The "cell phone" theory is a golden example of people projecting their own limited conception of the world onto something they don't recognize.
And rather poorly too - bluetooth headsets are abusrdly common today. If time-travel existed whatever communications device they used - cell phone or otherwise, would certainly use a mini-headset of some-sort if for no other reason than to make it less obvious to the locals.
But that's how the sausage is made. It's not like a book or a movie, you read it when the author is done. I suppose some TV is all written so the creators know the end before you see the fist show but I doubt most do that. Shows evolve as they wright the episodes. I don't think this is a valid criticism of the show.
I completely agree. I just watched Joss Whedon's "dinner table discussion" supplement on the Dollhouse Season2 discs and at one point he said exactly that. The writers have goalposts to mark the way, but that's about it.
Not to mention they actually profile people who are probably going to be a threat, instead of the 87 year old grandmother with oxygen tanks.
Because one of those oxygen tanks isn't a freaking ideal piece of equipment to conceal a really large explosive. Grandma probably wouldn't even notice it either.
I hate what Men have done to the airport/airplane experience. So much so that I am on personal boycott of all Men (unless forced to for work). I know it won't do anything but I do it on principle.
What would you expect when the Democrats started criticizing them as soon as they started holding rallies? You can't call someone crazy today, and expect them to support you tomorrow.
Your point is unclear.
Talk of cutting ANY government program, regardless of how useless or inappropriate, is the third rail of American politics.
b) said top 5% should also have 95% of the voting power in federal elections.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but that's pretty much the case now.
Anything else would hardly be fair. After all, if a person has to shoulder a disproportionate share of the upkeep costs of the country he should be entitled to an equally disproportionate share of the political franchise.
All kinds of wrong with that. For one thing, it ignores the basic fact that much of that income depends on public infrastructure like roads, legal system, etc. By virtue of that wealth they are already getting their money's worth.
When are reporters going to learn that they need to include the actual wording of the question posed in the poll for people to actually understand what was asked?
Even that is not enough. Different people interpret questions differently depending on their own circumstances. Here's a trivial example - ask a question about "coke" and in some parts of the USA many people will think you are talking about sodas in general, not just coca-cola. The discrepancies get even wider when you ask a question of people in a foreign country but try to interpret their answers in the context of your own country.
Did you even read that page? It describes how the top 5% of income earners are shouldering 59% of the federal tax burden. That fact doesn't directly have anything to do with rates.
Since the top 5% own 95% of the wealth in this country, that hardly seems fair.
Except that the tea-party isn't really a 3rd party. Most of their candidates competed in republican primaries.
For what my opinion is worth, I have my doubts that the tea-party will have any real policy impact on the republicans (or the democrats). There is a heck of lot of chatter about small government, but hardly any serious policy discussion. The part of the regular republican party that seems to be responding to the tea-partiers is even more vague about what parts of government they would really cut. There's hand-waving that "everything is on the table" but I haven't seen anything more concrete than that.
I find the idea that FPS bots are somehow comparable to human players sort of hilarious.
Sounds like there is a business opportunity in the vein of 3rd call-centers for training servers with real experienced players who deliberately go easy on the paying players.
I didn't vote for a third party candidate because not voting is just as effective.
That is absolutely not true.
The more people who vote for 3rd parties, the more the two ruling parties have to worry about bringing voters back. One way to bring voters back is to co-opt the most popular policies of the 3rd parties. There are a bunch of other underhanded ways to bring voters back, but incorporating parts of 3rd party platforms is common enough to make it worth while.
You won't vote for a winner, but politics isn't a sport - there's no value to voters for being "on the winning team" - what matters is if the policies you care about get implemented the way you want.
Exxon donated more to Obama than any other person in office, so that isn't true either, and that tidbit just chafes the leftwing mantra.
I can see how some people would be chafed by that tidbit, since it doesn't appear to be true. I looked. The best I could find was that Obama received more than McCain -- not "any other person in office."
