You may not like to do that on cell phones or face to face very often, but obviously you enjoy discussing things on/., sharing thoughts and in a way being a social creature. Or am I seeing it all wrong?
Apples and oranges. One, I am typing quietly in the privacy of my own home -- I'm not assaulting innocent bystanders with my business. People who read my comments choose to read them -- I'm not broadcasting them to people who have no interest in this board. Two, I am conveying specific thoughts and comments in response to a particular subject or thread -- I'm not just idly pecking at my keyboard for the sake of something to do. I probably post 3 or 4 messages a week here, if that, and only when I have something that I believe to be germane to the ongoing discussion, whether in the form of a reasoned commentary or simply what I hope is a witty one-liner. (Though the latter are not always viewed as witty by the mods...)
When it comes to many of the cellphone conversations I hear, a more apt parallel would be if I spent hours on end on Slashdot compulsively responding to every post and thread I could find for no particular reason other than boredom and the inability to be still and at rest. Have you ever actually listened to many of the cellphone conversations that take place around you? People talking endlessly about absolutely nothing of substance. Maybe I'm just a creature apart from most humans, but I don't get that. We communicate (supposedly) to convey information, to express an opinion, to comfort someone emotionally, etc. Talking to just fill up time, alleviate boredom, or avoid dealing with one's own inner thoughts is noise, not communication. (And noise that negatively impacts the lives of those within earshot.) We are losing the art and pleasure of being alone with ourselves -- to contemplate, meditate, or just clear out the cobwebs and relax. You can't do any of that while endlessly yakking about everything under the sun just to be heard.
I suppose my whole attitude towards the subject is expressed in a favorite quote: "The intelligent man speaks because he has something to say -- the ignorant man speaks because he has to say something."
I don't understand the complains about people talking on their phones. What if the other person they were talking to was right there? Still talking about the same things, still as much in your ear space...
Actually, that can be just as bad, probably worse. It amazes me how LOUDLY some people seem to think they have to talk when their conversational partner is seated three feet away from them. Many a time I've been on a bus and, with my own headphones turned up loud, I can still hear and understand the conversation of people seated 2/3 of the way down the bus from me. There is a restaurant where I sometimes eat breakfast in which a group on 3 people often are there at the same time, and you can clearly hear their conversations throughout the entire (fairly large) room.
I suppose what puzzles me is: I know that expecting folks to have any sense of courtesy towards others is long gone in our society. But what about YOU, Mr. or Ms. Loud Talker? Why do you not care that everybody within 50 feet of you can hear your private business? If I am in public chatting with a friend, my conversation is intended for that person's ears only, and needs go no further. And please don't give me that excuse along the lines of "well, some people just naturally talk loudly -- that is their 'normal' voice." Sorry -- we intelligent monkeys have these things call brains that regulate what our bodies do. My brain can instruct my voice to speak in a barely audible whisper, or scream at the top of my lungs, and everything in-between. It's not a matter of not being able to moderate one's voice -- it's a matter of not caring. And having no sense of self-control or caring that perfect strangers can hear all the details of your brother's operation, or the hot date you had last night. They don't want or need to hear it, and you shouldn't want them to hear it.
.....we buy phones because most of us are social creatures rather than paranoid conspiracy nuts, and actually like being able to make contact with other human beings.
Not necessarily. The reason -- and the ONLY reason -- I even own a cellphone is to keep tabs on my 80-year old disabled shut-in mother (for whom I am a full-time caretaker) and enable her to contact me in an emergency if I am out running errands. If it weren't for that need, I wouldn't have the slightest interest in the damn thing. Unlike most people nowadays, I like being alone with my thoughts, my music, or whatever while out and about, and do not have the compulsive need to be constantly talking to anyone about anything at all times. Yes, I have friends (very few -- I look for quality, not quantity), but I chat with them in the privacy and comfort of my own home, maybe once or twice a week for an hour or so. I do not have the need to be yakking with them for hours on end about trivia while riding the bus or shopping at the supermarket or eating lunch out, nor the desire to broadcast those personal conversations to all within earshot.
