The differences here is that you had a young girl who was clinically depressed and actively seeking help. Then you had an adult woman who knew the girl personally and was aware of this condition pose as boy love interest only to eventually deliberately "break it off" publicly and brutally.
There's a difference between causing distress in a normal person, and planning an elaborate emotional shock to someone you know is clinically depressed and suicidal. The former is part of normal human interaction the later is analogous to handing a grenade to a baby. They can't handle it without killing themselves, and you KNOW it.
Because, you know, signing up to a website under a fake name is entirely justified with 15 years of prison time. Maybe you'd like the death penalty to anyone who steals a snickers bar or crank calls you as "I P Freely".
I don't understand why they couldn't have charged her with some form of harassment, endangering/abusing a minor, or any other number of things. I guess the prosecution saw violating the TOS as the easy way out.
Are you telling me that if she verbally abused that girl in person to the point where she killed herself that it would be A-OK by the law simply because she wasn't violating a TOS?
Analogy time: if I sit outside a store and record the date and time that each customer walks into and out of the store, that's my information. It may be about you, if you're one if the customers, but it's still my information.
The difference is that Viacom didn't sit outside youtube and record who went in and out. Youtube (as most sites) has a privacy policy that says they wont share the info, viacom walked into the store and demanded the books...
So on one end of the spectrum we have a mother who posed as a teen on myspace ending in a case that will make violating a TOS a federal offense analogous to hacking a network... and on this end of the spectrum Privacy Policies are completely worthless if a company simply guesses that there is wrong doings.
Is there any way to legally make myself a company instead of a person? I think I'd have way more rights that way.
Hmm... I've made some videos, I should request that google give me all of the user records too just to be sure that they didn't infringe.
Better yet, I should request that Viacom give me recorded history of everyone that works for them and all the footage they've ever produced to ensure that they haven't violated any of my copyrights.
wow that's awesome... Build your own electronics tools. Definitely the perfect "first kit". I'm going to start recommending that to people when the topic comes up again.
I've ordered a number of "Velleman" kits http://www.vellemanusa.com/ for various projects. They're quite similar to heathkits and others mentioned. The problem with kits like those is that they don't really teach you about electronics so much as they're just good soldering practice. A bit more professional and adult in execution than the wire+spring kits sold by rat-shack but just as empty in the theory it teaches.
If you're really interested in leaning about electronics the first thing you need to do is pick a project, pick something that someone else has already done and posted the schematics and other information about. Then head over to to this website Its the home page for a highschool electronics club but IMO it's some of the best info on the web on the basic theory about how electronics work as well as how to read diagrams, understand components and solder them together, everything you need to get started.
now you've got a project and some basic knowledge head over to a site like SparkFun loads of useful parts and kits to get you started on nearly any project. I order 99% of my parts from Digikey if they don't have it there you'd be hard pressed to find it elsewhere, it's not very beginner friendly though... Mouser Electronics is much more suited for beginners but their pricing is also a little higher and their selection not as good.
I didn't get into electronics until I was in college and I didn't study electronics in college at all. I basically just picked a project and then just did as much research and self teaching as I needed to get it done, then picked a harder project then a harder project until I am where I am today. I've actually had a couple of my custom electronics projects published in magazines and I only started learning this stuff about 6 or so years ago, not even knowing how to solder or what a resistor is. The resources above were invaluable though
Having good equipment is important too. Go to the rat-shack and buy their 15Watt iron, a spring stand with a sponge, some.22mm silver bearing solder, a de-soldering iron, a nice set of helping hands, a nice set of miniature pliers, a nice set of cutters/strippers/crimps, and some 22ga stranded hookup wire. You'll spend about $50 and have pretty much everything you need to tackle any DIY electronics project. You should also consider spending a bit of cash on a good multimeter, which isn't necessary but HIGHLY recommended for troubleshooting or reverse engineering.
don't forget that those automatic transmissions weigh a great deal more (50-100 extra pounds) and typically offer far worse gearing for fuel economy... good luck finding a modern car with a stick-shift unless it's a sports car or you custom order it.
don't forget that all that emissions equipment is a drag on your fuel economy too...
Part of the problem is that rather than create a baseline for pollutant output we've constructed laws that state the car must have X equipment on it and based the pollutants as a % of the output.
