My last apartment had cable included in the rent. The one before that had TV and a 10BaseT connection to a T1 for some cheap price since the rent was so high for one room. This one doesn't. The cable company got rid of their 'low price options' because they 'switched to digital cable for higher quality'. They want a minimum of $80, for 30 channels that I don't care about. To get anything I would want to see, I would have to spend over $120. And to add internet would be another 40 to 50, which is nearly what my DSL connection costs. When I have $150 left for groceries at the end of the month, that isn't likely to happen. Easy solution was an antenna so I get local broadcast stations: cbs, nbc, ion. Then I picked up Netflix. When I get bored and would turn on the TV to just watch whatever is on, now I just turn on a movie or tv show that I want to watch. Mix in hulu for Burn Notice, a friend who has BBC-A so I can watch Doctor Who, and I find I don't miss cable at all.
>...plus whatever penalties HIPPA can be used to bring to bear.
Which is none. HIPAA applies to health care providers, not their employees.
Employees who signed a contract, possibly with penalties for causing the company to violate federal law. At minimum, use of company assests (the network) in an unlawful manner would be grounds for lose of employment. The hospital might even pursue charges of theft for use of assets outside of the employees contracted obligations, wording it in the same way as stealing wifi, or using licensed software at home. Not saying the police or DA would care, but they could start the process when they fired them.
Everquest had that when it launched. In order to limit what the PvP flagged character could do, they prevented them from receiving heals or buffs from any non-PvP flagged character. This limited the griefer trick of healing with a non-PvP character, preventing other PvPers from killing them. But it made any PvP character useless to anyone not PvP flagged. If you could not find a PvP guild with enemies to fight against, or had a group of friends willing to fight each other some times but were willing to level together, you had no way to play any other part of the game. When the Arenas were made available, areas in certain zones where everyone is PvP until they leave, there was no reason to permanently flag yourself as PvP anymore.
The people who wanted to PvP went to the PvP servers. Every one there was flagged, and on one of them there were no level limits on who could gank who. When they introduced some protection to low level characters, they created a situation where very low level characters could kill much higher levels using the environment, while giving the high level players no recourse. See: Fansy The Famous Bard.
I should take offence at that stupid crack, knowing where myself and friends ended up. But then I look back at all the meth-heads, 2-child-families before high-school graduation, the percent of high-schoolers who went on to college or trade school, and the unemployment numbers . ..
Christ, what kind of lunatic small town did you live in? I grew up in a little town of about 5000 people in Northern California. Everytime a new family moved in somewhere people were excited. We wanted to hear about what they had done, places they had been, what kind of cool toys they had that we didn't. At the schools,
Are you talking from just your perspective at school, as a kid/teen/community college age individual?
There were always a few crazy old codgers that liked to bitch
Going to take that as a yes. If you were talking about it from a younger perspective, you might be right about the view from that age. I collected stories from my parent's and grandparent's, that's where the ice-cream anecdote came from. That generation gap shows up, as a kid I had no idea about the gossip that went around. But I don't know about small towns in Northern California, maybe it really is the paradise my family there tells me it is. Or it might be the average age of people, my experience was in a rather aged town because all the young folks moved out and stayed away, while the older ones, or those who followed in the family jobs, were now unemployed and stuck. Railroad and farms and mining, hell of a combinations.
Have five to ten generations of people living in a small community for nearly 100 years, and see how many can trace their families back to just a hand-full of individuals. When the women are the ones moving out, while the men stay in town to continue the same line of work their fathers -grandfather,and so on- were in then the town also tends to collect very few family names. Five thousand people, and nearly all could trace their family and find kinship with almost anyone else born in the town.
If you thought I meant just three or four modern nuclear families, I apologize for the confusion.
You have never lived in a small town, have you? As the new person, if you are friendly then you must be hiding something. If you are quiet, you are hiding something. If you talk to people, you are trying to blend in and are hiding something. 1200 people, you might meet 100 in the first week, but the other 1100 will have heard about you from their friends and family. I grew up in a town only a bit larger, under 5000 people, and when someone new moved to town people would know their favorite ice cream flavor before they ever met them. New people being those not already kin to one of the three or four families, or marrying into one of those families.
Okay, so my perspective is from a small southern town. Maybe them yankees do it differently.
Mob AI in MMORPGs is a very simple thing. Pathfinding towards the player with the most aggro, if distance range then cast a spell or shoot an arrow. Then you have physics, which most MMOs just ignore. So far, I have not met an MMO that put my CPU at 100% while at minimal graphics, just so it could calculate world effects and AI. Some newer FPS, on the other hand, do exactly that. If you drop their AI on a central server, you are going to need more processors available, not fewer. The company would have to shell out for a huge data center, or make the AI requirements a bit less severe. The end result would be less a unique experience, as the AI had to handle itself with far less resources.
