Watch yourself. Those who question The List are probably destined to end up on The List.
Understand.....whether or not it works for the stated purpose is utterly irrelevant. All that matters is that ignorant people believe that it works. It's like Homeopathic Government. Rule by Placebo.
And also understand.....all these draconian measures have little or nothing to do, really, with fighting terrorism. That's the "cover story." It's all about control -- control of "We, the people." The people who more and more are considered an utterly irrelevant nuisance to those in power.
This is a perfect example of the two-edged sword of "open information." I think it's pretty universal that we are all in favor of "open information" until it is your information that is at stake.
There is also another hypocrisy at work. Many (even some on this board who cry "information wants to be free!"), if finding themselves in the position of being an employer doing a background check on someone would probably still think twice if something marginally "suspect" came up. It's all well and good to pontificate in theory about "innocent until proved guilty" and "youthful indiscretions" and "the law and the courts do make mistakes" and such, but try to tell me that if you are hiring a school bus driver, and the applicant was once accused of molesting a child, but found not guilty, that you wouldn't nevertheless pass right over that person and onto the next. Or if you're hiring a bookkeeper and find that they were once accused of embezzlement, but the charges were dropped. Don't tell me you wouldn't. But if the shoe were on the other foot, you would be hoping like hell that your own past "glitches" don't turn up when you need a job.
There is also the problem of interpretation and context. 32 years ago, as a reckless and confused youth of 18, I was arrested for some "indiscretions," even spending a few days in the pokey. Misdemeanors all; however, because of the nature and circumstances of the incident and the wording of the law at that time, one of the charges has a rather uncomfortable ring, if you look at just the term used. The reality, though still a bit hinky, is not nearly as bad as one would assume looking at the charge, and the laws have changed to where the specific act that happened to fall under that statute is no longer even unlawful. Still, it would be very uncomfortable to have to "explain" the situation. Fortunately, it has only come up once, very early on, and I have held several jobs since then with no problems, either because an extensive background check was not done (as it was not for most non-sensitive jobs until the paranoia of recent years), or eventually the check simply did not go back far enough to turn it up (most commercially provided background checks only go back so many years). Yet every time this subject comes up, I get antsy thinking "what if that small police department one day decides to dig through their basement, dust off all those moldy old records, digitize them, and put them on the Web for the world to see?"
Indeed. Back when I was young I was heavily into photography, and often carried an SLR with a 135mm lens. Back then nobody cared.
Same here...from the age of about 16 to 25 I was a very active amateur photog, and carted my SLR and a couple of extra lenses everywhere. Only once was I ever confronted, but not by a rent-a-cop. I was photographing a public event at which a radio station was doing a remote, and it seems that one of the female DJs, who did public appearances all the time around town, didn't want someone taking her picture! So her male DJ partner got in my face about it. Go figure that one out.....
Anyway, I see pics on Flickr, etc. all the time people have taken in malls -- it's just that they are taking them with camera phones or little cheapo digitals. The more serious and professional (and larger and more obvious) your equipment is, the greater the suspicion you arouse these days. It's not so much what you are doing, but how and with what. A gaggle of giggling girls taking camera pics of each other, the singer performing outside the food court, and the dresses in the window of a store aren't going to arouse the slightest bit of notice. A lone, middle-aged man with a professional SLR taking his time photographing store fronts, however, will. And if you happen to look not terribly "Aryan," well, then you're screwed.
Not to be flippant, but does anyone really believe there is any privacy anymore with simple, unencrypted email?
Does anyone really believe there is any privacy anymore with ANYTHING? Technology, government and law enforcement practices, and the general public indifference are all converging to insure that nothing is hidden. Rant and rave, fight the good fight, but those of us who give a shit are becoming increasingly rare. It's an out of control freight train that can't be stopped -- delayed maybe, diverted to do less damage perhaps, but unstoppable.
The only thing you can do is try to leave as small a footprint as possible. I know damn well that if someone really wanted to find me, or know my business, they could do so. I long ago abandoned any notion of being able to prevent any and all personal, corporate, or governmental snooping. All I can do is use some common sense, do nothing to call attention to myself, and try to make it as difficult as possible so as to not be worth the effort for all but those who are truly determined. And try to avoid doing the things that would make those determined folks want to find me.
Unfortunately, the list of those things gets longer everyday, and all those peculiar interests and eccentric foibles I used to take pride in may now well brand me as "suspicious" and worthy of further scrutiny.
So, who foots the bill for this? The retailer, the credit card comany / debit card issuer, or the customer?
The credit card company raises my rates to cover their expenses, the government uses my taxes to pay for the investigation and prosecution, looks like I'm paying for it!
Dude, the customer pays for everything one way or another -- haven't you figured that out by now?
So is my name, but somehow someone with the same full name I have beat me to a gmail address with my name on it. Am I crying about it? Am I yelling BLOODY CAPITALIZED MURDER? No, I got over it. I moved on. I got a slightly different email address. And I'm fine now.
