I never understood the cellphone video at a concert thing. The volume of the concert is going to be overloading the mic on the phone, the video is going to be over/undersaturated, unbalanced color, and wobbly, with a view of 60 degrees from the stage, partially obscured by the head and arms of the person in front of the recorder, who is also holding up their phone to record the shot.
It's not like these aren't popular artists in the first place, a professionally shot version of the concert is going to be on Youtube soon enough. I just don't get it.
before we get to #2, 911 IN the theater room is not necessary. you probably can't call 911 when you're swimming in the public pool for example. It's not a civil right. If you think that it is, then I challenge you to force your local pool to find a way to accommodate this right. Cellular/landline access to 911 is only relevant when there are no other convenient ways to summon help. Being 40 feet from the theater lobby is NOT too inconvenient. I can probably sprint to the lobby faster than you can fumble for your phone in the dark and dial 911. Maybe you should insist on them leaving the lights on in the theater so you can dial 911 faster? Seconds count! now put that silly argument away
I've never been to a pool that prohibits phones. You are free to bring your phone into the pool. The reliability of your phone is not the concern of the pool, feel free to take it for a dip.
Do you really care if someone calls Pluto a planet instead of the more precise term dwarf planet?
Nature doesn't have to organize itself into neat little boxes for easy categorization. If the message is understood, even with non-precise language, the message is still understood.
You are modded funny, but you aren't actually wrong.
I've long complained that you either have to be very wealthy, or willing to walk (and be wealthy) to avoid waiving your rights to something as fundamentally simple as a trip from New York to LA. The logistics involved (not driving to avoid 'implied consent' and other rights removing stipulations) are enormous even if you just put on a pair of shoes and decided to walk. (12 hour days of 4mph walking would take you 41 days to go 2000miles)
However, online at least, you can take some precautions which sacrifice convenience, but not to the insane levels that your physical presence would require. Obviously if you have the full force of the government looking for you specifically, it's not going to be simple, but in general through the use of VPNs, public access points, and a few other techniques, it's still at least reasonably possible.
That certainly doesn't mean that it is as easy or convenient as it should be, but maintaining your anonymity online to chat with someone cross country is a hell of a lot easier than if you tried to do it in person while maintaining anonymity.
In the situation where pricing is equal, it's hard to see where the crime is because the company doing the purchasing has nothing to gain or lose switching between vendors.
Even with equal pricing, it all boils down to the purchaser pocketing cash due to the company/shareholders.
So Company A offers to sell to you at $100, Company B offers to sell to you at $100.
A bidding war starts, and Company A cuts their price to $70 Company B also cuts their price to $70 but says if you pick them over Company A, they will give you, personally, $5 per unit purchased.
The ethical response is to turn down the $5/unit and instead purchase the widgets at $65/unit. The $5/unit is money which is not legally yours, as your responsibility is to negotiate the price on behalf of your shareholders/company as you have already agreed upon your own compensation in the form of a salary.
If we learned nothing else from "The Highlander" TV series, it's that every 10-12 years, immortals need to appear to "die" so they can start over elsewhere and not be questioned about their appearing to never age...
The worst part is memorizing a whole new set of passwords!
I had to ditch three identities before I realized that they were tracking me based on my repeated use of Th3r3canB0nly1!
At least on the internet, information typically doesn't get twisted as easily as it does with a rumor. It's usually easier to trace information, and when it gets copied, it's rarely distorted. I'd say that has a certain advantage over old fashioned rumor.
THis is absolutely not true. On the internet, the only thing that is true, is what is repeated. As the story is repeated, linked, and given popularity, it becomes the 'true' story.
The primary method that online reputation management companies use is the constant, cross-linked, and widely available story which is repeated over and over until it 'crowds out' the information you want suppressed.
The actual veracity of the propagated story is irrelevant.
If you don't want your data mined then you shouln't publish it in the first place.