Some people seem to think their parents never did this. Whether as blatantly as calling other parents to ensure that stories match, or just talking to the other parents at the grocery store about the party both kids went to, this isn't something new. Parents now can not just ask the internet, while shopping for groceries, about what the kids were doing.
Right, because judging the person based on a question they asked is so obviously the correct way to respond to it. Why does everyone bashing this person assume that they have not tried talking to their kids. Maybe they have tried setting rules, and enforcing them. Maybe the kids are not as well behaved or rational as all the/. posters seem to remember themselves being. Or, in your case, Mr. Anon. "10 year old computer is proof of bad parenting" Coward, maybe the kids are exactly as asinine and obnoxious as you are, and NEED to have their computer usage restricted.
Of course it sucks that children come across, say, waterballoon fetishists on youtube every day by accident. The problem is probably a lot more severe if a child has an illness such as autism. Being admittedly largely ignorant when it comes to the education of autistic children, I'd still be interested to learn if it isn't possible to convey the nature of fetish porn to an 11-year old child and teach him how to avoid this stuff by himself?
It would really depend on the degree of autism that the child suffers from. Some children, even by age 11, are not able to communicate effectively, and others would not understand, or be frightened by, the concept of a fetish for destroying something they like. Explaining the jump from just a fetish for popping balloon to balloon popping fetish porn would be another huge step. But the spectrum for autism is so wide that there really is not way to make a generalization.
Hmm, alright, on re-reading how I phrased that, I see that it can be read that way. My train of thought focused more on the 'catching' part, requiring proof to be certain you have caught the person involved. Without proof, you haven't caught the person involved, just captured or detained someone you think might be. Similar thought for the meaning of proof, as opposed to evidence.
But that is my personal opinion about the criminal, not my opinion on what I feel the law should require.
You must be one of those kids who never knew that their parent's called your friend's parents and checked if you were actually there. Before the advent of the telephone, parents just talked to each other, "Hey, little Timmy said he was with you and your kid playing baseball last week, how did the game go?" Kids might not get caught misbehaving as quickly, but they still would get caught.
New technology, new times, new ways of keeping an eye on your kids. By your animosity, either your parents were quite over the line of reasonable, or you feel you were raised fine with no parental involvement so someone else's kids should be too. Both are very weak arguments.
You have to remember, the tricky thing about morals is that 'mine are always right'. Almost every sociology 101 course has to devote a huge amount of time just getting people to admit their own ethnocentrism, much less acknowledge that other people have values that are right for their culture. However, it is the government's job to legislate, if not morality, socially agreed norms. One could even say that legislation against murder is a moral legislation, if someone wanted to carry the argument that far. And I know one sociology professor who probably would, if not just to annoy his students. It seems that our culture has come to view the internet as our own. It follows that, if it is ours, then the internet must play by our rules. Circular logic says that, since we have used our laws to enforce our views on the internet already, it must be our own to legislate further. Bad logic, but the cynic in me says that the same logical problem pervades more of our culture than just the way we deal with the internet.
I do agree with you, that anyone harming a child deserves to be caught. I, personally, feel they should be shot on sight. The problem, for my opinion, is what constitutes harm? Given the way our society has come down strongly against child porn and abuse, what harm is done after the fact to the children involved? How much of a role does the stigma of being abused, and the ostracization that follow, play in the development of the children involved? And how can we, as a society, justify 'think of the children' when we so blatantly do not think of them at all after the 'bad guy' has been put away?
A proprietary, closed, you have to buy our software to develop on language is being told to fuck off in favor of an open, anyone can develop for without any cost language (Flash vs. HTML5)
Well, you have one and a half out of three right, so good job. But you might want to look at the SWF spec, now available through the Open Screen Project, and the free AS3/Flex SDK and build tools. It is still proprietary, and some parts are still closed. But it isn't nearly as bad as you make it seem.
I don't think it has to be an us vs them mentality in this. I am of the mind, having watched the video, that the troops were making the best decision they could. They do not have the benefit of rewinding the video, of blowing up the resolution to make the picture wall sized, or selective highlighting to show who is a reporter and who is a civilian and who is an enemy. They knew there were friendly ground forces in the area, and it is their job to protect them. Their controllers authorized them to shoot. I did find it disturbing that they wanted the injured man to 'just pick up a gun' so they could shoot again.
On the other side of things, I also think it is a good thing that this video got leaked to the public. My generation and those younger have only seen war through gun and infrared missile cameras, and while this is not as graphic as films from embedded reporters or soldiers with cameras in wars past, it is not as disconnected as watching a building get closer to a missile camera before the camera goes out. These are people we can see, not invisible ones in a building and not dehumanized 'terrorists'. People need to know the human cost of bread and circuses.
Yes, I watched the video when it was leaked. Nearly threw up several times.
Why that walnut decided to attack our car, I will never know. I never had a chance to ask it, as it was promptly dealt with by the car behind us. I would say that it's remains were returned, it's next of kin notified, and so forth. But it wouldn't be true. The nut got what it deserved.