That is an entirely different situation (and you know it). No one is telling you you can't use your name because it contains a "dirty word." It would be one thing if there were another Dr. Libshitz out there, and the good doctor in the story merely had the option of appending a random number, or his birth year, or something else to the name. No matter what he does, if his surname is to be included, it is still verboten. And all because of a very silly and overly-broad anti-expletive policy, not because there are legions of Libshitz's competing for that address.
And BTW, my sincere apologies if my use of a few capitalized phrases got your panties in a wad. So, I'm a little lazy and sometimes it's faster to just hit the shift key for emphasis than putting in HTML codes to italicize or bold the text. Mea culpa. I shall deny myself dessert this evening in self-reproach...
No, I think you're attributing far too much malice to something that was probably just some minor programming/validation/usability error.
Probably some programmer/web monkey/contractor got overzealous in the form validation he implemented. You know, some people do enter bogus information on web forms. And some people will register an email address that says eatshit@verizon.
Leaving aside the whole über-issue of "naughty" words in general (I could rant for hours on that), it still remains absurd that someone might be offended not by the word itself, used contextually, but the same four-letter string happening to be part of another legitimate word or name. And the more important point that you bring up: more and more, we are cutting the human element and common sense out of these things and just trusting the software to do the work for us. So, Verizon couldn't just have a human look at the case in question, understand that there is no "expletive" issue here, and manually override the rejection of his name? Or did they leave themselves with no way to do that? Even the Internet filters that we all hate and revile usually have the provision for the user to manually unblock innocuous sites that are caught up in their overly-broad algorithms. No, apparently, Verizon doesn't want the responsibility of doing that, so they just implement some filters that cannot possibly understand the difference of intent between "eatshit@verizon" and "libshitz@verizon." That takes a human being with a brain actually taking a few minutes to review and correct, but I guess that is too much of a bother for them.
It has everything to do with the EMAIL ADDRESS he apparently wasn't willing to change. They wouldn't grant him the address he requested. All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine. I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.
Are you serious? Why in the hell should he have to -- IT'S HIS NAME. It's on his birth certificate, his Social Security card, his drivers license. It's probably in the phone book, and on every check he's ever written. And now he can't use his OWN LEGAL NAME that he has had since birth for his e-mail address because it "contains an expletive?" It's not even like he's some anarchistic goofball who somehow managed to legally change his surname to "Shit" in an attempt to be cute or radical -- it's his family name, borne by his ancestors, and it just happens to contain that four-letter sequence in the middle of the name. And, what, he can't use it because somewhere, somehow there might be some handful of insanely moralistic wackos who would be offended by it?
I'm sorry, but this is just about the most ridiculous thing I've heard of in my life. And, given what I've witnessed in my half century on this planet, that's really saying something.
Reading this thread, I am amazed (as I often am) at the naivete of the Slashdot crowd. But then, what do you expect from folks who think that a handful of geeks refusing to patronize the big record companies is going to bring the RIAA to their knees?
The IOC should ban China's team from participating? Yeah, that's gonna work. And China's going to lay right down and take it, huh? They will simply counter-threaten to shut the games down entirely. Beijing holds most of the cards here.
Withdraw the U.S. team in protest? Yeah, that worked real well in Moscow, and look how it changed the world. All that does is penalize the athletes who have worked hard for years to get where they are, and effectively make them disposable pawns in a political chess game.
The best are the folks who say that we should not watch the Olympics in protest. Sure. That will make about a 0.00000000000000000000000001% dent in the Nielsens. Utterly useless. Hey, I disagree strongly with some of the NCAA's policies -- does that mean I should protest by not watching my alma mater's football games on TV?
No one with half a brain didn't see this coming. In fact, I think the IOC and pretty much everyone else associated with the Games expected it. Considering all the ways in which Beijing could fuck up the Olympics, I think the repercussions of journalists not being able to reach websites about Falun Gong or Tiennammen Square during a sporting event is not too bitter of a pill to swallow. Is this censorship a breach of what China agreed to? Absolutely. Is it worth creating a political brouhaha and potentially screwing the Olympics over? Absolutely not.
.....and then shut down -- if the servers overload that quickly, they're going to fade into obscurity pretty damn fast.
But I saw enough in those 5 minutes to realize it has major problems:
-- Returned fewer results than Google on 2/3 of my searches
-- Compound "words" (such as, say, "georgebush" as opposed to "George Bush" as might be found in file names, tags, captions, etc.) produce NO results
-- Eliminates common words, connectors, and even pronouns from exact phrase searches, which defeats the whole point
-- Seems to have no provision for ordering by date or viewing most recent additions
-- Also does not seem to allow more than 10 results per page, which severely slows things down
-- Their "safesearch" (which I wouldn't use, but I wanted to try it for comparison) seems to eliminate even some innocuous terms
-- Some of the images that accompany the entries have nothing to do with the actual webpage listed
-- The layout sucks with their "paragraphs all over the page" format -- Give me a LIST, dammit, that I can quickly scroll through and scan
Overall, just as useless to me as most search engines have been. Google has its own faults, and you may rightly criticize them for their ethics, privacy policies, or business practices, but it is still a far better tool, and no one is seriously challenging their dominance anytime soon.
