According to the US Law definition, what I do is not theft and is not fraud. All I do it lie to marketing companies and get (completely unsolicited) giveaways from them; sometimes expensive ones. The ToD laws always specifically indicate something like this: "The term 'deception' does not include falsity...or statements unlikely to deceive ordinary persons in the group addressed". Those are the kind of statements I make. I never portray the info as if it were legit; only an automated and brainless process would see my info as anything but a joke.
For example, once I filled in a marketing form and put my name as "Dr. Octopus", my occupation as "Super Villain", my income as 'over $100K yearly', and my mailing address as "Snake Mountain (followed by my actual street address)". I used one of my 'spam-only' Hotmail accounts as the email address. In a few weeks I started getting a bunch of stuff addressed to 'Dr. Octopus' in the mail. I got free movie tickets from some company selling malpractice insurance. I got a $50 AMEX gift card encouraging me to sign up for a AMEX card. And, I started getting email with real coupons codes for discounts at several different retail sites.
All this and, apparently, not a single human ever even read what I had put down on the form (except for some data-entry person, who probably didn't care).
The blacklist model requires a fully front-loaded configuration to be of any use. What's more, if one wanted to prevent a site from running scripts without permission (like Google is), they would have to somehow know about it beforehand and add it to their blacklist. The YesScript plugin is cute and all, but I want something that prevents annoyances before I have to experience them. Not to mention the security issues. But at least YesScript makes no secret of that:
Unlike NoScript, YesScript does absolutely nothing to improve your security. I believe that Firefox is secure enough by default and that blocking all scripts by default is paranoia. YesScript strives to remove hassles from your browsing experience, rather than add them.
The mentality of reasonable security being seen as 'paranoia' and requiring minimal effort by the user as creating 'hassles' has been behind some of the worst information security breaches in history.
If you can't fight it, exploit it. I have actually gotten some pretty cool (free) stuff by misrepresenting myself to various sites online (up to the legal limit, of course).Everything from free Amazon gift cards, to free electronics. I even got a free mobile phone (with service paid for 6 months) once because I claimed I had a business with over 100 employees and that I made over $100K yearly (that was back in 1998 when phones were pricier and I only made about 1/3 of that). Free magazine subscriptions, free enterprise web hosting, free lawnmowers, it's all there for the taking for those willing to game the game.
I have not yet received my opinion assignment document from those we don't speak of, so I am not really sure what I am supposed to think about this. On one tentacle, anything helping to make photovoltaic material affordable is very good. But the other tentacle, harvesting (and likely destroying) scores of jellyfish to do so seems, well, creepy. I think I will need to wait until cable news tells me what to think.
That type of thing is exactly what the Firefox+NoScript combo is for. There is nothing (at least nothing I find useful) on Google that really requires scripts of any kind; especially this 'Instant' thing.
Whatever. I watched the Avatars too. I was attracted to neither. The one with the blue cat people gave me a headache, and the one with the emo bald kid was just sad.
All I know is this: if I can't ctrl-a, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, grep out all special characters, then take that and ctrl-a, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v into a Slashdot comment to appear learned, and then delete the article to cover my tracks....it's not a valid source of information.
Not so much. I just hate dogma. My feeling is that all scientific, religious, social, political, and personal dogmas are of no merit whatsoever. This article was written well, but I was joking about how short a time will pass before it gets woven into the so-called 'fact' of various scientific discoveries (whether it's ever proven or not).
And religion has some intense dogmas as well. Often, the most vocal religious folk are also the most dogmatic. Any time one side or the other cannot, at the very least, admit the possibility that their beliefs/discoveries/understandings might be completely wrong, it all just becomes a useless discussion based more on emotion than information.
The costs of certain elements vary greatly, so I went by this site, which adds the fees/costs using averages.
