All the same issues that the parent that you replied to brought up still apply. A workplace is a workplace. Sometimes there is downtime on the job, sometimes you just need a break, some people just slack. Lots of things. Some of it will always go on, but if its really going on at such a rate that its actually causing a problem, then its a problem.
The question I have is, whats the real problem and whats the symptom. People have been finding ways to slack since people enough os a social hierarchy to have work they were expected to do by others. Its fundamentally the same problem. People will slack one way or another, put a person in an environment, and he will find a way to slack in it.
The question is how much, and whether that slacking is causing a problem wrt getting the needed work done.
This is, as was pointed out, a management issue. Just as it always has been. You can't get a janitor to stop leaning on his mop by taking his mop away.
Besides... I would vote against it because its silly. This stuff is easy to get around. There is always a way.
This reminds me of Traci Lords. I checked wikipedia to make sure i have the story straight but, there was some speculation that she did just that. She denies it of course but... it is an interesting coincidence that she was 16 when she went into porn....
and the authorities found out, and all her old videos became known to be illegal soon after her first and only porn flick that was produced after she turned 18.... and coincidentially, the only one she owned.
Heh yah, but being a stereotype doesn't make it wrong. There seem to be alot of passive women. In fact, the one I had in mind who specifically told me that was a rather passive type. She was the same one who said that no matter how much she likes a guy, she wont ever make the first move. She will lose interest and go on to someone else if he doesn't initiate.
Lots of women tend to be passive, and I think alot of it is social. Alot of guys are scared off by women who arn't passive. Women are encouraged to expose their availability and sexuality, but to hide their interest in it. Its almost like the ideal seems to be women whose breasts hang out everywhere and ass shows, but are blissfully unaware of what anyone would like to do with them.
Its kind of strange really, I don't get it. Then again, maybe its because I am attracted to non-passive females?
These guys are "wired normal". A Paedophile is someone attracted to pre-pubecent people.
13 is pubecent... a guy attracted to a 13 year old is a male animal attracted to a fertile female animnal.... he is doing exaclty what millions of years of evolution taught him to do and society tried to unteach.... and on some level... failed.
I think thats my real problem. There is grass on the field. a 13 year old girl will often have a strong sex drive. The few women who I know that have been really open and honest about their teenage years have told me they would spend hours masturbating at that age.
Now I know 13 year olds in our culture are nowhere near as mature as they could be...and in terms of their maturity, probably far behind in the area of sex compared to other areas, since our culture seems hell bent on intentionally retarding their growth. (and thus leaving them even easier prey)
However.... I do think we have to keep nature in mind when we look at these crimes. Should it be illegal? Yah probably. Is it wrong? Yah usually. How bad is it? I don't know, I mean... I have a problem faulting people for just... being what they are.
Besides, I think its far healthier to start young than late. More so for men than women since there is still alot of social expectation laid on us, and starting mostly in my mid-late 20s, its been quite an uphill battle to become more normal and make sex part of my life. I wish to the gods I don't believe in that I had started at 13.
When I was 19 I moved in with my first girlfriend, a 26 year old.
Thats a 7 year age difference. The relationship lasted all of 2 years.... but if you went backwards that same amount of time, it would have been illegal (maybe, there is some debate over the actual law in MA... some say 18, others 16, and I am aware of no age difference law... just an age of consent). is 24/17 really so different from 26/19 ?
Hell, in that case, *I* was the one carrying the financial burden. Paying most of the rent and letting her just handle bills. Age really means little. My sister has regularly dated guys 10 years her senior, and I seem to be going for girls about 5 years my junior (which at 28 is legal for me)
People mature in different ways and at different rates.... I don't think any legislation will ever really be adequet in this area.
Thats pretty obnoxious. Actually this stuff tends to be shakey anyway since the definition of "assault" isn't what one expects it to be. I mean, most people, even in terms of non-sexual assault, don't really understand the difference between say "assault" and "assault and battery".
Admittedly I was ignoring the fact that "sexual assault" includes "consensual" sex if the law says one of the parties "couldn't consent". The difference between everyday and technical legal use of terms can be head spinning.
There was a case not too long back where an underage girl got into a bar with a fake id, was picked up by a major league baseball player (ok this was maybe 6-8 years ago... doesn't seem that long ago).
Even though it was in a bar, and even though she had used fake id to get in, he was still convicted. Don't know if he appealed or the conviction got overturned, but I do remember being rather incensed that such a moronic verdict was handed down.