UPDATE: It just came back up. Why am I seeing many of the SAME results on page 2 and 3 and 4 as I saw on page 1? Is it just repeating entries to inflate the numbers for results? This thing is not just "not ready for prime time" -- it's not even ready for "obscure middle-of-the-night cable slot."
Who's passing a bill? They introduce it, it gets shot down. Repeat. The other two didn't pass, did they? Everybody's happy.
But it is wrong that it even got introduced. It would be like introducing a bill that allowed the government to take whatever you owned with no warrant and the ability to sell that at auctions. Sure that bill wouldn't get voted in, and hopefully the supreme court would find it un-constitutional, but it shouldn't have gotten introduced.
Guys, this is the way Congress works much of the time. It doesn't matter if a bill actually passes or not. Maybe sometimes they don't even really want it to pass. You introduce the thing, you know it isn't going to pass, it gets debated endlessly or dies a slow death due to indifference or actually makes it to a vote and gets shot down like a crippled pheasant. But the congresscritter(s) who introduced it gets to crow to (choose one) constituents/lobbyists/media/all of the above, "See? I tried to (choose one) protect the children/eliminate drugs/stop piracy/fight the terrorists" and then blame it all on everyone else in the damn institution for not being as vigilant as he/she is.
Besides, don't worry too much -- this do-nothing Congress couldn't pass gas if you gave them a 5 burrito head start.....
Good riddance to him. But how sad for his family. Why do assholes like this feel the need to take others along with them when they decide to check out? It's times like this when I'm sorry to be an atheist -- I want to believe that he's burning in Hell. Mere nonexistence is not a sufficient punishment for him.
So much for spammers being "non-violent" criminals...
Yes, online banking can entail risks and, yes, banks should do all they can to make their sites and procedures secure (while understandably needing to keep the whole process from becoming too cumbersome and unwieldy to the point of making it difficult for many customers, especially the elderly). But what are the actual stats on how widespread the problem is? What percentage of banking customers have actually suffered financial loss due to someone hacking into their account? 1%? 2%? Not even that many? My guess is that it is in reality pretty low -- if it were significantly high, no one would trust doing any financial transaction online. Sure, when there has been a major breach, or some poor soul gets nailed big-time and we read his tale of woe in an article or on a blog somewhere, it gives one pause, but of all the people I know, family and friends, who have online access to their accounts, I know of no one who has had an account breach.
Second, I'd like to see those figures published by institution so that the security-conscious could do some comparison shopping. There may be such a source of information out there, but I have not found it.
Then, obviously, you get the expected three replies to each of those posts and the thread exponentially drifts more and more off-topic until the initial point is lost amongst a haze of Natalie Portman's and gritz.
But "Natalie Portman's [sic] and gritz [sicker]" is the whole reason why I visit Slashdot.
If you buy something for personal use, use it and sell it on ebay or a garage sale I believe that you owe no income taxes on that item if the sale price is less than the purchase price. So the sale of an old grill or suit on ebay is not generally taxable. This counts as recouping some of the money spent on the item not "making money from the sale of an item."
I don't think it makes a diff whether you originally purchased the item for yourself, or deliberately bought it to resell -- in any case, who's to tell? Besides, if you sell it for less than you originally paid for it, technically that is a net loss (Cost of Goods Sold is a deduction on Schedule C), and should reduce your total income. In my case, some books are those that I bought solely for the purpose of reselling and making a profit, while others are books originally purchased for myself that I no longer want, and am reselling just to recoup a few bucks in lieu of tossing it or giving it away. Both situations are identical: I own an item that I paid X for, and I sold it for Y. As long as you have receipts for them, the cost of both is deductible. How would the IRS differentiate between a book I bought to resell that I just got around to listing a year later, or one that I bought for myself a year ago and am now unloading? ARe they going to read my mind?
In a perfect world, I would like to see this as well. But...two problems:
(1) Who gets to make the curriculum for the education? The government? Clergy? Psychologists? All three in some joint effort that will result in a mish-mash compromise? There are good and bad parents of every stripe: religiously, economically, politically. Is the curriculum for the "education" going to be secular or have some religious component? Either way will piss off some potential parents. Will they be taught that it's OK to occasionally spank your kid, or that doing so is tantamount to child abuse? Are parental wannabes who have too low of an income, or live in the "wrong" neighborhood going to be denied a "license?" What if the couple are avowed socialists, or devoted Wiccans, or belong to any number of socially unpopular groups? Try telling a conservative Christian couple that they are too authoritarian, smothering, and narrow-minded to be "allowed" to have a child, while the atheist couple are granted a "fertility license," and just watch the church vs. state sparks fly.