The quality of a nations public transportation system is, of course, a matter of opinion. But here are several sites that put German cities in the 'one of the best in the world' (or as the the best in Europe) category:
TravelPod.com: Hamberg listed as having..."one of the best public transportation systems in the world..." The book Germany: Unraveling an Enigma (Greg Ness - copyright 2000) list Germany as having "...one of the worlds's best public transportation systems..." AskMen.com: rates the U-Bahn as #9 in the
world HelpGlobe.com: rates the U-Bahn as #11 in the world USA Today: "Munich has Europe's best public transportation VirtualTourist.com: "Munich has one of the best...public transport systems in Europe" Plus countless Germany sites saying how superior it is (not exactly non-bias, so I didn't list them).
It's not guesswork junior. They are called verifiable facts. Look these up when you get a chance:
INFAS, DIW (2004): Mobilität in Deutschland: Ergebnisbericht. Projekt-Nr. 70.0736/2003,
Bundesministerium Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen.
infas, DIW (2003): Mobilität in Deutschland 2002 - Kontinuierliche Erhebung zum
Verkehrsverhalten. Projekt-Nr. 70.0681/2001, Forschungsprogramm Stadtverkehr des
Bundesministeriums Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen. Endbericht.
Oooookay? So the sources cited from the GFoT just don't count? Not everything is on the Interwebz. You may actually need to leave you home, go to a library, an look it up. That's what I did (at least with the German statistics). It's all there. But you will need to find it manually and not just Google the keywords...you know, the way actual research is done.
Ridiculous hyperbole aside, all I did was get the licensing statistics from the German Federal Ministry of Transport. Maybe there has been a massive increase in car ownership in the last few years, but I doubt it. In fact, given the steady decrease in the German economy, I imagine the ownership/licensing rates are even lower that the stats reflected several years ago. If you can find the time, look these up (assuming you can read German): INFAS, DIW (2004): Mobilität in Deutschland: Ergebnisbericht. Projekt-Nr. 70.0736/2003,
Bundesministerium Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen.
infas, DIW (2003): Mobilität in Deutschland 2002 - Kontinuierliche Erhebung zum
Verkehrsverhalten. Projekt-Nr. 70.0681/2001, Forschungsprogramm Stadtverkehr des
Bundesministeriums Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen. Endbericht.
Some of the highlights:
- German households have no car whatsoever: ~25%
- German 18 to 19 year olds having no license: ~30%
- Germans over 19 (and younger than 50) with no license: ~10%
- Trips made using methods other than a car: ~39%
- Cars trips that are 5km or less: ~60%
Now maybe you passive observations trump all this, but I suspect you just don't that many people. It's true that most people do drive in Germany, but it's not even close to 100%. In contrast, the number of cars per household in the US is higher than the number of license drivers per household. The percentage of driving age people in the US that did not have a drivers license (in 2004): 6%.
Speaking of pulling thing out of asses, maybe you should have pulled your head out before you make statements like 'Germany has less accidents on the Autobahn blah blah blah...'. They most certainly do. Do you know why? Because 1) it is very cost/time prohibitive for a German citizen to get a drivers license (~$1600US, 6+ hours of first aid training, books, etc) and 2) Germany has one of the best (if not the best) public transportation systems on Earth.
There is a much smaller percentage of licensed drivers in Germany than in the US (which is near 99%). And the drivers that are on the Autobahn have much more training and are far more skilled. Sure, they have less accidents, but not even remotely for the reasons you think.
First of, full points for using the term "experimentally testable" in this article. Don't let those physics nerds push you around! I swear, those guys use "experimentally testable" as a pronoun... But I digress.
This was at the very end of TFA, so no one may have read it:
"It's a conjecture at the moment, but it could become a formal scientific core for the emergence of life."
Wha?! Are they kidding? This has been published by an apparently respected research organization. It became 'fact' less than 24 hours after it was published. No need for them to waste their time with bothersome 'empirical research' or the 'scientific method'. In the minds of many, words like 'conjecture' and 'could' in the above statement will be subconsciously replaced with 'wicked awesome fact' and 'suck it Fundies!'.