I really want to know more about the psychology of this and how it comes about. I mean... who wants to be with a 13 yo anyway? Though, 19 meh... I have known 19 year olds who have dated 13 year olds, its usually a case of an overly marture 13 year old and an immature 19 year old. Hell, one of my best friends today was 19 and dated my sister when she was 14 and going on 15.
I can attest that at 19, he wasn't quite at her level then. At 28, he still isn't now, but thats another story:)
But I digress... and far. This is an issue of assault more than age. Who cares how old he was? What he did was wrong at any age where the person can tell right from wrong. I really don't see how age verification will help. 13 year olds arn't that hard to talk into doing things that their authority figures don't approve of, hell he might have had an easier time with his real age... 13 year olds think 19 year olds are cool and mature.
The reason I say I want to know more about it, was I saw those dateline shows where they caught and outed a bunch of guys who did this stuff and interviewed them. It was sobering. Sobering that it was happening, and sobering to see these guys interviewd.
They seemed.... mostly normal. The only thing really different about them seemed to be that they seemed rather socially undeveloped. I really got the feeling they were going after young easily influenced girls because, they seemed to lack the social skills to get a girl their own age. As a slashdot geek, I am pretty familiar with some of the behavious.
I guess what bugs me, is I saw myself at different points in my life in their stories and thought, that with a slightly different values, and influences in my life, could I have been one of these guys showing up at a 13 year olds house with a six pack of cheap malt beverages?
While its easy to deamonize people who try to do, or do bad things, and we have to deal with this from a criminal justice standpoint when it happens. However, shouldn't we be looking at our society and how we can help to not create people who are in the situation where a 13 year old starts to look like a viable option?
It seems to me like these guys needed something. It wasn't a 13 year old girl they really needed, but it wasn't anything that time in jail was going to fix either. Most of them had even seen the show in the past, so the threat of incarceration certainly wasn't stopping them.
I think it behooves us to understand these issues at a deeper level, and try to solve them from their source rather than their symptoms.
I wouldn't know.... I am still boycotting them over the 1-click patent lawsuit.
Seriously, I havn't spent a dime at amazon in something like 6 years now. Its too bad, they were good years ago when I used them. Too bad they abused patents. Really is.
While I applaud your desire to keep your children safe, I have to wonder if the "threat" here isn't more in your own imagination than real. In my experience, it is not uncommon to parents to make all manner of completly irrational decisions based entirely on ideas of risk that are, to say the least, complete fantasy.
Frankly, I delpore this, and all of this kowtowing as I really don't see any real harm that comes from exposure to so called "mature themes" in video games. Generally speaking, the truely mature things, kids arn't all that interested in, and the infantile gore and other things server to desensitise them to violent and sexual imagry.
Contrary to the "party line" I will argue that this is, in fact, a very good thing.
Honestly, I really think the attempts to "shield" kids from being exposed to things is well... something that does far more harm than good. This "ratings" buisness serves only to reinforce harmful overprotection and the idea that we live in a somehow very angerous world, which children need protection from.
Actually I would argue that our world, violent games and all, safer for everyone than it has ever been in the past. The possible exception being the oversensitivisation to violence by the lack of exposure to it, which degrades a persons ability to deal in true life threatening situations. The ability to not feel compassion and fear, and the ability to dissociate from such dangerous activities is an important skill when those situations come up in real life, however rare they might be.
> On one occasion, a fellow grad student was capturing faces from amateur porn sites for some > research. He got a stern warning from the IT department, and, in return, the IT department got a > stern warning from the Provost's office about disturbing researchers.
And well they should!
As someone who worked in University IT, we were often reminded of where we worked and what our purposes was. I think it was a good thing. IT exists to provide infrastructure for things to be done, not for its own ends.
Restricting porn in your house or in your buisness is one thing, but a university exists to promote knowledge and discover new knowledge. These sorts of restrictions and policing run directly against the very mission of the institution.
I think people tend to forget that there are reasons to block porn. Parents block porn in a misguided attempt to protect their children from some imagined harm (which is a very common thing for parents to do). Or to protect a company from potential legal liability from overly sensative workers. (I mean really... it has nothing to do with productivity. There are plenty of ways to be unproductive, thats like rotating the tires to see if it fixes that loud exhaust sound) .
A university has a completly different mission. Its good to see that the school has an intelligent provost.
