So when a whole country (well, not really) rejects a lifestyle choice that an iPhone user made
It's. A. Goddamned. Phone. It's not a "lifestyle choice". The only people who view buying Apple products as a "lifestyle" are the raging fanboys -- the same ones who obsess over every word Steve Jobs may have been rumored to casually utter in passing. And you can find obsessive freaks for pretty much everything under the sun -- that doesn't mean anything.
If someone is defining their lifestyle by which company's products they purchase, that person has a far, far larger problem than worrying about what people in Japan are doing.
It is just a phone, but for many people it is also an expression of their personality.
William Shatner needs to revisit his SNL sketch, I think, and explain something to people like that. Get a life.
Uh, why wouldn't you want a modem? They're cheap and take up almost no space, and they're the kind of component you almost never need nowadays, but when you do need it, you're really glad you have it. A few months ago my cable internet went out for a few hours, and of course my boss chose that time to call and tell me there was some sort of issue with one of our servers. I could have driven around looking for some wireless, or cracked the nearby WEP APs, or I could.. plug into the phone line, use the modem, and do what I need to do. Sure was nice to have a modem right then. >
Also handy when visiting elderly relatives who haven't caught on to the whole broadband thing and probably never will.
Because then the crime is "failure to appear" before a court when so ordered, and they take that seriously. It seems silly when they make such a big deal out of not showing up for your court date for a seatbelt violation, but I'm okay with it -- a blanket rule saying "Show up to court when lawfully ordered" seems fair to me, and if that means treating the same the dweeb who ran a stop sign and the important witness on a felony charge, so be it. When told to show up, you'd better to do it, and nevermind whether you think it's stupid.
That aside, the way they skirt around the jury trial in traffic violations is by calling them "violations", "infractions", or "administrative matters", and not "crimes". Personally I find that laughable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that you can get arrested, have to post bond, and go through all the other legal BS for this thing which is allegedly not a crime, just a "violation".
The reason they do this is twofold: First, there is no way in hell they'd ever get a panel of twelve average Joes to convict you for little bullshit non-moving violations, and the same is true for most moving violations since nobody really cares that you were doing 70 on the highway marked 55, especially since as jurors they're all locals and they all know that everyone does 70 on that highway. Second, there is rarely, if ever, any evidence in these matters -- the cop charges you and says you did something (ran a stop sign? parked too close to a hydrant? who knows?) and that's all they've got. Pointing out that the only "evidence" against you is an accusation would get most juries to let you go, and the state doesn't want that.
Hence, you're given a "bench trial" instead, where the judge will claim to be impartial but is on the state's payroll and has a vested interest in making sure matters turn out in the state's favor.
Natural selection doesn't happen to 'the species as a whole', it happens to individuals.
Fine, I agree with that, but when people discuss this topic, they generally mean "If I go into suspended animation for fifty thousand years, when I wake up, will the people still be the same sort of humans, or will humanity have become something else?"
One person's superior genetics and mating ability isn't going to cause any change to our species. His children might be better off than some others, which is fine, but in a population this large it's not going to alter the state of humanity, nor produce some offshoot of evolved post-humans.
But there are definitely some types that are more successful at breeding than others, right?
Ehhh. A person would have to be pretty damn messed up not to find anyone in a first-world, industrial society. Maybe more attractive or social people have more sexual opportunities but human sexuality is about far more than reproduction. Charlie Sheen claims to have slept with over three thousand women -- I doubt that number, but he's rich and reasonably good-looking, so I'm sure he's got a his pick of fertile women, and the means to support a huge number of children if he wanted. Yet he only has one daughter. Meanwhile, Cletus the Slackjawed Yokel manages to have ten kids. My point is that if left to his own devices, the Cletuses of the world wouldn't be likely to even survive into adulthood and get the chance, but we don't live in that type of society. We live in an industrial, agrarian society where Cletus can survive, and because we live in such a society, we've removed ourselves from environmental pressures to adapt. We adapt the world to our needs, not vice versa.
When it comes down to actually producing a child, most people seem to manage if they want to. Honestly, take a look around next time you're sitting in traffic, or at a coffee shop, or at the office, or anywhere else really. Most people should have been wolf food long ago, as I said -- yet here they are, alive as adults, and a good number of them have families. You will not come back in fifty thousand years to find some new form of post-human -- or if you do, it'll be a technological adaptation, not one that was guided by natural selection.
That was my point. It's an absurd thing to say. It's just as absurd to say that aborting a fetus a few weeks old is "murder" -- that thing is certainly alive, but merely being alive affords no special protection on this planet when it comes to our willingness to kill. Murder is specifically the killing of a human, and until certain things occur, it's tough to argue that the fetus is human.
The courts pretty routinely take one person's word over another's, if that one person is a sworn peace officer.
I concede your point. In every bullshit traffic violation, the only "evidence" against you is the cop's word that he saw you do something, and that's all the proof the court needs. I like to hpoe against hope that the standards are higher for more serious crimes, but.. you're probably right.
The password itself is not incriminating, therefore it's not protected by the 5th.
That's uh, the issue under contention here, isn't it?
My personal view is that this is no different from asking me for my house key. That person is under no obligation to give it up. If the police want to haul in a battering ram to knock the door down, as long as that's legal, they're welcome to try -- but if their battering ram can't knock the door down why should is that my problem? I'm under custody, you have access to the material -- if you can't unlock it, well c'est la vie.
the contents of the hard drive is not self-incrimination
The charge is that the contests of the hard drive are illegal. That's not just "evidence", that's the entire crux of the case. The question at hand is, "are the contents of this drive illegal?" If the prosecution can't prove that it is, that's their tough luck. If they can't view the contents of the drive then what the hell business do they have prosecuting this guy? Their inability to break encryptioon isn't the defendent's fault or problem. The state wants to prove that the guy did something wrong? Okay, let's see the proof. You have the guy's laptop, let's see why you think he's doing something illegal.
WELL SORRY YOUR HONOR BUT WE CAN'T SHOW YOU
Why not?
THE HARD DRIVE IS ENCRYPTED
I see. So you can't see what's on that hard drive?