Almost called it a fruit, and then realized exactly how badly that could be quoted out of context. Not that this can't be, mind you.
Not to be rude, but nothing you said is proof. I am curious, though, so feel free to elaborate on any points. I am just going through your story as an interested science type, so maybe you or someone else can prove they have a physical malady.
If your points are in the other that you went through them, great. I, however, am going to respond in an order that I would look at from the outside. Point three, you find that leaving the apartment fixed the problem. Good, but this doesn't help the case that it was the telco. All it says is that you were having some reaction to the apartment, physiological or psychological. Points one and two, your symptoms matched the symptoms for EMF exposure. On a quick search, I found that I could pin any given symptom to EMF exposure. Someone, somewhere, has said that SymptomX (from dry mouth to pain to heart problems to depression) may be caused by EMF. The WHO has done double blind studies and found that people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity can not detect the radio signals they think, but instead may be picking up on the 60Hz flicker in florescent lights. I know that I can not walk into certain apartment complexes that leave old florescent bulbs to flicker, the noise and lights blinking make me ill. No clue of the symptoms, they could match any number of other real disorders, or reactions to things in the building. On to point four, you don't mention how you "solved" the problem, maybe you don't want to. If it was moving away, that would only say that either something in the building was making you ill, again physiologically or psychologically, or there is the possibility that since you had attached to this thought that the problem was because of the telco building you masked or removed the symptoms in the same way a psychosomatic allergy to yellow can be avoided by avoiding yellow things. If you got the telco to shut the building down, congrats on that if it is the case, or put up some radio wave shielding it still doesn't differentiate anything.
As for point five, no, a psychosomatic response is definitely not the best answer for things that can't be diagnosed. However, it tends to be the common one; before chronic fatigue and fibromialgia, the problems those describe were usually treated as psychological only with no physical cause. The problem is, in double blind studies where people who claim to be sensitive to EMF were exposed to real and sham radiation, they proved no more able to determine which was real and which was fake than a person with no symptoms. Nor did they prove to be better than shear chance, if I read the studies correctly. So if, when tested, the symptoms appear to be psychosomatic in studied cases of other individuals with the same disorder, then it is not that far of a stretch to say that the disorder is psychosomatic.
There is a lot more to your story than you mention, obviously. And this is the internet, so don't post anything you don't want everyone to see. But as an observer, with all the studies stacked against this being a real physical disorder, you are up against a lot that says this isn't real so I would have to see lots of information to believe it exists. The steps you took, especially the order you took them in, do not help your case as they line up with hypochondria pretty well.
Disclaimer: Not a doctor, psychologist, LCSW, or any other diagnostic professional. Take everything with grain of salt. Or the whole shaker, as the case may be.
Why don't you look from the other side - make the lady put her house in a Faraday cage if she insist on her wireless?
Because it is much simpler to put his house in a Faraday cage, rather then first renovate this woman's rented house, and then the other neighbor that he sees with a wireless phone. And some time later another neighbor whom he finds out owns a cell phone.
Did you test yourself to find out if it was the wireless radiation from the base station? Maybe vibrations from it instead, or maybe some mold/dust/CO or something else in the apartment complex. Allergy to the neighbor's incense of choice. The onus is really on this guy to prove not only that he is sensitive to wifi and cellular signals but that this woman is the source of the problem. Maybe another neighbor has a AP running, but not broadcasting any SSID, his computer might not spot that. And if he uses a computer to find the access points, someone really needs to point out that the wireless card will be broadcasting at the same exact frequency. The radiation from a cellphone in her house is going to be pretty low compared to the electrical noise from light bulbs in his house, or any AC-DC transformers, or AC motor. If he is only sensitive to certain frequencies like wifi, then the microwaves in just about all of his neighbors houses could be a bigger source. They don't leak much, for safety reasons, but they not leak enough to annoy a cell or wireless signal. Which should put the energy level close enough in power to bother him, if this is real.
Well, fair enough, but to play devil's advocate for a second here, what if it was really making him sick (it isn't)? Clearly you can't claim to be able to do whatever you want within the confines of your own house if it makes the guy next door sick?
Depends on what it is you are doing, and if your actions are otherwise legal. The FCC has said you are allowed to broadcast these wireless signals, I think that will trump a doctor saying that symptoms might be real. Now, if you were piping something known to be hazardous, say gamma radiation, because you were not following known safety guidelines, then the neighbors would have some ground to stand on.
Also, if I was your neighbor and, according to your argument, I can do whatever I want within the confines of my house, you won't mind if I play loud rock music at 2 AM in the morning every day? I think your right to a good nights sleep in your own home should trump by right to rock out at an unsocialable hour.
I, personally, would not mind as I am awake at 2AM most days. However, the existing town ordinance establishing a noise curfew might cause the police to take issue. Your repeated violation of that ordinance, with documents showing that the police had been there to shut you down multiple times, might give the cranky old lady across the way the legal ground to get a lawsuit past preliminary hearings and maybe even enough to win a suit against you. And if you decide to play it at 2PM, but even louder, you might run afoul of those safety laws for safe decibel levels.