That's all well and good. I don't publish that information. Many times it is the government that is publishing my information. Information which was previously available only by physically going to the records office and pulling up a specific record.
Then, companies pull the data from those databases and create 'placeholder' websites in my name. I'm sure you have seen these sites if you ever googled your name. For my RL name, the first few links are relevant, a NY times article, a wedding announcement, and links to real social sites which I have registered accounts (Facebook, Linkedin, etc).
Then come literally thousands of sites which have scraped data on me from obituaries, home sale records, other people's unsecured social media postings. These sites have compiled this information into pseudo websites which look as if I have entered all the information there. All it takes is a few clueless relatives/friends to create accounts on those sites and fill in the blanks.
I've not posted anything to facebook in 10-12 months. My Linked in Profile is little more than my name, and my friends know not to take/post pictures of me.
Little help NOT posting information to the web does.
At some point, while I agree it is shady and not an ideal practice, it kind of seems like it's illegal because business management doesn't like it or get a piece of it, not because it represents material harm.
The reason it is illegal is fiduciary responsibilty. What it boils down to is this: The people who own the company have hired this person to make business decisions which will maximize the profit (or maximize whatever specific metric was defined as his responsibility). When someone with a fiduciary responsibility takes a bribe, they are basically conspiring with the bribing entity to steal a money from the shareholders/business owner and taking a cut of that stolen money in the form of the bribe.
ie: You give me $100 and tell me to go get the best value widget on the market. I determine that widgets should cost $50. Company A offers the widget for $50 and Company B offers the widget for $80.
Company B offers a bribe of $20 dollars if I choose their $80 widget. This provides for $10 pure profit for company B over the base widget value, and $20 for me by accepting.
However, that $30 difference was $30 that was effectively stolen from you when the decision was made to not select the appropriately priced $50 widget.
The value of the bribe, plus the cost difference between comparable products is pure theft from the people whose money the bribe receiver was entrusted to manage.
Personally, the only time I've ever experienced even the slightest bit of motion sickness was after eating an Italian hoagie that had warmed to 80 degrees while I was riding on a KC-135A during a training mission. I'm talking about the fact that human physiology in general relies a great deal on visual cues to keep balance and THAT is an advantage over some physiological scenario where visual feedback to maintaining balance was reduced. I took your use of the term 'you' as the general 'all humans' rather than the specific individual 'you'.
Your response, however, is pretty rabid. Did someone with motion sickness push you in the dirt as a child?
What happens when you dust a crowd of protestors with a chemical or radioactive marker and then track their movements via chemical/radiological sensors tuned to those specific signatures?
essentially you rely a bit too much on sight for balance.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Balance based on visual cues allows us to preemptively compensate for pending shifts in balance. It also allows us to more quickly react to sudden or rapid changes instead of relying on fluids stimulating sensory hairs.
Yet no one protests... If people started to take their privacy seriously, to attribute a value to their individuality, then maybe we'd get somewhere.
Protest, anger, and reservations don't occur until AFTER it becomes clear that you have been harmed. Afterall, if you aren't being harmed, it is hard to say that abuse is occuring.
It's not so much that people are enjoying the 'bread and circuses', but that human nature is to trust, until the trust is abused. While you may be right in your statement that trust is misplaced, you will find that it is very difficult to convince people NOT to trust by default.
I consider it something like trusting a Barber to give you a shave. You are trusting a person to literally place a razor sharp blade against your neck and do you no harm. That's a hell of a lot of trust to be placed in a stranger. But you aren't calling for people to implicitly distrust barbers and demand the adoption of safety razors instead of straight razors.
So why trust the barber? Because we have no actual experience with barbers slaughtering their customers. There isn't fear of abuse of that trust because there is no experience of that trust being abused (either first hand, or from friends/family being harmed).
Until people (or those close to them) are harmed by something, we won't think to care. Unfortunately for privacy advocates, the harm from having your privacy violated is hard to quantify, and therefore seems intangible and non-existent to normal people.