Civil liberties and government funding have little to do with it.
Its about academic freedom, and freedom of inquery.
Realise I worked in IT at a major university. I was there when we decided to impliment virus scanning, not even spam filtering (I was there for that too) but just virus scanning.
It was debated because well... what if someone had a legitimate acedemic need to recieve viruses in email?
Seriously! We gave unfettered internet access. Porn? Well... guess what... someone may be doing acedemic research into porn and needs to access porn sites. These are legitimate debates that come up in that environment because... they take the persuit of intellectual inquery as serious buisness... because it IS their buisness.
No firewalls, no filtering... unfettered access, because if someone needs it, they need it.
They saw you with a pipe.... maybe a clean pipe thats never been used.... but your friend that you were hanging out with had a big bag of grass.....
The funny thing is, people can be convicted of stuff like this. There are, in fact, laws against things like "being in a place where heroin is known to be kept". Yup... if its possibly "known" to you that your friend has heroin, it may be illegal for you to hang out with him.... even if you don't use, sell, or have ever touched heroin.
So overall... sounds like they have some pretty good evidence there overall.
Have you considered asking their support if they can offer this, maybe as a pay service.
You never know... they may already be willing to do that for a fee if you ask.
Though, don't you only pop download new messages? Why not setup another mailbox somewhere, pop everything off, then setup a filter rule that sends a copy of each message off to the other mailbox. That way you have a real auto-updating archive.
Then just BCC that mailbox on everything you send too.
You sir are an idiot and a dangerous one at that. I am forced to call into question not only your breeding, but your very upbringing!
> Happy Meal Toys on the other hand, are intended to entertain children while they > eat fatty foods
Ahem.... Happy Meal Toys are intended to entertain children AFTER they have eaten their fatty foods. Children playing with toys WHILE eating are misbehaved, illmannered youth whose activities reflect badly on their parents!
I see that you are not aware of this fact and this makes me think that your mother was lax and never taught you proper manners young man. Your mother should be ashamed!
And why should we be so closed minded and discriminatory against them? I say as long as they are consenting adults, let them beat the piss and snot out of eachother.... and put the video on TV, and call it "Candid Pub Camera".
> For some reason, graphic designers think it desirable for futuristic applications to have > moving backgrounds, serving no purpose, yet being nonetheless distracting.
Whats so futuristic about that? Never run a screensaver in our root window have we? Not that I recomend it but... theres nothing new about the ability to make the UI unusable.
Could always go for the disaster area UI... black on black on black....
shit, just post on craigslist saying you have a room for rent... you should get at least 2 replies from someone claiming to live in some other country and be looking for a room.... (though what they are really looking for is some dupe to cash their fake checks) chance to play indeed... have fun!
Whats real fun is you get the checks and then out them and tell them you know the scam and want in. Thats when the real fun begins. They will bend over backwards to have a conspirator in the US. I strung one of these guys on for weeks.
> I agree with you on this. I wish to God, they'd let me opt out of the system. I'd sign away all of my SS funds > I've put into the system and supposed to get...all of it, if starting today, I could take the money, and start > investing it myself...
You know, there is a part of me that really wants to agree with you. It would, for an intelligent person like you or me, be better. We can invest our money and plan for our retirements in far wiser ways than the multitude and would benefit under such a plan.
This sort of independance and self reliance is admirable. Every individual should strive to be able to take care of themselves as much as they can, in the ways that they can. That said, I do think that its often better for us to act collectivly than sepratly. Its more efficient to start with (or has more capacity for efficiency). Not everything and in every way, but in some ways.
Lets face it... people don't save. Call it a failure of discipline, call it a failure of education, call it a failure of human nature, we just don't do it. Some people, yes. Most people? No. Should we fix this? Absolutly. We should be encouraging people to act financially responsibly. I don't think that means we have to leave them out in the cold if they don't.
We have to look at that tax, and all taxes in terms of their total effect, rather than simple cost. Social Security came about for one reason. People got old and realised they couldn't afford to live after retirement. Fammilies saw bread winners become drains on their finances as life spans began to shoot well beyond peoples ability to generate saleable value to society.
Whether it is Social Security, or financial education and smart investing programs, or whatever. The people will support whatever it is that actually does the job of ridding our lives, as much as possible, from seeing people reach their "golden years" and find themselves unable to care for themselves and unable to be taken care of. We dont want to have to put our parents out in the cold, or see anyone else have to either. We don't want our parents dragging us down either.... just as our parents parents didn't want it and put a stop to it.