So does the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons program (their budget is 30% larger, but still only a tiny fraction my taxes). But that neither here nor there. I just grow tired of all fanboi-ism surrounding NASA. I think it's beneficial for humankind to explore space too. And there are genuine NASA inventions that directly benefit some people. But it seems that sometimes what is touted as a "NASA invention" were really a "NASA funded invention" from private organizations. I would be like saying CERN "invented" the WWW because Berners-Lee invented it while being funded by CERN.
Not to mention all the completely mythical claims that NASA invented the MRI, the barcode, smoke detector, Velcro, etc.. It's hard for me to keep my dream of space alive amid all the legalisitc doublespeak and misinformation.
Irrelevant. When a person is out in public, with no reasonable expectation privacy, I can take their picture and use it commercially with impunity. Were that not the case the people standing on a public sidewalk, outside Hollywood nightclubs, trying to get an less-than-flattering shot Brittaney Spears (i.e. paparazzi) would be consistently, successfully sued and eventually cease to exist. Some larger cities require permits for big-budget filming, but it's rare. And even if you refuse to pay for the permit and take pictures anyway, all they can do is fine you and kick you out of town. It's never a criminal offense.
What's more, Google cannot build a "psychological profile of everything you do on the net" unless you allow them to. One must surf the net, while signed into Google, in order for them to gather information. It's not as Google reaches out from the ether and tracks you. If one does not log into Google, all Google can know is what what all web servers know about you (IP, OS, browser, etc). For it to go beyond that, Google would have be colluding with every ISP in the country (or the world if it went that far). And even if they did that, they would have no way of knowing who was doing the surfing. Was it a 50 year-old man? A 10 year-old girl? Someone using a unsecured WAP? A cat walking across a keyboard? No way to know....unless they logged into Google.
The only reason telcos don't do that is because there is no tech (yet) to do it cheaply and accurately. Even Google struggles with transcribing the human voice well.
Personally I think Google has every right to do whatever they want on their servers. There are lots of legal precedents regarding how an employee has no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' when they are using a work PC, bandwidth, etc for personal surfing or email. Their employer has every right to monitor and record (including keystrokes) everything they do. Why would Google be any different? If you don't want your activity and personal emails scraped by Google, don't use Google. Or at the very least sign out of Google before you go to www.hotunderagehorserape.com (god I hope that's not a real site).
I agree there is a long list of non-violent things that could be done. The problem is that none of them work for more than a decade or two. In the last, say, 1000 years of human history people have never been able to "get everybody...out, and start fresh" without bloodshed. I am talking about actual change (e.g. monarchy to republic, republic to theocratic). Not like the occasional 'bloodless coup' where only people are replaced.
Does Google 'track you' any more than a telco does? My phone company has a list of every call I make, and where I made it from. This applies to landlines, mobile phones (though exact location is tricky), and VoIP. If I start using a different company, then I might be able to 'cover my tracks', as it were. But one could do the same thing by getting a new ISP and creating a different Google account.
Your adorable hyperbole aside, I never mentioned any particular year. I was just responding to Wyatt Earp's claim that exemption to this law only apply for "...foreign nationals touring the US in their own vehicle and for cars displayed in museums.". I was just helping him/her understand how completely incorrect that statement was.
So when I said 'old-timey cars', what did you think I meant...Model-T's?. But, even if the car was manufactured yesterday, it's doesn't matter. As long as it meets the legal definition of "personal use", there's no problem.
That's true for issues like "there's really needs to be a light at this intersection", or "my city has too much chlorine in their water". But rants going in the direction of "the US government needs to be torn down and replaced with a completely new governmental system!!!" are just silly without a willingness to actually take any effective, tangible steps to bring it about.
Most (all?) of these types of people would totally freak if you took away their government backed roads, police/fire departments, etc. Hell , most of them probably couldn't even take having their American Idol or YouTube disappearing because the government no longer regulated the infrastructure upon which they are built.
I would recommend you read the actual source material before you make statements based on such easily verifiable facts. You're just making an ass out of yourself.
According to the law code, the "Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and Regulations" law does not apply to imported vehicles for "personal use" (i.e. high end foreign cars kept on private property or hauled to car shows) or to cars "at least 25 years old" (i.e. old-timey cars).
