I've long had this idea that someone should send national-security-related incriminating emails to a group of "co-conspirators". It would be something that the government would definitely want to stop if they knew about, like a planned assassination, but it would all be fake, yet look real enough. That would let you know if the government's already reading them.
(You'd want to document this with several third-parties first, of course, in case you get arrested.)
Yeah, and sell them at Whole Foods with a big poster showing one of the gold farmers and the story behind his life and his gold farming. It shows him staring passionately at a computer screen in some smoky room with a bunch of post-it notes on the monitor.
"This is Chang Lee. He helped bring this WoW gold to your local store. He works over 12 hours a day, part of which pays back the microloan he used to purchase the lvl 20 paladin he uses to harvest gold..."
You know how there are US laws that mandates what you put in gasoline so that cars' emissions are at a certain level? None of that exists in the 20 cents per liter petrol they sell in Asia.
My understanding was that the required additives vary between regions (they're called "boutique blends", a name I hate with a passion), and that they mainly shift what kind of pollution the car emits, not the absolute level. That is, they're just using cities as guinea pigs. Most of the cost isn't from some additive necessary to keep the air clean.
So sure, you can get cheap gas if you want. Do you like breathing too?
To be honest, if they want to be consistent, how about banning woodburning, which is far worse than any car I've even known. Oh, right, that's a winter tradition, so it gets a free pass.
Also, breathing is over-rated. My brain works just as fine when it's oxygen-deprived. See if you can figure out which of my posts here are made while oxygen starved. You can't tell, can you?
hey ladies: random pointless negative asocial retards is pretty much par for the course on internet posting boards, especially when done anonymously. if you post with any regularity on the intertubes, you will get trolled, violently and personally. it's a given. it's just hot air from ignorant asocial losers
Or as I say, never attribute to bigotry, what can be explained by misanthropy.
On a more serious note, Dahlia Lithwick on Slate wrote an article that may be of interest here, about how female law students think they are being denied positions based on these postings.
otally irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is that companies have more "access" to legislators than the electorate does.
I'd say it's completely relevant -- if the law currently already does what "the people" want, what's the "value-add" of more stringent campaign financing rules?
But since you asked - the current war in Iraq. Current law funds it - current public opinion is that the invasion was a mistake and to get out.
No, it isn't. The Democrats control both houses and would have already done this if they didn't think it would get them kicked out of office at the next election.
Another one - the deficit. Current law says its okay to run huge deficits, and to keep raising the legal deficit ceiling. public opinion is WTF
I couldn't read the link (after trying some variants), but I suspect it simply says the public doesn't like deficits. But it's one thing to favor reducing debt in the abstract; it's quite another to accept the tradeoffs that that would require. Is the public willing to curtail lots of programs or raise taxes to pay down the deficit? Apparently not.
Yeah, and ditto for Onstar -- that feature only gets exemptions from the cell phone laws because GM is a failing company and legislators want to "take one for the [American industrial] team", and it's pretty much the only thing that GM can hope will keep them alive. That's why they always sex it up as being "the next seatbelt" and use scare tactics in their ads.
I think the main, *driving* force keeping me from using Safari on Windows is the fact that Safari always crashes on startup. But I'm just picky like that.
You ivory tower intellectuals must not lose touch with the world of industrial growth and hard currency. It is all well and good to pursue these high-minded scientific theories, but research grants are expensive. To justify your existence, you must provide not only knowledge, but concrete and profitable applications as well.
Scientists say global warming is real and countries have to mandate reductions in CO2 emission because that's where the science points! If you have a better theory, submit it to a journal, but all other explanations have LOST in the market place of ideas, and only through willful ignorance do people continue to ignore the rigorous scientific methodology.
Oh, sorry, I was just channeling Chris Burke's bias-pandering populism for a second there.
Hm, not too bad. The troll I was thinking about for this story would be more like:
"Hey, I think the headline should be, 'Kodak announces latest attempt to maintain relevance after failing in its attempts to keep a captive market via Bill Cosby and Japan-bashing.'"
But yours is good too.
*attaching this hypothetical troll to one already labled as such to keep it away from productive discussion*
5) Criminal being chased accidentally dies due to overaggressiveness on the part of the pursuer, followed by pursuer saying to self, "Alive, Marcus, take 'em ALIVE!" or "Aw, she-it, can't get no intel outta a corpse!"
