Dude, accidentally stumbling across fetish sites will not automatically make you like them. You're on/., which probably means, like me, you spend an unhealthy amount of time on IRC - how many times have you been tricked into seeing goatse, or tubgirl, or lemonparty? Do you like what you saw there? Did you instantly develop a fetish for anal expansion, scat and so on? No you didn't, so what makes you think anyone else is any different?
Exposure does not automatically lead to enjoyment. You could make me eat all the bananas you want, but I still won't like bananas, and your kid stumbling across the weird-ass side of the internet won't make him weird.
Ah- you mean the stuff that makes up the delerious fantasies of the loony tin foil hat crowd that calls/. home?
No, the stuff that makes up the grim reality of what is going on in what is supposed to be the free'est nation on earth. Slashdot may have a liberal bias, but that doesn't change the fact that these things really do happen. Look back through the past stories on here and check the sources, particularly from the Politics and YRO sections. Links? Find them yourself, it's not my job to educate you.
"blahblahblah tips an Al Jazeera story reporting that the Saudi Arabia-based International Sharia Law Alliance claims the USA has joined the UK and Holland (you know what those Dutch get up to) among the biggest violators of Islamic Sharia law. Quoting: "The group's report is the latest to urge the Saudi government into pressuring the USA to reform morality and public association laws." As we have previously discussed here, the current Republican government had planned to introduce new morality and public association laws, but dissent from the Democrats and a groundswell of public protest delayed that action. blahblahblah adds, "What makes this story so important now is that this pressure is being applied at a time and in a manner that may cause the US government to fall, forcing an election." Meanwhile, on the other side of the rapidly heating debate, Random Guy blogs about the forces arranged against a US Sharia law. The Public Coalition for Humane Laws, which includes a who's who of the privacy, civil rights, religious freedom and sexual equality communities, has outlined a list of it's morality reform demands."
Would you accept it? Would the US government accept it? Note to US: Canada is no more subject to your copyright laws than you are subject to Islamic Sharia law. You stare at the TV, watching distant wars while politicians tell you how evil and inhumane Sharia law is, and you say to yourself "Thank God we live in a sovereign country free of the insane demands of the laws of another". Well guess what? That's what the Canadians say to themselves when they see stories about single mothers and eleven year old girls being sued for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a Britney track. Before you start demanding your laws be passed on to another, think what it would be like if it happened to you. Size doesn't matter, there are 1.6 *billion* Muslims in the world, up to around only 300 million Americans, so if it were put to a worldwide vote as to which legal system the world should adopt, you would likely end up with Sharia. It's because most people in the world are sensible, unlike the people pushing for a Canadian DMCA, and they realise that different regions should have the right to set their own laws and not be dictated to by others, that you don't. If you wouldn't like it happening to you, don't push it on other people.
This is not an advocation of Sharia law, nor is it a condemnation. It is not an advocation of copyright law, nor is it a condemnation. Those debates would rage pretty much forever. It is just a theoretical example to see how you, with the majority of/. being Americans, would react to a system of laws that many Americans find highly distasteful being forced upon them. How would you react? How would people more right-wing than you react (I think the hardiest of/. regulars would accept that the site doesn't cover the entire spectrum of political thought)? How would Bill O'Reilly react? Would America accept it like they expect Canada to accept this? No. I would want, and expect, them to fight it to the very end, much as I hope the Canadians do over this. Canada exists for the benefit of the Canadian people, not foreign corporations. So far the Canadian government has agreed with this, and long may it continue.
Religious belief is a more positive force in society than the brutal oppression thereof, which is the only way you'll ever 'ban' religion - you can lock the churches, synagogues, mosques, etc and you will only force it underground. People who hate religion are almost as bad as people who hate because of religion, and are in some cases even more ignorant, saying that what I believe has to be a positive force in society or I'm not allowed to believe it. That's a pretty slippery slope: Can someone please explain to me again how alcohol is a positive force in our society?
(Note: The above is just an example and I have absolutely no problem with alcohol in society, and not some kind of prohibitionist loony. If you've ever tasted Jewish wine, however, you'll understand why I have every reason to be;).
If you were religious before reading things like this, this is a bad reason to stop being religious. It isn't your deity of choice's fault that there are idiots out there that would invoke religion to cause harm. You're right that religious teachings have been and are being used to drive people to murder and hatred, but that doesn't mean that religion itself is inherently bad: If it brought you comfort before, it still can. It isn't going to drive you to start stoning people to death, and it's a tragedy that even one person would deny their faith because of the actions of other, infinitely fallible human beings.
Religion needs people like you. In an increasingly secular world (not that there's anything wrong with that), religion is increasingly becoming the domain of the kooks and the maniacs, at least at the higher levels. Because almost nobody still listens to their priest, or their rabbi, or their imam, or whoever, people only pay attention when the kooks shout the loudest and tell their followers to kill everyone else. This drives all the sensible people away as people become ashamed to admit they believe in a higher power in case it implies they're a kook that wants to kill everyone. The sensible people are scared away and the idiots flood in.
People have always gawked at celebrities, and being a rock star has always been cooler than being a scientist. There's no use crying that the world is going to the dogs because of these two facts when they've been going on since forever.