To me, all these modern devices have made communication too easy and cheapened it, lowering it to the level of a nervous habit akin to chewing gum. We have vastly increased the ability to communicate, yet added nothing of substance or value to that communication. And I believe we are worse off as a society because of it.
I'll be scribbling a note to my legislators today, and maybe another one to the Illinois Times, too. Oh yeah, the Trib and the St Louis Post Dispatch. Might be nice if someone would post a comprehensive list of states so other slashdotters can slashdot their congresscritters' email servers.
You mean legislators actually care about what their constituents think? When did this start?
Why is it that we never heard about this crap in the Trib or the Post?
Maybe because apart from slahdotters, libertarians, privacy advocates, and those who are doing all the file-swapping, the other 97% of the populace just does not give a crap? Rising health care costs -- pretty much everyone cares. Out of sight gas prices? Ditto. War in Iraq? Oh, yeah. Cracking down on P2P file sharers? Ah.....not so much.
Don't waste your time...anyone who has reached adulthood misspelling a word is probably never going to change. A Freshman English professor once said: "If someone has reached the age of 18 utterly convinced that the possessive form of the pronoun 'it' is formed with an apostrophe, nothing you do will ever dissuade them from the notion."
What if someone recorded a few minutes of belching and farting, named it after some song RIAA seeks, clipped it to the lenght and packed with some white noise in the background so that the file size roughly matched and put it up on BT? You see, P2P clients publish a checksum of every file and every expert appointed by the court will admit that an MD5 or SHA checksum is a sufficient proof of the file spotted by RIAA being the same as the file promptly presented to the court by the defendant, with a claim of copyright over it as well (that is, if a few minutes of belching and farting can be deemed creative to be copyrighted at all). Wouldn't that show quite well, how baseless RIAA's "evidence" is?
At the very least, I'd like to be a fly on the wall when the file is played in court.....
About time. The more "mainstream" pub on this whole debacle, the better. I think, if you were to lay out all the facts and history in front of the American people (well, those with brains, anyhoo), they would feel this way:
Is piracy wrong? Yes.
Does much P2P activity infringe on copyrights? Yes.
Do copyright holders have the right to defend and protect those copyrights? Yes.
Do the "yes" answers above justify bullying, intimidation, and harassment; spurious, questionable, and sometimes downright wrong technical claims; spying by 3rd parties; end runs around the legal system; or a general reluctance to allow accused file sharers to defend themselves, or take their case to a court of law? NO.
The last question is where the RIAA loses whatever moral high ground they may have.
However, one of the chief "safety" features of Soyuz is the robustness of the basic capsule itself, which has allowed it to protect the crew, even in the event of the catastrophic failure of several of its systems (one of them exploded on the launchpad, and the crew survived).
Clarification -- it was the booster that exploded on the pad, and after (by a few seconds) the Soyuz had safely blasted away from the booster with its escape rockets (as it was supposed to). The flaw here wasn't in the Soyuz itself, but in the booster and in the support systems. The booster caught fire and almost instantly severed the "hard wire" connections that would normally be used to initiate a pad abort. The controllers managed to initiate the abort by radio signal just before the explosion. But the capsule did exactly what it needed to do, saving the lives of the two cosmonauts (although one was pretty seriously injured in the abort and never flew again).
To work in the intelligence community, and I'm sure to a similar degree in the law enforcement community, you need a clean background to get a clearance. Most of us, myself included, have absolutely no criminal background.....
FWIW, having a clean criminal records check doesn't mean that one is not a criminal. It may simply mean that they've never been caught.....
Much in the same way as the music bigwigs think P2P = infringement (it is a file distribution protocol, and nothing else), all mp3 files are not necessarily infringing. I could make mp3 files of my own music, sound effects I've created (or royalty-free sfx), perhaps a personal audio diary, etc., etc. Unless the file names are blatantly obvious, how would anyone know their content without downloading and listening to every one? So now they want mp3 files to be banned from remote online storage because they might be (or even probably are) copyrighted material? Where does that stop? That's like saying that since most child porn images are in JPG format, therefore storing JPGs online is illegal.