Essentially if you stripped 100% of the emissions equipment off 10 modern sedans their combined pollutant output would be less than that of an H2... AND they would get on average 5-7MPG better mileage than they did before... add another 2-3MPG to that if you switched to a 6-speed and drove it properly.
It doesn't take much effort to determine what things like "Gold standard" mean.
"Gold Standard" essentially means that the paper money in your pocket is worth X amount of gold... and there is a fixed relationship. So lets say $1000 = 1 oz of gold that ratio will never change. The point is that gold is a valuable commodity no matter which region of the world you are in. The US used to be a gold standard currency meaning we had a stock pile of the stuff somewhere and your money was as good as gold.
Someone had the bright idea to throw all that out the window and now our money is backed by essentially nothing... in reality it's backed by investors... so when foreign confidence in the US economy drops so does the value of the dollar.
If the US currency was still backed by gold, it would be worth nearly 100x what it is today, not only that but the value of the dollar wouldn't blow around based on the fear and greed of investors. The currency we have in the US now is worth about as much as an IOU signed by the politicians.
I couldn't agree more... though I always though it would be interesting if say 50% of my tax dollars I was able to distribute to charities as I see fit. let the government continue to control the other half to fill in the gaps. Make the charity selection process part of the tax filing process.
I think we'd see a lot of special interest programs drop of the map because they'd would have to convince the citizens that it's a worthy program as opposed to lobbying government officials. Not to mention I think it would make a lot of people feel like their taxes where actually doing something/going to a good cause as opposed to simply being "taken" by the government for whatever.
Same here, except my company is owned by a larger Japanese company so it's JSOX for us... Some days the boredom is enough that I seriously just want to stab myself in the head.
I built a liquid cooled system a few years back. As part of the kit they included a little jumper cable to power up the PSU with the cooling system in place before you put in the mobo and other parts (such that you can test for leaks and whatnot). It's basically just a 2" piece of wire with a prong on each end to plug into the PSU connector. I've used that little wire for testing PSUs more times than I can remember.
Using that in addition to a multimeter (something you probably already have if you tiker) you can fully diagnose pretty much anything on a PSU.
There was a video of a developer playing through NGII that became available on Xbox Live not to long ago.
I'm a big fan of the NG series as well as Tecmo's other stuff but to be perfectly honest I was bored to tears.
A number of other games in the genre have raised the bar, particularly in terms of open ended gamplay and plot, NGII just felt tired from what I saw, perfectly linear, with nothing other than a graphics update an a few new moves that will dazzle you for an hour before getting boring.
The fact that everyone in the game still wear glossy black suits with china-doll faces means that the graphical improvements aren't all that apparent either.
? What about s/n ratio on censored and uncensored forums ? if 5 of 6 posts on latter messageboard are offtopic (goatse, flamewars, irrelevant and trollish) , then s/n ratio of censored forum is waay higher.
There's a difference between not censoring, and not filtering out spam. censorship implies that certain view points are barred, unsensored implies that everyone's view point is accepted, it doesn't mean that no one picks up the trash.
Without a hard drive it's quite easy to convince them not to charge you for any of the software... and if they do still call you, it's quite easy to call them up after the fact and get a refund for the software, since it wasn't included, at least I've never had problems doing that.
I don't know of any undergraduate course called "management". Managers have degrees, often in economy or accountancy, but also, in many cases, engineering as well.
I went to RPI for my undergraduate, and there was most definitly a "management" undergraduate course, I also watched several hundred of them walk up and get similarly titled diplomas on graduation day.
The problems caused by short-sided decisions do not come from one single profession in particular, but from a general system where managers make all the decisions without much supervision.
I agree that short sighted decisions, and or decisions made in self interest rather than in the best interest in the company or the company's customers are the root problem... I think the point the GP was trying to make was that the fault most notoriously falls on the management staff.
IMO this goes back to the reason why these people are in the positions in their in. Most of those in the management undergraduate course were taking that course "because its easy and you can make a lot of money"... not my words, that was pretty much the mantra of those I asked. Most of those in engineering and sciences where doing so because they loved engineering and sciences.
Fast forward to the workplace and you have engineers who care about what they're doing and the results they produce, and managers who are only there to kick back and receive a paycheck... which one do you think breeds short sighed decisions and self-centered cronyism?