NO YOUR HONOR
If you can't see what's on the hard drive, why do you think he did something illegal?
OH YOU KNOW.. A GUY SAID.. SOME STUFF.. HE THINKS HE MIGHT HAVE.. SEEN.. SOME THINGS..
Give me a fucking break. If the prosecution can't secure evidence for its own case, that is nobody's fault but thier own. Either you have a reason to detain the guy or you don't. If you can't show us the contents of the drive then you have no reason to think he's doing anything wrong.
Change in allele frequency over time? Fits perfectly.
I'm not denying that. But humanity compensates for disease far, far more quickly with technology and medicine than evolution ever will. We've wiped out a number of diseases that used to be fatal and almost every single other disease, which would have killed our ancestors before they ever got a chance to produce offspring, is now treatable to the point where a more or less normal life can be had -- including finding a mate. By that measure, we've removed ourselves from natural selection.
We have no predators. As agrarians we don't compete for food, prey, or territory. We compensate for virtually every disease or disability with medicine and technology. We humans, as a species, have basically zero environmental pressures against us, and those few we do -- disease, say -- are either inconsequential to reproductive fitness, or are conquered within decades, where evolution would take eons.
So all humans are equally successful at propagating their genes, regardless of their particular personal traits and environment?
When we consider the species as a whole? Yes.
I'm obviously not considering fringe cases here, like some forgotten tribe in the Amazon where life and death is still a matter of personal fitness. But note that I discussed "industrial societies" -- basically any first-world country, or developing nation. Just about anyone has an equal shot at growing up and reproducing. They're not necessarily the ones you'd wish would reproduce, mind you, but try pointing at any first-world doofus and saying there is no chance. In a day and age where survival is almost guaranteed by technology and medicine, there is almost always someone willing to mate with someone else, no matter how effed-up they might be.
Or do some traits prosper better in some environments, and not in others?
Strictly speaking humans have no "traits" that allow us to live in desert or arctic environments. Yet that doesn't seem to stop anyone. Left to their own devices, every man and woman in places like that would perish. But oh. They build shelters. They domesticate animals. They fashion clothing. They deal with the environment using technology. That's my point.
That means a new beneficial trait cannot be swamped by the size of the gene pool. If the mutant gull's variation is truly beneficial, then it will have more young than the rest, and they will carry the gene. They in turn will also have more children than the rest, and pass the gene on again.
Thanks for the lecture, but I'm aware of this mysterious "genetics" to which you refer. Now you explain to me why a mutant gull will produce "more young" than the rest. That's not a given. A gull that has some beneficial trait might have a better chance at surviving longer than his buddies, long enough to reproduce where his buddies won't. That's obvious. But in a large colony, it doesn't much matter -- thus mutant gull has a few baby gulls, and fifty thousand other gulls have normmal baby gulls. The mutant baby gull grows up and the gene pool is diluted.
Your math is all well and good but human sexuality is far, far more complicated than math, which is another factor I'm not sure you're considering. In any given random city you'll find guys who prefer pale girls with dark hair or guys who prefer tanned blondes. You'll find women who prefer scrawny geeks and women who prefer muscular dudes. Virtually regardless of who you are or your preferred type, you'll find someone. This is observationally untrue for the rest of the animal kingdom. Trying to apply animal sexual preference to humans is futile, and that's discounting all the technical and medicinal benefits "unfit" humans already have.
Okay, well, I documented some of my adventures right here. There are no screenshots because I didn't think to take any, but these were HP nx7400 machines. So we're talking, let's see...
I think you'll agree none of this is unusual -- in fact, it's all pretty generic stuff. Neither Vista nor XP handled it and I had to, as documented, go download the driver installers one by one, and install them one by one. They all worked fine out of the box on my Ubuntu install (which is where I just pulled the above information, since I'm still using the same laptop, only now I'm on 8.04).
So, that's as much proof as I can give you. I admit it'd have been better if I'd thought to take some screenshots but whatever.
Virtually everything can use the fallback LAN driver in Windows.
And yet I've never seen that happen. I've had the same experience on my company's old Dell 600m laptops as well, by the way, so it's not just some fluke of the nx7400s. Come to think of it, I had to go through this dance when I installed Vista 64 on my custom-built workstation at home two years ago, and that thing also has some generic Intel on-board ethernet.
Are you serious? You've never seen an updated driver package on Windows Update?
Okay, true, I have seen drivers update, but I've never seen new drivers get installed during the whole "NEW HARDWARE DETECTED! WOULD YOU LIKE WINDOWS TO SEARCH ONLINE FOR DRIVERS?" thing. That's what I was talking about, so I guess I misread, but I stand by what I said in that context -- Windows claims to have this vast online repository of drivers, but nobody has ever actually gotten drivers that way to my knowledge. Being able to update drivers isn't all that impressive if I have to move mountains to get the drivers in the first place, you know what I'm sayin'?
You're not doing anything with Ubuntu.
Three years of using it as my only OS at work as a sysadmin for a mixed-platform environment would seem to disagree.
How about that Brother printer? Does the Linux driver support ALL the features of the Brother printer? I bet not.
Don't know. I only plugged my machine into it long enough to test the printer, and it worked, as far as printing and scanning using xsane. That's all I cared about -- what "features" am I missing? I have no idea because if I'm missing anything they're features so unimportant that I'd never give a damn. It prints, it scans, what the hell else do I need it to do?
If the only thing against him at this point is some border guard saying he saw child porn on the guy's laptop, the guy has not given up his fifth amendment rights. For one thing, one person's word against another's is rarely given much weight in court if that's all there is.
In short, the guard claiming he saw child porn on the guy's hard drive is much, much different than the court ordering the guy to provide evidence against himself.
This is different from, say, a police interrogation, where what you're saying and doing is recorded and usually witnessed by several people. In such a scenario, assuming you'd been Mirandized, then if you confess to something, it's game over, and you can't go to court and claim fifth amendment protection against information you voluntarily gave away in the presence of corroborating witnesses and recording equipment.
But in this situation, it seems like all the court has is some guard's say-so that there was child porn, at which point the laptop was seized, but now nobody can confirm whether or not the guard saw what he claims to have seen. As far as I can see, there's no legal reason to insist that the guy has to give up information based on that.