It's fine and dandy for people to use Flash -- as long as I have the option to bypass it. Seems like early on, when people first started using Flash, there was almost always a link to "skip this page" or one labeled "HTML" if you wanted to just get to the meat without all the bells and whistles. I enter a lot of sweepstakes online (go ahead...make fun of me), many of which use Flash in their web presentations, and it seems like nowadays 2/3 of them give you no "opt out" choice -- you just have to let the damn thing load, usually to find that it's just some garish graphic with a "click here to enter" link embedded in it. Yeah....that's real efficient.
Did you bother to read TFA?
File sharing? DRM circumvention? hollywood/music industry??
The only thing that the FA mentions is child pornography, molestation, rape, abuse, etc. Not once do they speak about any of the illegal things you've mentioned.
I'll admit that I've a fear of a legitimate child-porn-tracking system being used to combat other activities, esp. for people in no way involved in such horrific fetishes, but that isn't the point of the system (as stated) that Biden wants.
Whenever law enforcement at any level says of a tactic or system or program, "Don't worry -- we're only going to use it to go after [insert category of criminals here]," always assume an unspoken "NOT" between "we're" and "only." Hello??? Patriot Act, anyone? Warrantless wiretaps? National Security Letters?
If Google traipsed onto the "private road" to take the photo, that's trespassing, and the law should handle it. If they instead stood on the adjacent public highway and the house can be seen from there, well, too bad -- that's fair game. If the owners of the house want visual privacy, they can invest in a fence or large hedge. I'm as big an advocate of privacy as the next guy, but hell, you can't keep people from looking at or taking photos of your house if it is in plain sight. (That's why my dream house would sit in the middle of thick woods, surrounded by a 12-foot fence, surrounded by a moat. And maybe some gators in the moat if I can get a good deal from pets.com.....)
People are worried about big brother scenarios. If this was the UK maybe, but no this is the land of pork barrel projects galore. As such I am not worried. they will spend billions and achieve a semi working prototype that needs to be rebooted every 6 hours.
Yeah, it might work about as well as that piecemeal fence will work keeping out illegals....
I'm torn whether the general inefficiency and ineptitude of our federal government is a good or a bad thing in this case. On one hand, it could lead to the whole system never coming to completion or never working quite right in the first place. OTOH, using a half-assed system manned by incompetents could lead to a whole lotta "false positives" and a lot of ruined innocent lives. It's pretty bad when you expect your government to screw up royally, and are reduced to merely hoping they screw up in such a manner as to do the least possible damage.
If someone started masking these kinds of links as legit links and sent them out in e-mails and such you could wind up with a lot of innocent people being raided by the FBI. And then how do you prove you didn't mean to click on the link?
What about hidden frames that open these kinds of links?
What about use of javascript, flash, java, or other embedded technology to make http requests in the background?
It just seems way too easy to get innocent people caught up in this sort of trap.
Does anyone still even give a shit about the innocent as long as some bad guys are caught? In the wars on drugs, terrorism, kiddie porn, and all other hot buzz quests, I was under the impression that innocent people caught up in their dragnets have been viewed as "acceptable collateral damage" for quite some time now.
Before anyone starts foaming at the mouth about big companies I say this. They already run your health system, your financial institutions, your currency, transportation systems, and your food supply. It's not such a big leap.
Let's see....
Health system = millions of uninsured, outrageous costs, inconsistent care with no coordination
Currency = check current exchange rates: need I say more?
Transportation systems = Think about that next time you're in gridlock, or sitting on a plane for hours on the tarmac, or trying to efficiently utilize most cities' mass transit
Food supply = E. coli, Mad Cow, various recalls, food poisoning, not to mention the overall lousy nutritional value of most processed foods
And so, I'm supposed to trust "big companies" with my vote....why, exactly? I realize we may have to do something along your suggestion to fix the voting system, but the examples you chose hardly inspire confidence...