Here are some interesting sections for you to read:
CHAPTER 301, SUBCHAPTER III, Section 30142, subsection 5
CHAPTER 301, SUBCHAPTER III, Section 30142, subsection 9
Slashdot Mirror
According to the US Law definition, what I do is not theft and is not fraud. All I do it lie to marketing companies and get (completely unsolicited) giveaways from them; sometimes expensive ones. The ToD laws always specifically indicate something like this: "The term 'deception' does not include falsity...or statements unlikely to deceive ordinary persons in the group addressed". Those are the kind of statements I make. I never portray the info as if it were legit; only an automated and brainless process would see my info as anything but a joke.
For example, once I filled in a marketing form and put my name as "Dr. Octopus", my occupation as "Super Villain", my income as 'over $100K yearly', and my mailing address as "Snake Mountain (followed by my actual street address)". I used one of my 'spam-only' Hotmail accounts as the email address. In a few weeks I started getting a bunch of stuff addressed to 'Dr. Octopus' in the mail. I got free movie tickets from some company selling malpractice insurance. I got a $50 AMEX gift card encouraging me to sign up for a AMEX card. And, I started getting email with real coupons codes for discounts at several different retail sites.
All this and, apparently, not a single human ever even read what I had put down on the form (except for some data-entry person, who probably didn't care).
The mentality of reasonable security being seen as 'paranoia' and requiring minimal effort by the user as creating 'hassles' has been behind some of the worst information security breaches in history.
If you can't fight it, exploit it. I have actually gotten some pretty cool (free) stuff by misrepresenting myself to various sites online (up to the legal limit, of course).Everything from free Amazon gift cards, to free electronics. I even got a free mobile phone (with service paid for 6 months) once because I claimed I had a business with over 100 employees and that I made over $100K yearly (that was back in 1998 when phones were pricier and I only made about 1/3 of that). Free magazine subscriptions, free enterprise web hosting, free lawnmowers, it's all there for the taking for those willing to game the game.
I have not yet received my opinion assignment document from those we don't speak of, so I am not really sure what I am supposed to think about this. On one tentacle, anything helping to make photovoltaic material affordable is very good. But the other tentacle, harvesting (and likely destroying) scores of jellyfish to do so seems, well, creepy. I think I will need to wait until cable news tells me what to think.
That type of thing is exactly what the Firefox+NoScript combo is for. There is nothing (at least nothing I find useful) on Google that really requires scripts of any kind; especially this 'Instant' thing.
Whatever. I watched the Avatars too. I was attracted to neither. The one with the blue cat people gave me a headache, and the one with the emo bald kid was just sad.
All I know is this: if I can't ctrl-a, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, grep out all special characters, then take that and ctrl-a, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v into a Slashdot comment to appear learned, and then delete the article to cover my tracks....it's not a valid source of information.
Not so much. I just hate dogma. My feeling is that all scientific, religious, social, political, and personal dogmas are of no merit whatsoever. This article was written well, but I was joking about how short a time will pass before it gets woven into the so-called 'fact' of various scientific discoveries (whether it's ever proven or not).
And religion has some intense dogmas as well. Often, the most vocal religious folk are also the most dogmatic. Any time one side or the other cannot, at the very least, admit the possibility that their beliefs/discoveries/understandings might be completely wrong, it all just becomes a useless discussion based more on emotion than information.
Understood. My apologies. Here are my sources:
..."one of the best public transportation systems in the world..."
The costs of certain elements vary greatly, so I went by this site, which adds the fees/costs using averages.
The quality of a nations public transportation system is, of course, a matter of opinion. But here are several sites that put German cities in the 'one of the best in the world' (or as the the best in Europe) category:
TravelPod.com: Hamberg listed as having
The book Germany: Unraveling an Enigma (Greg Ness - copyright 2000) list Germany as having "...one of the worlds's best public transportation systems..."