That is the reality, the people don't like seeing the old and infirmed suffer. The people are willing to do what it takes to stop them from suffering. Many will do it individually through their own works, many will do it by supporting them. All in all, there was enough support for the idea that we accepted a general income tax to make it happen.
I absolutly welcome any proposal to make it go away, as does every other person really. Nobody actually likes being taxes. However, the reality is that there is a problem that this is solving. In comparison to other uses of government money.... complaining about Social Security is, as my grandmother likes to say, "Penny Wise and Dollar Foolish". If you want to make it go away, then you had better have something ready to replace it that fixes the same problem that it does (one way or another) or else, it will be back.
What is alarming is that cell phones have become ubiquetous, and everyone is now carrying around their own personal bug.
Its not alarming when this is used on a criminal suspect with a warrent. Its alarming that the capability exists and could be used on almost anyone at almost any time and a warrent is hardly a technical requirement for doing it.
If the backdoor exists, it can be used for either good or evil.
This ability seems just full of potential for abuse.
Sure you can buy the tires in cash and put them on with no paper trail to tie them back to you. However, how hard would that be to correlate?
As soon as you go through a toll booth or a detector with a camera nearby, it would be trivial to tie your tire IDs to your cars License plate. In fact, they wouldn't even need to do it en mass. All they need to do is store the data.
Then when they have an ID to look for, they can go back and see when they saw it previously, or where it has been since.
Once you have detectors in place, it becomes a data mining issue. Put some of them at toll booths, where they already have cameras, and hell, with speed pass, they should be able to correlate your tires with your car the first time you use your speed pass.
These days, I hear, they try to keep things more low key. Besides, they probably own RIAA stock at this point. These days they are far more likely to let it be a court challenge... and maybe bringing the Italian American Anti-Defamation League into it:)
Did you ever see the attempts by the FBI to ignite violence by the maffia against the communist party? Some hillarious stuff. Gotta love the FOIA.
Sure you can cost them more money than they can cost you....
but can you cost them a larger percentage of their revenue stream than the percentage that they can cost yours?
I dunno about you... but I am pretty sure the RIAA can take a million dollar hit much more gracefully and with less notice than I could personally take a thousand dollar hit.
Not that you are wrong, I agree... these are the sorts of tactics that could work. Just make them drop the case by dragging it out.
Honestly dealing with cops is sooooo fuckign easy. As long as there isn't someone there demanding something be done about you, and you havn't been directly endangering too much life, they will generally look the other way or let you off with a warning if you show them a little respect and deference.
You submit to their authority, and don't lie to them. Don't admit to anything, but don't go makign shit up. You have to figure the vast majority of people, when confronted, will try to make up some excuse, especially under the pressure of having a guy in uniform with a gun asking the questions.
Most people are not great liars under pressure. Alot of these people end up insulting the cops intelligence.
So simply be honest, respectful, and don't scream out "arrest me please, I know I am a huge lawbreaker", and they will usually let you go.
I tend to like "No officer, why did you pull me over?" "Oh really? No, how fast was I going? I am sorry. You are right, I will slow it down"
Deference, respect... and I have never gotten a speeding ticket. Though I have been asked a couple of times to slow it down. 15 miles over the speed limit... who knew.
I once heard a mechanic say "You can just think of an engine as a glorified air pump" (a really dirty one)
The point is you just have to change how your looking at it. To see a heat pump as a generator, look at hot air on one side as fuel being burned (with colder air being the exhaust output) and hot air on the other side as the output energy.
Actually it has 2 fuels... the electricity comming in too. So it burns electricity and hot air, and makes hot air on the other side.
An air conditioner is just a heat pump where you hang out inside the "spent fuel tank". Its kind of like an engine with no alternator so it needs an external power source to spark the gas. And instead of hooking up a cam shaft, transmissions and wheels, you just pump the exhaust into the room to keep warm (finding the problems with that plan is left as an exercise to the reader)
Slashdot Mirror
Against. Hands down. Not even a question.
All the same issues that the parent that you replied to brought up still apply. A workplace is a workplace. Sometimes there is downtime on the job, sometimes you just need a break, some people just slack. Lots of things. Some of it will always go on, but if its really going on at such a rate that its actually causing a problem, then its a problem.