The FCC has pending before it "hundreds of thousands of complaints" regarding the broadcast of expletives, Clement said. He argued that the appeals court decision has left the agency "accountable for the coarsening of the airwaves while simultaneously denying it effective tools to address the problem."
I think "hundreds of thousands" is hyperbole -- I can imagine MAYBE a few tens of thousands at most. And it has been shown in the past that the vast majority of these are usually automated "copy, sign, and send" complaints coming from a very tiny group of people associated with some of the right-wing Christian watchdog groups. I seem to recall that of the complaints that came in about the infamous "wardrobe malfunction," all but a tiny handful came from ONE group's members.
I guess I'm someone who just never understood the whole concept of certain words arbitrarily being designated as "naughty." Profanity serves a purpose in language -- it can be overdone, but there are also times when it is entirely appropriate. I cringe every time I watch "Law and Order" or other crime shows and hear some gang member or drug dealer use the contrived euphemism "friggin'" -- it rings SO false and destroys the credibility of the character.
And I guess I don't understand people who are offended to the point of pathology by words. Just words. Not even necessarily the idea behind the words (which can be offensive, for much better reasons) but the words themselves. It's like hearing or using those words is some sort of magical incantation that will corrupt their children, compromise their salvation, and spell the doom of Western civilization.
The best of the bunch are the folks who condescendingly say, "The English language is so rich, there are plenty of words and synonyms -- why so you have to use THOSE words?" And my response is: if you truly appreciate the breadth and variety of the language, why are you trying to LIMIT the number of words that can be used?
Really? You'll still be able to buy single (or multiple) trip tickets for cash, surely?
Any "person of interest" will be sure to be doing that from today, if they weren't already. So as usual, the people the measures are supposed to catch will easily evade them, meanwhile millions of innocent commuters will lose another piece of their privacy.
Give them time.....I'm sure eventually they will do away with currency, probably sooner in the U.K. than in the U.S., but inevitably. The people in power (not to mention divorce lawyers and the like) would absolutely love to be able to know where every penny of your income goes (or comes from, in the case of the tax folks). Here the "Green Dot" and similar refillable debit cards are being hawked in ads everywhere, so eventually more and more poorer folk will be tempted into plastic, under the guise of "security" and "safety" ("Don't carry all that cash around.....") and "convenience." Not to mention those ubiquitous VISA ads that show traffic through some commercial establishment flowing like clockwork, with people waving their smart cards at that infernal little machine, until some nimnul pulls out cash and brings everything to a screeching halt.
Eventually, most Americans will be conditioned to see cash as "slow," "unsafe," and (the worst!) "old-fashioned" and the only citizens left clinging to their dead presidents will be the ignorant, the homeless, and those damned pointy-headed paranoia-spreading, conspiracy-theory nonconformists. It would be rather smooth at that point to phase out the use of currency altogether. Oh, it might be that some private transactions could still go on, perhaps in the form of barter/exchange, or some form of private scrip (which would be clamped down on pretty quickly), or for larger transactions hard metal such as gold (the private ownership of which will no doubt eventually be criminalized), but for the most part we are rushing towards a point at which any transaction involving any commercial enterprise will be logged, stored, and available for the data miners.
No..., If they win.. everything will as it is right now... It can not get worse than this.
As a general rule that is almost infallible, there is nothing on God's Green Earth that "can't get worse." Maybe the sun exploding and wiping out the planet....that might qualify. Anything short of that, though.....
Slashdot Mirror
You may not like to do that on cell phones or face to face very often, but obviously you enjoy discussing things on /., sharing thoughts and in a way being a social creature. Or am I seeing it all wrong?
