There is a kind of vertigo where your semi-circular canals get infected or otherwise screwed up. You basically can't walk and are bedridden until it clears up. A friend of mine suffered from this and it wasn't fun.
Any time you mess with a biological function like this, it's safer to go slow. Permanently mess up someone's inner ear and you'll condemn him to a hell that you would wish on anyone.
Animal testing. Lots and lots of animal testing are needed for this before it's considered safe.
...someone cracks a cure for VR Motion Sickness (TM) where the inner ear conflicts with what the eye is seeing, you're not going to see a lot of VR uptake.
.. the cable companies would compress the signal as they presently do with "HDTV" to the point that it looks like crap
Pretty much this.
There is so much artifacting going on with Verizon "hdtv" that I may as well be watching sdtv DVD rips from Pirate Bay, and no, nothing is wrong with the signal. The signal itself is fine without dropouts. It's just crap.
You can certainly go through life without a SSN. You can apply for and get an IRS tax ID. The IRS gives not one shit about whether you are in the SSI system, but they do tend to give a shit if you are an Amish or Mennonite farmer that has an income that needs to be taxed. They will even give an illegal immigrant a tax ID. They don't give a shit about whether you're here illegally, and many illegal aliens pay taxes in the demonstration of good faith hoping that one day that we'd see immigration reform and a tax record would establish "good residency behavior." The IRS cares only about one thing, that you paid enough taxes this year and on that they should be commended for sticking to their business and not scope-creeping like other agencies.
I believe I did mention tax ID numbers... yes, yes I did.
Render unto Caesar and all that.
Someone should have just told her that you can throw the badge in the microwave for a couple of seconds.
I think we need to stop giving religions a break. Stop making exceptions for various religions. The First Amendment is about the endorsement of religions and particular religions that government should not do either. Why should we make exceptions for the whacko Evangelical who believes that the end is nigh, and not for the Buddhist, Hindu, Jainist, or a peyote munching Jeff Merkey?
Fuck them all equally, I say. Tax them all and apply all laws equally to everyone, regardless of belief system. "Respecting" any religion means disrespecting all other religions, because "separate but equal" with religion doesn't work since *someone* is going to be pissed off. "Respecting" religions also means disrespecting people without any religion at all or "seekers" who have not settled on a religion yet, because they don't get the same breaks that the religious get. "Respecting" religion undermines the ideal that we are all equal under the law.
Those with religion are "more equal" than others, I guess.
> I know people like to *believe* it's *infallible*.
We have a construct that we all agree that the SCOTUS is the last word on whether something is constitutional or not. The arguments before it are usually logically based and not circular for either side, because the trivial cases never actually make it there, it's only the conundrums that actually make it. There has to be an end of the argument somewhere. I know of nobody who calls the SCOTUS infallible, but I know a lot of people who say that whatever the SCOTUS says *today* is "good enough for now."
Are the arguments before the SCOTUS different from the arguments in religious circles? I'd wager that yes they are and those who say that they are merely gedankenexperiments based in nothing but circular reasoning like much of religion is, that those people are practising the false equivalence fallacy.
Go ahead, try to find some place that exists where there are people and no cultural norms at all. I'm betting you can't.
Did you build your computer from scratch that you are reading this message on? Did you smelt the copper for the circuit boards yourself? Did you make the photolithography masks for the chips yourself? No? Other people did that?
You owe society for your ability to have the things you have, to be able to get up every day in a safe environment, to have standards for food and water. To have sanitation. To live in society, and take advantage of these things, we all have to conform to certain norms because without those norms, society fails and there are no computers, no health standards, no road maintenance, and no internet.