Furthermore, those donations were only in the 5 digits, while it looks like Exxon regularly spends $600,000+ in political bribes every year. Seems to me that any of their favourite senators could easily rack up triple digit donations over the years - and according to this article which does not name names so is unfortunately a PITA to verify, the top 20 cumulative recipients of Exxon money since 1990 are all republican.
If you have some citations that show otherwise, I am all ears - I'm looking for the truth, not truthiness.
So what? This isn't about establishing a scientific test for who will be the next Muslim hijacker. We're talking about whether fearing someone for how they dress is an indicator of bigotry or craziness.
So in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, maintaining irrational beliefs that stereotype a group based on the actions of an infinitesimally small subset of members of that group is not the dictionary definition of bigotry.
There are black groups, like black power groups, that are definitely not good or honest Americans. I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "first and foremost" black but it would definitely qualify.
So, being muslim is the same as being a member of a militant black power group.
Are you willing to call every Muslim who expresses anti-American sentiment a bigot?
So, being critical of American policies is the same thing as fearing individual muslims.
I mean really, maybe one pilot dropped a bomb on a house full of children. Let's say it was deliberate. So what? 99.9% of soldiers didn't do that.
So, being a member of a military that has official goals that have been demonstrated to be more important than civilian lives is the same thing as being a member of the most diverse religion in history.
He certainly did say (roughly) what I said. I just watched the clip on youtube. And if he said it's right to feel that way, he also said it's not right to act on those feelings.
So, it's right to be a bigot in your heart as long as you don't act on it.
Also I think your logic is faulty at the end. If a Muslim says he and some other Muslims are at war with America, then it IS true that Muslims are at war with America. I don't know what you could mean by implying that's not true. Note he didn't say all Muslims are at war with America.
So, it's logical to point out a technically true fact when it is in no way a legitimate basis for judging all muslims.
Its pretty clear you approach this discussion from the ingrained belief that any muslims is a potential threat. Pretty much every argument you make has that assumption as its basis. So I doubt that this will ever be productive.
AThe Xbox was not included in the permission granted and therefore such hacking is a violation of the current statute until found otherwise in a court.
Yes we know that. It doesn't make the hypocrisy of the law any less.
I think it makes a difference because of another thing that comes into play. Since we're talking about Juan Williams's comment regarding people in Black garb at the airport, the population in question is not "all Blacks" but rather "Blacks who ostentatiously display their culture in a host culture and a particular setting like an airport where it is likely to arouse discomfort."
After all, people who are "first and foremost" black can't be honest americans.
Who knows what the real numbers are, but it's common sense that people who purposely stick out and flash their Muslim identity, despite living in a non-Muslim society, and being in a setting where radical Muslims have committed terrorist attacks, may be more likely than a randomly selected Muslim to be radical.
Which has nothing to do with them being a threat. The 9-11 attackers blended in. So did Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab. And of course there is the whole question of what is "muslim garb" anyway? Can you tell the difference between a sikh and muslim? What about a christian from Mali and a muslim from Mali?
Maybe you should read the poll questions again. It's asking specifically about attacking civilians, not collateral damage. Are you suggesting that maybe 40% of Americans support deliberate bombings of innocent civilians?
No - both groups support "fighting back" without thinking through the consequences. When at least an order of magnitude more civilians died in Iraq than all terrorist attacks worldwide combined for the last 30+ years it is head-in-the-sand thinking to say that they don't count because they weren't deliberately targeted. Only the wilfully ignorant would believe that massive civilians casualties would not be the end result.
"Yes I feel nervous when I see certain people on a plane."
No, that is unequivocally NOT what he said.
He said it was right to feel that way. He went on to say that because the times square bomber said muslims are at war with america that it is true.
AND there's a group of 10 Americans dressed as US soldiers with gas masks on so they can't be identified, AND they are walking down a dark alley in Baghdad... would it be fair or unfair for a Muslim walking through the same alley to either fear that group or be angry at them?