So don't get upset that people aren't up in arms, they won't be until the harm is either tangible, or quantifiable and relevant.
My wife gets severe motion sickness, which is a challenge on Pennsylvania roads. For those who aren't familiar, most non-highway PA roads are basically just old farmers paths that have been worn down and eventually paved. They tend to hug the terrain and follow creeks. Fun to drive, bad for motion sickness.
One trick that I suggested and seems to work is pretending to drive the car. I noticed that most people don't get motion sick when they drive, only when they are in the passenger or rear seats. By pretending to drive the car, literally holding up your arms and operating an imaginary steering wheel, you can trick your brain into linking the motion sensations with what you see.
So the next time you start feeling a bit motion sick, pretend that you are driving the car. Sure, you might look a bit silly, but less silly than horking out the window of a car.
They removed the feature from new units and told the folks on the old ones to not update.
Yes, those are the words they used, but actual implications of those words was a lot worse than 'You won't get a bugfix for Red's Raiders game'.
The reason you are sworn to tell the whole truth, and not only the truth.
So the whole truth of that statement would be: "Don't update, and never again connect to our network. Also, your PS3 is now a sub-PS3 and you are forbidden from playing any new game released from this point forward*."
"*Also, post a guard on your couch to prevent anyone from ever clicking through the text when they pop in a game or movie. Because that's going to be an irrevocable update applied to your hardware with no recourse to you. Sure, you could go out and buy an entire new PS3... but we altered the HW of the PS3 so you lose your backward compatability as well."
That would be the 'Whole truth' of 'Just don't update.'
Back to communism and money: the main problem here is how do you decide who does what job, and how do you get people to actually do jobs? Everyone wants the good jobs, and no one wants the shit jobs. Who actually wants to haul garbage for a living? Or clean toilets? Lots and lots of people would prefer not to work at all if they don't have to.
The answer, of course, is phasers. Useful and motivational.
Looks as if I've been downmodded for something? I guess the civil engineer that designed the roads surrounding the Ben Franklin Bridge are upset that I don't care for the signage leading up to it...
Is this actually true, or is it that you need to be a licensed gunsmith to *sell* a gun (but making one for yourself is totally legal)?
Honest question; I don't know anything about American gun laws...
When trying to understand US laws, keep in mind that one of the founding principles of the US was that it was to be a collection of semi-sovereign states. As such, the states have great authority at shaping their own laws.
So to answer your question... it depends on which state you are in when you want to sell a firearm. Pennsylvania, IIRC, doesn't have any particular restriction on personal sales of firearms (I'm sure there are some, but I remember it being pretty free). New York State does, but it also depends on the type of firearm.
It can actually be a big problem for people because you can easily make a wrong turn in your car and what is perfectly legal and a non-issue in one state can be considered an extreme felony with mandatory multi-year minimum sentences.
IE: The Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. It's so damned easy to accidentally cross over into New Jersey where the gun laws are more draconian. Of course, the laws in Philly are pretty severe too, but you could be legal in Philly, and accidentally cross into NJ.
The Ben Franklin Bridge, for those that don't know, is very easy to accidentally cross as the roads leading to it are confusing and don't really have the standard 'Oh shoot, this road is taking me to the bridge let me quick take this exit' offramps. By the time you realize you are approaching the Ben Franklin Bridge, it's already too late and you are on your way to Camden, NJ.
Slashdot Mirror
In a century or two, we will be erased from history? Just like the Mayan ruins?
I never understood the cellphone video at a concert thing. The volume of the concert is going to be overloading the mic on the phone, the video is going to be over/undersaturated, unbalanced color, and wobbly, with a view of 60 degrees from the stage, partially obscured by the head and arms of the person in front of the recorder, who is also holding up their phone to record the shot.