It's a privacy issue all the way around and I didn't say that the school has any right to track movement at all. But I will now. The school is in loco parentis, meaning it is in the care of minor children as a surrogate parent of sorts. They are responsible for the child while he or she is there. Whether it is verbally taking attendance or attendance is done with an RFID card, the school should make a basic effort to keep track of the student while he or she is there, because woe be to the school department that doesn't and a child gets hurt wandering off school property. While in loco parentis is being eroded over time, it's still pretty much in force for primary and secondary education in the US. Schools have a duty to make sure students are where they belong while at school. They have the duty to make sure people who don't belong are not allowed to wander the halls randomly. They have a duty to make sure there is a safe learning environment.
Don't like it? Tough bananas. The rights of the other students trump the right of the religious nutter trying to get a special exception (and I might add, a special endorsement by the state of a particular religion by making the exception). She had the option to go with a non-RFID card, and she declined. Non-RFID cards don't have the same privacy issues, and trying to twist a religious argument to fit this situation is disingenuous at best.
She could have used a privacy argument as the main thrust and talked about the use of RFID tags for *all* students being a problem, but didn't, even though that was the right one to use. Instead, she wanted to emphasize how people with religions are better than those without and deserve special breaks and it didn't work. Boo. Hoo. Sucks to be her.
>Should public officials have privacy while on duty?
If they are out in public, no. They have the same right to privacy that you and I do out in public: none.
>But what about citizens?
You have no right to privacy out in public. This is established law. Doing something out on a public thoroughfare, sidewalk, public building, etc, means that you expect people to see you do/say things. It's the reason why the police don't need a warrant to arrest you for doing something illegal in front of them.
>A good phone should be able to eavesdrop on the private interview between suspect and cop.
If it's in an office, it's private, but not out in public. It's a publich conversation.
Tough shit.
>And, what if I did not want the tape to be posted?
Tough shit.
>Maybe I did something shameful and donâ(TM)t want it to be public?
Tough shit.
>Maybe something that is implied to be shameful â" like a false arrest.
Tough shit.
You can redress this by various means up to and including suing for false arrest and making public statements about the bad practices of the PD that led to the false arrest.
>Letâ(TM)s say you were pulled over for a moving violation in a red light district? A little careful editing and it could look very bad.
Tough shit. The only right you have to complain is whether the editing was defamatory.
If it was a serious issue with Evangelicals, we'd see full blown communities of them without state IDs or SSNs or Tax IDs. There would be enough to make it a Serious Issue (TM), much like how the Amish and Mennonites have their separate societies here in the US.
But we don't see it, do we? Because it's not really a serious issue. It's only a SERIOUS ISSUE among the true nutters.
This girl has the religious right to not be mandated to do anything, especially anything her religion mandates against.
Prove it.
Prove that this is against her religion. Prove that state issued IDs are against her religion. Prove that all Evangelicals that rant and rave about the Mark of the Beast, while Evangelicals accept state issued IDs in other contexts, like taxes, jobs, bank accounts, etc.
PROVE IT.
PROVE ALL THINGS; HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD. - 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21
We live in a complex society, where the membership is much larger than the 300 person tribe/clans of the paleolithic hunter-gatherer era. Beyond that, it begins to be much more difficult to keep track of everyone. Beyond that, you no longer *personally* know everyone. So we, as a species, decided to organize, create writing and math to keep track of things. Getting a state issued ID is a direct extension of this drive to organize things and make stuff less confusing.
Organization is part of civilization. If you don't want to be part of the organization, yes, you are an anarchist and basically anti-civilization.
How well could you do, personally, foraging off the land and depending solely on the goodwill of strangers and living like Diogenes, living in a barrel and masturbating publicly?
You need to have more guns than the other guy. You can't just waltz over to Somalia and declare yourself completely independent from the human race. And not only that, but if you piss enough of the "other guys" off in Somalia (probably likely if you take offense to Islam and show your distaste), it probably won't matter how many guns you do have.
But #2 is not the argument presented. The argument presented is a religious one, and it's bogus, given the evidence that government issued IDs are just fine with the Evangelicals for a whole host of other activities. I agree that there are privacy concerns. I agree that the ability to read an RFID chip presents a hazard to its holder due to bad actors, a kind of picking of a pocket without having to reach into one's physical pocket to pick.