You really can't see the difference between members of an occupying army and muslims who live in america? I have to seriously doubt your good faith.
However your number show that those actions prevented at least one terrorist attack on a plane that would have cost several million dollars and somewhere around 100 lives! That is going with your exaggerated and none factual numbers trying to prove that those actions are not helping.
(A) You assume that such an attack would not have been thwarted any other means. (B) In actuality there have been zero people "caught" by the post 9-11 system who were then convicted of trying to attack the plane they were on, ZERO. Try to find a single case. Last I checked the best you can do is a guy caught in Orlando who had bomb materials in his checked luggage because he wanted to build bombs in jamaica.
Anyway, your 1000000:1 estimate is incorrect. If there are 2 billion Muslims in the world, that's only 2000 Muslim terrorists. I don't know, maybe you don't consider the Taliban to be a terrorist organization, but it's got way more than 2000 soldiers by itself. Al Shabaab has 3000-7000 members and Al Qaeda has 500-1000 members, both according to Wikipedia.
And few of them are actual risks. Just like the US army has something like 10 support personnel for every actual soldier. Furthermore, they are all concentrated on the other side of the planet, nowhere near an american airport. But really, so what if I am wrong by an order of magnitude or even two? Its still just a drop of water in a bucket that is absolutely pointless to make any risk evaluations on. Even just 100 false positives for every true positive would be considered an abject failure of practicality for any actual testing system.
Okay then we have popular support.
And how many americans supported the use of military force against countries like iraq? That's essentially the same question but american style and just as much an indictment, or not, of us. Just as practically none of the warhawks had a thing to do with the invasions so to do practically none of those who think suicide attacks are legitimate would ever do more than downplay causality reports from such actions.
Fortunately I don't need to restart the browser daily; maybe it's because I use AdBlock and NoScript.
I use those plugins too (and now RequestPolicy too) and my problem is not having to restart my browser often enough. I am a tab hoarder and I used to rely on firefox crashes to force me to "throw out" unneeded tabs. But on both ubuntu 10.04 and WinXP I can go for well over a month without crashing or hanging firefox 3.6.x. It's gotten to the point where my firefox will grow well to over 3GB - not because of a memory leak, just because I've got hundreds of tabs lying around.
Who would have thought that too much stability would be a problem?
It's too bad Wikileaks has such an obvious agenda.
Really? You mean to publish leaks? Or do you think it is something else? Because if you think it's to paint somebody as good and somebody else as bad, I don't see it. If you think it's to specifically paint the US government as bad, well there is at least one leaked document that does the reverse:
One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.
Driving down the street at 25MPH would seem to fall into your definition of reasonable. No?
Right. Which is why I think this case isn't a problem. I just take issue with the broader argument that it is reasonable to expect to lose all expectation of privacy when out in public.
The entire point of the GPL is to focus revenue as services rather than sales of complex, copyrighted, IP
You are confusing an effect with a goal. RMS has said many times that his goal in creating the GPL and other forms of copyleft (a name that itself inherently demonstrates the intent to subvert the system of copyright) is to spread freedom and cooperation while the dominant use of copyright law is to take away freedom.
I'm pretty sure that at a minimum they abide by all local laws regarding law-enforcement access to the data that they collect, and probably are 'friendly' enough to cooperate even when the law doesn't require it.
Maybe I haven't been looking, but I've yet to see one story about google standing up a warrant-less search request in the west. Wasn't there even some concern that they've made such searches super-easy for law-enforcement, giving them their own web-interface which would presumably only require the user to check the "I have a warrant" box without any actual verification?
Slashdot Mirror
There's no reason to assume this particular individual gives a rat's ass what the locals think
Because walking around with a box held up to the side your face is in no way conspicuous.
The "cell phone" theory is a golden example of people projecting their own limited conception of the world onto something they don't recognize.