Let's put it another way. Suppose you get pulled over on a routine traffic stop. For no reason, the cop arrests you, and claims you told him you killed a guy. Now, do you think your fifth amendment rights have been forfeit because a single individual says you already admitted to the crime? Or do you think maybe there should be a little more to it than that?
I think the difference is that "Jobs stopped by some guy's desk for a quick followup to last week's TPS meeting at 12:45 EST" is considered news for some reason, just because it involves Apple and Steve Jobs. This is a total non-story -- unconfirmed rumors of how Jobs might or might not be returning to Apple a few months down the road, and how some people sang to him while he wasn't there. Woo.
By and large, Linux, Windows, and other news only gets posted when something happens or there is some information about the actual product or service. We don't need to hear about every damn move an egomaniacal micromanager makes.
Hey. Hey. Take a tour of Windows XP! Click here to start! New programs added! Click here for a view of all programs! Your virus scanner is out of date! Your firewall settings are all wrong! Click here to fix the virus scanner! Click here to fix the firewall! Click here for the Security Center! You have unused icons on your desktop! Your screen resolution is exactly what it should be but I'm going to yell about it anyway! Wireless networks detected! Connecting to wireless! Now connected! Click here to safely remove hardware! Click here to visit the Windows Solution Center! Windows updates detected! Quicktime updates detected! Click here to view hidden icons! Norton updates detected! Would you like to register with Microsoft now? Would you like to register with Microsoft now? Would you like to register with Microsoft now? Hey! More wireless networks detected! Click here to view! The program you closed has closed unexpectedly! Click here to send an error report to nobody!
Give me a break dude. Unless you go out of your way to disable all that horseshit, Windows does constantly harass you. By default, Windows is incapable of shutting the fuck up. Everything is always connecting and disconnecting and scanning and searching and indexing and updating and it has to tell you all of this right now.
Yeah, sure, drivers. I heard that with XP. I heard that with Vista. Every single cherry install of XP or Vista I've ever done, without exception, has failed to load ethernet, wireless, video, or soundcard drivers. Every. Single. One.
That's especially great when you check under Device Manager and see five or six "unknown devices" and Windows helpfully offers to search online for the drivers. Thanks, jackasses.
Meanwhile, I have to use a second computer to not only find out what hardware this thing has by looking up specs -- cause Windows sure as hell ain't gonna tell you -- but go to each individual manufacturer's website, click through search opens, and hopefully come out on the other side with a couple of executable driver installers, each and every single one of which will want to install a horseshit systray thing to hog memory, extraneous entries in the program menus, a few desktop icons, and various other party favors.
Even when the drivers install, they don't work half the time. I just got done fighting with some Brother printer driver one of the marketing girls installed on her machine, actually -- after I had to manually point it at the driver files it just finished installing, it took me half an hour of screwing around to get it to even *see* the printer. Ready for the desktop!
Meanwhile, with Ubuntu, the biggest driver headache I've ever had was back in the Dapper Drake days where I had to wrap the Windows drivers for a Broadcom wireless card. That hasn't even been an issue since 7.04 as far as I know -- at most you click "enable restricted drivers" and away you go. The aforementioned Brother printer worked immediately when I plugged it into my Ubuntu machine, by the way.
Microsoft bragging about driver support is laughable not only for the fact that their hardware and driver support effing sucks, but unlike Linux, Microsoft can't even use the vendors-aren't-supporting-us excuse.
Finally:
The remaining devices were almost all served by downloading drivers from Windows Update
Has anyone, in the history of humanity, ever gotten that to work? I don't mean the part where it connects to some anonymous server in Redmond and sends them god-knows-what information -- I mean, has anyone actually come out on the other end of that process with a driver? In fifteen years I haven't seen it happen even once, and I don't think I've ever heard of it happening.
all drivers included, "almost all" could be downoaded easily. No matter what you think of Microsoft, that information is pretty much astonishing.
It'd be astonishing if it were true, but somehow I doubt reality is anything close to this. Your quote comes from the pen of Steven Sinofsky, the guy in charge of Windows 7 engineering, and like every other claim Microsoft makes about how great their OS will be this time, it's just as much BS now as it was every other time we've heard it.
We're not evolving in any meaningful sense of the word. Resistance to disease or narcotic addiction is only "evolution" if you massage the word a lot.
As humans, we do not deal with environmental pressures. Animals have to adapt to their surroundings or perish -- we adapt our surroundings to suit our needs. Through our ability to construct shelter, clothes, and grow food virtually at will, we've neatly removed ourselves from natural selection that way.
Another reason we aren't evolving is because we live in an industrial society where basically any schmuck has a pretty good chance of reproducing and carrying on the gene pool. The world is full of weak, stupid morons who by all rights would have been wolf food long ago, but today they're coddled, protected, somehow manage to mate, and that's their lineage continued. By and large we do not allow people to just fall by the wayside, and most people will eventually find someone willing to have sex with them, even marry. The guy with the body of Schwartzeneggar and the brain of Einstein has about as much chance of producing children as the dingus down the street who can barely figure out how to operate his toaster oven.
Finally, evolution generally only occurs in isolated populations, and usually in populations with relatively low numbers. In a flock of one thousand gulls, one who is just a bit faster or has better eyesight or whatever is going to have a notable advantage at staying alive, and will be adept at outcompeting his peers. In a flock of one hundred thousand, his genetic advantages are barely a drop in a bucket, and for every gull chick produced from his loins, fifty thousand other "lesser" gulls are born. We're a population of nearly seven billion and aren't really constrained by geographic considerations anymore either. Tomorrow's superchild's signal will get completely drowned out by the noise of the slavering, drooling masses around him.
If you kill a fetus, you have killed the potentiality of a child.
And every time a woman ovulates she's doing the same thing, I suppose? That egg was a potential child just as much as a zygote -- given the right circumstances and conditions, both could become human at some point, but there's no guarantee. Hell, most of the time when a sperm meets an egg it doesn't actually implant in the womb anyway, and gets ejected in the next menustrual cycle.