Apples and oranges. One, I am typing quietly in the privacy of my own home -- I'm not assaulting innocent bystanders with my business. People who read my comments choose to read them -- I'm not broadcasting them to people who have no interest in this board. Two, I am conveying specific thoughts and comments in response to a particular subject or thread -- I'm not just idly pecking at my keyboard for the sake of something to do. I probably post 3 or 4 messages a week here, if that, and only when I have something that I believe to be germane to the ongoing discussion, whether in the form of a reasoned commentary or simply what I hope is a witty one-liner. (Though the latter are not always viewed as witty by the mods...)
When it comes to many of the cellphone conversations I hear, a more apt parallel would be if I spent hours on end on Slashdot compulsively responding to every post and thread I could find for no particular reason other than boredom and the inability to be still and at rest. Have you ever actually listened to many of the cellphone conversations that take place around you? People talking endlessly about absolutely nothing of substance. Maybe I'm just a creature apart from most humans, but I don't get that. We communicate (supposedly) to convey information, to express an opinion, to comfort someone emotionally, etc. Talking to just fill up time, alleviate boredom, or avoid dealing with one's own inner thoughts is noise, not communication. (And noise that negatively impacts the lives of those within earshot.) We are losing the art and pleasure of being alone with ourselves -- to contemplate, meditate, or just clear out the cobwebs and relax. You can't do any of that while endlessly yakking about everything under the sun just to be heard.
I suppose my whole attitude towards the subject is expressed in a favorite quote: "The intelligent man speaks because he has something to say -- the ignorant man speaks because he has to say something."
I don't understand the complains about people talking on their phones. What if the other person they were talking to was right there? Still talking about the same things, still as much in your ear space...
Actually, that can be just as bad, probably worse. It amazes me how LOUDLY some people seem to think they have to talk when their conversational partner is seated three feet away from them. Many a time I've been on a bus and, with my own headphones turned up loud, I can still hear and understand the conversation of people seated 2/3 of the way down the bus from me. There is a restaurant where I sometimes eat breakfast in which a group on 3 people often are there at the same time, and you can clearly hear their conversations throughout the entire (fairly large) room.
I suppose what puzzles me is: I know that expecting folks to have any sense of courtesy towards others is long gone in our society. But what about YOU, Mr. or Ms. Loud Talker? Why do you not care that everybody within 50 feet of you can hear your private business? If I am in public chatting with a friend, my conversation is intended for that person's ears only, and needs go no further. And please don't give me that excuse along the lines of "well, some people just naturally talk loudly -- that is their 'normal' voice." Sorry -- we intelligent monkeys have these things call brains that regulate what our bodies do. My brain can instruct my voice to speak in a barely audible whisper, or scream at the top of my lungs, and everything in-between. It's not a matter of not being able to moderate one's voice -- it's a matter of not caring. And having no sense of self-control or caring that perfect strangers can hear all the details of your brother's operation, or the hot date you had last night. They don't want or need to hear it, and you shouldn't want them to hear it.
Not necessarily. The reason -- and the ONLY reason -- I even own a cellphone is to keep tabs on my 80-year old disabled shut-in mother (for whom I am a full-time caretaker) and enable her to contact me in an emergency if I am out running errands. If it weren't for that need, I wouldn't have the slightest interest in the damn thing. Unlike most people nowadays, I like being alone with my thoughts, my music, or whatever while out and about, and do not have the compulsive need to be constantly talking to anyone about anything at all times. Yes, I have friends (very few -- I look for quality, not quantity), but I chat with them in the privacy and comfort of my own home, maybe once or twice a week for an hour or so. I do not have the need to be yakking with them for hours on end about trivia while riding the bus or shopping at the supermarket or eating lunch out, nor the desire to broadcast those personal conversations to all within earshot.
To me, all these modern devices have made communication too easy and cheapened it, lowering it to the level of a nervous habit akin to chewing gum. We have vastly increased the ability to communicate, yet added nothing of substance or value to that communication. And I believe we are worse off as a society because of it.
Feel free to mod me down as "-1 old fogy."
I'll be scribbling a note to my legislators today, and maybe another one to the Illinois Times, too. Oh yeah, the Trib and the St Louis Post Dispatch. Might be nice if someone would post a comprehensive list of states so other slashdotters can slashdot their congresscritters' email servers.