The question I have is, whats the real problem and whats the symptom. People have been finding ways to slack since people enough os a social hierarchy to have work they were expected to do by others. Its fundamentally the same problem. People will slack one way or another, put a person in an environment, and he will find a way to slack in it.
The question is how much, and whether that slacking is causing a problem wrt getting the needed work done.
This is, as was pointed out, a management issue. Just as it always has been. You can't get a janitor to stop leaning on his mop by taking his mop away.
Besides... I would vote against it because its silly. This stuff is easy to get around. There is always a way.
This reminds me of Traci Lords. I checked wikipedia to make sure i have the story straight but, there was some speculation that she did just that. She denies it of course but... it is an interesting coincidence that she was 16 when she went into porn....
and the authorities found out, and all her old videos became known to be illegal soon after her first and only porn flick that was produced after she turned 18.... and coincidentially, the only one she owned.
Coincidence? Maybe.
-Steve
Sexist stereotypes?
Heh yah, but being a stereotype doesn't make it wrong. There seem to be alot of passive women. In fact, the one I had in mind who specifically told me that was a rather passive type. She was the same one who said that no matter how much she likes a guy, she wont ever make the first move. She will lose interest and go on to someone else if he doesn't initiate.
Lots of women tend to be passive, and I think alot of it is social. Alot of guys are scared off by women who arn't passive. Women are encouraged to expose their availability and sexuality, but to hide their interest in it. Its almost like the ideal seems to be women whose breasts hang out everywhere and ass shows, but are blissfully unaware of what anyone would like to do with them.
Its kind of strange really, I don't get it. Then again, maybe its because I am attracted to non-passive females?
-Steve
Or speaking of being "wired that way"
These guys are "wired normal". A Paedophile is someone attracted to pre-pubecent people.
13 is pubecent... a guy attracted to a 13 year old is a male animal attracted to a fertile female animnal.... he is doing exaclty what millions of years of evolution taught him to do and society tried to unteach.... and on some level... failed.
I think thats my real problem. There is grass on the field. a 13 year old girl will often have a strong sex drive. The few women who I know that have been really open and honest about their teenage years have told me they would spend hours masturbating at that age.
Now I know 13 year olds in our culture are nowhere near as mature as they could be...and in terms of their maturity, probably far behind in the area of sex compared to other areas, since our culture seems hell bent on intentionally retarding their growth. (and thus leaving them even easier prey)
However.... I do think we have to keep nature in mind when we look at these crimes. Should it be illegal? Yah probably. Is it wrong? Yah usually. How bad is it? I don't know, I mean... I have a problem faulting people for just... being what they are.
Besides, I think its far healthier to start young than late. More so for men than women since there is still alot of social expectation laid on us, and starting mostly in my mid-late 20s, its been quite an uphill battle to become more normal and make sex part of my life. I wish to the gods I don't believe in that I had started at 13.
-Steve
When I was 19 I moved in with my first girlfriend, a 26 year old.
Thats a 7 year age difference. The relationship lasted all of 2 years.... but if you went backwards that same amount of time, it would have been illegal (maybe, there is some debate over the actual law in MA... some say 18, others 16, and I am aware of no age difference law... just an age of consent). is 24/17 really so different from 26/19 ?
Hell, in that case, *I* was the one carrying the financial burden. Paying most of the rent and letting her just handle bills. Age really means little. My sister has regularly dated guys 10 years her senior, and I seem to be going for girls about 5 years my junior (which at 28 is legal for me)
People mature in different ways and at different rates.... I don't think any legislation will ever really be adequet in this area.
-Steve
Thats pretty obnoxious. Actually this stuff tends to be shakey anyway since the definition of "assault" isn't what one expects it to be. I mean, most people, even in terms of non-sexual assault, don't really understand the difference between say "assault" and "assault and battery".
Admittedly I was ignoring the fact that "sexual assault" includes "consensual" sex if the law says one of the parties "couldn't consent". The difference between everyday and technical legal use of terms can be head spinning.
There was a case not too long back where an underage girl got into a bar with a fake id, was picked up by a major league baseball player (ok this was maybe 6-8 years ago... doesn't seem that long ago).
Even though it was in a bar, and even though she had used fake id to get in, he was still convicted. Don't know if he appealed or the conviction got overturned, but I do remember being rather incensed that such a moronic verdict was handed down.