The whole argument about "potential" is unbelievably weak.
Re:Parents choose their baby's name
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Designer Babies
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Name your daughter "prostitute", and let me know how she fairs elementary and jr. high.
Right. By the time she gets to high school everyone will have matured and moved on from being juvenile about it.
Yeah man, good idea. Let's just wipe out any species which happens to be an inconvenience for humans.
By the way, if you shoot it, you're still going to have to get someone to load it in a truck and haul the carcass away unless you want five hundred pounds of reptile flesh decaying in your yard. As long as you're going to have to cart it away one way or another, why not, y'know, have a heart and let it live?
The idea that a generation of human-fearing crocodiles would arise from your plan is equally laughable. Hell's wrong with you?
Using plural verb forms for entities which are clearly singular (band, group, family, company) but which are by definition composed of multiple individual components -- that's a quirk of Brits. You know, the ones who sneer at Americans for using an inferior dialect of English, yet can't seem to figure out basic subject/verb agreement or the concept of collective nouns?
In general, when merely verifying employment, someone will call your previous employer's HR department and ask "Did Joey Ramone work there?" and the HR person will say "Yes, his employment was from November 2001 to February 2009," or whatever.
My understanding is that's all they're allowed to say by law, but even if I'm wrong, corporations aren't stupid about CYA -- they'd rather just give a bland fact like the above and leave it at that, so they don't position themselves on the receiving end of libel or slander suits. And at any rate, the HR drone answering the question probably has no idea who you are or why you left, nor cares. He or she will check your employment date and termination date, verify it to whoever is asking, and leave it at that.
Your references are altogether different; you get to hand-pick those. So whoever is "implying" that they'd bad-mouth you about this, just don't list them as a reference -- then nobody will call them and they'll never get a chance to carry out their threat.
Remember, nobody at your new company knows anyone at your old company. Just list a few co-workers or immediate managers with whom you've worked closely. They'll be in a position to say "Oh yeah, I worked with Joey Ramone for three years, great programmer, very professional."
If it's all "a little more complicated than that" (it usually is), consider emailing the person: "I want to reiterate that I'd prefer my last day to be X, three weeks from now, and asking me to extend this date is not something I believe I can accomodate. Can we work something out?" Wait for the reply -- it'll probably be a rehash of the same veiled threat. Now you have something in writing showing that you gave ample time, were shot down, and you can bring it up with your Legal department, who is likely to take a pretty dim view of anyone placing the company at risk of litigation.
You're talking about Photography but Juarez is now infamous for the killings of women there and I'm not sure which definition of "shoot" you're trying to use.
So you're either an idiot for not being able to tell what he means, or an idiot for thinking your comment was even remotely clever or funny. Either way, you're an idiot.
The part you're describing happens apprximately three minutes into the game. Give it a real chance, would ya?
Okay, a lot of Bioshock is standard FPS fare -- collect better guns and items, wander around shooting dudes, and having things collapse in front of you so you have to go the long way around. But it's got quite a few surprises, and even the standard stuff is remarkably well executed. It's not "open" the way, say, Crysis is, but the combination of traps, guns, alternate ammo, and plasmid powers make sure things stay fun. And the atmosphere alone is worth it -- I never got bored of looking at all the pretty.
I personally disagree, but I'll concede you make a point. However, your examples just don't make the point for you.
Virtual Desktop on a massive server over the Network it will seem slow and clunky to the kids especially once they are shown a modern Windows PC that their parents my have for work
Almost without exception, every Windows machine I've had to deal with, other than mine, has been a mind-bogglingly slow piece of garbage. That isn't necessarily because of Windows, but because of the way people load it up with forty thousand useless bits of trash hogging memory and processor cycles. The sales staff at my office are a fine example -- all I ever hear from them, day after day, is how slow their Core 2 Duo 1.8ghz machines are. Machines they really only need for web browsing, Outlook, Word & Excel, and maybe AIM. And every time I look, those machines really are slow, but I see it's because they have ungodly amounts of crap running behind the scenes. Stuff they probably don't know about, but that's the mindset of Windows users and the reality of using an OS that lets application installers puke anywhere they want.
I'm obsessive about keeping mine crap-free and keeping an eye on running processes, and anyone with a clue isn't asking me to look at their computers, so I admit that's something of a skewed set, but you can't tell me with a straight face that Windows in the hands of the average user is "fast" after a week or two.
(Yes, I realise that if you really wanted to, and knew how, you could make a Linux machine slow too, but the difference is that you'd have to go pretty damn far out of your way to do this -- whereas with Windows, the expected method of doing things is to download untrusted executables from unverified websites, run them, and Windows happily lets them do whatever they want as soon as you click 'OK', which everyone does.)
Also because Linux has much better security, when exposed to windows they will feel that it could do more.
Like what, get viruses? Install "Free Smilies" toolbars in the browser? Put useless icons, shortcuts, and systray helpers all over the place? Other than some modern games, which the kids presumably aren't running on school computers anyway, can you name something Windows can do which Linux cannot? Something someone would want to do?
Normally I'd agree but this whole stupid situation is made more stupid by the fact that she apparently hid the phone in her underwear.
So, what should the school do at this point? If they reach in her pants to try to get it, or even frisk her, suddenly they have a potential sexual harassment suit on their hands. If they tried it and no harassment suit came out of it, then you could -- potentially -- have some unscrupulous teacher leverage that to actually perpetrate harassment: "I was only grabbing her ass because I was checking for contraband cellphones!" Whether or not that's a silly concern is beside the point -- it could happen, and if it never did, the fact that people think it could happen is enough for an outcry from every parent at the school.
So in a situation like that, I'd say letting the police handle it is the only option that avoids some pretty unnecessary complications -- but the police only had to get involved thanks to this girl's phone-in-the-panties manuever, so whatever punishment gets doled out should, in my estimation, be increased for not only wasting the local administration's time, but for forcing things to get to the point where police had to get involved. Police that could be doing more important things, like driving around looking for evildoers who forgot to renew their tag.
