an advantage, so it became a widespread practice. Ever since then, it's been very difficult for an individual to purchase affordable health insurance because the bargaining power of an individual is no match for a company that says "we have 200,000 employees, let's talk about rates." Get an individual health insurance quote sometime and compare that to the total amount paid for your employer-provided benefits (what the employer pays plus what you pay - both should be on your paycheck stub) and you will see what I am talking about. The point I am making is, the current system that even allows such concerns is the direct result of government meddling with the economy; it does not follow that further government erosion of privacy is going to fix this.
While you are on the clock, they can tell you what kind of work to do, how to do it, what you may or may not say to their customers, and when you may or may not take breaks. When you are in their building using their facilities they can also listen in on your phone calls and monitor your Internet usage. You have no expectation of privacy when you are an employee on the clock using equipment and networks that do not belong to you, which is all I meant by that comment (any other meaning you read into that was in your mind only). This is reasonable and I have no problem with this; the workplace is not your home. In fact, I am glad that (business) phone calls are recorded where I work because you don't want to play "he said, she said" games when real money is involved. However, that lack of privacy ends the moment I clock out and walk out that door; it is the government helping them spy on what I do off the clock that would constitute "buying the right to violate my privacy" and that is what is unacceptable.
Law enforcement is not supposed to be easy. One description I have heard of fascism is when the desire for efficiency of law enforcement outweighs any concern about civil rights. Judges (or whomever) may set a nearly-unenforcable condition for a probation if they choose to do so -- that is not my problem. It certainly does not give them or anyone else the right to invade my privacy for the sake of making their job easier.
Also, this will do nothing or next to nothing to stop drunk drivers. So this database can confirm that someone was at a bar and had an alcoholic beverage. It will not confirm whether they drove to the bar, walked to the bar, took a cab, or had a designated driver. So if a crime is committed, this will tell you even less than what could be learned by old-fashioned policework, i.e. interviewing witnesses.
I wish there were just one politician with the balls to be honest and say "yeah, I could say that this is for your safety or to help make the world a better place, but really we just want to invade your privacy so that we can have a society increasingly under central control." They are too cowardly to be so honest and it's fitting that they are elected by people too cowardly to value freedom more than security.
When are we going to decide that government is on a need-to-know basis, and when it comes to shit like this, they don't need to know?
It's a shame that most people are so docile and sheeplike that they will shrug their shoulders and say "well I got nothing to hide." Of course, that's not a complete thought. The complete thought is "well I got nothing to hide, so something as prone to abuse as unnecessary surveillance of a legal activity is OK by me!"
You make a very good point. There are indeed two sides to this issue, and there is something to be said about encouraging people to think about the consequences of their actions.
The only real issue I have with this situation is that this was caused by pictures of underage drinking, not fraud or violence or some other crime that really does have a victim. I realize our state legislatures feel differently about this, but I do not consider anything a person does with their own body to be a crime at all, whether said activity is actually in that person's best interests or not. Government is the only entity that is legally allowed to use force to further its goals, and deciding whether what you do with yourself and your own property is really in your best interests is not a proper use for the police power of government in a supposedly "free" country. If you harm no one but possibly yourself (the one person you have the right to harm if that's what you want to do) then why should you feel ashamed for what you did? What is the good (non-arbitrary) reason why you should have to hide this?
There are natural consequences and there are artificial consequences. If you bang your head into a brick wall and feel pain, this is simple cause-and-effect, unwise action and unpleasant reaction. If you buy more house than you can actually afford and end up losing the house, this is also an unwise action with a perfectly natural reaction. If you drink a beer at the age of sixteen, or eighteen (an act that is legal in many countries) and someone decides that this should cost you your education, this is not at all an inevitable cause-and-effect relationship; it's an arbitrary and artificial consequence imposed by people who could have chosen differently. Because they could have chosen differently and because they are able to enforce their decision on others, I question their judgment and their sense of justice, national climate of drug hysteria (legal or otherwise) be damned.