-Steve
I really want to know more about the psychology of this and how it comes about. I mean... who wants to be with a 13 yo anyway? Though, 19 meh... I have known 19 year olds who have dated 13 year olds, its usually a case of an overly marture 13 year old and an immature 19 year old. Hell, one of my best friends today was 19 and dated my sister when she was 14 and going on 15.
:)
I can attest that at 19, he wasn't quite at her level then. At 28, he still isn't now, but thats another story
But I digress... and far. This is an issue of assault more than age. Who cares how old he was? What he did was wrong at any age where the person can tell right from wrong. I really don't see how age verification will help. 13 year olds arn't that hard to talk into doing things that their authority figures don't approve of, hell he might have had an easier time with his real age... 13 year olds think 19 year olds are cool and mature.
The reason I say I want to know more about it, was I saw those dateline shows where they caught and outed a bunch of guys who did this stuff and interviewed them. It was sobering. Sobering that it was happening, and sobering to see these guys interviewd.
They seemed.... mostly normal. The only thing really different about them seemed to be that they seemed rather socially undeveloped. I really got the feeling they were going after young easily influenced girls because, they seemed to lack the social skills to get a girl their own age. As a slashdot geek, I am pretty familiar with some of the behavious.
I guess what bugs me, is I saw myself at different points in my life in their stories and thought, that with a slightly different values, and influences in my life, could I have been one of these guys showing up at a 13 year olds house with a six pack of cheap malt beverages?
While its easy to deamonize people who try to do, or do bad things, and we have to deal with this from a criminal justice standpoint when it happens. However, shouldn't we be looking at our society and how we can help to not create people who are in the situation where a 13 year old starts to look like a viable option?
It seems to me like these guys needed something. It wasn't a 13 year old girl they really needed, but it wasn't anything that time in jail was going to fix either. Most of them had even seen the show in the past, so the threat of incarceration certainly wasn't stopping them.
I think it behooves us to understand these issues at a deeper level, and try to solve them from their source rather than their symptoms.
-Steve
I wouldn't know.... I am still boycotting them over the 1-click patent lawsuit.
Seriously, I havn't spent a dime at amazon in something like 6 years now. Its too bad, they were good years ago when I used them. Too bad they abused patents. Really is.
-Steve
Meh....
While I applaud your desire to keep your children safe, I have to wonder if the "threat" here isn't more in your own imagination than real. In my experience, it is not uncommon to parents to make all manner of completly irrational decisions based entirely on ideas of risk that are, to say the least, complete fantasy.
Frankly, I delpore this, and all of this kowtowing as I really don't see any real harm that comes from exposure to so called "mature themes" in video games. Generally speaking, the truely mature things, kids arn't all that interested in, and the infantile gore and other things server to desensitise them to violent and sexual imagry.
Contrary to the "party line" I will argue that this is, in fact, a very good thing.
Honestly, I really think the attempts to "shield" kids from being exposed to things is well... something that does far more harm than good. This "ratings" buisness serves only to reinforce harmful overprotection and the idea that we live in a somehow very angerous world, which children need protection from.
Actually I would argue that our world, violent games and all, safer for everyone than it has ever been in the past. The possible exception being the oversensitivisation to violence by the lack of exposure to it, which degrades a persons ability to deal in true life threatening situations. The ability to not feel compassion and fear, and the ability to dissociate from such dangerous activities is an important skill when those situations come up in real life, however rare they might be.
-Steve
> On one occasion, a fellow grad student was capturing faces from amateur porn sites for some
> research. He got a stern warning from the IT department, and, in return, the IT department got a
> stern warning from the Provost's office about disturbing researchers.
And well they should!
As someone who worked in University IT, we were often reminded of where we worked and what our purposes was. I think it was a good thing. IT exists to provide infrastructure for things to be done, not for its own ends.
Restricting porn in your house or in your buisness is one thing, but a university exists to promote knowledge and discover new knowledge. These sorts of restrictions and policing run directly against the very mission of the institution.
I think people tend to forget that there are reasons to block porn. Parents block porn in a misguided attempt to protect their children from some imagined harm (which is a very common thing for parents to do). Or to protect a company from potential legal liability from overly sensative workers. (I mean really... it has nothing to do with productivity. There are plenty of ways to be unproductive, thats like rotating the tires to see if it fixes that loud exhaust sound) .
A university has a completly different mission. Its good to see that the school has an intelligent provost.
-Steve
Civil liberties and government funding have little to do with it.
Its about academic freedom, and freedom of inquery.