You mean legislators actually care about what their constituents think? When did this start?
Why is it that we never heard about this crap in the Trib or the Post?
Maybe because apart from slahdotters, libertarians, privacy advocates, and those who are doing all the file-swapping, the other 97% of the populace just does not give a crap? Rising health care costs -- pretty much everyone cares. Out of sight gas prices? Ditto. War in Iraq? Oh, yeah. Cracking down on P2P file sharers? Ah.....not so much.
Don't waste your time...anyone who has reached adulthood misspelling a word is probably never going to change. A Freshman English professor once said: "If someone has reached the age of 18 utterly convinced that the possessive form of the pronoun 'it' is formed with an apostrophe, nothing you do will ever dissuade them from the notion."
What if someone recorded a few minutes of belching and farting, named it after some song RIAA seeks, clipped it to the lenght and packed with some white noise in the background so that the file size roughly matched and put it up on BT? You see, P2P clients publish a checksum of every file and every expert appointed by the court will admit that an MD5 or SHA checksum is a sufficient proof of the file spotted by RIAA being the same as the file promptly presented to the court by the defendant, with a claim of copyright over it as well (that is, if a few minutes of belching and farting can be deemed creative to be copyrighted at all). Wouldn't that show quite well, how baseless RIAA's "evidence" is?
At the very least, I'd like to be a fly on the wall when the file is played in court.....I'm against shoplifting, but I don't think that gives storeowners the right to summarily execute anyone they suspect of the crime.
Silly analogy....they don't execute suspected file sharers. Um....well, not yet they don't. (Let's not give them any ideas, hmmm?)
About time. The more "mainstream" pub on this whole debacle, the better. I think, if you were to lay out all the facts and history in front of the American people (well, those with brains, anyhoo), they would feel this way:
Is piracy wrong? Yes.
Does much P2P activity infringe on copyrights? Yes.
Do copyright holders have the right to defend and protect those copyrights? Yes.
Do the "yes" answers above justify bullying, intimidation, and harassment; spurious, questionable, and sometimes downright wrong technical claims; spying by 3rd parties; end runs around the legal system; or a general reluctance to allow accused file sharers to defend themselves, or take their case to a court of law? NO.
The last question is where the RIAA loses whatever moral high ground they may have.
However, one of the chief "safety" features of Soyuz is the robustness of the basic capsule itself, which has allowed it to protect the crew, even in the event of the catastrophic failure of several of its systems (one of them exploded on the launchpad, and the crew survived).
Clarification -- it was the booster that exploded on the pad, and after (by a few seconds) the Soyuz had safely blasted away from the booster with its escape rockets (as it was supposed to). The flaw here wasn't in the Soyuz itself, but in the booster and in the support systems. The booster caught fire and almost instantly severed the "hard wire" connections that would normally be used to initiate a pad abort. The controllers managed to initiate the abort by radio signal just before the explosion. But the capsule did exactly what it needed to do, saving the lives of the two cosmonauts (although one was pretty seriously injured in the abort and never flew again).
To work in the intelligence community, and I'm sure to a similar degree in the law enforcement community, you need a clean background to get a clearance. Most of us, myself included, have absolutely no criminal background.....
FWIW, having a clean criminal records check doesn't mean that one is not a criminal. It may simply mean that they've never been caught.....
Much in the same way as the music bigwigs think P2P = infringement (it is a file distribution protocol, and nothing else), all mp3 files are not necessarily infringing. I could make mp3 files of my own music, sound effects I've created (or royalty-free sfx), perhaps a personal audio diary, etc., etc. Unless the file names are blatantly obvious, how would anyone know their content without downloading and listening to every one? So now they want mp3 files to be banned from remote online storage because they might be (or even probably are) copyrighted material? Where does that stop? That's like saying that since most child porn images are in JPG format, therefore storing JPGs online is illegal.
Most definitely not required to hold elected office, either.