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So when a whole country (well, not really) rejects a lifestyle choice that an iPhone user made
It's. A. Goddamned. Phone. It's not a "lifestyle choice". The only people who view buying Apple products as a "lifestyle" are the raging fanboys -- the same ones who obsess over every word Steve Jobs may have been rumored to casually utter in passing. And you can find obsessive freaks for pretty much everything under the sun -- that doesn't mean anything.
If someone is defining their lifestyle by which company's products they purchase, that person has a far, far larger problem than worrying about what people in Japan are doing.
It is just a phone, but for many people it is also an expression of their personality.
William Shatner needs to revisit his SNL sketch, I think, and explain something to people like that. Get a life.
Uh, why wouldn't you want a modem? They're cheap and take up almost no space, and they're the kind of component you almost never need nowadays, but when you do need it, you're really glad you have it. A few months ago my cable internet went out for a few hours, and of course my boss chose that time to call and tell me there was some sort of issue with one of our servers. I could have driven around looking for some wireless, or cracked the nearby WEP APs, or I could.. plug into the phone line, use the modem, and do what I need to do. Sure was nice to have a modem right then.
>
Also handy when visiting elderly relatives who haven't caught on to the whole broadband thing and probably never will.
Because then the crime is "failure to appear" before a court when so ordered, and they take that seriously. It seems silly when they make such a big deal out of not showing up for your court date for a seatbelt violation, but I'm okay with it -- a blanket rule saying "Show up to court when lawfully ordered" seems fair to me, and if that means treating the same the dweeb who ran a stop sign and the important witness on a felony charge, so be it. When told to show up, you'd better to do it, and nevermind whether you think it's stupid.
That aside, the way they skirt around the jury trial in traffic violations is by calling them "violations", "infractions", or "administrative matters", and not "crimes". Personally I find that laughable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that you can get arrested, have to post bond, and go through all the other legal BS for this thing which is allegedly not a crime, just a "violation".
The reason they do this is twofold: First, there is no way in hell they'd ever get a panel of twelve average Joes to convict you for little bullshit non-moving violations, and the same is true for most moving violations since nobody really cares that you were doing 70 on the highway marked 55, especially since as jurors they're all locals and they all know that everyone does 70 on that highway. Second, there is rarely, if ever, any evidence in these matters -- the cop charges you and says you did something (ran a stop sign? parked too close to a hydrant? who knows?) and that's all they've got. Pointing out that the only "evidence" against you is an accusation would get most juries to let you go, and the state doesn't want that.
Hence, you're given a "bench trial" instead, where the judge will claim to be impartial but is on the state's payroll and has a vested interest in making sure matters turn out in the state's favor.
Natural selection doesn't happen to 'the species as a whole', it happens to individuals.
Fine, I agree with that, but when people discuss this topic, they generally mean "If I go into suspended animation for fifty thousand years, when I wake up, will the people still be the same sort of humans, or will humanity have become something else?"
One person's superior genetics and mating ability isn't going to cause any change to our species. His children might be better off than some others, which is fine, but in a population this large it's not going to alter the state of humanity, nor produce some offshoot of evolved post-humans.
But there are definitely some types that are more successful at breeding than others, right?
Ehhh. A person would have to be pretty damn messed up not to find anyone in a first-world, industrial society. Maybe more attractive or social people have more sexual opportunities but human sexuality is about far more than reproduction. Charlie Sheen claims to have slept with over three thousand women -- I doubt that number, but he's rich and reasonably good-looking, so I'm sure he's got a his pick of fertile women, and the means to support a huge number of children if he wanted. Yet he only has one daughter. Meanwhile, Cletus the Slackjawed Yokel manages to have ten kids. My point is that if left to his own devices, the Cletuses of the world wouldn't be likely to even survive into adulthood and get the chance, but we don't live in that type of society. We live in an industrial, agrarian society where Cletus can survive, and because we live in such a society, we've removed ourselves from environmental pressures to adapt. We adapt the world to our needs, not vice versa.
When it comes down to actually producing a child, most people seem to manage if they want to. Honestly, take a look around next time you're sitting in traffic, or at a coffee shop, or at the office, or anywhere else really. Most people should have been wolf food long ago, as I said -- yet here they are, alive as adults, and a good number of them have families. You will not come back in fifty thousand years to find some new form of post-human -- or if you do, it'll be a technological adaptation, not one that was guided by natural selection.
That was my point. It's an absurd thing to say. It's just as absurd to say that aborting a fetus a few weeks old is "murder" -- that thing is certainly alive, but merely being alive affords no special protection on this planet when it comes to our willingness to kill. Murder is specifically the killing of a human, and until certain things occur, it's tough to argue that the fetus is human.
The courts pretty routinely take one person's word over another's, if that one person is a sworn peace officer.
I concede your point. In every bullshit traffic violation, the only "evidence" against you is the cop's word that he saw you do something, and that's all the proof the court needs. I like to hpoe against hope that the standards are higher for more serious crimes, but.. you're probably right.
The password itself is not incriminating, therefore it's not protected by the 5th.
That's uh, the issue under contention here, isn't it?
My personal view is that this is no different from asking me for my house key. That person is under no obligation to give it up. If the police want to haul in a battering ram to knock the door down, as long as that's legal, they're welcome to try -- but if their battering ram can't knock the door down why should is that my problem? I'm under custody, you have access to the material -- if you can't unlock it, well c'est la vie.
the contents of the hard drive is not self-incrimination
The charge is that the contests of the hard drive are illegal. That's not just "evidence", that's the entire crux of the case. The question at hand is, "are the contents of this drive illegal?" If the prosecution can't prove that it is, that's their tough luck. If they can't view the contents of the drive then what the hell business do they have prosecuting this guy? Their inability to break encryptioon isn't the defendent's fault or problem. The state wants to prove that the guy did something wrong? Okay, let's see the proof. You have the guy's laptop, let's see why you think he's doing something illegal.
WELL SORRY YOUR HONOR BUT WE CAN'T SHOW YOU
Why not?
THE HARD DRIVE IS ENCRYPTED
I see. So you can't see what's on that hard drive?
NO YOUR HONOR
If you can't see what's on the hard drive, why do you think he did something illegal?