I really wish that people who object to things like drug use or underage drinking would start believing in the power of their own message, rather than looking for ways to use the establishment to force their views on other people. Doesn't anyone else see the contradiction between saying "we believe this not in your best interests" and in the same breath saying "so don't do things we dislike or we will find ways to make you suffer"? Which is it? Do they want to remedy what they view as self-destructive behavior by the most counterproductive means possible, which is by making it much more destructive? Or do they want to take revenge against behavior that personally offends them in the name of saving us from ourselves? I really cannot support either viewpoint, and this is independent of whether the students in question should have seen it coming or not.
I agree that people need to lose any entitlement mentality that they have. However, let's not pretend that scholarships are a pure act of charity. They generally happen because either the student is very strong academically and is therefore more likely to improve that college's performance and graduation rate, or because the student has athletic ability and is an asset to their sports team. Colleges are not for-profit businesses and they need successful students and popular sports teams if they wish to maintain the financial contributions (to which they, too, are not entitled) that help maintain them.
Viewed in that way, the scholarship is not truly "free"; the student is merely exchanging something else of value other than cash in return for an education. If this were not so, then scholarships would not have criteria that determine who qualifies, but would be more like a random lottery.
There is also the idea that revoking a scholarship worth tens of thousands of dollars for "talking trash" is a bit like breaking someone's arms and legs because they were wearing a tie you didn't like. The consequences are quite harmful, while the act being punished causes no real material harm to anyone. As I have mentioned elsewhere, this isn't a judge and a jury imposing a legal penalty in response to formal charges and with due process, and if it were, the punishment would fit the crime. This is a bunch of bureaucrats adversely affecting the rest of someone's life over silly shit because they didn't play ball.
I hate to reply to my own post, but I did want to add one more thing. If your goal is to give out a reasonable punishment with the idea that a youth can learn from his/her mistake and go on to grow up and lead a productive life, denying a scholarship is the most counterproductive thing you could do. We're not talking about gang violence here; we're talking about drinking alcohol while underage. If you are going to talk about law and what the legal punishment would prescribe for said offense, I can point out that there is a good reason why "denying scholarship for which student would otherwise qualify" is NOT what the law would call for.
There is no justification (other than the very weak "because we can") for government school personnel to be able to impose more severe and more far-reaching penalties than what legal due-process would call for. That is the problem I have with this whole concept, and pointing out the legality or illegality of said behavior does absolutely nothing to address this point.
What you seem to have trouble distinguishing is the difference between a one-time fine or even a one-time jail/community service sentence, and the loss of a scholarship which might adversely affect the rest of someone's life. One of those is a punishment that fits the "crime" (in quotes because there is no victim here), while the other is excessive and occurs with no charges, no judge, and no jury of one's peers. You can see that there is a difference here, can't you?
Now if you can respond to what I actually said, which was that the punishment should fit the "crime" and should not be excessive, I would like to hear what you have to say. If you prefer to make shit up that I never implied, you would be better served by debating a mirror.
It's pretty simple, really. If that "crime" has a victim, report it. If not, then let people make their own mistakes, especially if you're talking about something like drinking a beer. The most severe action that is warranted in that case is informing the parents. To compare that to sexual abuse and murder is absurd; to put it (very) mildly, this is comparing an apple to an orange.
I know this idea is very scary to all of you law-enforcement-fantasy types who really think you can legislate morality, but controlling behavior is the least of your problems. If you really believe that putting a substance into your own body that someone else might disapprove of is morally wrong, what you need to improve is the power of your message and the reasoning behind it, not the government school's power to manipulate behavior by means of sanctions. The first option might actually persuade people to see things your way; the second option will drive said behavior underground and result in people who are better at not getting caught (namely, by not posting evidence on a public network).
So much for that idea of "the punishment should fit the crime". Hmm, what you are saying or portraying is disagreeable
A better question: why are they still using a filesystem that needs to be routinely defragmented? Ext2 (and 3) hasn't been that way for how many years now? I think of things like this when I hear Microsoft talk about "innovation".