I am an engineer, and oddly enough I also work for a Japanese company. I do see many engineers make shortsighted decisions, but I know many of them make those decisions against their better judgment because they're either being rushed by management so they have something to show at the next ops meeting or they know that the short term benefits will please management more than long term benefits.
I believe the root of this problem comes from the current capitalist system where large corporations are never owned by a single person. If a company is owned by one individual, or a family, who depends on that company's profits for the foreseeable future, they care more for the long view. With modern corporations, if the profits are likely to drop in the near future, you sell the shares. Since most companies today behave in the same way, no shareholder cares for anything more remote than the next quarter.
what's good for the company in the long term view isn't necessarily good for the customers, similarly Just being family owned as opposed to traded doesn't make it any better.
Doesn't/Didn't Bill Gates own a majority stock in Microsoft? Doesn't the Walt Family own a majority stock in Walmart? Does being "owned" by an individual or family with a long term view do anything to make the company any less evil?
Next time you buy a computer order it without a hard drive, and then order whatever hard drive you want separately... this has worked for me several times in the past.
Good luck on the $100 bit. I'd say you will pay that for the joysticks and buttons alone. The material will probalby run you another $100 after you add up the lumber, screws, glue, molding, bits, etc. Probably ~$25 for the plexi and around $50 for the usb style keyboard hack. If you're lucky you might get it done for $500. Not to say it wouldn't be worth it, I just don't want you to be misled.
I got my estimate of 100 because I've done it for 100, this does of course does assume that you have at least SOME of the materials lying around. You can get joysticks and buttons for about $25 off of eBay, spend another ~$35 in lumber (a single piece of plywood will do it). I had an old window that I cut the glass to shape instead of using plexi, you probably have a keyboard laying around and metal pc chassis that you can cut up for brackets. you can buy molding for about $15 online or just sand the edges smooth. figure you'd spend another $20 on the templates...
Cheap laptops are great to use as... cheap laptops!
I've got a few old Thinkpads (P2/P3 processors) ubuntu+firefox+wifi card and leave them sitting on the coffee table in my living room, the coffee table in my home theater room, the work bench in my garage, etc.
Watching TV and need to think of where else you know that actor? Hop online and check IMDB.
Playing a game and need a strategy guide for that boss you're having trouble with? Hop online and check gamefaqs.
Working on your car and need to look up a part number? Hop online and google it.
Cooking something and want to lookup a recipe? Hop online and google it.
They slide easily under a couch and a single power lead is easy enough to manage, not to mention you can quickly check email/banking or other online crap when you think of it instead of putting it off until you happen to be sitting back at your desk.
some of the old think pads also have IR ports and you can get software to make it into an Uber Remote for your home theater setup too.
If you're looking for something more creative then just another computer but less generic than a picture frame... P2s are powerful enough to run some older MAME games. Buy a cabinet template online, make a trip to home depot and build yourself a cocktail cabinet that plays all the old favorites from the 70s and 80s. You could probably get it done for less than $100 in materials.
I would extend that to say that if you can find a critic that you consistently dis agree with, then you can stick with them as well. The fleeting, random internet reviews are about useless. That is, unless you can find a site that has consistent reviews that you either agree or disagree with.
The problem with finding a critic that you consistently disagree with is that you wind up seeing lots of movies that EVERYONE can agree are really bad... You really have to pay attention as to WHY they disliked it if you want to find something you'll actually like...
Slashdot Mirror
The differences here is that you had a young girl who was clinically depressed and actively seeking help. Then you had an adult woman who knew the girl personally and was aware of this condition pose as boy love interest only to eventually deliberately "break it off" publicly and brutally.
There's a difference between causing distress in a normal person, and planning an elaborate emotional shock to someone you know is clinically depressed and suicidal. The former is part of normal human interaction the later is analogous to handing a grenade to a baby. They can't handle it without killing themselves, and you KNOW it.
I don't understand why they couldn't have charged her with some form of harassment, endangering/abusing a minor, or any other number of things. I guess the prosecution saw violating the TOS as the easy way out.
Are you telling me that if she verbally abused that girl in person to the point where she killed herself that it would be A-OK by the law simply because she wasn't violating a TOS?
Someone needs to start a company called "Hackers Inc." that provides a "Piracy" service that actually has nothing to do with hacking or piracy.