Though I guess in this case you'd replace "Marcus" with her name...
"Hey everyone! I'll recommend books to your friends if you ask me to!" "Oh, can you tell UbuntuDupe to buy The Da Vinci Code... and that I'm going to kill him?" "Sure, no problem! Just let me get your name..." *** "Hey, UbuntuDupe! One of your friends thinks you should buy The Da Vinci Code! And he's going to kill you!" "Wait, which friend???" "Whoa whoa whoa, I can't reveal to you the names of your friends! That information is PRIVATE, moron! If you knew who your friends were... bad, bad things could happen!"
1) They can see that the message contained a threat.
2) The service is "recommend a book to a friend", i.e. *someone already know and who also knows you*, not "send an anonymous message to anyone!" You are expressly supposed to identify yourself to do this.
3) They do know who I am -- I'm the one the got the message.
Even though they paid for it with my credit card, they said they weren't allowed to provide me with any information.
Heh, you gotta love the resistance some businesses have to logic. I was in a sort of similar situation (though luckily not as severe) with Amazon. Someone used Amazon's "recommend a book to a friend" feature (probably patented) to make an ominous, personal threat to me. I reported this and asked for the sender's information, and was told that they couldn't reveal that information because it's private.
Yes, that's right: Amazon seriously believed that giving out the names of people who made threats to their "friends" using the "recommend a book" feature, somehow compromised the integrity of the system.
Eventually, once the Indians passed it up through a few levels of supervisors they relented though.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone deserves the same rights and treatment under the law.
I agree.
Well, except for rich people. And pharmaceutical companies that spend more on advertising than research. AFAIK, they're first against the wall.
But yeah, equal treatment for everyone else.
I've long had this idea that someone should send national-security-related incriminating emails to a group of "co-conspirators". It would be something that the government would definitely want to stop if they knew about, like a planned assassination, but it would all be fake, yet look real enough. That would let you know if the government's already reading them.
(You'd want to document this with several third-parties first, of course, in case you get arrested.)
Anyone ever explored this?
Yeah, and sell them at Whole Foods with a big poster showing one of the gold farmers and the story behind his life and his gold farming. It shows him staring passionately at a computer screen in some smoky room with a bunch of post-it notes on the monitor.
"This is Chang Lee. He helped bring this WoW gold to your local store. He works over 12 hours a day, part of which pays back the microloan he used to purchase the lvl 20 paladin he uses to harvest gold..."
You know how there are US laws that mandates what you put in gasoline so that cars' emissions are at a certain level? None of that exists in the 20 cents per liter petrol they sell in Asia.
My understanding was that the required additives vary between regions (they're called "boutique blends", a name I hate with a passion), and that they mainly shift what kind of pollution the car emits, not the absolute level. That is, they're just using cities as guinea pigs. Most of the cost isn't from some additive necessary to keep the air clean.
So sure, you can get cheap gas if you want. Do you like breathing too?
To be honest, if they want to be consistent, how about banning woodburning, which is far worse than any car I've even known. Oh, right, that's a winter tradition, so it gets a free pass.
Also, breathing is over-rated. My brain works just as fine when it's oxygen-deprived. See if you can figure out which of my posts here are made while oxygen starved. You can't tell, can you?
20 cents amounts to a liter of petrol which goes a long way as well in those cranky noisy motorcycles of theirs.
Hm...
Could they maybe send some of that to the US, where it definitely costs more than 80 cents/gallon?
Too bad they hold the patent on OnePageView(tm) :-/
I think you should have seen the writing on the wall YEARS ago, if you live in Michigan.
hey ladies: random pointless negative asocial retards is pretty much par for the course on internet posting boards, especially when done anonymously. if you post with any regularity on the intertubes, you will get trolled, violently and personally. it's a given. it's just hot air from ignorant asocial losers
Or as I say, never attribute to bigotry, what can be explained by misanthropy.
On a more serious note, Dahlia Lithwick on Slate wrote an article that may be of interest here, about how female law students think they are being denied positions based on these postings.
otally irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is that companies have more "access" to legislators than the electorate does.
I'd say it's completely relevant -- if the law currently already does what "the people" want, what's the "value-add" of more stringent campaign financing rules?
But since you asked - the current war in Iraq. Current law funds it - current public opinion is that the invasion was a mistake and to get out.