I would define 'removable storage' as storage I can plug in, write data to, remove and carry on with my device operating normally. Start up a mobile phone over here in the UK without a SIM in it and you'll get a 'SIM not Present' screen and that's as far as you'll get, which means it fails to be 'removable storage' by any sensible definition. Calling it removable storage would make your computer's hard drive removable storage - sure, you *can* remove it, but not if you want your device to function properly.
The sports news pages on both sides of the Atlantic and numerous spots in between have been eulogising chess 'genius' Bobby Fischer, who dropped dead earlier today of kidney failure. The famous grandmaster who defeated the Soviet Unions finest Chess minds is dead, and countless column inches have been dedicated to his achievements and his passing. What is reduced to a throwaway line, or even glossed over entirely, are his ludicrous, hateful political views which he was only too happy to spout whenever interviewed. His belief that he was the victim of an international Jewish conspiracy against him would be laughable were it not for his sincere desire for hundreds of thousands of "dirty, hook-nosed" Jews to be executed, all synagogues to be forcefully closed, and his deeply held and widely spoken denial of Ha-Shoah, the holocaust of the Jews.
So a bigoted idiot who was once quite good at moving little pieces of wood around a board is dead. Good. Ironically, it's only my convictions keeping me from wishing he went slowly and painfully. Good riddance you rediculous anti-semite.
I'm of the impression that just linking to copyrighted material (which is all bittorrent trackers do) is perfectly legal in Sweden.
Now let me go on record as saying I rarely, if ever, pirate anything I have no intention of buying. You could call my bittorrent activity a sort of enhanced version of iTunes' preview feature, because a 30-second sample of a 1-minute intro really isn't enough to do justice to a 5 or 6 minute song, for example. If I like what I hear having listened to the album, I buy it on iTunes - I have an iPod and less than 5 computers and I don't lend music to my friends, so their DRM has never been an issue for me, despite the screaming from the rafters on/. about it every time it comes up. Between that and watching the occasional TV show like when I miss an episode of Top Gear, that's as much 'piracy' as I get through.
Now that's out of the way, let me explain why this story annoys me, someone who has never actually used TPB (I didn't like the interface rather than any other moral objections, but I digress):
It annoys me that the Swedish authorities are wasting time and resources to pursue people in the interests of foreign corporations. Not Swedish people, not even Swedish companies, but foreign corporations. 65 police officers charging in and confiscating the equipment, right down to faxes about the air conditioning, of an ISP demonstrably doing nothing illegal under Swedish law is rediculous, forcing the company's legal advisor to submit a DNA sample despite doing nothing illegal under Swedish law is a massive invasion of privacy, and the ongoing legal furore, of which this is just the lastest aftershock, showed off the infuriating smug cockiness of the **AAs, and the fact that they clearly think they have the power to change Sweden to their interests, and not the interests of it's people.
Now, I'm not Swedish, I'm British, but that doesn't mean I can't find the **AA's behaviour reprehensible. Did your school ever cut the funding for the Math Club (or whatever nerd club you belonged to - if you didn't belong to any, imagine you did, just for the sake of argument) and give it to the jocks for more ass-slapping practice? It didn't benefit you, it didn't benefit the school in any meaningful way, but I bet those guys were smug as shit that they got things changed the way they wanted, regardless of whether or not it was good for you or anyone else. Now replace the jocks with the **AA, and the Math Club (or whatever) with Sweden. Annoying, isn't it?
Now imagine a British company was trying to get... I don't know... Slashdot shut down, and being extremely cocky about it, because by linking to the Pirate Party website they are encouraging piracy, or for having their site use an illegal amount of.gifs or some other thing that isn't actually illegal in the US (or whereever). Imagine the fuss that would get kicked up, even here - after it came back up - which is a place most would consider extremely (in the good sense) liberal. Imagine how Bill O'Reilly would react? The man would go thermonuclear on national television calling for our heads.
Now, as you say, it might annoy most people because if TPB goes down, they'll no longer get free stuff. But I'm annoyed for the reasons outlined above. If what TPB was doing was illegal in Sweden, or if the Swedes were carrying out these raids as a piece of fair diplomacy in dealing with the US, then that wouldn't trouble me - if you will insist on sailing close to the wind, don't complain when things go awry - but it's the fact that we have smug corporate talking heads attempting to bully entire governments with statements like "It is not in Sweden's best interests to earn a reputation as a place where utter lawlessness is tolerated" that really annoys me.
That, and encouraging Swedish politicians to break Swedish law ('Ministerstyre'
By 'out of the state', they don't mean "onto a sovereign sea platform", they mean into another state - Wiki says Belgium and Russia. Quite frankly, as much as I'm sure Sweden would like to preserve it's good relationship with the corporations of the USA, I doubt they'd go as far as to blow up parts of Russia.
In a post-[Event X] world, have needless appeals to emotion gone too far?
A couple of days ago I posted a comment against the constant references to 9/11 being used to justify or explain things that have very little to do with preventing terrorism or other terrible event, and this is another example, and the shame this time is that it's a comment from a/. user - I thought we were supposed to be more informed and enlightened than knee-jerking idiots?
In a post-Virginia Tech world, has university surveillance of online identities gone too far?"