Then anytime someone uses those terms incorrectly you can sue them for defamy of character.
WOOOOOOSH!!!11
The difference is that Viacom didn't sit outside youtube and record who went in and out. Youtube (as most sites) has a privacy policy that says they wont share the info, viacom walked into the store and demanded the books...
So on one end of the spectrum we have a mother who posed as a teen on myspace ending in a case that will make violating a TOS a federal offense analogous to hacking a network... and on this end of the spectrum Privacy Policies are completely worthless if a company simply guesses that there is wrong doings.
Is there any way to legally make myself a company instead of a person? I think I'd have way more rights that way.
Hmm... I've made some videos, I should request that google give me all of the user records too just to be sure that they didn't infringe.
Better yet, I should request that Viacom give me recorded history of everyone that works for them and all the footage they've ever produced to ensure that they haven't violated any of my copyrights.
Is that what it's called when the keys get all sticky?
In other news: People who make generalizations can never be right.
I'd love to see the attendance delta after that one.
wow that's awesome... Build your own electronics tools. Definitely the perfect "first kit". I'm going to start recommending that to people when the topic comes up again.
I've ordered a number of "Velleman" kits http://www.vellemanusa.com/ for various projects. They're quite similar to heathkits and others mentioned. The problem with kits like those is that they don't really teach you about electronics so much as they're just good soldering practice. A bit more professional and adult in execution than the wire+spring kits sold by rat-shack but just as empty in the theory it teaches.
.22mm silver bearing solder, a de-soldering iron, a nice set of helping hands, a nice set of miniature pliers, a nice set of cutters/strippers/crimps, and some 22ga stranded hookup wire. You'll spend about $50 and have pretty much everything you need to tackle any DIY electronics project. You should also consider spending a bit of cash on a good multimeter, which isn't necessary but HIGHLY recommended for troubleshooting or reverse engineering.
:)
If you're really interested in leaning about electronics the first thing you need to do is pick a project, pick something that someone else has already done and posted the schematics and other information about. Then head over to to this website Its the home page for a highschool electronics club but IMO it's some of the best info on the web on the basic theory about how electronics work as well as how to read diagrams, understand components and solder them together, everything you need to get started.
now you've got a project and some basic knowledge head over to a site like SparkFun loads of useful parts and kits to get you started on nearly any project. I order 99% of my parts from Digikey if they don't have it there you'd be hard pressed to find it elsewhere, it's not very beginner friendly though... Mouser Electronics is much more suited for beginners but their pricing is also a little higher and their selection not as good.
I didn't get into electronics until I was in college and I didn't study electronics in college at all. I basically just picked a project and then just did as much research and self teaching as I needed to get it done, then picked a harder project then a harder project until I am where I am today. I've actually had a couple of my custom electronics projects published in magazines and I only started learning this stuff about 6 or so years ago, not even knowing how to solder or what a resistor is. The resources above were invaluable though
Having good equipment is important too. Go to the rat-shack and buy their 15Watt iron, a spring stand with a sponge, some
Good Luck and have fun
don't forget that those automatic transmissions weigh a great deal more (50-100 extra pounds) and typically offer far worse gearing for fuel economy... good luck finding a modern car with a stick-shift unless it's a sports car or you custom order it.
don't forget that all that emissions equipment is a drag on your fuel economy too...
Part of the problem is that rather than create a baseline for pollutant output we've constructed laws that state the car must have X equipment on it and based the pollutants as a % of the output.
Essentially if you stripped 100% of the emissions equipment off 10 modern sedans their combined pollutant output would be less than that of an H2... AND they would get on average 5-7MPG better mileage than they did before... add another 2-3MPG to that if you switched to a 6-speed and drove it properly.
It doesn't take much effort to determine what things like "Gold standard" mean.
"Gold Standard" essentially means that the paper money in your pocket is worth X amount of gold... and there is a fixed relationship. So lets say $1000 = 1 oz of gold that ratio will never change. The point is that gold is a valuable commodity no matter which region of the world you are in. The US used to be a gold standard currency meaning we had a stock pile of the stuff somewhere and your money was as good as gold.
Someone had the bright idea to throw all that out the window and now our money is backed by essentially nothing... in reality it's backed by investors... so when foreign confidence in the US economy drops so does the value of the dollar.