(2) The other problem is this. Liberals and progressives have fought for decades now in favor of a woman's right to control her body. The mantra is that the decision to use contraception, or to terminate a pregnancy, is solely the purview of the woman and her physician, and that no one else should be able to interfere. But if we are going to allow a woman the right to NOT bear a child, it would be difficult to now argue that the state may conversely tell a woman who WANTS to have a child that she may not do so. You can't have it both ways: either a woman is in charge of her uterus, or she's not. Based solely on the societal impact of unwanted or poorly raised children, that dichotomy may seem like an ideal, but you would have a hard time making a convincing legal or philosophical argument for it.
If I pay my neighbor $20 to clean my gutters because I cannot, or he gives me $50 for my old grill when I get a new one, that's income and we're supposed to be honest and report it!
Since when is that income? Have you ever read the tax code?
Um, no. If you sell used equipment, it's not income -- not unless you had already depreciated it to below the amount you sold it for.
OK, maybe I misled by using the word "income." If you sell that grill at the flea market, or on eBay, it damn sure is taxable, though. You're making money from the sale of an item -- by engaging in the sale, you are making a profit -- it is esentially self-employment even if it is not your main source of income. (Yes, I know with certain types of used goods, like cars and such, we get into Capital Gains and so forth, but still...) I sell a handful of used collectible books every year on eBay, maybe $1000 worth in a good year. I have no storefront, no incorporated business, I am just one private citizen selling things to other private citizens, but the IRS definitely considers that profit from a business, and taxable. It is also subject to Self-Employment Tax as well (since there are no SS/FICA taxes being withheld). Obviously, if you do this sort of thing just once in a blue moon, no one is going to be prying into your affairs or threatening an audit over a few bucks, but if you do it on a regular basis in any kind of public manner (weekly garage sales, flea market table, eBay) you damn sure are supposed to report it. Most don't, of course, which is why eliminating currency and requiring all transactions, even between private individuals, to be trackable, is the ultimate goal.
The government can't stand to have any "unregulated" exchange of goods, services, or capital.
Like, say, cash. I really feel that the government would eliminate currency in a heartbeat if they could get away with it. Millions of cash transactions take place every day between private citizens, and the government would dearly love to have a piece of the action (as in taxes) as well as the information (who sold what to whom, and when, and why). Not to mention the IRS. (If I pay my neighbor $20 to clean my gutters because I cannot, or he gives me $50 for my old grill when I get a new one, that's income and we're supposed to be honest and report it! Yeah, right...) Cash transactions with businesses are a bugaboo, too, as the government can't easily track your purchases or link you to them. The powers that be are very upset when they can't snoop into your financial affairs.
The trend away from cash is slow, but steady. The marketplace helps: we have things like the Green Dot debit cards pushed on the lower classes, painting cash as "old fashioned," inconvenient and risky to carry around. Many government payments at all levels, like welfare/unemployment/etc. are now being paid to people not in the form of a check, but on reloadable debit cards. And the fearmongers are doing a great job associating large cash transactions with crime and terrorism -- obviously if you use an untraceable form of payment, you must have something to hide. Just try paying for an airline ticket in cash, or any large transaction (car, etc.) and you will set off at the very least raised eyebrows, and in some cases alarm bells. You can't even purchase above a certain amount in money orders at the post office now without them having to get more details from you (what they are for, where they are going, etc.). The government would adore having every single financial transaction done electronically so that every cent you spend and the recipients of your payments are trackable.
I own no plastic, save for an ATM card, and make all my purchases in cash. It's just a matter of time before this brands me as an "enemy of the state..."
If people feel compelled to stick photos and information about themselves and their possibly illegal and/or immoral activities on a public website of the friggin' Internet, I have not an ounce of sympathy for them. If you want to do things that may get you in trouble with the law, wreck your marriage, engender a lawsuit, get fired from your job, etc., it doesn't take a genius to understand that it might not be a great idea to advertise those activities to the world...
The point is not whether those who won the election would have won anyway even without tampering. Obviously, those who perpetrated the alleged act believed that there was a chance there might be an upset, and alleged act itself remains criminal.
The ideal way to deal with any controversial issue is to seek action that produces maximum PR benefit with minimum effort and expense. Actual efficacy of the measures taken is irrelevant.
In this case, it's the perfect con:
1. Go after a backwater of the Net that probably less than 1% of your subscribers even know about, let alone use.
2. Cut it off mercilessly -- no surgical strikes here.
3. Lose a dozen or so hothead subscribers in the process. (CEO's annual bonus will be reduced by maybe 6 cents...)
4. Bask in the adulation of the mindless cattle who will "moo" their approval at your strong and fearless proactive stance for the children.
Slashdot Mirror
Terrorist's wouldn't even need to use fake names! They'd just need to abbreviate their real ones.
Or just change their name. I can foresee Hamad Al-Ashiriz becoming "Bubba McCoy."
Watch yourself. Those who question The List are probably destined to end up on The List.
Understand.....whether or not it works for the stated purpose is utterly irrelevant. All that matters is that ignorant people believe that it works. It's like Homeopathic Government. Rule by Placebo.