OH YOU KNOW.. A GUY SAID.. SOME STUFF.. HE THINKS HE MIGHT HAVE.. SEEN.. SOME THINGS..
Give me a fucking break. If the prosecution can't secure evidence for its own case, that is nobody's fault but thier own. Either you have a reason to detain the guy or you don't. If you can't show us the contents of the drive then you have no reason to think he's doing anything wrong.
Change in allele frequency over time? Fits perfectly.
I'm not denying that. But humanity compensates for disease far, far more quickly with technology and medicine than evolution ever will. We've wiped out a number of diseases that used to be fatal and almost every single other disease, which would have killed our ancestors before they ever got a chance to produce offspring, is now treatable to the point where a more or less normal life can be had -- including finding a mate. By that measure, we've removed ourselves from natural selection.
We have no predators. As agrarians we don't compete for food, prey, or territory. We compensate for virtually every disease or disability with medicine and technology. We humans, as a species, have basically zero environmental pressures against us, and those few we do -- disease, say -- are either inconsequential to reproductive fitness, or are conquered within decades, where evolution would take eons.
So all humans are equally successful at propagating their genes, regardless of their particular personal traits and environment?
When we consider the species as a whole? Yes.
I'm obviously not considering fringe cases here, like some forgotten tribe in the Amazon where life and death is still a matter of personal fitness. But note that I discussed "industrial societies" -- basically any first-world country, or developing nation. Just about anyone has an equal shot at growing up and reproducing. They're not necessarily the ones you'd wish would reproduce, mind you, but try pointing at any first-world doofus and saying there is no chance. In a day and age where survival is almost guaranteed by technology and medicine, there is almost always someone willing to mate with someone else, no matter how effed-up they might be.
Or do some traits prosper better in some environments, and not in others?
Strictly speaking humans have no "traits" that allow us to live in desert or arctic environments. Yet that doesn't seem to stop anyone. Left to their own devices, every man and woman in places like that would perish. But oh. They build shelters. They domesticate animals. They fashion clothing. They deal with the environment using technology. That's my point.
That means a new beneficial trait cannot be swamped by the size of the gene pool. If the mutant gull's variation is truly beneficial, then it will have more young than the rest, and they will carry the gene. They in turn will also have more children than the rest, and pass the gene on again.
Thanks for the lecture, but I'm aware of this mysterious "genetics" to which you refer. Now you explain to me why a mutant gull will produce "more young" than the rest. That's not a given. A gull that has some beneficial trait might have a better chance at surviving longer than his buddies, long enough to reproduce where his buddies won't. That's obvious. But in a large colony, it doesn't much matter -- thus mutant gull has a few baby gulls, and fifty thousand other gulls have normmal baby gulls. The mutant baby gull grows up and the gene pool is diluted.
Your math is all well and good but human sexuality is far, far more complicated than math, which is another factor I'm not sure you're considering. In any given random city you'll find guys who prefer pale girls with dark hair or guys who prefer tanned blondes. You'll find women who prefer scrawny geeks and women who prefer muscular dudes. Virtually regardless of who you are or your preferred type, you'll find someone. This is observationally untrue for the rest of the animal kingdom. Trying to apply animal sexual preference to humans is futile, and that's discounting all the technical and medicinal benefits "unfit" humans already have.
Okay, well, I documented some of my adventures right here. There are no screenshots because I didn't think to take any, but these were HP nx7400 machines. So we're talking, let's see...
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/
02:0e.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
10:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
I think you'll agree none of this is unusual -- in fact, it's all pretty generic stuff. Neither Vista nor XP handled it and I had to, as documented, go download the driver installers one by one, and install them one by one. They all worked fine out of the box on my Ubuntu install (which is where I just pulled the above information, since I'm still using the same laptop, only now I'm on 8.04).
So, that's as much proof as I can give you. I admit it'd have been better if I'd thought to take some screenshots but whatever.
Virtually everything can use the fallback LAN driver in Windows.
And yet I've never seen that happen. I've had the same experience on my company's old Dell 600m laptops as well, by the way, so it's not just some fluke of the nx7400s. Come to think of it, I had to go through this dance when I installed Vista 64 on my custom-built workstation at home two years ago, and that thing also has some generic Intel on-board ethernet.
Are you serious? You've never seen an updated driver package on Windows Update?
Okay, true, I have seen drivers update, but I've never seen new drivers get installed during the whole "NEW HARDWARE DETECTED! WOULD YOU LIKE WINDOWS TO SEARCH ONLINE FOR DRIVERS?" thing. That's what I was talking about, so I guess I misread, but I stand by what I said in that context -- Windows claims to have this vast online repository of drivers, but nobody has ever actually gotten drivers that way to my knowledge. Being able to update drivers isn't all that impressive if I have to move mountains to get the drivers in the first place, you know what I'm sayin'?
You're not doing anything with Ubuntu.
Three years of using it as my only OS at work as a sysadmin for a mixed-platform environment would seem to disagree.
How about that Brother printer? Does the Linux driver support ALL the features of the Brother printer? I bet not.
Don't know. I only plugged my machine into it long enough to test the printer, and it worked, as far as printing and scanning using xsane. That's all I cared about -- what "features" am I missing? I have no idea because if I'm missing anything they're features so unimportant that I'd never give a damn. It prints, it scans, what the hell else do I need it to do?
If the only thing against him at this point is some border guard saying he saw child porn on the guy's laptop, the guy has not given up his fifth amendment rights. For one thing, one person's word against another's is rarely given much weight in court if that's all there is.
In short, the guard claiming he saw child porn on the guy's hard drive is much, much different than the court ordering the guy to provide evidence against himself.
This is different from, say, a police interrogation, where what you're saying and doing is recorded and usually witnessed by several people. In such a scenario, assuming you'd been Mirandized, then if you confess to something, it's game over, and you can't go to court and claim fifth amendment protection against information you voluntarily gave away in the presence of corroborating witnesses and recording equipment.
But in this situation, it seems like all the court has is some guard's say-so that there was child porn, at which point the laptop was seized, but now nobody can confirm whether or not the guard saw what he claims to have seen. As far as I can see, there's no legal reason to insist that the guy has to give up information based on that.