But that's not their concern. They don't present the privacy concern, and it just struck me as to why:
If you present the privacy concern as the main argument, that the People have a right to privacy as per the SCOTUS, then you reinforce Roe V. Wade, which gets Evangelical panties in a severe twist.
So as Evangelical literalists, as this girl and her dad obviously are, they are kinda stuck. Either make a non-sensical argument, or make a valid argument that reinforces something one dislikes intensely.
Wisconsin v. Yoder Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District Rosenberger v. University of Virginia
Absolute non-sequiturs. These are not applicable to the argument at hand - whether an argument can be made to prohibit the issuing of IDs on religious grounds. I don't think you can, as Evangelicals have already accepted state issued IDs as a matter of course in this country even with their reading of the Bible, saying it's the literal word of God. The doublethink with this girl and her dad is staggering - that a driver's license, tax number, or social security number, etc., is not a "mark of the beast" while a school ID is. If you accept the former, saying you don't accept the latter on religious grounds is inconsistent and mere whim, based on an argument where logic has not only flown away, but has completely vanished from this earthly realm, never to be seen again.
But this is typical. Religion does not require logic, except the self-reinforcing circular kind in a vacuum of un-reality. But if we are to function as a society, we have to base our laws on reason, logic, and practicality, or else we wind up as some hell-hole where laws are much more arbitrary than they already are.
Because you live in civilization. We do not live in an anarchy.
But previously....
>So, until the late 90s
So you needed a state ID. You couldn't get through life without one at that point.
The government also assigned you a Social Security number and failing that, you got an IRS tax number, which identifies you in "the system." - because either one of these is mandatory to be able to file your taxes.
Why are these *not* a "Mark of the Beast" while a school ID *is*?
...just maybe if she didn't include a hypothesis that wasn't absolutely looney-tunes, she would have a better argument.
Using the bible as a basis for legal argument is dumb. It can be *part* of an argument, to show history, but this whole "mark of the beast" Revelations crap is just crap.
FTFA:
"The judge disagreed. In a 25-page ruling, he wrote that the Hernandezâ(TM)s refusal to wear the badge even without the tracking chip undermined her claims that the district was violating her religious freedom. âoePlaintiff's objection to wearing the Smart ID badge without a chip is clearly a secular choice, rather than a religious concern,â Garcia wrote."
Evangelicals drive around with drivers' licenses with numbers and a photo and other state/work/school IDs. They don't have a religious objection to those. So why is it suddenly a religious objection when it's a high school ID even without an RFID chip?
Someone's telling tall tales here, and it's not necessarily the school being mistaken about the utility of RFID off campus.
I want an argument against RFID badges that doesn't include a batshit-insane argument about Satan, because I think there are legitimate privacy concerns about RFID being trackable outside of their intended environments. But this gets drowned out in the herp-a-derp religiosity, which only paints those with real concerns as shiny-side-out tinfoil haberdashers.
This girl and her dad aren't helping. Not. One. Bit.
They're not enough. They're not enough for the housebound or those who *do* work but not make enough to feed their family and can't make it to the soup kitchen for the scheduled time.
They are only *part* of the solution.
But hey, this is Slashdot where everyone is 20 something and has a job paying $300k/yr so everyone should be able to get a job like that.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a kind of vertigo where your semi-circular canals get infected or otherwise screwed up. You basically can't walk and are bedridden until it clears up. A friend of mine suffered from this and it wasn't fun.
Any time you mess with a biological function like this, it's safer to go slow. Permanently mess up someone's inner ear and you'll condemn him to a hell that you would wish on anyone.
Animal testing. Lots and lots of animal testing are needed for this before it's considered safe.
--
BMO
asteroid 99942 Apophis is actually bigger than we thought
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzZ4i8aWs_s
--
BMO
...someone cracks a cure for VR Motion Sickness (TM) where the inner ear conflicts with what the eye is seeing, you're not going to see a lot of VR uptake.
