There's practically nothing in MA except some Math Wizards and an assload of whiny liberals.
I dunno, I don't think Lowell or Lawrence fit either of those categories. Yes, I did live in Lowell for a year (close enough to Tewksbury that I didn't need a gun to walk outside my apartment) and have since escaped to Woburn.
To be honest, I'm surprised and slightly disturbed that my original post got modded that high, especially as Insightful. Maybe a +1 Informative (Nitpicking), but I sure wasn't aiming at Insightful. I just felt the need to nitpick about someone that apparently thought that United States senators are elected by cities and not states. I've only lived in Massachusetts for about a year and a half, but growing up in Maine, people got rather annoyed when you tried lumping groups of cities together. The common example amongst my friends was people saying the Maine Mall was in Portland, even though it's actually in South Portland. Maybe Massachusetts is different, but I figured most people (especially from cities farther away, like Lowell, Worcester, or Amherst) would rather not be lumped together as all being from Boston.
This was in a clued-up metro area in touch with world affairs.
Perhaps, but how many politicians in large urban areas watch this cartoon? I fit the Slashdot profile pretty well, and I still wouldn't know what the hell this thing was.
Boston is the only one that shut their city down over it
This seems like a good time to point out that Boston did not "shut down the city". Only one part of one highway was closed, which certainly slows down incoming traffic, but there are plenty of other roads into the city. Out here in the suburbs (of which there are a metric ton surrounding Boston), we didn't even know what happened until the end of the day. There's quite a difference between making a few thousand people late for work and stopping the work days of a million people.
95% of the population isn't blaming Turner, and the other 5% isn't in their demographic anyway. $2 million is a lot better for so much advertising than a long, drawn out court battle where some embarrassing (and most likely unrelated) memo could get out into public. Sounds like a no-brainer decision to me.
The real issue here is that these advertisements were put up without seeking permission.
I think that's perhaps the biggest point of stupidity in the whole situation. The whole thing could have been avoided if someone had called up city officials and said "Hey, we want to put an ad next to that bridge."
IT MAKES NO SENSE for terrorists to call attention to their devices with bright flashing lights. Whether or not individuals belieive that they are bombs, having your devices so plainly visible makes them infinitely easier to find and diffuse than if they were hidden.
Unless the goal is to get as many people as possible close to the device before detonating it. Hiding in plain sight is a tactic that seems to be overlooked by a lot of people in this story.
No matter how this turned out, I think the terrorists have already won. America is completely terrified. So much so that innocent-looking devices have to be treated suspiciously. And if a terrorist does use such a tactic (it probably doesn't even have to be successful), it'll just make us even more scared.
Just nuke the whole place from orbit. At this point, it's the only way to be sure.
Only a dickhead terrorist would invite attention to a bomb
I think that was the police's reasoning. Something that looks like a suspicious box will be treated as such. Making a bomb look innocent could very well be the best camouflage. And yes, some terrorists will make bombs that attract attention, because it gets more people in the blast radius. Personally, I think $2 million is a decent stupidity fine for whomever thought attaching a crude-looking electronic device to the support structure of a bridge was a good idea.
I think I heard that the only charges they're still facing are disorderly conduct, which means fines of maybe $1000 if they act like real jackasses in front of the judge. I think the "omg terrorists!" charges got dropped pretty quickly.
If the need is that immediate, police don't need to get a warrant ahead of time. If they can't prove the urgency in court, though, the judge will most likely throw out any of the evidence. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance
At the risk of going somewhat off topic, this is one of the biggest problems a lot of people had with the federal government's wiretap program. The government could get a warrant the next day if they needed to do an immediate wiretap, and the court almost never (something like 1 in 1000, I think) refused warrants.
I was thinking the same thing. At worst, your EZPass records would show that you took two hours longer to get from Tollbooth A to Tollbooth B than it would if you drove straight from A to B at 65 (or 75, or 85) MPH. A court might be able to use that to support other evidence by showing that you were in a certain area at a certain time, but I don't think even the US judicial system is screwed up enough to use that as the primary evidence for any crime.
What if the company manages to become successful and goes on to spend $43 million every year on developing anti-malarial drugs? Not saying that's necessarily true, but if it were (and was written down somewhere in some legally binding document), would you feel better about it?
Just make sure you are factoring everything into your $100 savings calculation.
On that note, how much of the postal service is supported by junk mail? How much more would postage stamps cost if a significant amount of the postal service's income didn't come from companies?
.Net has an HTTP request class that can be used exactly the same way as XMLHttpRequest. Personally, I think C# is a much better language than Javascript and a web browser (or two, or three, or ten) for dealing with the user interface, and with Mono getting better every day, it's pretty close to cross-platform. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess Java also has the same capability.
If my parents tried pulling that level of bullshit on me, they'd find every computer in the household wiped clean. Of everything.
And you'd find your ass grounded for at least a couple months and probably wouldn't see a computer again until you moved out. Funny how that works, huh?