What has Virginia Tech got to do with university surveillance, ever? Seung-Hui Cho was well known on campus for being weird, handing in obviously violently disturbed plays for class assignments, and even writing a story about a school shooting which the university was aware of. Now I know that what one writes is not neccessarily a reflection of what one intends to do, but it's not like anyone needed to spy on Seung-Hui's Facebook page, if indeed he had one, to see that he had serious issues going on - his social problems were far more severe than some kid writing a comment about his teacher building a parking garage, and were being waved in the face of his tutors for more than a year before the horrendous act took place.
That turned me off. I don't recall buying alcohol myself at that mart. What I think is stupid is swiping the ID of someone who obviously is well above 25 or 30, and doesn't appear to be wearing spy or makeup-artist appliances
I don't know how it works in America, but over here in the UK, the selling of one drink to someone under the legal age can result in the cashier that made the purchase being fined around £2,000 and the licencee being fined £5,000 or £10,000 and having their licence to sell alcohol revoked. It's not worth £2,000 of a till monkey's wages to let anyone go through without checking ID, and that's just the legal problems - the supermarket I worked at when I was younger had a policy that if you get caught selling alcohol to someone without checking ID, even if they looked like your grandmother, you would probably lose your job (they had CCTV pointed at the counter, to catch any robbers on film).
Plus, I've got a friend who's almost completely bald at 20, but he looks a lot older because of his... ahem, folical challenged-ness. In America he'd be below legal drinking age, even though he could easily pass for 35, particularly in a dimly-lit bar or to a cashier who's been working 10 hours and to whom the customers are just becoming one continuous droning blur. No spy equipment, no makeup, just a guy who, due to unfortunate physical features, looks older than he is, and with one assumption, if the legal age here was the same as it is there, the assumer could lose their job and £2,000 of their hard-earned money, and the store and licencee could be fined and lose their licence.
It might look stupid when you see till monkeys checking the IDs of guys in their 40s, but when you're making minimum wage, it's just not worth the risk.
The September 11 attacks were the main motivation for the changes.
First of all, I'd be willing to bet most people who lost someone dear to them in the tragedy of 9/11 is downright insulted by the constant abuse of the memory of their loved one as a tool to cudgel the American public into accepting laws which have no point other than to increase the power and pervasiveness of the Federal government. The 9/11 attackers all had legitimate IDs, so what possible purpose would this have served back then? We might have known the names of the guys that did it sooner after the fact? Yeah, I'm sure that would have come in real handy.
Frankly, I know there's nothing anyone can do to stop the REAL-ID ball from rolling, so I'd just be happier if they came out and admitted they just want the power trip.
Truth hurts, doesn't it? For all your demagoguery, the truth remains is that over 50% of the stuff on your local TV, and over 90% of the stuff on your local "warez" server is produced in America (and copied without permission of the creators/owners).
Ahem, I'm in the UK, and looking at the BBC TV guide for this evening, across three channels, I can only see two episodes of Family Guy, 'Dracula 2000' and a couple of late-night episodes of Star Trek. Not quite what I'd call 50%. Over on ITV, there's a couple of American films spread across four channels of content, and Channel 4 is awash with American-made content, with one whole episode of the Simpsons.
Channel 5 I'll give you, as all I ever see on there is terrible CSI knock-offs and shows about people having nose jobs, but across the board it's about 10% American content, maybe less, and you guys can hardly complain when you have a whole TV station dedicated to showing British content on American TV (though looking at the girls in the Torchwood banner at the top, who can blame you?). Also, I'm sure I read somewhere that France has laws ensuring more than 50% of shows on French television are French language productions produced in France, but I don't have a source for that so I could be wrong, and I can't see the rest of Europe being dominated by American television as you don't actually speak the same language, and nobody likes watching awful dubs all the time.
Then you wouldn't mind people copying your passport, your high school/college diplomas (if any), your date of birth and drivers license, your credit card numbers and bank accounts, your address and pictures of your family and pets in the nude?
There is a not-so-subtle difference between data A (a Metallica.mp3, for example) and data B (my credit card details). It's not like if the RIAA waved a magic wand and stopped piracy tomorrow everyone who would have previously downloaded 'Metallica_Discography_342342Kbps_OGG.torrent' is going to rush out and buy the pieces of crap that were 'Load' and 'Reload', but if I were to publish my bank account details on some identity theft forum, the vast majority of people would go in and steal all my cash. I don't want me or James Hetfield to be deprived of rightfully-earned cash, but the fact is 99% of downloaders wouldn't buy the CD if the torrent wasn't availible anyway, whereas 99.9999% of people interested in my bank account details are only interested in affecting my bank balance significantly and negatively compared to what it would be if that information was not published.
As for the other stuff - and in fact the bank details as well - there is a difference between personal information and creative output. The problem there is identity theft. By downloading The Black Album (to continue the Metallica theme - I don't even like friggin' Metallica) you are not able to steal Lars Ulrich's identity and make his life a living hell to pay for your own enjoyment. You could make your neighbour's life a living hell through the use of the files you downloaded and an amplifier that goes up to 11, but Lars Ulrich wouldn't care. You stealing my identity and using my credit card information to purchase child porn would land me, an innocent party, in deep shit, but I can't think of anything you can implicate someone in by downloading an MP3 of them.
As for pictures of me in the nude... that'd hurt you more than it'd hurt me, but if you really want, I'll bust out the Polaroids.