--
BMO
Oh, OK, then I am moar edumacated today.
Thanks.
--
BMO
.. the cable companies would compress the signal as they presently do with "HDTV" to the point that it looks like crap
Pretty much this.
There is so much artifacting going on with Verizon "hdtv" that I may as well be watching sdtv DVD rips from Pirate Bay, and no, nothing is wrong with the signal. The signal itself is fine without dropouts. It's just crap.
--
BMO
You can certainly go through life without a SSN. You can apply for and get an IRS tax ID. The IRS gives not one shit about whether you are in the SSI system, but they do tend to give a shit if you are an Amish or Mennonite farmer that has an income that needs to be taxed. They will even give an illegal immigrant a tax ID. They don't give a shit about whether you're here illegally, and many illegal aliens pay taxes in the demonstration of good faith hoping that one day that we'd see immigration reform and a tax record would establish "good residency behavior." The IRS cares only about one thing, that you paid enough taxes this year and on that they should be commended for sticking to their business and not scope-creeping like other agencies.
I believe I did mention tax ID numbers... yes, yes I did.
Render unto Caesar and all that.
Someone should have just told her that you can throw the badge in the microwave for a couple of seconds.
--
BMO
Revisiting this issue.
BEGIN RANT
I think we need to stop giving religions a break. Stop making exceptions for various religions. The First Amendment is about the endorsement of religions and particular religions that government should not do either. Why should we make exceptions for the whacko Evangelical who believes that the end is nigh, and not for the Buddhist, Hindu, Jainist, or a peyote munching Jeff Merkey?
Fuck them all equally, I say. Tax them all and apply all laws equally to everyone, regardless of belief system. "Respecting" any religion means disrespecting all other religions, because "separate but equal" with religion doesn't work since *someone* is going to be pissed off. "Respecting" religions also means disrespecting people without any religion at all or "seekers" who have not settled on a religion yet, because they don't get the same breaks that the religious get. "Respecting" religion undermines the ideal that we are all equal under the law.
Those with religion are "more equal" than others, I guess.
END RANT.
--
BMO
> I know people like to *believe* it's *infallible*.
We have a construct that we all agree that the SCOTUS is the last word on whether something is constitutional or not. The arguments before it are usually logically based and not circular for either side, because the trivial cases never actually make it there, it's only the conundrums that actually make it. There has to be an end of the argument somewhere. I know of nobody who calls the SCOTUS infallible, but I know a lot of people who say that whatever the SCOTUS says *today* is "good enough for now."
Are the arguments before the SCOTUS different from the arguments in religious circles? I'd wager that yes they are and those who say that they are merely gedankenexperiments based in nothing but circular reasoning like much of religion is, that those people are practising the false equivalence fallacy.
--
BMO
Then go live where there is no society.
Go ahead, try to find some place that exists where there are people and no cultural norms at all. I'm betting you can't.
Did you build your computer from scratch that you are reading this message on? Did you smelt the copper for the circuit boards yourself? Did you make the photolithography masks for the chips yourself? No? Other people did that?
You owe society for your ability to have the things you have, to be able to get up every day in a safe environment, to have standards for food and water. To have sanitation. To live in society, and take advantage of these things, we all have to conform to certain norms because without those norms, society fails and there are no computers, no health standards, no road maintenance, and no internet.
You're crazy.
--
BMO
No I didn't equivocate anything.
It's a privacy issue all the way around and I didn't say that the school has any right to track movement at all. But I will now. The school is in loco parentis, meaning it is in the care of minor children as a surrogate parent of sorts. They are responsible for the child while he or she is there. Whether it is verbally taking attendance or attendance is done with an RFID card, the school should make a basic effort to keep track of the student while he or she is there, because woe be to the school department that doesn't and a child gets hurt wandering off school property. While in loco parentis is being eroded over time, it's still pretty much in force for primary and secondary education in the US. Schools have a duty to make sure students are where they belong while at school. They have the duty to make sure people who don't belong are not allowed to wander the halls randomly. They have a duty to make sure there is a safe learning environment.