And rather poorly too - bluetooth headsets are abusrdly common today. If time-travel existed whatever communications device they used - cell phone or otherwise, would certainly use a mini-headset of some-sort if for no other reason than to make it less obvious to the locals.
But that's how the sausage is made. It's not like a book or a movie, you read it when the author is done. I suppose some TV is all written so the creators know the end before you see the fist show but I doubt most do that. Shows evolve as they wright the episodes. I don't think this is a valid criticism of the show.
I completely agree. I just watched Joss Whedon's "dinner table discussion" supplement on the Dollhouse Season2 discs and at one point he said exactly that. The writers have goalposts to mark the way, but that's about it.
Not to mention they actually profile people who are probably going to be a threat, instead of the 87 year old grandmother with oxygen tanks.
Because one of those oxygen tanks isn't a freaking ideal piece of equipment to conceal a really large explosive. Grandma probably wouldn't even notice it either.
I hate what Men have done to the airport/airplane experience. So much so that I am on personal boycott of all Men (unless forced to for work). I know it won't do anything but I do it on principle.
I agree.
Me too.
What would you expect when the Democrats started criticizing them as soon as they started holding rallies? You can't call someone crazy today, and expect them to support you tomorrow.
Your point is unclear.
Talk of cutting ANY government program, regardless of how useless or inappropriate, is the third rail of American politics.
You appear to be agreeing with me.
b) said top 5% should also have 95% of the voting power in federal elections.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but that's pretty much the case now.
Anything else would hardly be fair. After all, if a person has to shoulder a disproportionate share of the upkeep costs of the country he should be entitled to an equally disproportionate share of the political franchise.
All kinds of wrong with that. For one thing, it ignores the basic fact that much of that income depends on public infrastructure like roads, legal system, etc. By virtue of that wealth they are already getting their money's worth.
When are reporters going to learn that they need to include the actual wording of the question posed in the poll for people to actually understand what was asked?
Even that is not enough. Different people interpret questions differently depending on their own circumstances. Here's a trivial example - ask a question about "coke" and in some parts of the USA many people will think you are talking about sodas in general, not just coca-cola. The discrepancies get even wider when you ask a question of people in a foreign country but try to interpret their answers in the context of your own country.
Did you even read that page? It describes how the top 5% of income earners are shouldering 59% of the federal tax burden. That fact doesn't directly have anything to do with rates.
Since the top 5% own 95% of the wealth in this country, that hardly seems fair.
Except that the tea-party isn't really a 3rd party.
Most of their candidates competed in republican primaries.
For what my opinion is worth, I have my doubts that the tea-party will have any real policy impact on the republicans (or the democrats). There is a heck of lot of chatter about small government, but hardly any serious policy discussion. The part of the regular republican party that seems to be responding to the tea-partiers is even more vague about what parts of government they would really cut. There's hand-waving that "everything is on the table" but I haven't seen anything more concrete than that.
I find the idea that FPS bots are somehow comparable to human players sort of hilarious.
Sounds like there is a business opportunity in the vein of 3rd call-centers for training servers with real experienced players who deliberately go easy on the paying players.
So why did it get approved in the first place?
Because most of the people in charge of doing approvals are too young to remember what DOS is. ;->
I didn't vote for a third party candidate because not voting is just as effective.
That is absolutely not true.
The more people who vote for 3rd parties, the more the two ruling parties have to worry about bringing voters back. One way to bring voters back is to co-opt the most popular policies of the 3rd parties. There are a bunch of other underhanded ways to bring voters back, but incorporating parts of 3rd party platforms is common enough to make it worth while.
You won't vote for a winner, but politics isn't a sport - there's no value to voters for being "on the winning team" - what matters is if the policies you care about get implemented the way you want.
Exxon donated more to Obama than any other person in office, so that isn't true either, and that tidbit just chafes the leftwing mantra.
I can see how some people would be chafed by that tidbit, since it doesn't appear to be true.
I looked.