This will probably end up modded 'Redundant' because plenty of people have explained this before me, but you evidently missed all of those, so I'll take a chance and explain it again for you.
- Idiot deletes medical records because he's pissy he got fired.
- Doctor cannot access medical records for a patient who's unconscious, has been in a car crash or something.
- Paramedic makes a snap decision to treat unconscious patient with... I don't know, pick any drug you want that might be used to treat people in this situation that people might have an allergy to, because someone somewhere will.
- Patient has severe allergic reaction.
- Patient dies.
See also: The millions of other problems that erasing medical records causes for lots of innocent people. Anyone unlucky enough to have specific medical requirements that can't be accessed because of this idiot is just as dead as anyone unlucky enough to be at the water cooler when John Q. Moron opens fire in the corridor.
I hate to want to reply to own post, but just in case you think TFA is just some goof with a Blogspot blog, the original quote is from Mozilla Labs, specifically from Dan Mills, a FireFox dev and former Novell engineer - definately not the average moron.
[I'd like to see] a way to save bookmarks, etc on *MY* server. (By "My server", I mean my personally owned and operated FreeBSD box I have colo'ed', not what the average moron might mean where they confuse 'server' with 'service provider' and use 'my server' to refer to their ISP)
From TFA:
We kept the server intentionally dumb and standards-based, so that anyone can set up a server for themselves and/or their friends or company.
If you don't want to use it, don't download the extension. To use it, you have to:
- Go to a site
- Create an account
- Download an extension (on every single computer you use)
- Put in your username and password (again)
- Put in a private encryption passphrase
- Manually click the 'Sync' button.
Only then will it start automatically updating your bookmarks. If you have privacy issues about uploading your bookmarks to Mozilla's servers, then you can quite easily back out at any of these points, or not bother at all. If the fear is that they will share your bookmarks, then simply don't give them any to share. This is not a feature that is on by default, and the blog linked to even specifies that, if you're that paranoid about giving them your data, there will be a way to set up your own Weave server, so no-one but you will be able to know you visit PissMidgets.com
You clicked the article, you (assuming you don't run adblock, etc) saw the ads, PC Mag got paid. Rinse and repeat. While he can troll you and other/.'ers into reading his articles with things like this, he's going to keep doing it - there's what, 8 ads per page? They all pay.
Your predictions are a little far-fetched for just a century from now, and some are true already. I'm going to dissect a few largely because I'm bored.
Will it become a place where Latin American and African Christians live in tense coexistence with Moslems
Probably, as that's the case now and so in 100 years will probably still be the case. The current tense stand-off between Islam and the rest of the world is not going to go away overnight, and we're currently still in a tailspin of distrust and hatred that shows no signs of stopping.
Will whites become so rare that New Yorkers will stare in fascination at white people?
In 100 years? I sincerely doubt it. That's not too far away when you think of it in generations - only around 5 or so. With the amount of big dumb white people that still exist in New York, and with the social elite of the city being largely white (no offence intended, but the majority of rich people in New York, who usually only marry other rich people in New York, are white) I sincerely doubt the strange notion people seem to have of "a coffee-coloured race of people with no racism or hatred" will come true, and definately not in the next 100 years.
Jews will have long since have converted to Buddhism or intermarried with others, that they are a regarded as a mysterious ancient people like the Druids or Manicheans.
Full disclosure, I'm a practicing Jew. Again, 100 years? Pfft, not happening. 1000 years? Still probably not. Judaism has been a relatively small religion for most if not all of the thousands of years of it's existence. It's not going to vanish within a century, especially as Judaism places a much stronger emphasis on marrying other members of the community than, say, Christianity in terms of religion and the Big Dumb White People I covered in the previous entry in terms of race. I'm going to be around for the majority of the next century, hopefully, and with the way medical advancements are going, my kids - who will be raised Jewish - have every probability of making it to the end. If they in turn raise their children to be Jewish, which admittedly is not a 100% chance, those children will almost definately make it to 2108 as proud Jews. Like I said, I think 100 years is a much shorter time than you think it is.
The world's economic center of gravity will have long since shifted South and East, so New York will be a historical curiosity like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh today.
This, however, is highly possible. The chances of the economy shifting to developing nations like India and China once they have finished their development is very high - their sheer strength of numbers as a workforce will become truly intimidating on the global stage once they have the technology to keep up with their American cousins, especially as they tend to have a much higher work ethic and place a lot more pride in what they do than the average Westerner. That's not a criticism of either, merely a statement of fact.
At the request of France's Islamic government, the Statue of Liberty will be replaced with a statue of Sayyid Qutb
The chances of France getting an Islamic government within 100 years is very small, largely because, as I pointed out with New York, the social elite in France is largely white and only the poor people tend to be Muslims, and as we know with elections in America, democracy means choosing between two rich white people. Revolution? They already had one of those, and the cultural problems France is having with it's 'ghettos' are being so overblown by the media as to be completely rediculous. Also, if the chances of France having an Islamic government are low, even lower are the chances that, if they do, with the tense standoff I've already covered between Islam and the West, and especially America, can you really see our foreign relations with them being good enough for them to request anything? Especially the replacement of an iconic American symbol with som
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, accidentally stumbling across fetish sites will not automatically make you like them. You're on /., which probably means, like me, you spend an unhealthy amount of time on IRC - how many times have you been tricked into seeing goatse, or tubgirl, or lemonparty? Do you like what you saw there? Did you instantly develop a fetish for anal expansion, scat and so on? No you didn't, so what makes you think anyone else is any different?