In the USA, you can sue anyone for just about anything. What you sue them for has to just barely make legal sense. Suing, filing the lawsuit to start proceedings, has nothing to do with actually getting anything more than a preliminary 'this sounds like something the court should/shouldn't hear' ruling.
Reasonable accommodation usually applies, in housing issues, to the landlord having to allow a tenant to make changes to their property to facilitate better living conditions. If this guy rents, and his doctor believes this is real, his landlord might have to allow him to install a faraday cage, though it would be paid for from the tenant's pockets. As far as I know, barring various HOA rules, and various town ordinances, there is very little legal basis for stopping this woman from using her FCC certified router. Now, if they find she swapped antennas to something unrated, or added an amplifier, or some other little FCC nit-pick, there might be problems.
With the tree analogy, lets go even further and say it is a walnut tree. Some people are deathly allergic to walnuts, but I really doubt a court of law would require someone to cut a tree down based on the possibility that someone else might somehow ingest a walnut, or one could blow through their window at night. If the tree owner started grinding walnuts, venting powder in the direction of the allergic person's house, that might be taken as malicious. For radiation, the router/laptop/lightbulb/microwave/wiring should be good as long as they are all in their certified condition, or meeting code. If, as someone else suggested, she stuck a cantenna on the router and aimed it at his house, that would probably be malicious.
Complete aside: who ever let walnut trees grow over state highways, with high transfer truck traffic, should be shot. Walnuts and windshields do not mix.
Sure, but what's that got to do with the price of egss?
Because that may be what was happening here. Not a case I am following, so don't rightly know. You said, in the post I replied to, that they were "arresting people for saying mean things" and that the "nanny state" was overstepping it's bounds. I am pointing out that there exist laws, to charge people with crimes, for behavior that you may just define as "being mean" or "saying mean things".
If you do not care for those laws, I suggest you take it up with various local, state, and federal authorities, to get the law changed, instead of making up new crimes on slashdot.
So is contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Equally irrelevant, but even more so when the "suspects" are themselves minors.
They will likely get charged as adults for the other crimes, that may well follow for this one as well.
Stalking.
Not an issue here.
Really, says who? I don't know all the facts of the case, but if the girl tried to get away from them, say blocking them on her pages or what not, and they found ways around them, that is stalking.
Hell, if the kids said to each other, online or otherwise, "lets try to get her to kill herself" then you can bump up to conspiracy to commit murder.
How so? If I say to you "let's see if we can get Bill to say bad and inaccurate things about someone", am I guilty of conspiracy to libel?
Conspiracy to commit libel is not a crime. I know you, and half of slashdot and the internet at large, what this to be a vast conspiracy to criminalize free speech. Maybe the way the DA is going about this case will do so, I don't know. But there are plenty of ways to apply current law, laws that have been upheld by the SCOTUS.
If someone sent you 100 postal letters per day, or organized friends to stand outside your house yelling at you, this would get the attention of law enforcement.
Once again, that's not the issue here. This isn't a case of one person constantly sending her harassing messages - it's a case of many people exercising their free-speech rights. Some of their other actions are certainly illegal, and should be prosecuted, but let's not invent new "crimes" to charge them with.
I agree there should not be new crimes invented. That's why I was pointing out the laws that already exist, for crimes that have been tested already in other case, that could be applied to this case. As I said, conspiracy to commit murder is a crime, there are laws against it. Your straw-man of conspiracy to commit libel is just that, a made up "new crime" that you are using to justify other "new crimes" you think are being created here.
Harassment is a crime in some jurisdictions. So is contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Stalking. Hell, if the kids said to each other, online or otherwise, "lets try to get her to kill herself" then you can bump up to conspiracy to commit murder.
There is no need for any slippery slope, no new cyber laws. If someone sent you 100 postal letters per day, or organized friends to stand outside your house yelling at you, this would get the attention of law enforcement. The laws are there already, and have been for years.
That was my first thought as well, but I went for Hanlon's razor. You deal with digital software and analogue parts, and know that even a momentary push button switch is analogue. So even something that simple gets de-bounced because it might cause a problem for the software if it changes rapidly. But, picture some software engineer staring at the circuit board specification, and seeing all of these extra capacitors jumping from a signal line to ground. "Hey, I can save the company a few cents by getting rid of these!" Admittedly, because I have been that software engineer on a home-made project, it is an easy mistake to make and the first that came to my mind.
What I wonder about all of this, is why the Japanese haven't had this problem with Priuses . . . Priusi? kept in Japan. Flaw in North American manufacturing, something weird in the road conditions, driving habits, smaller feet not hitting both the gas and brake when they get panicked, or just numbers on the road?