And also understand.....all these draconian measures have little or nothing to do, really, with fighting terrorism. That's the "cover story." It's all about control -- control of "We, the people." The people who more and more are considered an utterly irrelevant nuisance to those in power.
This is a perfect example of the two-edged sword of "open information." I think it's pretty universal that we are all in favor of "open information" until it is your information that is at stake.
There is also another hypocrisy at work. Many (even some on this board who cry "information wants to be free!"), if finding themselves in the position of being an employer doing a background check on someone would probably still think twice if something marginally "suspect" came up. It's all well and good to pontificate in theory about "innocent until proved guilty" and "youthful indiscretions" and "the law and the courts do make mistakes" and such, but try to tell me that if you are hiring a school bus driver, and the applicant was once accused of molesting a child, but found not guilty, that you wouldn't nevertheless pass right over that person and onto the next. Or if you're hiring a bookkeeper and find that they were once accused of embezzlement, but the charges were dropped. Don't tell me you wouldn't. But if the shoe were on the other foot, you would be hoping like hell that your own past "glitches" don't turn up when you need a job.
There is also the problem of interpretation and context. 32 years ago, as a reckless and confused youth of 18, I was arrested for some "indiscretions," even spending a few days in the pokey. Misdemeanors all; however, because of the nature and circumstances of the incident and the wording of the law at that time, one of the charges has a rather uncomfortable ring, if you look at just the term used. The reality, though still a bit hinky, is not nearly as bad as one would assume looking at the charge, and the laws have changed to where the specific act that happened to fall under that statute is no longer even unlawful. Still, it would be very uncomfortable to have to "explain" the situation. Fortunately, it has only come up once, very early on, and I have held several jobs since then with no problems, either because an extensive background check was not done (as it was not for most non-sensitive jobs until the paranoia of recent years), or eventually the check simply did not go back far enough to turn it up (most commercially provided background checks only go back so many years). Yet every time this subject comes up, I get antsy thinking "what if that small police department one day decides to dig through their basement, dust off all those moldy old records, digitize them, and put them on the Web for the world to see?"
Indeed. Back when I was young I was heavily into photography, and often carried an SLR with a 135mm lens. Back then nobody cared.
Same here...from the age of about 16 to 25 I was a very active amateur photog, and carted my SLR and a couple of extra lenses everywhere. Only once was I ever confronted, but not by a rent-a-cop. I was photographing a public event at which a radio station was doing a remote, and it seems that one of the female DJs, who did public appearances all the time around town, didn't want someone taking her picture! So her male DJ partner got in my face about it. Go figure that one out.....
Anyway, I see pics on Flickr, etc. all the time people have taken in malls -- it's just that they are taking them with camera phones or little cheapo digitals. The more serious and professional (and larger and more obvious) your equipment is, the greater the suspicion you arouse these days. It's not so much what you are doing, but how and with what. A gaggle of giggling girls taking camera pics of each other, the singer performing outside the food court, and the dresses in the window of a store aren't going to arouse the slightest bit of notice. A lone, middle-aged man with a professional SLR taking his time photographing store fronts, however, will. And if you happen to look not terribly "Aryan," well, then you're screwed.
For reviews in the USA, does this not go against the spirit of the first amendment (freedom of the press) even if not the letter of it?
What is this "first amendment" of which you speak? No doubt some ancient and outmoded document that no one takes seriously anymore.....
Not to be flippant, but does anyone really believe there is any privacy anymore with simple, unencrypted email?
Does anyone really believe there is any privacy anymore with ANYTHING? Technology, government and law enforcement practices, and the general public indifference are all converging to insure that nothing is hidden. Rant and rave, fight the good fight, but those of us who give a shit are becoming increasingly rare. It's an out of control freight train that can't be stopped -- delayed maybe, diverted to do less damage perhaps, but unstoppable.
The only thing you can do is try to leave as small a footprint as possible. I know damn well that if someone really wanted to find me, or know my business, they could do so. I long ago abandoned any notion of being able to prevent any and all personal, corporate, or governmental snooping. All I can do is use some common sense, do nothing to call attention to myself, and try to make it as difficult as possible so as to not be worth the effort for all but those who are truly determined. And try to avoid doing the things that would make those determined folks want to find me.
Unfortunately, the list of those things gets longer everyday, and all those peculiar interests and eccentric foibles I used to take pride in may now well brand me as "suspicious" and worthy of further scrutiny.
So, who foots the bill for this? The retailer, the credit card comany / debit card issuer, or the customer?
The credit card company raises my rates to cover their expenses, the government uses my taxes to pay for the investigation and prosecution, looks like I'm paying for it!
Dude, the customer pays for everything one way or another -- haven't you figured that out by now?
So is my name, but somehow someone with the same full name I have beat me to a gmail address with my name on it. Am I crying about it? Am I yelling BLOODY CAPITALIZED MURDER? No, I got over it. I moved on. I got a slightly different email address. And I'm fine now.