Exposure does not automatically lead to enjoyment. You could make me eat all the bananas you want, but I still won't like bananas, and your kid stumbling across the weird-ass side of the internet won't make him weird.
Your viewings are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your search engine.
Ah- you mean the stuff that makes up the delerious fantasies of the loony tin foil hat crowd that calls /. home?
No, the stuff that makes up the grim reality of what is going on in what is supposed to be the free'est nation on earth. Slashdot may have a liberal bias, but that doesn't change the fact that these things really do happen. Look back through the past stories on here and check the sources, particularly from the Politics and YRO sections. Links? Find them yourself, it's not my job to educate you.
Think about this:
/. being Americans, would react to a system of laws that many Americans find highly distasteful being forced upon them. How would you react? How would people more right-wing than you react (I think the hardiest of /. regulars would accept that the site doesn't cover the entire spectrum of political thought)? How would Bill O'Reilly react? Would America accept it like they expect Canada to accept this? No. I would want, and expect, them to fight it to the very end, much as I hope the Canadians do over this. Canada exists for the benefit of the Canadian people, not foreign corporations. So far the Canadian government has agreed with this, and long may it continue.
"blahblahblah tips an Al Jazeera story reporting that the Saudi Arabia-based International Sharia Law Alliance claims the USA has joined the UK and Holland (you know what those Dutch get up to) among the biggest violators of Islamic Sharia law. Quoting: "The group's report is the latest to urge the Saudi government into pressuring the USA to reform morality and public association laws." As we have previously discussed here, the current Republican government had planned to introduce new morality and public association laws, but dissent from the Democrats and a groundswell of public protest delayed that action. blahblahblah adds, "What makes this story so important now is that this pressure is being applied at a time and in a manner that may cause the US government to fall, forcing an election." Meanwhile, on the other side of the rapidly heating debate, Random Guy blogs about the forces arranged against a US Sharia law. The Public Coalition for Humane Laws, which includes a who's who of the privacy, civil rights, religious freedom and sexual equality communities, has outlined a list of it's morality reform demands."
Would you accept it? Would the US government accept it? Note to US: Canada is no more subject to your copyright laws than you are subject to Islamic Sharia law. You stare at the TV, watching distant wars while politicians tell you how evil and inhumane Sharia law is, and you say to yourself "Thank God we live in a sovereign country free of the insane demands of the laws of another". Well guess what? That's what the Canadians say to themselves when they see stories about single mothers and eleven year old girls being sued for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a Britney track. Before you start demanding your laws be passed on to another, think what it would be like if it happened to you. Size doesn't matter, there are 1.6 *billion* Muslims in the world, up to around only 300 million Americans, so if it were put to a worldwide vote as to which legal system the world should adopt, you would likely end up with Sharia. It's because most people in the world are sensible, unlike the people pushing for a Canadian DMCA, and they realise that different regions should have the right to set their own laws and not be dictated to by others, that you don't. If you wouldn't like it happening to you, don't push it on other people.
This is not an advocation of Sharia law, nor is it a condemnation. It is not an advocation of copyright law, nor is it a condemnation. Those debates would rage pretty much forever. It is just a theoretical example to see how you, with the majority of
You couldn't do that! That's cruel and unusual punishment of whoever's universe they pop out in ;)
Religious belief is a more positive force in society than the brutal oppression thereof, which is the only way you'll ever 'ban' religion - you can lock the churches, synagogues, mosques, etc and you will only force it underground. People who hate religion are almost as bad as people who hate because of religion, and are in some cases even more ignorant, saying that what I believe has to be a positive force in society or I'm not allowed to believe it. That's a pretty slippery slope: Can someone please explain to me again how alcohol is a positive force in our society?
;).
(Note: The above is just an example and I have absolutely no problem with alcohol in society, and not some kind of prohibitionist loony. If you've ever tasted Jewish wine, however, you'll understand why I have every reason to be
If you were religious before reading things like this, this is a bad reason to stop being religious. It isn't your deity of choice's fault that there are idiots out there that would invoke religion to cause harm. You're right that religious teachings have been and are being used to drive people to murder and hatred, but that doesn't mean that religion itself is inherently bad: If it brought you comfort before, it still can. It isn't going to drive you to start stoning people to death, and it's a tragedy that even one person would deny their faith because of the actions of other, infinitely fallible human beings.
Religion needs people like you. In an increasingly secular world (not that there's anything wrong with that), religion is increasingly becoming the domain of the kooks and the maniacs, at least at the higher levels. Because almost nobody still listens to their priest, or their rabbi, or their imam, or whoever, people only pay attention when the kooks shout the loudest and tell their followers to kill everyone else. This drives all the sensible people away as people become ashamed to admit they believe in a higher power in case it implies they're a kook that wants to kill everyone. The sensible people are scared away and the idiots flood in.
People have always gawked at celebrities, and being a rock star has always been cooler than being a scientist. There's no use crying that the world is going to the dogs because of these two facts when they've been going on since forever.
Not if you want your device to work, it isn't.