The best I could find was that Obama received more than McCain -- not "any other person in office."
Furthermore, those donations were only in the 5 digits, while it looks like Exxon regularly spends $600,000+ in political bribes every year. Seems to me that any of their favourite senators could easily rack up triple digit donations over the years - and according to this article which does not name names so is unfortunately a PITA to verify, the top 20 cumulative recipients of Exxon money since 1990 are all republican.
If you have some citations that show otherwise, I am all ears - I'm looking for the truth, not truthiness.
So what? This isn't about establishing a scientific test for who will be the next Muslim hijacker. We're talking about whether fearing someone for how they dress is an indicator of bigotry or craziness.
So in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, maintaining irrational beliefs that stereotype a group based on the actions of an infinitesimally small subset of members of that group is not the dictionary definition of bigotry.
There are black groups, like black power groups, that are definitely not good or honest Americans. I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "first and foremost" black but it would definitely qualify.
So, being muslim is the same as being a member of a militant black power group.
Are you willing to call every Muslim who expresses anti-American sentiment a bigot?
So, being critical of American policies is the same thing as fearing individual muslims.
I mean really, maybe one pilot dropped a bomb on a house full of children. Let's say it was deliberate. So what? 99.9% of soldiers didn't do that.
So, being a member of a military that has official goals that have been demonstrated to be more important than civilian lives is the same thing as being a member of the most diverse religion in history.
He certainly did say (roughly) what I said. I just watched the clip on youtube. And if he said it's right to feel that way, he also said it's not right to act on those feelings.
So, it's right to be a bigot in your heart as long as you don't act on it.
Also I think your logic is faulty at the end. If a Muslim says he and some other Muslims are at war with America, then it IS true that Muslims are at war with America. I don't know what you could mean by implying that's not true. Note he didn't say all Muslims are at war with America.
So, it's logical to point out a technically true fact when it is in no way a legitimate basis for judging all muslims.
Its pretty clear you approach this discussion from the ingrained belief that any muslims is a potential threat. Pretty much every argument you make has that assumption as its basis. So I doubt that this will ever be productive.
AThe Xbox was not included in the permission granted and therefore such hacking is a violation of the current statute until found otherwise in a court.
Yes we know that. It doesn't make the hypocrisy of the law any less.
I think it makes a difference because of another thing that comes into play. Since we're talking about Juan Williams's comment regarding people in Black garb at the airport, the population in question is not "all Blacks" but rather "Blacks who ostentatiously display their culture in a host culture and a particular setting like an airport where it is likely to arouse discomfort."
After all, people who are "first and foremost" black can't be honest americans.
Who knows what the real numbers are, but it's common sense that people who purposely stick out and flash their Muslim identity, despite living in a non-Muslim society, and being in a setting where radical Muslims have committed terrorist attacks, may be more likely than a randomly selected Muslim to be radical.
Which has nothing to do with them being a threat. The 9-11 attackers blended in. So did Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab. And of course there is the whole question of what is "muslim garb" anyway? Can you tell the difference between a sikh and muslim? What about a christian from Mali and a muslim from Mali?
Maybe you should read the poll questions again. It's asking specifically about attacking civilians, not collateral damage. Are you suggesting that maybe 40% of Americans support deliberate bombings of innocent civilians?
No - both groups support "fighting back" without thinking through the consequences. When at least an order of magnitude more civilians died in Iraq than all terrorist attacks worldwide combined for the last 30+ years it is head-in-the-sand thinking to say that they don't count because they weren't deliberately targeted. Only the wilfully ignorant would believe that massive civilians casualties would not be the end result.
"Yes I feel nervous when I see certain people on a plane."
No, that is unequivocally NOT what he said.
He said it was right to feel that way. He went on to say that because the times square bomber said muslims are at war with america that it is true.
AND there's a group of 10 Americans dressed as US soldiers with gas masks on so they can't be identified, AND they are walking down a dark alley in Baghdad... would it be fair or unfair for a Muslim walking through the same alley to either fear that group or be angry at them?