1. I'm not familiar with the scheme, but how do I:
a) determine somebody's age from their SSN
b) determine if the parent's SSN supplied is really the parent's SSN
c) tell if somebody's using a forged SSN
That's easy, just ask the government. The site can send the federal government the Social Security number you gave them and the full name of the person setting up the account. The government knows the birth date of the owner of that SSN and the names of any dependents, so that takes care of a) and b). As for forgery or the child just using their parent's name and number, also include some other identifying information of some sort that only the person would know. See, that isn't too hard, is it?
Age Range % Male % Female % Total
Totals 48.85 46.87 95.72
So is that other 4.28% of users under 12 or over 99? I know statistics are rarely (never) completely accurate, but if you're giving numbers to two decimal places, I'd expect them to be accurate to at least the first decimal place.
Hillary is one of the most blatant, shameless populists ever to have walked the Earth. Her perspectives, her very mind itself in its' entirety is completely for sale, for the purpose of gaining votes.
You could have just said "Hillary is a politician" and saved yourself some typing.
Remember how all those forms you fill out (a lot in school, and even on the couple apartment leases I've signed) there's a line labeled "In case of emergency, contact this person"? That's what the government should do instead of marriage. Inheritance, medical decisions, stuff like that would all be done by whomever you want. It can be your husband or wife (no matter what gender you are), a parent, a sibling, or even your pet goat. No more debates about defining marriage, you get to pick any person you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory Daily Show video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1232251620 809275724
To be honest, I'm surprised and slightly disturbed that my original post got modded that high, especially as Insightful. Maybe a +1 Informative (Nitpicking), but I sure wasn't aiming at Insightful. I just felt the need to nitpick about someone that apparently thought that United States senators are elected by cities and not states. I've only lived in Massachusetts for about a year and a half, but growing up in Maine, people got rather annoyed when you tried lumping groups of cities together. The common example amongst my friends was people saying the Maine Mall was in Portland, even though it's actually in South Portland. Maybe Massachusetts is different, but I figured most people (especially from cities farther away, like Lowell, Worcester, or Amherst) would rather not be lumped together as all being from Boston.
Unfortunately, I think they consider all of eastern Massachusetts "metropolitan Boston". Boston itself has under 600,000.
95% of the population isn't blaming Turner, and the other 5% isn't in their demographic anyway. $2 million is a lot better for so much advertising than a long, drawn out court battle where some embarrassing (and most likely unrelated) memo could get out into public. Sounds like a no-brainer decision to me.
No matter how this turned out, I think the terrorists have already won. America is completely terrified. So much so that innocent-looking devices have to be treated suspiciously. And if a terrorist does use such a tactic (it probably doesn't even have to be successful), it'll just make us even more scared.
Just nuke the whole place from orbit. At this point, it's the only way to be sure.
I think I heard that the only charges they're still facing are disorderly conduct, which means fines of maybe $1000 if they act like real jackasses in front of the judge. I think the "omg terrorists!" charges got dropped pretty quickly.
You are aware that Kennedy and Kerry are the senators for Massachusetts and that there's a lot more in Massachusetts than just Boston, right?
If the need is that immediate, police don't need to get a warrant ahead of time. If they can't prove the urgency in court, though, the judge will most likely throw out any of the evidence. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance
At the risk of going somewhat off topic, this is one of the biggest problems a lot of people had with the federal government's wiretap program. The government could get a warrant the next day if they needed to do an immediate wiretap, and the court almost never (something like 1 in 1000, I think) refused warrants.
I was thinking the same thing. At worst, your EZPass records would show that you took two hours longer to get from Tollbooth A to Tollbooth B than it would if you drove straight from A to B at 65 (or 75, or 85) MPH. A court might be able to use that to support other evidence by showing that you were in a certain area at a certain time, but I don't think even the US judicial system is screwed up enough to use that as the primary evidence for any crime.
I would much rather have such a decision dissuade people (and their lawyers) from filing frivolous lawsuits of any kind.
What if the company manages to become successful and goes on to spend $43 million every year on developing anti-malarial drugs? Not saying that's necessarily true, but if it were (and was written down somewhere in some legally binding document), would you feel better about it?
Ideal worlds are fun to think about, aren't they?
And +1, Loose
.Net has an HTTP request class that can be used exactly the same way as XMLHttpRequest. Personally, I think C# is a much better language than Javascript and a web browser (or two, or three, or ten) for dealing with the user interface, and with Mono getting better every day, it's pretty close to cross-platform. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess Java also has the same capability.
"omg are you serious?" replies in 3, 2, 1...
Remember how all those forms you fill out (a lot in school, and even on the couple apartment leases I've signed) there's a line labeled "In case of emergency, contact this person"? That's what the government should do instead of marriage. Inheritance, medical decisions, stuff like that would all be done by whomever you want. It can be your husband or wife (no matter what gender you are), a parent, a sibling, or even your pet goat. No more debates about defining marriage, you get to pick any person you want.