AskMen.com: rates the U-Bahn as #9 in the world
HelpGlobe.com: rates the U-Bahn as #11 in the world
USA Today: "Munich has Europe's best public transportation
VirtualTourist.com: "Munich has one of the best...public transport systems in Europe"
Plus countless Germany sites saying how superior it is (not exactly non-bias, so I didn't list them).
It's not guesswork junior. They are called verifiable facts. Look these up when you get a chance:
INFAS, DIW (2004): Mobilität in Deutschland: Ergebnisbericht. Projekt-Nr. 70.0736/2003, Bundesministerium Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen.
infas, DIW (2003): Mobilität in Deutschland 2002 - Kontinuierliche Erhebung zum Verkehrsverhalten. Projekt-Nr. 70.0681/2001, Forschungsprogramm Stadtverkehr des Bundesministeriums Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen. Endbericht.
Oooookay? So the sources cited from the GFoT just don't count? Not everything is on the Interwebz. You may actually need to leave you home, go to a library, an look it up. That's what I did (at least with the German statistics). It's all there. But you will need to find it manually and not just Google the keywords...you know, the way actual research is done.
Ridiculous hyperbole aside, all I did was get the licensing statistics from the German Federal Ministry of Transport. Maybe there has been a massive increase in car ownership in the last few years, but I doubt it. In fact, given the steady decrease in the German economy, I imagine the ownership/licensing rates are even lower that the stats reflected several years ago. If you can find the time, look these up (assuming you can read German):
INFAS, DIW (2004): Mobilität in Deutschland: Ergebnisbericht. Projekt-Nr. 70.0736/2003,
Bundesministerium Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen.
infas, DIW (2003): Mobilität in Deutschland 2002 - Kontinuierliche Erhebung zum
Verkehrsverhalten. Projekt-Nr. 70.0681/2001, Forschungsprogramm Stadtverkehr des
Bundesministeriums Verkehr, Bau- und Wohnungswesen. Endbericht.
Some of the highlights:
- German households have no car whatsoever: ~25%
- German 18 to 19 year olds having no license: ~30%
- Germans over 19 (and younger than 50) with no license: ~10%
- Trips made using methods other than a car: ~39%
- Cars trips that are 5km or less: ~60%
Now maybe you passive observations trump all this, but I suspect you just don't that many people. It's true that most people do drive in Germany, but it's not even close to 100%. In contrast, the number of cars per household in the US is higher than the number of license drivers per household. The percentage of driving age people in the US that did not have a drivers license (in 2004): 6%.
Speaking of pulling thing out of asses, maybe you should have pulled your head out before you make statements like 'Germany has less accidents on the Autobahn blah blah blah...'. They most certainly do. Do you know why? Because 1) it is very cost/time prohibitive for a German citizen to get a drivers license (~$1600US, 6+ hours of first aid training, books, etc) and 2) Germany has one of the best (if not the best) public transportation systems on Earth.
There is a much smaller percentage of licensed drivers in Germany than in the US (which is near 99%). And the drivers that are on the Autobahn have much more training and are far more skilled. Sure, they have less accidents, but not even remotely for the reasons you think.
This was at the very end of TFA, so no one may have read it:
Wha?! Are they kidding? This has been published by an apparently respected research organization. It became 'fact' less than 24 hours after it was published. No need for them to waste their time with bothersome 'empirical research' or the 'scientific method'. In the minds of many, words like 'conjecture' and 'could' in the above statement will be subconsciously replaced with 'wicked awesome fact' and 'suck it Fundies!'.
So does the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons program (their budget is 30% larger, but still only a tiny fraction my taxes). But that neither here nor there. I just grow tired of all fanboi-ism surrounding NASA. I think it's beneficial for humankind to explore space too. And there are genuine NASA inventions that directly benefit some people. But it seems that sometimes what is touted as a "NASA invention" were really a "NASA funded invention" from private organizations. I would be like saying CERN "invented" the WWW because Berners-Lee invented it while being funded by CERN.