You really can't see the difference between members of an occupying army and muslims who live in america? I have to seriously doubt your good faith.
However your number show that those actions prevented at least one terrorist attack on a plane that would have cost several million dollars and somewhere around 100 lives!
That is going with your exaggerated and none factual numbers trying to prove that those actions are not helping.
(A) You assume that such an attack would not have been thwarted any other means.
(B) In actuality there have been zero people "caught" by the post 9-11 system who were then convicted of trying to attack the plane they were on, ZERO. Try to find a single case. Last I checked the best you can do is a guy caught in Orlando who had bomb materials in his checked luggage because he wanted to build bombs in jamaica.
Anyway, your 1000000:1 estimate is incorrect. If there are 2 billion Muslims in the world, that's only 2000 Muslim terrorists. I don't know, maybe you don't consider the Taliban to be a terrorist organization, but it's got way more than 2000 soldiers by itself. Al Shabaab has 3000-7000 members and Al Qaeda has 500-1000 members, both according to Wikipedia.
And few of them are actual risks. Just like the US army has something like 10 support personnel for every actual soldier. Furthermore, they are all concentrated on the other side of the planet, nowhere near an american airport. But really, so what if I am wrong by an order of magnitude or even two? Its still just a drop of water in a bucket that is absolutely pointless to make any risk evaluations on. Even just 100 false positives for every true positive would be considered an abject failure of practicality for any actual testing system.
Okay then we have popular support.
And how many americans supported the use of military force against countries like iraq? That's essentially the same question but american style and just as much an indictment, or not, of us. Just as practically none of the warhawks had a thing to do with the invasions so to do practically none of those who think suicide attacks are legitimate would ever do more than downplay causality reports from such actions.
Fortunately I don't need to restart the browser daily; maybe it's because I use AdBlock and NoScript.
I use those plugins too (and now RequestPolicy too) and my problem is not having to restart my browser often enough.
I am a tab hoarder and I used to rely on firefox crashes to force me to "throw out" unneeded tabs.
But on both ubuntu 10.04 and WinXP I can go for well over a month without crashing or hanging firefox 3.6.x.
It's gotten to the point where my firefox will grow well to over 3GB - not because of a memory leak, just because I've got hundreds of tabs lying around.
Who would have thought that too much stability would be a problem?
It's too bad Wikileaks has such an obvious agenda.
Really? You mean to publish leaks? Or do you think it is something else?
Because if you think it's to paint somebody as good and somebody else as bad, I don't see it.
If you think it's to specifically paint the US government as bad, well there is at least one leaked document that does the reverse:
One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.
I know where to go to buy a gay cruise, for instance.
But do you know where to cruise for gays?
Bada-Bum!
Driving down the street at 25MPH would seem to fall into your definition of reasonable. No?
Right. Which is why I think this case isn't a problem.
I just take issue with the broader argument that it is reasonable to expect to lose all expectation of privacy when out in public.
The entire point of the GPL is to focus revenue as services rather than sales of complex, copyrighted, IP
You are confusing an effect with a goal. RMS has said many times that his goal in creating the GPL and other forms of copyleft (a name that itself inherently demonstrates the intent to subvert the system of copyright) is to spread freedom and cooperation while the dominant use of copyright law is to take away freedom.
I'm pretty sure that at a minimum they abide by all local laws regarding law-enforcement access to the data that they collect, and probably are 'friendly' enough to cooperate even when the law doesn't require it.
Maybe I haven't been looking, but I've yet to see one story about google standing up a warrant-less search request in the west. Wasn't there even some concern that they've made such searches super-easy for law-enforcement, giving them their own web-interface which would presumably only require the user to check the "I have a warrant" box without any actual verification?
And, BTW, their version of "anonymous" just means the last 8 bits of the ip address has been zeroed out which isn't really all that effective.