I would define 'removable storage' as storage I can plug in, write data to, remove and carry on with my device operating normally. Start up a mobile phone over here in the UK without a SIM in it and you'll get a 'SIM not Present' screen and that's as far as you'll get, which means it fails to be 'removable storage' by any sensible definition. Calling it removable storage would make your computer's hard drive removable storage - sure, you *can* remove it, but not if you want your device to function properly.
The sports news pages on both sides of the Atlantic and numerous spots in between have been eulogising chess 'genius' Bobby Fischer, who dropped dead earlier today of kidney failure. The famous grandmaster who defeated the Soviet Unions finest Chess minds is dead, and countless column inches have been dedicated to his achievements and his passing. What is reduced to a throwaway line, or even glossed over entirely, are his ludicrous, hateful political views which he was only too happy to spout whenever interviewed. His belief that he was the victim of an international Jewish conspiracy against him would be laughable were it not for his sincere desire for hundreds of thousands of "dirty, hook-nosed" Jews to be executed, all synagogues to be forcefully closed, and his deeply held and widely spoken denial of Ha-Shoah, the holocaust of the Jews.
So a bigoted idiot who was once quite good at moving little pieces of wood around a board is dead. Good. Ironically, it's only my convictions keeping me from wishing he went slowly and painfully. Good riddance you rediculous anti-semite.
Is that legal in Sweden? Guess we'll find out.
/. about it every time it comes up. Between that and watching the occasional TV show like when I miss an episode of Top Gear, that's as much 'piracy' as I get through.
.gifs or some other thing that isn't actually illegal in the US (or whereever). Imagine the fuss that would get kicked up, even here - after it came back up - which is a place most would consider extremely (in the good sense) liberal. Imagine how Bill O'Reilly would react? The man would go thermonuclear on national television calling for our heads.
I'm of the impression that just linking to copyrighted material (which is all bittorrent trackers do) is perfectly legal in Sweden.
Now let me go on record as saying I rarely, if ever, pirate anything I have no intention of buying. You could call my bittorrent activity a sort of enhanced version of iTunes' preview feature, because a 30-second sample of a 1-minute intro really isn't enough to do justice to a 5 or 6 minute song, for example. If I like what I hear having listened to the album, I buy it on iTunes - I have an iPod and less than 5 computers and I don't lend music to my friends, so their DRM has never been an issue for me, despite the screaming from the rafters on
Now that's out of the way, let me explain why this story annoys me, someone who has never actually used TPB (I didn't like the interface rather than any other moral objections, but I digress):
It annoys me that the Swedish authorities are wasting time and resources to pursue people in the interests of foreign corporations. Not Swedish people, not even Swedish companies, but foreign corporations. 65 police officers charging in and confiscating the equipment, right down to faxes about the air conditioning, of an ISP demonstrably doing nothing illegal under Swedish law is rediculous, forcing the company's legal advisor to submit a DNA sample despite doing nothing illegal under Swedish law is a massive invasion of privacy, and the ongoing legal furore, of which this is just the lastest aftershock, showed off the infuriating smug cockiness of the **AAs, and the fact that they clearly think they have the power to change Sweden to their interests, and not the interests of it's people.
Now, I'm not Swedish, I'm British, but that doesn't mean I can't find the **AA's behaviour reprehensible. Did your school ever cut the funding for the Math Club (or whatever nerd club you belonged to - if you didn't belong to any, imagine you did, just for the sake of argument) and give it to the jocks for more ass-slapping practice? It didn't benefit you, it didn't benefit the school in any meaningful way, but I bet those guys were smug as shit that they got things changed the way they wanted, regardless of whether or not it was good for you or anyone else. Now replace the jocks with the **AA, and the Math Club (or whatever) with Sweden. Annoying, isn't it?
Now imagine a British company was trying to get... I don't know... Slashdot shut down, and being extremely cocky about it, because by linking to the Pirate Party website they are encouraging piracy, or for having their site use an illegal amount of
Now, as you say, it might annoy most people because if TPB goes down, they'll no longer get free stuff. But I'm annoyed for the reasons outlined above. If what TPB was doing was illegal in Sweden, or if the Swedes were carrying out these raids as a piece of fair diplomacy in dealing with the US, then that wouldn't trouble me - if you will insist on sailing close to the wind, don't complain when things go awry - but it's the fact that we have smug corporate talking heads attempting to bully entire governments with statements like "It is not in Sweden's best interests to earn a reputation as a place where utter lawlessness is tolerated" that really annoys me.
That, and encouraging Swedish politicians to break Swedish law ('Ministerstyre'
By 'out of the state', they don't mean "onto a sovereign sea platform", they mean into another state - Wiki says Belgium and Russia. Quite frankly, as much as I'm sure Sweden would like to preserve it's good relationship with the corporations of the USA, I doubt they'd go as far as to blow up parts of Russia.
In a post-[Event X] world, have needless appeals to emotion gone too far?
/. user - I thought we were supposed to be more informed and enlightened than knee-jerking idiots?
A couple of days ago I posted a comment against the constant references to 9/11 being used to justify or explain things that have very little to do with preventing terrorism or other terrible event, and this is another example, and the shame this time is that it's a comment from a
In a post-Virginia Tech world, has university surveillance of online identities gone too far?"