It's fine and dandy for people to use Flash -- as long as I have the option to bypass it. Seems like early on, when people first started using Flash, there was almost always a link to "skip this page" or one labeled "HTML" if you wanted to just get to the meat without all the bells and whistles. I enter a lot of sweepstakes online (go ahead...make fun of me), many of which use Flash in their web presentations, and it seems like nowadays 2/3 of them give you no "opt out" choice -- you just have to let the damn thing load, usually to find that it's just some garish graphic with a "click here to enter" link embedded in it. Yeah....that's real efficient.
Did you bother to read TFA? File sharing? DRM circumvention? hollywood/music industry??
The only thing that the FA mentions is child pornography, molestation, rape, abuse, etc. Not once do they speak about any of the illegal things you've mentioned.
I'll admit that I've a fear of a legitimate child-porn-tracking system being used to combat other activities, esp. for people in no way involved in such horrific fetishes, but that isn't the point of the system (as stated) that Biden wants.
Whenever law enforcement at any level says of a tactic or system or program, "Don't worry -- we're only going to use it to go after [insert category of criminals here]," always assume an unspoken "NOT" between "we're" and "only." Hello??? Patriot Act, anyone? Warrantless wiretaps? National Security Letters?
Ain't an algorithm in the world that can predict, counteract, or eliminate stupid drivers. Math and logic do not apply to human behavior.
If Google traipsed onto the "private road" to take the photo, that's trespassing, and the law should handle it. If they instead stood on the adjacent public highway and the house can be seen from there, well, too bad -- that's fair game. If the owners of the house want visual privacy, they can invest in a fence or large hedge. I'm as big an advocate of privacy as the next guy, but hell, you can't keep people from looking at or taking photos of your house if it is in plain sight. (That's why my dream house would sit in the middle of thick woods, surrounded by a 12-foot fence, surrounded by a moat. And maybe some gators in the moat if I can get a good deal from pets.com.....)
How could we possibly do a census with paper and pencil? I mean, we've never done it that way before, right?
People are worried about big brother scenarios. If this was the UK maybe, but no this is the land of pork barrel projects galore. As such I am not worried. they will spend billions and achieve a semi working prototype that needs to be rebooted every 6 hours.
Yeah, it might work about as well as that piecemeal fence will work keeping out illegals....
I'm torn whether the general inefficiency and ineptitude of our federal government is a good or a bad thing in this case. On one hand, it could lead to the whole system never coming to completion or never working quite right in the first place. OTOH, using a half-assed system manned by incompetents could lead to a whole lotta "false positives" and a lot of ruined innocent lives. It's pretty bad when you expect your government to screw up royally, and are reduced to merely hoping they screw up in such a manner as to do the least possible damage.
If someone started masking these kinds of links as legit links and sent them out in e-mails and such you could wind up with a lot of innocent people being raided by the FBI. And then how do you prove you didn't mean to click on the link?
What about hidden frames that open these kinds of links?
What about use of javascript, flash, java, or other embedded technology to make http requests in the background?
It just seems way too easy to get innocent people caught up in this sort of trap.
Does anyone still even give a shit about the innocent as long as some bad guys are caught? In the wars on drugs, terrorism, kiddie porn, and all other hot buzz quests, I was under the impression that innocent people caught up in their dragnets have been viewed as "acceptable collateral damage" for quite some time now.
Before anyone starts foaming at the mouth about big companies I say this. They already run your health system, your financial institutions, your currency, transportation systems, and your food supply. It's not such a big leap.
Let's see....
Health system = millions of uninsured, outrageous costs, inconsistent care with no coordination
Financial institutions = scandals, bailouts, housing bubble, credit crunch
Currency = check current exchange rates: need I say more?
Transportation systems = Think about that next time you're in gridlock, or sitting on a plane for hours on the tarmac, or trying to efficiently utilize most cities' mass transit
Food supply = E. coli, Mad Cow, various recalls, food poisoning, not to mention the overall lousy nutritional value of most processed foods
And so, I'm supposed to trust "big companies" with my vote....why, exactly? I realize we may have to do something along your suggestion to fix the voting system, but the examples you chose hardly inspire confidence...