Don't like it? Tough bananas. The rights of the other students trump the right of the religious nutter trying to get a special exception (and I might add, a special endorsement by the state of a particular religion by making the exception). She had the option to go with a non-RFID card, and she declined. Non-RFID cards don't have the same privacy issues, and trying to twist a religious argument to fit this situation is disingenuous at best.
She could have used a privacy argument as the main thrust and talked about the use of RFID tags for *all* students being a problem, but didn't, even though that was the right one to use. Instead, she wanted to emphasize how people with religions are better than those without and deserve special breaks and it didn't work. Boo. Hoo. Sucks to be her.
--
BMO
If you are a so-called good cop that covers up for the bad cops, then you are a bad cop too.
And no cops ever expose bad cop behavior.
They are all bad cops.
QED.
--
BMO
>Should public officials have privacy while on duty?
If they are out in public, no. They have the same right to privacy that you and I do out in public: none.
>But what about citizens?
You have no right to privacy out in public. This is established law. Doing something out on a public thoroughfare, sidewalk, public building, etc, means that you expect people to see you do/say things. It's the reason why the police don't need a warrant to arrest you for doing something illegal in front of them.
>A good phone should be able to eavesdrop on the private interview between suspect and cop.
If it's in an office, it's private, but not out in public. It's a publich conversation.
Tough shit.
>And, what if I did not want the tape to be posted?
Tough shit.
>Maybe I did something shameful and donâ(TM)t want it to be public?
Tough shit.
>Maybe something that is implied to be shameful â" like a false arrest.
Tough shit.
You can redress this by various means up to and including suing for false arrest and making public statements about the bad practices of the PD that led to the false arrest.
>Letâ(TM)s say you were pulled over for a moving violation in a red light district? A little careful editing and it could look very bad.
Tough shit. The only right you have to complain is whether the editing was defamatory.
--
BMO
As an aside, anyone who is paying attention already knows that the mark of the beast is the credit card.
This is the most insightful comment all day.
--
BMO
If it was a serious issue with Evangelicals, we'd see full blown communities of them without state IDs or SSNs or Tax IDs. There would be enough to make it a Serious Issue (TM), much like how the Amish and Mennonites have their separate societies here in the US.
But we don't see it, do we? Because it's not really a serious issue. It's only a SERIOUS ISSUE among the true nutters.
--
BMO
This girl has the religious right to not be mandated to do anything, especially anything her religion mandates against.
Prove it.
Prove that this is against her religion. Prove that state issued IDs are against her religion. Prove that all Evangelicals that rant and rave about the Mark of the Beast, while Evangelicals accept state issued IDs in other contexts, like taxes, jobs, bank accounts, etc.
PROVE IT.
PROVE ALL THINGS; HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD. - 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21
I feel terribly sorry for you
Blow me.
--
BMO
We live in a complex society, where the membership is much larger than the 300 person tribe/clans of the paleolithic hunter-gatherer era. Beyond that, it begins to be much more difficult to keep track of everyone. Beyond that, you no longer *personally* know everyone. So we, as a species, decided to organize, create writing and math to keep track of things. Getting a state issued ID is a direct extension of this drive to organize things and make stuff less confusing.
Organization is part of civilization. If you don't want to be part of the organization, yes, you are an anarchist and basically anti-civilization.
How well could you do, personally, foraging off the land and depending solely on the goodwill of strangers and living like Diogenes, living in a barrel and masturbating publicly?
--
BMO
No you can't.
You need to have more guns than the other guy. You can't just waltz over to Somalia and declare yourself completely independent from the human race. And not only that, but if you piss enough of the "other guys" off in Somalia (probably likely if you take offense to Islam and show your distaste), it probably won't matter how many guns you do have.