Slashdot Mirror
My last apartment had cable included in the rent. The one before that had TV and a 10BaseT connection to a T1 for some cheap price since the rent was so high for one room. This one doesn't. The cable company got rid of their 'low price options' because they 'switched to digital cable for higher quality'. They want a minimum of $80, for 30 channels that I don't care about. To get anything I would want to see, I would have to spend over $120. And to add internet would be another 40 to 50, which is nearly what my DSL connection costs. When I have $150 left for groceries at the end of the month, that isn't likely to happen. Easy solution was an antenna so I get local broadcast stations: cbs, nbc, ion. Then I picked up Netflix. When I get bored and would turn on the TV to just watch whatever is on, now I just turn on a movie or tv show that I want to watch. Mix in hulu for Burn Notice, a friend who has BBC-A so I can watch Doctor Who, and I find I don't miss cable at all.
> ...plus whatever penalties HIPPA can be used to bring to bear.
Which is none. HIPAA applies to health care providers, not their employees.
Employees who signed a contract, possibly with penalties for causing the company to violate federal law. At minimum, use of company assests (the network) in an unlawful manner would be grounds for lose of employment. The hospital might even pursue charges of theft for use of assets outside of the employees contracted obligations, wording it in the same way as stealing wifi, or using licensed software at home. Not saying the police or DA would care, but they could start the process when they fired them.
Everquest had that when it launched. In order to limit what the PvP flagged character could do, they prevented them from receiving heals or buffs from any non-PvP flagged character. This limited the griefer trick of healing with a non-PvP character, preventing other PvPers from killing them. But it made any PvP character useless to anyone not PvP flagged. If you could not find a PvP guild with enemies to fight against, or had a group of friends willing to fight each other some times but were willing to level together, you had no way to play any other part of the game. When the Arenas were made available, areas in certain zones where everyone is PvP until they leave, there was no reason to permanently flag yourself as PvP anymore.
The people who wanted to PvP went to the PvP servers. Every one there was flagged, and on one of them there were no level limits on who could gank who. When they introduced some protection to low level characters, they created a situation where very low level characters could kill much higher levels using the environment, while giving the high level players no recourse. See: Fansy The Famous Bard.
Different, not as stupid, but similar.
I should take offence at that stupid crack, knowing where myself and friends ended up. But then I look back at all the meth-heads, 2-child-families before high-school graduation, the percent of high-schoolers who went on to college or trade school, and the unemployment numbers . . .
;-)
Christ, what kind of lunatic small town did you live in? I grew up in a little town of about 5000 people in Northern California. Everytime a new family moved in somewhere people were excited. We wanted to hear about what they had done, places they had been, what kind of cool toys they had that we didn't. At the schools,
Are you talking from just your perspective at school, as a kid/teen/community college age individual?
There were always a few crazy old codgers that liked to bitch
Going to take that as a yes. If you were talking about it from a younger perspective, you might be right about the view from that age. I collected stories from my parent's and grandparent's, that's where the ice-cream anecdote came from. That generation gap shows up, as a kid I had no idea about the gossip that went around. But I don't know about small towns in Northern California, maybe it really is the paradise my family there tells me it is. Or it might be the average age of people, my experience was in a rather aged town because all the young folks moved out and stayed away, while the older ones, or those who followed in the family jobs, were now unemployed and stuck. Railroad and farms and mining, hell of a combinations.
Have five to ten generations of people living in a small community for nearly 100 years, and see how many can trace their families back to just a hand-full of individuals. When the women are the ones moving out, while the men stay in town to continue the same line of work their fathers -grandfather,and so on- were in then the town also tends to collect very few family names. Five thousand people, and nearly all could trace their family and find kinship with almost anyone else born in the town.
If you thought I meant just three or four modern nuclear families, I apologize for the confusion.
You have never lived in a small town, have you? As the new person, if you are friendly then you must be hiding something. If you are quiet, you are hiding something. If you talk to people, you are trying to blend in and are hiding something. 1200 people, you might meet 100 in the first week, but the other 1100 will have heard about you from their friends and family. I grew up in a town only a bit larger, under 5000 people, and when someone new moved to town people would know their favorite ice cream flavor before they ever met them. New people being those not already kin to one of the three or four families, or marrying into one of those families.
Okay, so my perspective is from a small southern town. Maybe them yankees do it differently.
Mob AI in MMORPGs is a very simple thing. Pathfinding towards the player with the most aggro, if distance range then cast a spell or shoot an arrow. Then you have physics, which most MMOs just ignore. So far, I have not met an MMO that put my CPU at 100% while at minimal graphics, just so it could calculate world effects and AI. Some newer FPS, on the other hand, do exactly that. If you drop their AI on a central server, you are going to need more processors available, not fewer. The company would have to shell out for a huge data center, or make the AI requirements a bit less severe. The end result would be less a unique experience, as the AI had to handle itself with far less resources.