It's not like these aren't popular artists in the first place, a professionally shot version of the concert is going to be on Youtube soon enough. I just don't get it.
before we get to #2, 911 IN the theater room is not necessary. you probably can't call 911 when you're swimming in the public pool for example. It's not a civil right. If you think that it is, then I challenge you to force your local pool to find a way to accommodate this right. Cellular/landline access to 911 is only relevant when there are no other convenient ways to summon help. Being 40 feet from the theater lobby is NOT too inconvenient. I can probably sprint to the lobby faster than you can fumble for your phone in the dark and dial 911. Maybe you should insist on them leaving the lights on in the theater so you can dial 911 faster? Seconds count! now put that silly argument away
I've never been to a pool that prohibits phones. You are free to bring your phone into the pool. The reliability of your phone is not the concern of the pool, feel free to take it for a dip.
Because the term is used everywhere, all the time.
SEO, seo seo seo. Seoseo seoseoseo seo seo seo seeeeeeooooo. Seoseo...?
Do you really care if someone calls Pluto a planet instead of the more precise term dwarf planet?
Nature doesn't have to organize itself into neat little boxes for easy categorization. If the message is understood, even with non-precise language, the message is still understood.
Also with regard to your concern for definition:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/soft-tissue-dinosaur-fossil.htm
You are modded funny, but you aren't actually wrong.
I've long complained that you either have to be very wealthy, or willing to walk (and be wealthy) to avoid waiving your rights to something as fundamentally simple as a trip from New York to LA. The logistics involved (not driving to avoid 'implied consent' and other rights removing stipulations) are enormous even if you just put on a pair of shoes and decided to walk. (12 hour days of 4mph walking would take you 41 days to go 2000miles)
However, online at least, you can take some precautions which sacrifice convenience, but not to the insane levels that your physical presence would require. Obviously if you have the full force of the government looking for you specifically, it's not going to be simple, but in general through the use of VPNs, public access points, and a few other techniques, it's still at least reasonably possible.
That certainly doesn't mean that it is as easy or convenient as it should be, but maintaining your anonymity online to chat with someone cross country is a hell of a lot easier than if you tried to do it in person while maintaining anonymity.
In the situation where pricing is equal, it's hard to see where the crime is because the company doing the purchasing has nothing to gain or lose switching between vendors.
Even with equal pricing, it all boils down to the purchaser pocketing cash due to the company/shareholders.
So Company A offers to sell to you at $100, Company B offers to sell to you at $100.
A bidding war starts, and Company A cuts their price to $70 Company B also cuts their price to $70 but says if you pick them over Company A, they will give you, personally, $5 per unit purchased.
The ethical response is to turn down the $5/unit and instead purchase the widgets at $65/unit. The $5/unit is money which is not legally yours, as your responsibility is to negotiate the price on behalf of your shareholders/company as you have already agreed upon your own compensation in the form of a salary.
If we learned nothing else from "The Highlander" TV series, it's that every 10-12 years, immortals need to appear to "die" so they can start over elsewhere and not be questioned about their appearing to never age...
The worst part is memorizing a whole new set of passwords!
I had to ditch three identities before I realized that they were tracking me based on my repeated use of Th3r3canB0nly1!
scraped data on me from obituaries
Emphasis mine.
You might have something really important going on here. Care to tell us about it?
A search of my name will turn up the obituary for my wife's grandmother which lists me as a surviving relative.
At least on the internet, information typically doesn't get twisted as easily as it does with a rumor. It's usually easier to trace information, and when it gets copied, it's rarely distorted. I'd say that has a certain advantage over old fashioned rumor.
THis is absolutely not true. On the internet, the only thing that is true, is what is repeated. As the story is repeated, linked, and given popularity, it becomes the 'true' story.
The primary method that online reputation management companies use is the constant, cross-linked, and widely available story which is repeated over and over until it 'crowds out' the information you want suppressed.
The actual veracity of the propagated story is irrelevant.
If you don't want your data mined then you shouln't publish it in the first place.
That's all well and good. I don't publish that information. Many times it is the government that is publishing my information. Information which was previously available only by physically going to the records office and pulling up a specific record.