That is an entirely different situation (and you know it). No one is telling you you can't use your name because it contains a "dirty word." It would be one thing if there were another Dr. Libshitz out there, and the good doctor in the story merely had the option of appending a random number, or his birth year, or something else to the name. No matter what he does, if his surname is to be included, it is still verboten. And all because of a very silly and overly-broad anti-expletive policy, not because there are legions of Libshitz's competing for that address.
And BTW, my sincere apologies if my use of a few capitalized phrases got your panties in a wad. So, I'm a little lazy and sometimes it's faster to just hit the shift key for emphasis than putting in HTML codes to italicize or bold the text. Mea culpa. I shall deny myself dessert this evening in self-reproach...
No, I think you're attributing far too much malice to something that was probably just some minor programming/validation/usability error.
Probably some programmer/web monkey/contractor got overzealous in the form validation he implemented. You know, some people do enter bogus information on web forms. And some people will register an email address that says eatshit@verizon.
Leaving aside the whole über-issue of "naughty" words in general (I could rant for hours on that), it still remains absurd that someone might be offended not by the word itself, used contextually, but the same four-letter string happening to be part of another legitimate word or name. And the more important point that you bring up: more and more, we are cutting the human element and common sense out of these things and just trusting the software to do the work for us. So, Verizon couldn't just have a human look at the case in question, understand that there is no "expletive" issue here, and manually override the rejection of his name? Or did they leave themselves with no way to do that? Even the Internet filters that we all hate and revile usually have the provision for the user to manually unblock innocuous sites that are caught up in their overly-broad algorithms. No, apparently, Verizon doesn't want the responsibility of doing that, so they just implement some filters that cannot possibly understand the difference of intent between "eatshit@verizon" and "libshitz@verizon." That takes a human being with a brain actually taking a few minutes to review and correct, but I guess that is too much of a bother for them.
It has everything to do with the EMAIL ADDRESS he apparently wasn't willing to change. They wouldn't grant him the address he requested. All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine. I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.
Are you serious? Why in the hell should he have to -- IT'S HIS NAME. It's on his birth certificate, his Social Security card, his drivers license. It's probably in the phone book, and on every check he's ever written. And now he can't use his OWN LEGAL NAME that he has had since birth for his e-mail address because it "contains an expletive?" It's not even like he's some anarchistic goofball who somehow managed to legally change his surname to "Shit" in an attempt to be cute or radical -- it's his family name, borne by his ancestors, and it just happens to contain that four-letter sequence in the middle of the name. And, what, he can't use it because somewhere, somehow there might be some handful of insanely moralistic wackos who would be offended by it?
I'm sorry, but this is just about the most ridiculous thing I've heard of in my life. And, given what I've witnessed in my half century on this planet, that's really saying something.
Does anyone understand that people are totally unwilling to give up their security and control to anyone else.....
Have you been living in a cave since before 9/11?
Reading this thread, I am amazed (as I often am) at the naivete of the Slashdot crowd. But then, what do you expect from folks who think that a handful of geeks refusing to patronize the big record companies is going to bring the RIAA to their knees?
The IOC should ban China's team from participating? Yeah, that's gonna work. And China's going to lay right down and take it, huh? They will simply counter-threaten to shut the games down entirely. Beijing holds most of the cards here.
Withdraw the U.S. team in protest? Yeah, that worked real well in Moscow, and look how it changed the world. All that does is penalize the athletes who have worked hard for years to get where they are, and effectively make them disposable pawns in a political chess game.
The best are the folks who say that we should not watch the Olympics in protest. Sure. That will make about a 0.00000000000000000000000001% dent in the Nielsens. Utterly useless. Hey, I disagree strongly with some of the NCAA's policies -- does that mean I should protest by not watching my alma mater's football games on TV?
No one with half a brain didn't see this coming. In fact, I think the IOC and pretty much everyone else associated with the Games expected it. Considering all the ways in which Beijing could fuck up the Olympics, I think the repercussions of journalists not being able to reach websites about Falun Gong or Tiennammen Square during a sporting event is not too bitter of a pill to swallow. Is this censorship a breach of what China agreed to? Absolutely. Is it worth creating a political brouhaha and potentially screwing the Olympics over? Absolutely not.
.....and then shut down -- if the servers overload that quickly, they're going to fade into obscurity pretty damn fast.
But I saw enough in those 5 minutes to realize it has major problems:
-- Returned fewer results than Google on 2/3 of my searches
-- Compound "words" (such as, say, "georgebush" as opposed to "George Bush" as might be found in file names, tags, captions, etc.) produce NO results
-- Eliminates common words, connectors, and even pronouns from exact phrase searches, which defeats the whole point
-- Seems to have no provision for ordering by date or viewing most recent additions
-- Also does not seem to allow more than 10 results per page, which severely slows things down
-- Their "safesearch" (which I wouldn't use, but I wanted to try it for comparison) seems to eliminate even some innocuous terms
-- Some of the images that accompany the entries have nothing to do with the actual webpage listed
-- The layout sucks with their "paragraphs all over the page" format -- Give me a LIST, dammit, that I can quickly scroll through and scan
Overall, just as useless to me as most search engines have been. Google has its own faults, and you may rightly criticize them for their ethics, privacy policies, or business practices, but it is still a far better tool, and no one is seriously challenging their dominance anytime soon.