What has Virginia Tech got to do with university surveillance, ever? Seung-Hui Cho was well known on campus for being weird, handing in obviously violently disturbed plays for class assignments, and even writing a story about a school shooting which the university was aware of. Now I know that what one writes is not neccessarily a reflection of what one intends to do, but it's not like anyone needed to spy on Seung-Hui's Facebook page, if indeed he had one, to see that he had serious issues going on - his social problems were far more severe than some kid writing a comment about his teacher building a parking garage, and were being waved in the face of his tutors for more than a year before the horrendous act took place.
That turned me off. I don't recall buying alcohol myself at that mart. What I think is stupid is swiping the ID of someone who obviously is well above 25 or 30, and doesn't appear to be wearing spy or makeup-artist appliances
I don't know how it works in America, but over here in the UK, the selling of one drink to someone under the legal age can result in the cashier that made the purchase being fined around £2,000 and the licencee being fined £5,000 or £10,000 and having their licence to sell alcohol revoked. It's not worth £2,000 of a till monkey's wages to let anyone go through without checking ID, and that's just the legal problems - the supermarket I worked at when I was younger had a policy that if you get caught selling alcohol to someone without checking ID, even if they looked like your grandmother, you would probably lose your job (they had CCTV pointed at the counter, to catch any robbers on film).
Plus, I've got a friend who's almost completely bald at 20, but he looks a lot older because of his... ahem, folical challenged-ness. In America he'd be below legal drinking age, even though he could easily pass for 35, particularly in a dimly-lit bar or to a cashier who's been working 10 hours and to whom the customers are just becoming one continuous droning blur. No spy equipment, no makeup, just a guy who, due to unfortunate physical features, looks older than he is, and with one assumption, if the legal age here was the same as it is there, the assumer could lose their job and £2,000 of their hard-earned money, and the store and licencee could be fined and lose their licence.
It might look stupid when you see till monkeys checking the IDs of guys in their 40s, but when you're making minimum wage, it's just not worth the risk.
From the article:
The September 11 attacks were the main motivation for the changes.
First of all, I'd be willing to bet most people who lost someone dear to them in the tragedy of 9/11 is downright insulted by the constant abuse of the memory of their loved one as a tool to cudgel the American public into accepting laws which have no point other than to increase the power and pervasiveness of the Federal government. The 9/11 attackers all had legitimate IDs, so what possible purpose would this have served back then? We might have known the names of the guys that did it sooner after the fact? Yeah, I'm sure that would have come in real handy.
Frankly, I know there's nothing anyone can do to stop the REAL-ID ball from rolling, so I'd just be happier if they came out and admitted they just want the power trip.
It won't make a blind bit of difference, but it might make you feel a little better about your friday.
Even more reason to get out and vote in November.
Truth hurts, doesn't it? For all your demagoguery, the truth remains is that over 50% of the stuff on your local TV, and over 90% of the stuff on your local "warez" server is produced in America (and copied without permission of the creators/owners).
.mp3, for example) and data B (my credit card details). It's not like if the RIAA waved a magic wand and stopped piracy tomorrow everyone who would have previously downloaded 'Metallica_Discography_342342Kbps_OGG.torrent' is going to rush out and buy the pieces of crap that were 'Load' and 'Reload', but if I were to publish my bank account details on some identity theft forum, the vast majority of people would go in and steal all my cash. I don't want me or James Hetfield to be deprived of rightfully-earned cash, but the fact is 99% of downloaders wouldn't buy the CD if the torrent wasn't availible anyway, whereas 99.9999% of people interested in my bank account details are only interested in affecting my bank balance significantly and negatively compared to what it would be if that information was not published.
Ahem, I'm in the UK, and looking at the BBC TV guide for this evening, across three channels, I can only see two episodes of Family Guy, 'Dracula 2000' and a couple of late-night episodes of Star Trek. Not quite what I'd call 50%. Over on ITV, there's a couple of American films spread across four channels of content, and Channel 4 is awash with American-made content, with one whole episode of the Simpsons.
Channel 5 I'll give you, as all I ever see on there is terrible CSI knock-offs and shows about people having nose jobs, but across the board it's about 10% American content, maybe less, and you guys can hardly complain when you have a whole TV station dedicated to showing British content on American TV (though looking at the girls in the Torchwood banner at the top, who can blame you?). Also, I'm sure I read somewhere that France has laws ensuring more than 50% of shows on French television are French language productions produced in France, but I don't have a source for that so I could be wrong, and I can't see the rest of Europe being dominated by American television as you don't actually speak the same language, and nobody likes watching awful dubs all the time.
Then you wouldn't mind people copying your passport, your high school/college diplomas (if any), your date of birth and drivers license, your credit card numbers and bank accounts, your address and pictures of your family and pets in the nude?
There is a not-so-subtle difference between data A (a Metallica
As for the other stuff - and in fact the bank details as well - there is a difference between personal information and creative output. The problem there is identity theft. By downloading The Black Album (to continue the Metallica theme - I don't even like friggin' Metallica) you are not able to steal Lars Ulrich's identity and make his life a living hell to pay for your own enjoyment. You could make your neighbour's life a living hell through the use of the files you downloaded and an amplifier that goes up to 11, but Lars Ulrich wouldn't care. You stealing my identity and using my credit card information to purchase child porn would land me, an innocent party, in deep shit, but I can't think of anything you can implicate someone in by downloading an MP3 of them.