Realise I worked in IT at a major university. I was there when we decided to impliment virus scanning, not even spam filtering (I was there for that too) but just virus scanning.
It was debated because well... what if someone had a legitimate acedemic need to recieve viruses in email?
Seriously! We gave unfettered internet access. Porn? Well... guess what... someone may be doing acedemic research into porn and needs to access porn sites. These are legitimate debates that come up in that environment because... they take the persuit of intellectual inquery as serious buisness... because it IS their buisness.
No firewalls, no filtering... unfettered access, because if someone needs it, they need it.
-Steve
They saw you with a pipe.... maybe a clean pipe thats never been used.... but your friend that you were hanging out with had a big bag of grass.....
The funny thing is, people can be convicted of stuff like this. There are, in fact, laws against things like "being in a place where heroin is known to be kept". Yup... if its possibly "known" to you that your friend has heroin, it may be illegal for you to hang out with him.... even if you don't use, sell, or have ever touched heroin.
So overall... sounds like they have some pretty good evidence there overall.
-Steve
Have you considered asking their support if they can offer this, maybe as a pay service.
You never know... they may already be willing to do that for a fee if you ask.
Though, don't you only pop download new messages? Why not setup another mailbox somewhere, pop everything off, then setup a filter rule that sends a copy of each message off to the other mailbox. That way you have a real auto-updating archive.
Then just BCC that mailbox on everything you send too.
-Steve
Ahahahah only on slashdot would advocating that kits eat before playing with their troys be a troll.
You sir are an idiot and a dangerous one at that. I am forced to call into question not only your breeding, but your very upbringing!
> Happy Meal Toys on the other hand, are intended to entertain children while they
> eat fatty foods
Ahem.... Happy Meal Toys are intended to entertain children AFTER they have eaten their fatty foods. Children playing with toys WHILE eating are misbehaved, illmannered youth whose activities reflect badly on their parents!
I see that you are not aware of this fact and this makes me think that your mother was lax and never taught you proper manners young man. Your mother should be ashamed!
-Steve
Clean Plate Club Gold Member
Exactly,
And why should we be so closed minded and discriminatory against them? I say as long as they are consenting adults, let them beat the piss and snot out of eachother.... and put the video on TV, and call it "Candid Pub Camera".
-Steve
> For some reason, graphic designers think it desirable for futuristic applications to have
> moving backgrounds, serving no purpose, yet being nonetheless distracting.
Whats so futuristic about that? Never run a screensaver in our root window have we?
Not that I recomend it but... theres nothing new about the ability to make the UI unusable.
Could always go for the disaster area UI... black on black on black....
-Steve
shit, just post on craigslist saying you have a room for rent... you should get at least 2 replies from someone claiming to live in some other country and be looking for a room.... (though what they are really looking for is some dupe to cash their fake checks) chance to play indeed... have fun!
Whats real fun is you get the checks and then out them and tell them you know the scam and want in. Thats when the real fun begins. They will bend over backwards to have a conspirator in the US. I strung one of these guys on for weeks.
-Steve
> I agree with you on this. I wish to God, they'd let me opt out of the system. I'd sign away all of my SS funds
> I've put into the system and supposed to get...all of it, if starting today, I could take the money, and start
> investing it myself...
You know, there is a part of me that really wants to agree with you. It would, for an intelligent person like you or me, be better. We can invest our money and plan for our retirements in far wiser ways than the multitude and would benefit under such a plan.
This sort of independance and self reliance is admirable. Every individual should strive to be able to take care of themselves as much as they can, in the ways that they can. That said, I do think that its often better for us to act collectivly than sepratly. Its more efficient to start with (or has more capacity for efficiency). Not everything and in every way, but in some ways.
Lets face it... people don't save. Call it a failure of discipline, call it a failure of education, call it a failure of human nature, we just don't do it. Some people, yes. Most people? No. Should we fix this? Absolutly. We should be encouraging people to act financially responsibly. I don't think that means we have to leave them out in the cold if they don't.
We have to look at that tax, and all taxes in terms of their total effect, rather than simple cost. Social Security came about for one reason. People got old and realised they couldn't afford to live after retirement. Fammilies saw bread winners become drains on their finances as life spans began to shoot well beyond peoples ability to generate saleable value to society.