If the US currency was still backed by gold, it would be worth nearly 100x what it is today, not only that but the value of the dollar wouldn't blow around based on the fear and greed of investors. The currency we have in the US now is worth about as much as an IOU signed by the politicians.
I couldn't agree more... though I always though it would be interesting if say 50% of my tax dollars I was able to distribute to charities as I see fit. let the government continue to control the other half to fill in the gaps. Make the charity selection process part of the tax filing process.
I think we'd see a lot of special interest programs drop of the map because they'd would have to convince the citizens that it's a worthy program as opposed to lobbying government officials. Not to mention I think it would make a lot of people feel like their taxes where actually doing something/going to a good cause as opposed to simply being "taken" by the government for whatever.
Same here, except my company is owned by a larger Japanese company so it's JSOX for us... Some days the boredom is enough that I seriously just want to stab myself in the head.
I built a liquid cooled system a few years back. As part of the kit they included a little jumper cable to power up the PSU with the cooling system in place before you put in the mobo and other parts (such that you can test for leaks and whatnot). It's basically just a 2" piece of wire with a prong on each end to plug into the PSU connector. I've used that little wire for testing PSUs more times than I can remember.
Using that in addition to a multimeter (something you probably already have if you tiker) you can fully diagnose pretty much anything on a PSU.
There was a video of a developer playing through NGII that became available on Xbox Live not to long ago.
I'm a big fan of the NG series as well as Tecmo's other stuff but to be perfectly honest I was bored to tears.
A number of other games in the genre have raised the bar, particularly in terms of open ended gamplay and plot, NGII just felt tired from what I saw, perfectly linear, with nothing other than a graphics update an a few new moves that will dazzle you for an hour before getting boring.
The fact that everyone in the game still wear glossy black suits with china-doll faces means that the graphical improvements aren't all that apparent either.
Without a hard drive it's quite easy to convince them not to charge you for any of the software... and if they do still call you, it's quite easy to call them up after the fact and get a refund for the software, since it wasn't included, at least I've never had problems doing that.
IMO this goes back to the reason why these people are in the positions in their in. Most of those in the management undergraduate course were taking that course "because its easy and you can make a lot of money"... not my words, that was pretty much the mantra of those I asked. Most of those in engineering and sciences where doing so because they loved engineering and sciences.
Fast forward to the workplace and you have engineers who care about what they're doing and the results they produce, and managers who are only there to kick back and receive a paycheck... which one do you think breeds short sighed decisions and self-centered cronyism?
I am an engineer, and oddly enough I also work for a Japanese company. I do see many engineers make shortsighted decisions, but I know many of them make those decisions against their better judgment because they're either being rushed by management so they have something to show at the next ops meeting or they know that the short term benefits will please management more than long term benefits. what's good for the company in the long term view isn't necessarily good for the customers, similarly Just being family owned as opposed to traded doesn't make it any better.
Doesn't/Didn't Bill Gates own a majority stock in Microsoft? Doesn't the Walt Family own a majority stock in Walmart? Does being "owned" by an individual or family with a long term view do anything to make the company any less evil?
really, it's not all that expensive.
Cheap laptops are great to use as... cheap laptops!
I've got a few old Thinkpads (P2/P3 processors) ubuntu+firefox+wifi card and leave them sitting on the coffee table in my living room, the coffee table in my home theater room, the work bench in my garage, etc.
Watching TV and need to think of where else you know that actor? Hop online and check IMDB.
Playing a game and need a strategy guide for that boss you're having trouble with? Hop online and check gamefaqs.
Working on your car and need to look up a part number? Hop online and google it.
Cooking something and want to lookup a recipe? Hop online and google it.
They slide easily under a couch and a single power lead is easy enough to manage, not to mention you can quickly check email/banking or other online crap when you think of it instead of putting it off until you happen to be sitting back at your desk.
some of the old think pads also have IR ports and you can get software to make it into an Uber Remote for your home theater setup too.
If you're looking for something more creative then just another computer but less generic than a picture frame... P2s are powerful enough to run some older MAME games. Buy a cabinet template online, make a trip to home depot and build yourself a cocktail cabinet that plays all the old favorites from the 70s and 80s. You could probably get it done for less than $100 in materials.