Let's put it another way. Suppose you get pulled over on a routine traffic stop. For no reason, the cop arrests you, and claims you told him you killed a guy. Now, do you think your fifth amendment rights have been forfeit because a single individual says you already admitted to the crime? Or do you think maybe there should be a little more to it than that?
I think the difference is that "Jobs stopped by some guy's desk for a quick followup to last week's TPS meeting at 12:45 EST" is considered news for some reason, just because it involves Apple and Steve Jobs. This is a total non-story -- unconfirmed rumors of how Jobs might or might not be returning to Apple a few months down the road, and how some people sang to him while he wasn't there. Woo.
By and large, Linux, Windows, and other news only gets posted when something happens or there is some information about the actual product or service. We don't need to hear about every damn move an egomaniacal micromanager makes.
Hey. Hey. Take a tour of Windows XP! Click here to start! New programs added! Click here for a view of all programs! Your virus scanner is out of date! Your firewall settings are all wrong! Click here to fix the virus scanner! Click here to fix the firewall! Click here for the Security Center! You have unused icons on your desktop! Your screen resolution is exactly what it should be but I'm going to yell about it anyway! Wireless networks detected! Connecting to wireless! Now connected! Click here to safely remove hardware! Click here to visit the Windows Solution Center! Windows updates detected! Quicktime updates detected! Click here to view hidden icons! Norton updates detected! Would you like to register with Microsoft now? Would you like to register with Microsoft now? Would you like to register with Microsoft now? Hey! More wireless networks detected! Click here to view! The program you closed has closed unexpectedly! Click here to send an error report to nobody!
Give me a break dude. Unless you go out of your way to disable all that horseshit, Windows does constantly harass you. By default, Windows is incapable of shutting the fuck up. Everything is always connecting and disconnecting and scanning and searching and indexing and updating and it has to tell you all of this right now.
Yeah, sure, drivers. I heard that with XP. I heard that with Vista. Every single cherry install of XP or Vista I've ever done, without exception, has failed to load ethernet, wireless, video, or soundcard drivers. Every. Single. One.
That's especially great when you check under Device Manager and see five or six "unknown devices" and Windows helpfully offers to search online for the drivers. Thanks, jackasses.
Meanwhile, I have to use a second computer to not only find out what hardware this thing has by looking up specs -- cause Windows sure as hell ain't gonna tell you -- but go to each individual manufacturer's website, click through search opens, and hopefully come out on the other side with a couple of executable driver installers, each and every single one of which will want to install a horseshit systray thing to hog memory, extraneous entries in the program menus, a few desktop icons, and various other party favors.
Even when the drivers install, they don't work half the time. I just got done fighting with some Brother printer driver one of the marketing girls installed on her machine, actually -- after I had to manually point it at the driver files it just finished installing, it took me half an hour of screwing around to get it to even *see* the printer. Ready for the desktop!
Meanwhile, with Ubuntu, the biggest driver headache I've ever had was back in the Dapper Drake days where I had to wrap the Windows drivers for a Broadcom wireless card. That hasn't even been an issue since 7.04 as far as I know -- at most you click "enable restricted drivers" and away you go. The aforementioned Brother printer worked immediately when I plugged it into my Ubuntu machine, by the way.
Microsoft bragging about driver support is laughable not only for the fact that their hardware and driver support effing sucks, but unlike Linux, Microsoft can't even use the vendors-aren't-supporting-us excuse.
Finally:
The remaining devices were almost all served by downloading drivers from Windows Update
Has anyone, in the history of humanity, ever gotten that to work? I don't mean the part where it connects to some anonymous server in Redmond and sends them god-knows-what information -- I mean, has anyone actually come out on the other end of that process with a driver? In fifteen years I haven't seen it happen even once, and I don't think I've ever heard of it happening.
all drivers included, "almost all" could be downoaded easily. No matter what you think of Microsoft, that information is pretty much astonishing.
It'd be astonishing if it were true, but somehow I doubt reality is anything close to this. Your quote comes from the pen of Steven Sinofsky, the guy in charge of Windows 7 engineering, and like every other claim Microsoft makes about how great their OS will be this time, it's just as much BS now as it was every other time we've heard it.
We're not evolving in any meaningful sense of the word. Resistance to disease or narcotic addiction is only "evolution" if you massage the word a lot.
As humans, we do not deal with environmental pressures. Animals have to adapt to their surroundings or perish -- we adapt our surroundings to suit our needs. Through our ability to construct shelter, clothes, and grow food virtually at will, we've neatly removed ourselves from natural selection that way.
Another reason we aren't evolving is because we live in an industrial society where basically any schmuck has a pretty good chance of reproducing and carrying on the gene pool. The world is full of weak, stupid morons who by all rights would have been wolf food long ago, but today they're coddled, protected, somehow manage to mate, and that's their lineage continued. By and large we do not allow people to just fall by the wayside, and most people will eventually find someone willing to have sex with them, even marry. The guy with the body of Schwartzeneggar and the brain of Einstein has about as much chance of producing children as the dingus down the street who can barely figure out how to operate his toaster oven.
Finally, evolution generally only occurs in isolated populations, and usually in populations with relatively low numbers. In a flock of one thousand gulls, one who is just a bit faster or has better eyesight or whatever is going to have a notable advantage at staying alive, and will be adept at outcompeting his peers. In a flock of one hundred thousand, his genetic advantages are barely a drop in a bucket, and for every gull chick produced from his loins, fifty thousand other "lesser" gulls are born. We're a population of nearly seven billion and aren't really constrained by geographic considerations anymore either. Tomorrow's superchild's signal will get completely drowned out by the noise of the slavering, drooling masses around him.
If you kill a fetus, you have killed the potentiality of a child.
And every time a woman ovulates she's doing the same thing, I suppose? That egg was a potential child just as much as a zygote -- given the right circumstances and conditions, both could become human at some point, but there's no guarantee. Hell, most of the time when a sperm meets an egg it doesn't actually implant in the womb anyway, and gets ejected in the next menustrual cycle.
The whole argument about "potential" is unbelievably weak.