Mind you it does take all of 20 seconds to have your network grab you an IP address...verify your computer...and finally connect.
20 seconds?!? Who's got that kind of time? I'll be old by then!
The FCC has pending before it "hundreds of thousands of complaints" regarding the broadcast of expletives, Clement said. He argued that the appeals court decision has left the agency "accountable for the coarsening of the airwaves while simultaneously denying it effective tools to address the problem."
I think "hundreds of thousands" is hyperbole -- I can imagine MAYBE a few tens of thousands at most. And it has been shown in the past that the vast majority of these are usually automated "copy, sign, and send" complaints coming from a very tiny group of people associated with some of the right-wing Christian watchdog groups. I seem to recall that of the complaints that came in about the infamous "wardrobe malfunction," all but a tiny handful came from ONE group's members.
I guess I'm someone who just never understood the whole concept of certain words arbitrarily being designated as "naughty." Profanity serves a purpose in language -- it can be overdone, but there are also times when it is entirely appropriate. I cringe every time I watch "Law and Order" or other crime shows and hear some gang member or drug dealer use the contrived euphemism "friggin'" -- it rings SO false and destroys the credibility of the character.
And I guess I don't understand people who are offended to the point of pathology by words. Just words. Not even necessarily the idea behind the words (which can be offensive, for much better reasons) but the words themselves. It's like hearing or using those words is some sort of magical incantation that will corrupt their children, compromise their salvation, and spell the doom of Western civilization.
The best of the bunch are the folks who condescendingly say, "The English language is so rich, there are plenty of words and synonyms -- why so you have to use THOSE words?" And my response is: if you truly appreciate the breadth and variety of the language, why are you trying to LIMIT the number of words that can be used?
Really? You'll still be able to buy single (or multiple) trip tickets for cash, surely? Any "person of interest" will be sure to be doing that from today, if they weren't already. So as usual, the people the measures are supposed to catch will easily evade them, meanwhile millions of innocent commuters will lose another piece of their privacy.
Give them time.....I'm sure eventually they will do away with currency, probably sooner in the U.K. than in the U.S., but inevitably. The people in power (not to mention divorce lawyers and the like) would absolutely love to be able to know where every penny of your income goes (or comes from, in the case of the tax folks). Here the "Green Dot" and similar refillable debit cards are being hawked in ads everywhere, so eventually more and more poorer folk will be tempted into plastic, under the guise of "security" and "safety" ("Don't carry all that cash around.....") and "convenience." Not to mention those ubiquitous VISA ads that show traffic through some commercial establishment flowing like clockwork, with people waving their smart cards at that infernal little machine, until some nimnul pulls out cash and brings everything to a screeching halt.
Eventually, most Americans will be conditioned to see cash as "slow," "unsafe," and (the worst!) "old-fashioned" and the only citizens left clinging to their dead presidents will be the ignorant, the homeless, and those damned pointy-headed paranoia-spreading, conspiracy-theory nonconformists. It would be rather smooth at that point to phase out the use of currency altogether. Oh, it might be that some private transactions could still go on, perhaps in the form of barter/exchange, or some form of private scrip (which would be clamped down on pretty quickly), or for larger transactions hard metal such as gold (the private ownership of which will no doubt eventually be criminalized), but for the most part we are rushing towards a point at which any transaction involving any commercial enterprise will be logged, stored, and available for the data miners.
No..., If they win.. everything will as it is right now... It can not get worse than this.
As a general rule that is almost infallible, there is nothing on God's Green Earth that "can't get worse." Maybe the sun exploding and wiping out the planet....that might qualify. Anything short of that, though.....Well, in fact, that is possible anywhere on the net. We have become intelligent consumers.....
We have? When did that happen? (*Grumble*) Musta been while I was taking my nap...better turn on CNN....