UPDATE: It just came back up. Why am I seeing many of the SAME results on page 2 and 3 and 4 as I saw on page 1? Is it just repeating entries to inflate the numbers for results? This thing is not just "not ready for prime time" -- it's not even ready for "obscure middle-of-the-night cable slot."
Who's passing a bill? They introduce it, it gets shot down. Repeat. The other two didn't pass, did they? Everybody's happy.
But it is wrong that it even got introduced. It would be like introducing a bill that allowed the government to take whatever you owned with no warrant and the ability to sell that at auctions. Sure that bill wouldn't get voted in, and hopefully the supreme court would find it un-constitutional, but it shouldn't have gotten introduced.
Guys, this is the way Congress works much of the time. It doesn't matter if a bill actually passes or not. Maybe sometimes they don't even really want it to pass. You introduce the thing, you know it isn't going to pass, it gets debated endlessly or dies a slow death due to indifference or actually makes it to a vote and gets shot down like a crippled pheasant. But the congresscritter(s) who introduced it gets to crow to (choose one) constituents/lobbyists/media/all of the above, "See? I tried to (choose one) protect the children/eliminate drugs/stop piracy/fight the terrorists" and then blame it all on everyone else in the damn institution for not being as vigilant as he/she is.
Besides, don't worry too much -- this do-nothing Congress couldn't pass gas if you gave them a 5 burrito head start.....
Good riddance to him. But how sad for his family. Why do assholes like this feel the need to take others along with them when they decide to check out? It's times like this when I'm sorry to be an atheist -- I want to believe that he's burning in Hell. Mere nonexistence is not a sufficient punishment for him.
So much for spammers being "non-violent" criminals...
Yes, online banking can entail risks and, yes, banks should do all they can to make their sites and procedures secure (while understandably needing to keep the whole process from becoming too cumbersome and unwieldy to the point of making it difficult for many customers, especially the elderly). But what are the actual stats on how widespread the problem is? What percentage of banking customers have actually suffered financial loss due to someone hacking into their account? 1%? 2%? Not even that many? My guess is that it is in reality pretty low -- if it were significantly high, no one would trust doing any financial transaction online. Sure, when there has been a major breach, or some poor soul gets nailed big-time and we read his tale of woe in an article or on a blog somewhere, it gives one pause, but of all the people I know, family and friends, who have online access to their accounts, I know of no one who has had an account breach.
Second, I'd like to see those figures published by institution so that the security-conscious could do some comparison shopping. There may be such a source of information out there, but I have not found it.
Then, obviously, you get the expected three replies to each of those posts and the thread exponentially drifts more and more off-topic until the initial point is lost amongst a haze of Natalie Portman's and gritz.
But "Natalie Portman's [sic] and gritz [sicker]" is the whole reason why I visit Slashdot.
Grammar is for Grandmas -- it's so 20th century.....
If you buy something for personal use, use it and sell it on ebay or a garage sale I believe that you owe no income taxes on that item if the sale price is less than the purchase price. So the sale of an old grill or suit on ebay is not generally taxable. This counts as recouping some of the money spent on the item not "making money from the sale of an item."
I don't think it makes a diff whether you originally purchased the item for yourself, or deliberately bought it to resell -- in any case, who's to tell? Besides, if you sell it for less than you originally paid for it, technically that is a net loss (Cost of Goods Sold is a deduction on Schedule C), and should reduce your total income. In my case, some books are those that I bought solely for the purpose of reselling and making a profit, while others are books originally purchased for myself that I no longer want, and am reselling just to recoup a few bucks in lieu of tossing it or giving it away. Both situations are identical: I own an item that I paid X for, and I sold it for Y. As long as you have receipts for them, the cost of both is deductible. How would the IRS differentiate between a book I bought to resell that I just got around to listing a year later, or one that I bought for myself a year ago and am now unloading? ARe they going to read my mind?
Licenses and education required for breeding.
In a perfect world, I would like to see this as well. But...two problems:
(1) Who gets to make the curriculum for the education? The government? Clergy? Psychologists? All three in some joint effort that will result in a mish-mash compromise? There are good and bad parents of every stripe: religiously, economically, politically. Is the curriculum for the "education" going to be secular or have some religious component? Either way will piss off some potential parents. Will they be taught that it's OK to occasionally spank your kid, or that doing so is tantamount to child abuse? Are parental wannabes who have too low of an income, or live in the "wrong" neighborhood going to be denied a "license?" What if the couple are avowed socialists, or devoted Wiccans, or belong to any number of socially unpopular groups? Try telling a conservative Christian couple that they are too authoritarian, smothering, and narrow-minded to be "allowed" to have a child, while the atheist couple are granted a "fertility license," and just watch the church vs. state sparks fly.