Name your daughter "prostitute", and let me know how she fairs elementary and jr. high.
Right. By the time she gets to high school everyone will have matured and moved on from being juvenile about it.
Yeah man, good idea. Let's just wipe out any species which happens to be an inconvenience for humans.
By the way, if you shoot it, you're still going to have to get someone to load it in a truck and haul the carcass away unless you want five hundred pounds of reptile flesh decaying in your yard. As long as you're going to have to cart it away one way or another, why not, y'know, have a heart and let it live?
The idea that a generation of human-fearing crocodiles would arise from your plan is equally laughable. Hell's wrong with you?
Using plural verb forms for entities which are clearly singular (band, group, family, company) but which are by definition composed of multiple individual components -- that's a quirk of Brits. You know, the ones who sneer at Americans for using an inferior dialect of English, yet can't seem to figure out basic subject/verb agreement or the concept of collective nouns?
In general, when merely verifying employment, someone will call your previous employer's HR department and ask "Did Joey Ramone work there?" and the HR person will say "Yes, his employment was from November 2001 to February 2009," or whatever.
My understanding is that's all they're allowed to say by law, but even if I'm wrong, corporations aren't stupid about CYA -- they'd rather just give a bland fact like the above and leave it at that, so they don't position themselves on the receiving end of libel or slander suits. And at any rate, the HR drone answering the question probably has no idea who you are or why you left, nor cares. He or she will check your employment date and termination date, verify it to whoever is asking, and leave it at that.
Your references are altogether different; you get to hand-pick those. So whoever is "implying" that they'd bad-mouth you about this, just don't list them as a reference -- then nobody will call them and they'll never get a chance to carry out their threat.
Remember, nobody at your new company knows anyone at your old company. Just list a few co-workers or immediate managers with whom you've worked closely. They'll be in a position to say "Oh yeah, I worked with Joey Ramone for three years, great programmer, very professional."
If it's all "a little more complicated than that" (it usually is), consider emailing the person: "I want to reiterate that I'd prefer my last day to be X, three weeks from now, and asking me to extend this date is not something I believe I can accomodate. Can we work something out?" Wait for the reply -- it'll probably be a rehash of the same veiled threat. Now you have something in writing showing that you gave ample time, were shot down, and you can bring it up with your Legal department, who is likely to take a pretty dim view of anyone placing the company at risk of litigation.
So I said fuck it and I'm buying a MAC.
You're buying a Media Access Control?
You're talking about Photography but Juarez is now infamous for the killings of women there and I'm not sure which definition of "shoot" you're trying to use.
So you're either an idiot for not being able to tell what he means, or an idiot for thinking your comment was even remotely clever or funny. Either way, you're an idiot.
The part you're describing happens apprximately three minutes into the game. Give it a real chance, would ya?
Okay, a lot of Bioshock is standard FPS fare -- collect better guns and items, wander around shooting dudes, and having things collapse in front of you so you have to go the long way around. But it's got quite a few surprises, and even the standard stuff is remarkably well executed. It's not "open" the way, say, Crysis is, but the combination of traps, guns, alternate ammo, and plasmid powers make sure things stay fun. And the atmosphere alone is worth it -- I never got bored of looking at all the pretty.
I personally disagree, but I'll concede you make a point. However, your examples just don't make the point for you.
Virtual Desktop on a massive server over the Network it will seem slow and clunky to the kids especially once they are shown a modern Windows PC that their parents my have for work
Almost without exception, every Windows machine I've had to deal with, other than mine, has been a mind-bogglingly slow piece of garbage. That isn't necessarily because of Windows, but because of the way people load it up with forty thousand useless bits of trash hogging memory and processor cycles. The sales staff at my office are a fine example -- all I ever hear from them, day after day, is how slow their Core 2 Duo 1.8ghz machines are. Machines they really only need for web browsing, Outlook, Word & Excel, and maybe AIM. And every time I look, those machines really are slow, but I see it's because they have ungodly amounts of crap running behind the scenes. Stuff they probably don't know about, but that's the mindset of Windows users and the reality of using an OS that lets application installers puke anywhere they want.
I'm obsessive about keeping mine crap-free and keeping an eye on running processes, and anyone with a clue isn't asking me to look at their computers, so I admit that's something of a skewed set, but you can't tell me with a straight face that Windows in the hands of the average user is "fast" after a week or two.
(Yes, I realise that if you really wanted to, and knew how, you could make a Linux machine slow too, but the difference is that you'd have to go pretty damn far out of your way to do this -- whereas with Windows, the expected method of doing things is to download untrusted executables from unverified websites, run them, and Windows happily lets them do whatever they want as soon as you click 'OK', which everyone does.)
Also because Linux has much better security, when exposed to windows they will feel that it could do more.
Like what, get viruses? Install "Free Smilies" toolbars in the browser? Put useless icons, shortcuts, and systray helpers all over the place? Other than some modern games, which the kids presumably aren't running on school computers anyway, can you name something Windows can do which Linux cannot? Something someone would want to do?
In which case the court can order the caller ID to be blocked. It shouldn't be up to the whim of any schmuck who wants it.
Are they saying that if I take something apart, I can access the components inside? That's astonishing.
Normally I'd agree but this whole stupid situation is made more stupid by the fact that she apparently hid the phone in her underwear. So, what should the school do at this point? If they reach in her pants to try to get it, or even frisk her, suddenly they have a potential sexual harassment suit on their hands. If they tried it and no harassment suit came out of it, then you could -- potentially -- have some unscrupulous teacher leverage that to actually perpetrate harassment: "I was only grabbing her ass because I was checking for contraband cellphones!" Whether or not that's a silly concern is beside the point -- it could happen, and if it never did, the fact that people think it could happen is enough for an outcry from every parent at the school.
So in a situation like that, I'd say letting the police handle it is the only option that avoids some pretty unnecessary complications -- but the police only had to get involved thanks to this girl's phone-in-the-panties manuever, so whatever punishment gets doled out should, in my estimation, be increased for not only wasting the local administration's time, but for forcing things to get to the point where police had to get involved. Police that could be doing more important things, like driving around looking for evildoers who forgot to renew their tag.