Then, companies pull the data from those databases and create 'placeholder' websites in my name. I'm sure you have seen these sites if you ever googled your name. For my RL name, the first few links are relevant, a NY times article, a wedding announcement, and links to real social sites which I have registered accounts (Facebook, Linkedin, etc).
Then come literally thousands of sites which have scraped data on me from obituaries, home sale records, other people's unsecured social media postings. These sites have compiled this information into pseudo websites which look as if I have entered all the information there. All it takes is a few clueless relatives/friends to create accounts on those sites and fill in the blanks.
I've not posted anything to facebook in 10-12 months. My Linked in Profile is little more than my name, and my friends know not to take/post pictures of me.
Little help NOT posting information to the web does.
At some point, while I agree it is shady and not an ideal practice, it kind of seems like it's illegal because business management doesn't like it or get a piece of it, not because it represents material harm.
The reason it is illegal is fiduciary responsibilty. What it boils down to is this: The people who own the company have hired this person to make business decisions which will maximize the profit (or maximize whatever specific metric was defined as his responsibility). When someone with a fiduciary responsibility takes a bribe, they are basically conspiring with the bribing entity to steal a money from the shareholders/business owner and taking a cut of that stolen money in the form of the bribe.
ie: You give me $100 and tell me to go get the best value widget on the market. I determine that widgets should cost $50. Company A offers the widget for $50 and Company B offers the widget for $80.
Company B offers a bribe of $20 dollars if I choose their $80 widget. This provides for $10 pure profit for company B over the base widget value, and $20 for me by accepting.
However, that $30 difference was $30 that was effectively stolen from you when the decision was made to not select the appropriately priced $50 widget.
The value of the bribe, plus the cost difference between comparable products is pure theft from the people whose money the bribe receiver was entrusted to manage.
That's why it is illegal, and unethical.
Personally, the only time I've ever experienced even the slightest bit of motion sickness was after eating an Italian hoagie that had warmed to 80 degrees while I was riding on a KC-135A during a training mission. I'm talking about the fact that human physiology in general relies a great deal on visual cues to keep balance and THAT is an advantage over some physiological scenario where visual feedback to maintaining balance was reduced. I took your use of the term 'you' as the general 'all humans' rather than the specific individual 'you'.
Your response, however, is pretty rabid. Did someone with motion sickness push you in the dirt as a child?
How much does a hand grenade weigh?
What happens when you dust a crowd of protestors with a chemical or radioactive marker and then track their movements via chemical/radiological sensors tuned to those specific signatures?
essentially you rely a bit too much on sight for balance.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Balance based on visual cues allows us to preemptively compensate for pending shifts in balance. It also allows us to more quickly react to sudden or rapid changes instead of relying on fluids stimulating sensory hairs.
Yet no one protests... If people started to take their privacy seriously, to attribute a value to their individuality, then maybe we'd get somewhere.
Protest, anger, and reservations don't occur until AFTER it becomes clear that you have been harmed. Afterall, if you aren't being harmed, it is hard to say that abuse is occuring.
It's not so much that people are enjoying the 'bread and circuses', but that human nature is to trust, until the trust is abused. While you may be right in your statement that trust is misplaced, you will find that it is very difficult to convince people NOT to trust by default.
I consider it something like trusting a Barber to give you a shave. You are trusting a person to literally place a razor sharp blade against your neck and do you no harm. That's a hell of a lot of trust to be placed in a stranger. But you aren't calling for people to implicitly distrust barbers and demand the adoption of safety razors instead of straight razors.
So why trust the barber? Because we have no actual experience with barbers slaughtering their customers. There isn't fear of abuse of that trust because there is no experience of that trust being abused (either first hand, or from friends/family being harmed).
Until people (or those close to them) are harmed by something, we won't think to care. Unfortunately for privacy advocates, the harm from having your privacy violated is hard to quantify, and therefore seems intangible and non-existent to normal people.