--
BMO
But #2 is not the argument presented. The argument presented is a religious one, and it's bogus, given the evidence that government issued IDs are just fine with the Evangelicals for a whole host of other activities. I agree that there are privacy concerns. I agree that the ability to read an RFID chip presents a hazard to its holder due to bad actors, a kind of picking of a pocket without having to reach into one's physical pocket to pick.
But that's not their concern. They don't present the privacy concern, and it just struck me as to why:
If you present the privacy concern as the main argument, that the People have a right to privacy as per the SCOTUS, then you reinforce Roe V. Wade, which gets Evangelical panties in a severe twist.
So as Evangelical literalists, as this girl and her dad obviously are, they are kinda stuck. Either make a non-sensical argument, or make a valid argument that reinforces something one dislikes intensely.
So they chose the derp.
--
BMO
Wisconsin v. Yoder
Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District
Rosenberger v. University of Virginia
Absolute non-sequiturs. These are not applicable to the argument at hand - whether an argument can be made to prohibit the issuing of IDs on religious grounds. I don't think you can, as Evangelicals have already accepted state issued IDs as a matter of course in this country even with their reading of the Bible, saying it's the literal word of God. The doublethink with this girl and her dad is staggering - that a driver's license, tax number, or social security number, etc., is not a "mark of the beast" while a school ID is. If you accept the former, saying you don't accept the latter on religious grounds is inconsistent and mere whim, based on an argument where logic has not only flown away, but has completely vanished from this earthly realm, never to be seen again.
But this is typical. Religion does not require logic, except the self-reinforcing circular kind in a vacuum of un-reality. But if we are to function as a society, we have to base our laws on reason, logic, and practicality, or else we wind up as some hell-hole where laws are much more arbitrary than they already are.
--
BMO
> why would I need them in a free country?
Because you live in civilization. We do not live in an anarchy.
But previously....
>So, until the late 90s
So you needed a state ID. You couldn't get through life without one at that point.
The government also assigned you a Social Security number and failing that, you got an IRS tax number, which identifies you in "the system." - because either one of these is mandatory to be able to file your taxes.
Why are these *not* a "Mark of the Beast" while a school ID *is*?
--
BMO
>The Constitution
Where? Point this out. It's a relatively short document. This should be easy enough, right?
>and Supreme Court decisions don't agree with you.
Name them.
--
BMO
Try going through life without a state issued ID.
--
BMO
...just maybe if she didn't include a hypothesis that wasn't absolutely looney-tunes, she would have a better argument.
Using the bible as a basis for legal argument is dumb. It can be *part* of an argument, to show history, but this whole "mark of the beast" Revelations crap is just crap.
FTFA:
Evangelicals drive around with drivers' licenses with numbers and a photo and other state/work/school IDs. They don't have a religious objection to those. So why is it suddenly a religious objection when it's a high school ID even without an RFID chip?
Someone's telling tall tales here, and it's not necessarily the school being mistaken about the utility of RFID off campus.
I want an argument against RFID badges that doesn't include a batshit-insane argument about Satan, because I think there are legitimate privacy concerns about RFID being trackable outside of their intended environments. But this gets drowned out in the herp-a-derp religiosity, which only paints those with real concerns as shiny-side-out tinfoil haberdashers.
This girl and her dad aren't helping. Not. One. Bit.
--
BMO
But we have soup kitchens.
They're not enough. They're not enough for the housebound or those who *do* work but not make enough to feed their family and can't make it to the soup kitchen for the scheduled time.
They are only *part* of the solution.
But hey, this is Slashdot where everyone is 20 something and has a job paying $300k/yr so everyone should be able to get a job like that.
*throws up hands*
--
BMO
Because some people abuse a system, that we should shut an entire system down and let people starve instead.
Right.
"Am I my brother's keeper?"
Yes, yes you are. Civilization is a lot better than the alternative.
--
BMO