No, it isn't. The Democrats control both houses and would have already done this if they didn't think it would get them kicked out of office at the next election.
Another one - the deficit. Current law says its okay to run huge deficits, and to keep raising the legal deficit ceiling. public opinion is WTF
I couldn't read the link (after trying some variants), but I suspect it simply says the public doesn't like deficits. But it's one thing to favor reducing debt in the abstract; it's quite another to accept the tradeoffs that that would require. Is the public willing to curtail lots of programs or raise taxes to pay down the deficit? Apparently not.
Could you name one issue where current law diverges from majority opinion, backed by some recent survey?
And when it crashes every time on startup, how does it accomplish any of that?
Just to keep some perspective: I catch flak for negatively mentioning Ubuntu once a month in slashdot posts. Imagine if I put up a website!
Yeah, and ditto for Onstar -- that feature only gets exemptions from the cell phone laws because GM is a failing company and legislators want to "take one for the [American industrial] team", and it's pretty much the only thing that GM can hope will keep them alive. That's why they always sex it up as being "the next seatbelt" and use scare tactics in their ads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onstar#Advocacy
I think the main, *driving* force keeping me from using Safari on Windows is the fact that Safari always crashes on startup. But I'm just picky like that.
Yeah, good point, if they told me who I am, that would be a COMPLETE violation of my privacy.
You ivory tower intellectuals must not lose touch with the world of industrial growth and hard currency. It is all well and good to pursue these high-minded scientific theories, but research grants are expensive. To justify your existence, you must provide not only knowledge, but concrete and profitable applications as well.
--CEO Nwabudike Morgan,
"The Ethics of Greed"
Scientists say global warming is real and countries have to mandate reductions in CO2 emission because that's where the science points! If you have a better theory, submit it to a journal, but all other explanations have LOST in the market place of ideas, and only through willful ignorance do people continue to ignore the rigorous scientific methodology.
Oh, sorry, I was just channeling Chris Burke's bias-pandering populism for a second there.
Hm, not too bad. The troll I was thinking about for this story would be more like:
"Hey, I think the headline should be, 'Kodak announces latest attempt to maintain relevance after failing in its attempts to keep a captive market via Bill Cosby and Japan-bashing.'"
But yours is good too.
*attaching this hypothetical troll to one already labled as such to keep it away from productive discussion*
5) Criminal being chased accidentally dies due to overaggressiveness on the part of the pursuer, followed by pursuer saying to self, "Alive, Marcus, take 'em ALIVE!" or "Aw, she-it, can't get no intel outta a corpse!"
Though I guess in this case you'd replace "Marcus" with her name...
"Hey everyone! I'll recommend books to your friends if you ask me to!" ... and that I'm going to kill him?" ... bad, bad things could happen!"
"Oh, can you tell UbuntuDupe to buy The Da Vinci Code
"Sure, no problem! Just let me get your name..."
***
"Hey, UbuntuDupe! One of your friends thinks you should buy The Da Vinci Code! And he's going to kill you!"
"Wait, which friend???"
"Whoa whoa whoa, I can't reveal to you the names of your friends! That information is PRIVATE, moron! If you knew who your friends were
1) They can see that the message contained a threat.
2) The service is "recommend a book to a friend", i.e. *someone already know and who also knows you*, not "send an anonymous message to anyone!" You are expressly supposed to identify yourself to do this.
3) They do know who I am -- I'm the one the got the message.
Even though they paid for it with my credit card, they said they weren't allowed to provide me with any information.
Heh, you gotta love the resistance some businesses have to logic. I was in a sort of similar situation (though luckily not as severe) with Amazon. Someone used Amazon's "recommend a book to a friend" feature (probably patented) to make an ominous, personal threat to me. I reported this and asked for the sender's information, and was told that they couldn't reveal that information because it's private.
Yes, that's right: Amazon seriously believed that giving out the names of people who made threats to their "friends" using the "recommend a book" feature, somehow compromised the integrity of the system.
Eventually, once the Indians passed it up through a few levels of supervisors they relented though.
But identity theft is a non-violent crime! [/predictable clueless liberal response]
You mean it doesn't have anything to do with mouth-breathing juries not being able to know when a claim is full of shit?
Remember: just now they figured out which of Eris and Pluto is more massive...
but they also know the internal density distributions of extrasolar planets that barely take up a pixel on the most powerful telescopes.