(2) The other problem is this. Liberals and progressives have fought for decades now in favor of a woman's right to control her body. The mantra is that the decision to use contraception, or to terminate a pregnancy, is solely the purview of the woman and her physician, and that no one else should be able to interfere. But if we are going to allow a woman the right to NOT bear a child, it would be difficult to now argue that the state may conversely tell a woman who WANTS to have a child that she may not do so. You can't have it both ways: either a woman is in charge of her uterus, or she's not. Based solely on the societal impact of unwanted or poorly raised children, that dichotomy may seem like an ideal, but you would have a hard time making a convincing legal or philosophical argument for it.
If I pay my neighbor $20 to clean my gutters because I cannot, or he gives me $50 for my old grill when I get a new one, that's income and we're supposed to be honest and report it!
Since when is that income? Have you ever read the tax code?
Um, no. If you sell used equipment, it's not income -- not unless you had already depreciated it to below the amount you sold it for.
OK, maybe I misled by using the word "income." If you sell that grill at the flea market, or on eBay, it damn sure is taxable, though. You're making money from the sale of an item -- by engaging in the sale, you are making a profit -- it is esentially self-employment even if it is not your main source of income. (Yes, I know with certain types of used goods, like cars and such, we get into Capital Gains and so forth, but still...) I sell a handful of used collectible books every year on eBay, maybe $1000 worth in a good year. I have no storefront, no incorporated business, I am just one private citizen selling things to other private citizens, but the IRS definitely considers that profit from a business, and taxable. It is also subject to Self-Employment Tax as well (since there are no SS/FICA taxes being withheld). Obviously, if you do this sort of thing just once in a blue moon, no one is going to be prying into your affairs or threatening an audit over a few bucks, but if you do it on a regular basis in any kind of public manner (weekly garage sales, flea market table, eBay) you damn sure are supposed to report it. Most don't, of course, which is why eliminating currency and requiring all transactions, even between private individuals, to be trackable, is the ultimate goal.
The government can't stand to have any "unregulated" exchange of goods, services, or capital.
Like, say, cash. I really feel that the government would eliminate currency in a heartbeat if they could get away with it. Millions of cash transactions take place every day between private citizens, and the government would dearly love to have a piece of the action (as in taxes) as well as the information (who sold what to whom, and when, and why). Not to mention the IRS. (If I pay my neighbor $20 to clean my gutters because I cannot, or he gives me $50 for my old grill when I get a new one, that's income and we're supposed to be honest and report it! Yeah, right...) Cash transactions with businesses are a bugaboo, too, as the government can't easily track your purchases or link you to them. The powers that be are very upset when they can't snoop into your financial affairs.
The trend away from cash is slow, but steady. The marketplace helps: we have things like the Green Dot debit cards pushed on the lower classes, painting cash as "old fashioned," inconvenient and risky to carry around. Many government payments at all levels, like welfare/unemployment/etc. are now being paid to people not in the form of a check, but on reloadable debit cards. And the fearmongers are doing a great job associating large cash transactions with crime and terrorism -- obviously if you use an untraceable form of payment, you must have something to hide. Just try paying for an airline ticket in cash, or any large transaction (car, etc.) and you will set off at the very least raised eyebrows, and in some cases alarm bells. You can't even purchase above a certain amount in money orders at the post office now without them having to get more details from you (what they are for, where they are going, etc.). The government would adore having every single financial transaction done electronically so that every cent you spend and the recipients of your payments are trackable.
I own no plastic, save for an ATM card, and make all my purchases in cash. It's just a matter of time before this brands me as an "enemy of the state..."
If people feel compelled to stick photos and information about themselves and their possibly illegal and/or immoral activities on a public website of the friggin' Internet, I have not an ounce of sympathy for them. If you want to do things that may get you in trouble with the law, wreck your marriage, engender a lawsuit, get fired from your job, etc., it doesn't take a genius to understand that it might not be a great idea to advertise those activities to the world...
The point is not whether those who won the election would have won anyway even without tampering. Obviously, those who perpetrated the alleged act believed that there was a chance there might be an upset, and alleged act itself remains criminal.
The ideal way to deal with any controversial issue is to seek action that produces maximum PR benefit with minimum effort and expense. Actual efficacy of the measures taken is irrelevant.
In this case, it's the perfect con:
1. Go after a backwater of the Net that probably less than 1% of your subscribers even know about, let alone use.
2. Cut it off mercilessly -- no surgical strikes here.
3. Lose a dozen or so hothead subscribers in the process. (CEO's annual bonus will be reduced by maybe 6 cents...)
4. Bask in the adulation of the mindless cattle who will "moo" their approval at your strong and fearless proactive stance for the children.
What on earth can the ISP's do against child porn, other than snooping around in real time at everything all users do?
Right -- that should be the government's job.....