Whether it is Social Security, or financial education and smart investing programs, or whatever. The people will support whatever it is that actually does the job of ridding our lives, as much as possible, from seeing people reach their "golden years" and find themselves unable to care for themselves and unable to be taken care of. We dont want to have to put our parents out in the cold, or see anyone else have to either. We don't want our parents dragging us down either.... just as our parents parents didn't want it and put a stop to it.
That is the reality, the people don't like seeing the old and infirmed suffer. The people are willing to do what it takes to stop them from suffering. Many will do it individually through their own works, many will do it by supporting them. All in all, there was enough support for the idea that we accepted a general income tax to make it happen.
I absolutly welcome any proposal to make it go away, as does every other person really. Nobody actually likes being taxes. However, the reality is that there is a problem that this is solving. In comparison to other uses of government money.... complaining about Social Security is, as my grandmother likes to say, "Penny Wise and Dollar Foolish". If you want to make it go away, then you had better have something ready to replace it that fixes the same problem that it does (one way or another) or else, it will be back.
-Steve
That is NOT what is alarming at all.
What is alarming is that cell phones have become ubiquetous, and everyone is now carrying around their own personal bug.
Its not alarming when this is used on a criminal suspect with a warrent. Its alarming that the capability exists and could be used on almost anyone at almost any time and a warrent is hardly a technical requirement for doing it.
If the backdoor exists, it can be used for either good or evil.
This ability seems just full of potential for abuse.
-Steve
maybe, maybe not.
Sure you can buy the tires in cash and put them on with no paper trail to tie them back to you. However, how hard would that be to correlate?
As soon as you go through a toll booth or a detector with a camera nearby, it would be trivial to tie your tire IDs to your cars License plate. In fact, they wouldn't even need to do it en mass. All they need to do is store the data.
Then when they have an ID to look for, they can go back and see when they saw it previously, or where it has been since.
Once you have detectors in place, it becomes a data mining issue. Put some of them at toll booths, where they already have cameras, and hell, with speed pass, they should be able to correlate your tires with your car the first time you use your speed pass.
-Steve
Maybe at one time.
:)
m l
These days, I hear, they try to keep things more low key. Besides, they probably own RIAA stock at this point. These days they are far more likely to let it be a court challenge... and maybe bringing the Italian American Anti-Defamation League into it
Did you ever see the attempts by the FBI to ignite violence by the maffia against the communist party? Some hillarious stuff. Gotta love the FOIA.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/hoodwink1.ht
-Steve
Sure you can cost them more money than they can cost you....
but can you cost them a larger percentage of their revenue stream than the percentage that they can cost yours?
I dunno about you... but I am pretty sure the RIAA can take a million dollar hit much more gracefully and with less notice than I could personally take a thousand dollar hit.
Not that you are wrong, I agree... these are the sorts of tactics that could work. Just make them drop the case by dragging it out.
-Steve
I would bet higher.
Honestly dealing with cops is sooooo fuckign easy. As long as there isn't someone there demanding something be done about you, and you havn't been directly endangering too much life, they will generally look the other way or let you off with a warning if you show them a little respect and deference.
You submit to their authority, and don't lie to them. Don't admit to anything, but don't go makign shit up. You have to figure the vast majority of people, when confronted, will try to make up some excuse, especially under the pressure of having a guy in uniform with a gun asking the questions.
Most people are not great liars under pressure. Alot of these people end up insulting the cops intelligence.
So simply be honest, respectful, and don't scream out "arrest me please, I know I am a huge lawbreaker", and they will usually let you go.
I tend to like "No officer, why did you pull me over?"
"Oh really? No, how fast was I going? I am sorry. You are right, I will slow it down"
Deference, respect... and I have never gotten a speeding ticket. Though I have been asked a couple of times to slow it down. 15 miles over the speed limit... who knew.
-Steve
Um.... thats ALWAYS what you are doing.
I once heard a mechanic say "You can just think of an engine as a glorified air pump" (a really dirty one)
The point is you just have to change how your looking at it. To see a heat pump as a generator, look at hot air on one side as fuel being burned (with colder air being the exhaust output) and hot air on the other side as the output energy.
Actually it has 2 fuels... the electricity comming in too. So it burns electricity and hot air, and makes hot air on the other side.
An air conditioner is just a heat pump where you hang out inside the "spent fuel tank". Its kind of like an engine with no alternator so it needs an external power source to spark the gas. And instead of hooking up a cam shaft, transmissions and wheels, you just pump the exhaust into the room to keep warm (finding the problems with that plan is left as an exercise to the reader)
-Steve