Not to mention all the completely mythical claims that NASA invented the MRI, the barcode, smoke detector, Velcro, etc.. It's hard for me to keep my dream of space alive amid all the legalisitc doublespeak and misinformation.
Irrelevant. When a person is out in public, with no reasonable expectation privacy, I can take their picture and use it commercially with impunity. Were that not the case the people standing on a public sidewalk, outside Hollywood nightclubs, trying to get an less-than-flattering shot Brittaney Spears (i.e. paparazzi) would be consistently, successfully sued and eventually cease to exist. Some larger cities require permits for big-budget filming, but it's rare. And even if you refuse to pay for the permit and take pictures anyway, all they can do is fine you and kick you out of town. It's never a criminal offense.
What's more, Google cannot build a "psychological profile of everything you do on the net" unless you allow them to. One must surf the net, while signed into Google, in order for them to gather information. It's not as Google reaches out from the ether and tracks you. If one does not log into Google, all Google can know is what what all web servers know about you (IP, OS, browser, etc). For it to go beyond that, Google would have be colluding with every ISP in the country (or the world if it went that far). And even if they did that, they would have no way of knowing who was doing the surfing. Was it a 50 year-old man? A 10 year-old girl? Someone using a unsecured WAP? A cat walking across a keyboard? No way to know....unless they logged into Google.
What makes you think they are not doing that already? /adjusts tinfoil hat/
The only reason telcos don't do that is because there is no tech (yet) to do it cheaply and accurately. Even Google struggles with transcribing the human voice well.
Personally I think Google has every right to do whatever they want on their servers. There are lots of legal precedents regarding how an employee has no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' when they are using a work PC, bandwidth, etc for personal surfing or email. Their employer has every right to monitor and record (including keystrokes) everything they do. Why would Google be any different? If you don't want your activity and personal emails scraped by Google, don't use Google. Or at the very least sign out of Google before you go to www.hotunderagehorserape.com (god I hope that's not a real site).
I agree there is a long list of non-violent things that could be done. The problem is that none of them work for more than a decade or two. In the last, say, 1000 years of human history people have never been able to "get everybody...out, and start fresh" without bloodshed. I am talking about actual change (e.g. monarchy to republic, republic to theocratic). Not like the occasional 'bloodless coup' where only people are replaced.
Does Google 'track you' any more than a telco does? My phone company has a list of every call I make, and where I made it from. This applies to landlines, mobile phones (though exact location is tricky), and VoIP. If I start using a different company, then I might be able to 'cover my tracks', as it were. But one could do the same thing by getting a new ISP and creating a different Google account.
Really? Because the Vatican says otherwise. So does the CIA.
Your adorable hyperbole aside, I never mentioned any particular year. I was just responding to Wyatt Earp's claim that exemption to this law only apply for "...foreign nationals touring the US in their own vehicle and for cars displayed in museums.". I was just helping him/her understand how completely incorrect that statement was.
So when I said 'old-timey cars', what did you think I meant...Model-T's?. But, even if the car was manufactured yesterday, it's doesn't matter. As long as it meets the legal definition of "personal use", there's no problem.
That's true for issues like "there's really needs to be a light at this intersection", or "my city has too much chlorine in their water". But rants going in the direction of "the US government needs to be torn down and replaced with a completely new governmental system!!!" are just silly without a willingness to actually take any effective, tangible steps to bring it about.
Most (all?) of these types of people would totally freak if you took away their government backed roads, police/fire departments, etc. Hell , most of them probably couldn't even take having their American Idol or YouTube disappearing because the government no longer regulated the infrastructure upon which they are built.
I would recommend you read the actual source material before you make statements based on such easily verifiable facts. You're just making an ass out of yourself.
According to the law code, the "Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and Regulations" law does not apply to imported vehicles for "personal use" (i.e. high end foreign cars kept on private property or hauled to car shows) or to cars "at least 25 years old" (i.e. old-timey cars).
Here are some interesting sections for you to read:
CHAPTER 301, SUBCHAPTER III, Section 30142, subsection 5
CHAPTER 301, SUBCHAPTER III, Section 30142, subsection 9