Some people seem to think their parents never did this. Whether as blatantly as calling other parents to ensure that stories match, or just talking to the other parents at the grocery store about the party both kids went to, this isn't something new. Parents now can not just ask the internet, while shopping for groceries, about what the kids were doing.
Right, because judging the person based on a question they asked is so obviously the correct way to respond to it. Why does everyone bashing this person assume that they have not tried talking to their kids. Maybe they have tried setting rules, and enforcing them. Maybe the kids are not as well behaved or rational as all the /. posters seem to remember themselves being. Or, in your case, Mr. Anon. "10 year old computer is proof of bad parenting" Coward, maybe the kids are exactly as asinine and obnoxious as you are, and NEED to have their computer usage restricted.
Of course it sucks that children come across, say, waterballoon fetishists on youtube every day by accident. The problem is probably a lot more severe if a child has an illness such as autism. Being admittedly largely ignorant when it comes to the education of autistic children, I'd still be interested to learn if it isn't possible to convey the nature of fetish porn to an 11-year old child and teach him how to avoid this stuff by himself?
It would really depend on the degree of autism that the child suffers from. Some children, even by age 11, are not able to communicate effectively, and others would not understand, or be frightened by, the concept of a fetish for destroying something they like. Explaining the jump from just a fetish for popping balloon to balloon popping fetish porn would be another huge step. But the spectrum for autism is so wide that there really is not way to make a generalization.
Hmm, alright, on re-reading how I phrased that, I see that it can be read that way. My train of thought focused more on the 'catching' part, requiring proof to be certain you have caught the person involved. Without proof, you haven't caught the person involved, just captured or detained someone you think might be. Similar thought for the meaning of proof, as opposed to evidence.
But that is my personal opinion about the criminal, not my opinion on what I feel the law should require.
You must be one of those kids who never knew that their parent's called your friend's parents and checked if you were actually there. Before the advent of the telephone, parents just talked to each other, "Hey, little Timmy said he was with you and your kid playing baseball last week, how did the game go?" Kids might not get caught misbehaving as quickly, but they still would get caught.
New technology, new times, new ways of keeping an eye on your kids. By your animosity, either your parents were quite over the line of reasonable, or you feel you were raised fine with no parental involvement so someone else's kids should be too. Both are very weak arguments.
You have to remember, the tricky thing about morals is that 'mine are always right'. Almost every sociology 101 course has to devote a huge amount of time just getting people to admit their own ethnocentrism, much less acknowledge that other people have values that are right for their culture. However, it is the government's job to legislate, if not morality, socially agreed norms. One could even say that legislation against murder is a moral legislation, if someone wanted to carry the argument that far. And I know one sociology professor who probably would, if not just to annoy his students. It seems that our culture has come to view the internet as our own. It follows that, if it is ours, then the internet must play by our rules. Circular logic says that, since we have used our laws to enforce our views on the internet already, it must be our own to legislate further. Bad logic, but the cynic in me says that the same logical problem pervades more of our culture than just the way we deal with the internet.
I do agree with you, that anyone harming a child deserves to be caught. I, personally, feel they should be shot on sight. The problem, for my opinion, is what constitutes harm? Given the way our society has come down strongly against child porn and abuse, what harm is done after the fact to the children involved? How much of a role does the stigma of being abused, and the ostracization that follow, play in the development of the children involved? And how can we, as a society, justify 'think of the children' when we so blatantly do not think of them at all after the 'bad guy' has been put away?
A proprietary, closed, you have to buy our software to develop on language is being told to fuck off in favor of an open, anyone can develop for without any cost language (Flash vs. HTML5)
Well, you have one and a half out of three right, so good job. But you might want to look at the SWF spec, now available through the Open Screen Project, and the free AS3/Flex SDK and build tools. It is still proprietary, and some parts are still closed. But it isn't nearly as bad as you make it seem.
I don't think it has to be an us vs them mentality in this. I am of the mind, having watched the video, that the troops were making the best decision they could. They do not have the benefit of rewinding the video, of blowing up the resolution to make the picture wall sized, or selective highlighting to show who is a reporter and who is a civilian and who is an enemy. They knew there were friendly ground forces in the area, and it is their job to protect them. Their controllers authorized them to shoot. I did find it disturbing that they wanted the injured man to 'just pick up a gun' so they could shoot again.
On the other side of things, I also think it is a good thing that this video got leaked to the public. My generation and those younger have only seen war through gun and infrared missile cameras, and while this is not as graphic as films from embedded reporters or soldiers with cameras in wars past, it is not as disconnected as watching a building get closer to a missile camera before the camera goes out. These are people we can see, not invisible ones in a building and not dehumanized 'terrorists'. People need to know the human cost of bread and circuses.
Yes, I watched the video when it was leaked. Nearly threw up several times.
Why that walnut decided to attack our car, I will never know. I never had a chance to ask it, as it was promptly dealt with by the car behind us. I would say that it's remains were returned, it's next of kin notified, and so forth. But it wouldn't be true. The nut got what it deserved.