So don't get upset that people aren't up in arms, they won't be until the harm is either tangible, or quantifiable and relevant.
My wife gets severe motion sickness, which is a challenge on Pennsylvania roads. For those who aren't familiar, most non-highway PA roads are basically just old farmers paths that have been worn down and eventually paved. They tend to hug the terrain and follow creeks. Fun to drive, bad for motion sickness.
One trick that I suggested and seems to work is pretending to drive the car. I noticed that most people don't get motion sick when they drive, only when they are in the passenger or rear seats. By pretending to drive the car, literally holding up your arms and operating an imaginary steering wheel, you can trick your brain into linking the motion sensations with what you see.
So the next time you start feeling a bit motion sick, pretend that you are driving the car. Sure, you might look a bit silly, but less silly than horking out the window of a car.
They removed the feature from new units and told the folks on the old ones to not update.
Yes, those are the words they used, but actual implications of those words was a lot worse than 'You won't get a bugfix for Red's Raiders game'.
The reason you are sworn to tell the whole truth, and not only the truth.
So the whole truth of that statement would be: "Don't update, and never again connect to our network. Also, your PS3 is now a sub-PS3 and you are forbidden from playing any new game released from this point forward*."
"*Also, post a guard on your couch to prevent anyone from ever clicking through the text when they pop in a game or movie. Because that's going to be an irrevocable update applied to your hardware with no recourse to you. Sure, you could go out and buy an entire new PS3... but we altered the HW of the PS3 so you lose your backward compatability as well."
That would be the 'Whole truth' of 'Just don't update.'
Popular internet polls are as reliable as astrology.
Not true. Astrology will vary between readings and individuals.
Responses from the internet will always trend toward maximum Lulz.
Back to communism and money: the main problem here is how do you decide who does what job, and how do you get people to actually do jobs? Everyone wants the good jobs, and no one wants the shit jobs. Who actually wants to haul garbage for a living? Or clean toilets? Lots and lots of people would prefer not to work at all if they don't have to.
The answer, of course, is phasers. Useful and motivational.
Looks as if I've been downmodded for something? I guess the civil engineer that designed the roads surrounding the Ben Franklin Bridge are upset that I don't care for the signage leading up to it...
Is this actually true, or is it that you need to be a licensed gunsmith to *sell* a gun (but making one for yourself is totally legal)?
Honest question; I don't know anything about American gun laws...
When trying to understand US laws, keep in mind that one of the founding principles of the US was that it was to be a collection of semi-sovereign states. As such, the states have great authority at shaping their own laws.
So to answer your question... it depends on which state you are in when you want to sell a firearm. Pennsylvania, IIRC, doesn't have any particular restriction on personal sales of firearms (I'm sure there are some, but I remember it being pretty free). New York State does, but it also depends on the type of firearm.
It can actually be a big problem for people because you can easily make a wrong turn in your car and what is perfectly legal and a non-issue in one state can be considered an extreme felony with mandatory multi-year minimum sentences.
IE: The Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. It's so damned easy to accidentally cross over into New Jersey where the gun laws are more draconian. Of course, the laws in Philly are pretty severe too, but you could be legal in Philly, and accidentally cross into NJ.
The Ben Franklin Bridge, for those that don't know, is very easy to accidentally cross as the roads leading to it are confusing and don't really have the standard 'Oh shoot, this road is taking me to the bridge let me quick take this exit' offramps. By the time you realize you are approaching the Ben Franklin Bridge, it's already too late and you are on your way to Camden, NJ.
But can you at least prioritize the crap on which you waste our tax dollars?
Don't worry, they do. It's just that your choice of priority depends on your final goal.
If your goal is a reduction in gun violence, you might prioritize efforts to reduce poverty, unemployment, and parents lacking time to be parents.
If your goal is to ban firearms, you prioritize the efforts which are achievable in small bite-sized portions.
And a small bomb on a school bus would make the entire country lose their minds.