As for pictures of me in the nude... that'd hurt you more than it'd hurt me, but if you really want, I'll bust out the Polaroids.
This will probably end up modded 'Redundant' because plenty of people have explained this before me, but you evidently missed all of those, so I'll take a chance and explain it again for you.
- Idiot deletes medical records because he's pissy he got fired.
- Doctor cannot access medical records for a patient who's unconscious, has been in a car crash or something.
- Paramedic makes a snap decision to treat unconscious patient with... I don't know, pick any drug you want that might be used to treat people in this situation that people might have an allergy to, because someone somewhere will.
- Patient has severe allergic reaction.
- Patient dies.
See also: The millions of other problems that erasing medical records causes for lots of innocent people. Anyone unlucky enough to have specific medical requirements that can't be accessed because of this idiot is just as dead as anyone unlucky enough to be at the water cooler when John Q. Moron opens fire in the corridor.
Then, pray tell, what is their reason? Because I sure as hell can't think of one good reason why sinking billions of dollars into this is a good idea.
A practicing Jew? What parts do you need to practice? Do you keep putting your kippah on the wrong way around?
Yours,
A Jew Who's Quite Good at It.
I hate to want to reply to own post, but just in case you think TFA is just some goof with a Blogspot blog, the original quote is from Mozilla Labs, specifically from Dan Mills, a FireFox dev and former Novell engineer - definately not the average moron.
From TFA:
If you don't want to use it, don't download the extension. To use it, you have to:
- Go to a site
- Create an account
- Download an extension (on every single computer you use)
- Put in your username and password (again)
- Put in a private encryption passphrase
- Manually click the 'Sync' button.
Only then will it start automatically updating your bookmarks. If you have privacy issues about uploading your bookmarks to Mozilla's servers, then you can quite easily back out at any of these points, or not bother at all. If the fear is that they will share your bookmarks, then simply don't give them any to share. This is not a feature that is on by default, and the blog linked to even specifies that, if you're that paranoid about giving them your data, there will be a way to set up your own Weave server, so no-one but you will be able to know you visit PissMidgets.com
Slightly sensationalist article methinks.
Honestly, why does Dvorak still have a job?
/.'ers into reading his articles with things like this, he's going to keep doing it - there's what, 8 ads per page? They all pay.
Page views.
You clicked the article, you (assuming you don't run adblock, etc) saw the ads, PC Mag got paid. Rinse and repeat. While he can troll you and other
Your predictions are a little far-fetched for just a century from now, and some are true already. I'm going to dissect a few largely because I'm bored.
Will it become a place where Latin American and African Christians live in tense coexistence with Moslems
Probably, as that's the case now and so in 100 years will probably still be the case. The current tense stand-off between Islam and the rest of the world is not going to go away overnight, and we're currently still in a tailspin of distrust and hatred that shows no signs of stopping.
Will whites become so rare that New Yorkers will stare in fascination at white people?
In 100 years? I sincerely doubt it. That's not too far away when you think of it in generations - only around 5 or so. With the amount of big dumb white people that still exist in New York, and with the social elite of the city being largely white (no offence intended, but the majority of rich people in New York, who usually only marry other rich people in New York, are white) I sincerely doubt the strange notion people seem to have of "a coffee-coloured race of people with no racism or hatred" will come true, and definately not in the next 100 years.
Jews will have long since have converted to Buddhism or intermarried with others, that they are a regarded as a mysterious ancient people like the Druids or Manicheans.
Full disclosure, I'm a practicing Jew. Again, 100 years? Pfft, not happening. 1000 years? Still probably not. Judaism has been a relatively small religion for most if not all of the thousands of years of it's existence. It's not going to vanish within a century, especially as Judaism places a much stronger emphasis on marrying other members of the community than, say, Christianity in terms of religion and the Big Dumb White People I covered in the previous entry in terms of race. I'm going to be around for the majority of the next century, hopefully, and with the way medical advancements are going, my kids - who will be raised Jewish - have every probability of making it to the end. If they in turn raise their children to be Jewish, which admittedly is not a 100% chance, those children will almost definately make it to 2108 as proud Jews. Like I said, I think 100 years is a much shorter time than you think it is.
The world's economic center of gravity will have long since shifted South and East, so New York will be a historical curiosity like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh today.
This, however, is highly possible. The chances of the economy shifting to developing nations like India and China once they have finished their development is very high - their sheer strength of numbers as a workforce will become truly intimidating on the global stage once they have the technology to keep up with their American cousins, especially as they tend to have a much higher work ethic and place a lot more pride in what they do than the average Westerner. That's not a criticism of either, merely a statement of fact.
At the request of France's Islamic government, the Statue of Liberty will be replaced with a statue of Sayyid Qutb
The chances of France getting an Islamic government within 100 years is very small, largely because, as I pointed out with New York, the social elite in France is largely white and only the poor people tend to be Muslims, and as we know with elections in America, democracy means choosing between two rich white people. Revolution? They already had one of those, and the cultural problems France is having with it's 'ghettos' are being so overblown by the media as to be completely rediculous. Also, if the chances of France having an Islamic government are low, even lower are the chances that, if they do, with the tense standoff I've already covered between Islam and the West, and especially America, can you really see our foreign relations with them being good enough for them to request anything? Especially the replacement of an iconic American symbol with som