Almost called it a fruit, and then realized exactly how badly that could be quoted out of context. Not that this can't be, mind you.
Not to be rude, but nothing you said is proof. I am curious, though, so feel free to elaborate on any points. I am just going through your story as an interested science type, so maybe you or someone else can prove they have a physical malady.
If your points are in the other that you went through them, great. I, however, am going to respond in an order that I would look at from the outside. Point three, you find that leaving the apartment fixed the problem. Good, but this doesn't help the case that it was the telco. All it says is that you were having some reaction to the apartment, physiological or psychological. Points one and two, your symptoms matched the symptoms for EMF exposure. On a quick search, I found that I could pin any given symptom to EMF exposure. Someone, somewhere, has said that SymptomX (from dry mouth to pain to heart problems to depression) may be caused by EMF. The WHO has done double blind studies and found that people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity can not detect the radio signals they think, but instead may be picking up on the 60Hz flicker in florescent lights. I know that I can not walk into certain apartment complexes that leave old florescent bulbs to flicker, the noise and lights blinking make me ill. No clue of the symptoms, they could match any number of other real disorders, or reactions to things in the building. On to point four, you don't mention how you "solved" the problem, maybe you don't want to. If it was moving away, that would only say that either something in the building was making you ill, again physiologically or psychologically, or there is the possibility that since you had attached to this thought that the problem was because of the telco building you masked or removed the symptoms in the same way a psychosomatic allergy to yellow can be avoided by avoiding yellow things. If you got the telco to shut the building down, congrats on that if it is the case, or put up some radio wave shielding it still doesn't differentiate anything.
As for point five, no, a psychosomatic response is definitely not the best answer for things that can't be diagnosed. However, it tends to be the common one; before chronic fatigue and fibromialgia, the problems those describe were usually treated as psychological only with no physical cause. The problem is, in double blind studies where people who claim to be sensitive to EMF were exposed to real and sham radiation, they proved no more able to determine which was real and which was fake than a person with no symptoms. Nor did they prove to be better than shear chance, if I read the studies correctly. So if, when tested, the symptoms appear to be psychosomatic in studied cases of other individuals with the same disorder, then it is not that far of a stretch to say that the disorder is psychosomatic.
There is a lot more to your story than you mention, obviously. And this is the internet, so don't post anything you don't want everyone to see. But as an observer, with all the studies stacked against this being a real physical disorder, you are up against a lot that says this isn't real so I would have to see lots of information to believe it exists. The steps you took, especially the order you took them in, do not help your case as they line up with hypochondria pretty well.
Disclaimer: Not a doctor, psychologist, LCSW, or any other diagnostic professional.
Take everything with grain of salt. Or the whole shaker, as the case may be.
Why don't you look from the other side - make the lady put her house in a Faraday cage if she insist on her wireless?
Because it is much simpler to put his house in a Faraday cage, rather then first renovate this woman's rented house, and then the other neighbor that he sees with a wireless phone. And some time later another neighbor whom he finds out owns a cell phone.
Did you test yourself to find out if it was the wireless radiation from the base station? Maybe vibrations from it instead, or maybe some mold/dust/CO or something else in the apartment complex. Allergy to the neighbor's incense of choice. The onus is really on this guy to prove not only that he is sensitive to wifi and cellular signals but that this woman is the source of the problem. Maybe another neighbor has a AP running, but not broadcasting any SSID, his computer might not spot that. And if he uses a computer to find the access points, someone really needs to point out that the wireless card will be broadcasting at the same exact frequency. The radiation from a cellphone in her house is going to be pretty low compared to the electrical noise from light bulbs in his house, or any AC-DC transformers, or AC motor. If he is only sensitive to certain frequencies like wifi, then the microwaves in just about all of his neighbors houses could be a bigger source. They don't leak much, for safety reasons, but they not leak enough to annoy a cell or wireless signal. Which should put the energy level close enough in power to bother him, if this is real.
Well, fair enough, but to play devil's advocate for a second here, what if it was really making him sick (it isn't)? Clearly you can't claim to be able to do whatever you want within the confines of your own house if it makes the guy next door sick?
Depends on what it is you are doing, and if your actions are otherwise legal. The FCC has said you are allowed to broadcast these wireless signals, I think that will trump a doctor saying that symptoms might be real. Now, if you were piping something known to be hazardous, say gamma radiation, because you were not following known safety guidelines, then the neighbors would have some ground to stand on.
Also, if I was your neighbor and, according to your argument, I can do whatever I want within the confines of my house, you won't mind if I play loud rock music at 2 AM in the morning every day? I think your right to a good nights sleep in your own home should trump by right to rock out at an unsocialable hour.
I, personally, would not mind as I am awake at 2AM most days. However, the existing town ordinance establishing a noise curfew might cause the police to take issue. Your repeated violation of that ordinance, with documents showing that the police had been there to shut you down multiple times, might give the cranky old lady across the way the legal ground to get a lawsuit past preliminary hearings and maybe even enough to win a suit against you. And if you decide to play it at 2PM, but even louder, you might run afoul of those safety laws for safe decibel levels.
In the USA, you can sue anyone for just about anything. What you sue them for has to just barely make legal sense. Suing, filing the lawsuit to start proceedings, has nothing to do with actually getting anything more than a preliminary 'this sounds like something the court should/shouldn't hear' ruling.
Reasonable accommodation usually applies, in housing issues, to the landlord having to allow a tenant to make changes to their property to facilitate better living conditions. If this guy rents, and his doctor believes this is real, his landlord might have to allow him to install a faraday cage, though it would be paid for from the tenant's pockets. As far as I know, barring various HOA rules, and various town ordinances, there is very little legal basis for stopping this woman from using her FCC certified router. Now, if they find she swapped antennas to something unrated, or added an amplifier, or some other little FCC nit-pick, there might be problems.
With the tree analogy, lets go even further and say it is a walnut tree. Some people are deathly allergic to walnuts, but I really doubt a court of law would require someone to cut a tree down based on the possibility that someone else might somehow ingest a walnut, or one could blow through their window at night. If the tree owner started grinding walnuts, venting powder in the direction of the allergic person's house, that might be taken as malicious. For radiation, the router/laptop/lightbulb/microwave/wiring should be good as long as they are all in their certified condition, or meeting code. If, as someone else suggested, she stuck a cantenna on the router and aimed it at his house, that would probably be malicious.
Complete aside: who ever let walnut trees grow over state highways, with high transfer truck traffic, should be shot. Walnuts and windshields do not mix.
Harassment is a crime in some jurisdictions.
Sure, but what's that got to do with the price of egss?
Because that may be what was happening here. Not a case I am following, so don't rightly know. You said, in the post I replied to, that they were "arresting people for saying mean things" and that the "nanny state" was overstepping it's bounds. I am pointing out that there exist laws, to charge people with crimes, for behavior that you may just define as "being mean" or "saying mean things".
If you do not care for those laws, I suggest you take it up with various local, state, and federal authorities, to get the law changed, instead of making up new crimes on slashdot.
So is contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Equally irrelevant, but even more so when the "suspects" are themselves minors.
They will likely get charged as adults for the other crimes, that may well follow for this one as well.
Stalking.
Not an issue here.
Really, says who? I don't know all the facts of the case, but if the girl tried to get away from them, say blocking them on her pages or what not, and they found ways around them, that is stalking.
Hell, if the kids said to each other, online or otherwise, "lets try to get her to kill herself" then you can bump up to conspiracy to commit murder.
How so? If I say to you "let's see if we can get Bill to say bad and inaccurate things about someone", am I guilty of conspiracy to libel?
Conspiracy to commit libel is not a crime.
I know you, and half of slashdot and the internet at large, what this to be a vast conspiracy to criminalize free speech. Maybe the way the DA is going about this case will do so, I don't know. But there are plenty of ways to apply current law, laws that have been upheld by the SCOTUS.
If someone sent you 100 postal letters per day, or organized friends to stand outside your house yelling at you, this would get the attention of law enforcement.
Once again, that's not the issue here. This isn't a case of one person constantly sending her harassing messages - it's a case of many people exercising their free-speech rights. Some of their other actions are certainly illegal, and should be prosecuted, but let's not invent new "crimes" to charge them with.
I agree there should not be new crimes invented. That's why I was pointing out the laws that already exist, for crimes that have been tested already in other case, that could be applied to this case. As I said, conspiracy to commit murder is a crime, there are laws against it. Your straw-man of conspiracy to commit libel is just that, a made up "new crime" that you are using to justify other "new crimes" you think are being created here.
Harassment is a crime in some jurisdictions. So is contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Stalking. Hell, if the kids said to each other, online or otherwise, "lets try to get her to kill herself" then you can bump up to conspiracy to commit murder.
There is no need for any slippery slope, no new cyber laws. If someone sent you 100 postal letters per day, or organized friends to stand outside your house yelling at you, this would get the attention of law enforcement. The laws are there already, and have been for years.
That was my first thought as well, but I went for Hanlon's razor. You deal with digital software and analogue parts, and know that even a momentary push button switch is analogue. So even something that simple gets de-bounced because it might cause a problem for the software if it changes rapidly. But, picture some software engineer staring at the circuit board specification, and seeing all of these extra capacitors jumping from a signal line to ground. "Hey, I can save the company a few cents by getting rid of these!" Admittedly, because I have been that software engineer on a home-made project, it is an easy mistake to make and the first that came to my mind.
What I wonder about all of this, is why the Japanese haven't had this problem with Priuses . . . Priusi? kept in Japan. Flaw in North American manufacturing, something weird in the road conditions, driving habits, smaller feet not hitting both the gas and brake when they get panicked, or just numbers on the road?