I wouldn't even be surprised if there were companies which specialize in revenge, where you can google bomb someone's name and associate it with something unpleasant for a fee.
There is, I saw it on Dr. Phil. A woman had a website offering various services to get revenge on ex-boyfriends/ex-husbands. IIRC, putting damaging information about them (true or untrue) on the web was one of the tactics.
Amendment 10:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to
the people.
Yes, that's terse and open to interpretation in this case, but it obviously allows the states to have "powers" that the federal government doesn't in some cases.
This from the party that claimed the Florida elections were rigged and had all these Floridians saying, "I voted, but my vote didn't count!". Isn't this a little like pouring salt on the wound?
I, for one, think society might actually benefit from people choosing their words more carefully.
I agree there's a downside to this, and people can misuse information, and I don't think all concept of privacy should be abolished, but trying to control the storage of information is probably an unwinnable battle. Educating people on how and when information about them may be stored might be the best we can do. It's an interesting idea, though.
Even more unfortunately, Americans seem to have a hard time distinguishing between what to ignore (Swift boat veterans paid to speak against John Kerry,) and what may be a real reflection of character (George Bush skipping out on his Air Force duty.)
Exactly! No matter how many times Democrats tell Americans what to think, an appalling number of them still form their own opinions.
1. "I hate my profligate urges, but at least I can feel better about them by cracking down on yours."
2. "Hey, no fair getting laid twice a week! My husband barely wants me once a month!"
3. Them: "Promiscuous behavior is immoral because it creates unintentional babies."
You: "But birth control ends that risk; therefore, there is no longer any basis for condemning promiscuous behavior. Your moral rule is obsolete."
Them: "Then to protect morality, we must ban birth control."
News flash: birth control doesn't eliminate the risk. It greatly reduces it, but does not eliminate it. Only abstinence eliminates the risk of STDs and pregnancy. And just because you don't understand the reason for a rule (moral, law, whatever) doesn't necessarily mean there isn't a reason. I'm not even against birth control, but I am against BS, and someone telling my kids, "if you use birth control you eliminate the risk" is irresponsible B.S.!
Interestingly, if you have a reward someone wants in relationships, you can use the same quasi-random reward to make them more strongly desire a relationship with you. People are suprisingly trainable. And you can catch yourself being trained by others (usually unwittingly) by getting randomly rewards you desire from them.
That is the best post I've seen all day <subliminal>buy me beer</subliminal>!
I mean you really summed up the whole issue <subliminal>and pizza</subliminal>!
However, you are obviously way too smart to be trained in the way you suggest <subliminal>give me your steam account info</subliminal>!
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads.
Now there's an idea. Only I don't think they could get enough energy from wind to make it worthwhile. It would be much cheaper to replace the toll booths with "treadmill generators". You pull your vehicle onto the treadmill and spin it to generate power until you've generated enough electricity to pay your toll, then the treadmill stops and you can move on. It might actually be good for the environment, too, because of the number of people who decide they would rather just stay home.
This is an urban legend propagated by conservative propaganda sites. Good thing we have editors to filter this stuff out for us...
Conservative propaganda? Here's an NPR article about the same thing. I don't know how dangerous 5mg of mercury in a room really is, but I can easily imagine some government agency demanding an expensive cleanup for it.
Dude, you find the oddest shit to be all superior about.
Well put. If a story came out that... I don't know... Osama Bin Laden was once a woman, you can bet someone would post "Am I the only one to whom that wasn't patently obvious?"
The funny thing is, the "patchwork" appearance of less populated areas on Google earth is probably NOT evidence of the photos coming from different sources. You can get very high resolutions from satellite imagery. I always assumed the low-res areas were due to storage limitations of Google's servers - I mean, why store detailed images of every square mile of the pacific ocean?
You perfer blaming your problem on something that doesn't exist, and as such has to take all the forced ignorance that come with it.
What problem am I blaming on what? Forced ignorance?...
Does someone doubting evolution makes you so angry that you can't post coherently?
Espcially telling is the fact the there is nothing that counters evolution except a sect of people who mis-interpet a Jewish Myth.
Do all Jews agree that it's a Myth? Do all other religions believe in evolution? Do no atheists doubt the theory of evolution?
I don't doubt evolution so much because of scientific evidence to the contrary, but because of a lack of evidence for it. Trying to prove or disprove a process that spans millions of years is not trivial, and I became suspicious partially because of people like you who do not even consider the matter open to debate, and get so angry about anyone expressing doubt.
I don't believe in the theory of evolution (seriously, I'm not trolling), but assuming for the sake of argument that it's true, this absolutely makes sense.
You could argue that the human "big brain" is an evolutionary dead end of sorts, because we now respond to environmental pressures by inventing tools and medicines. Humans who would be very "unfit" from a purely physical point of view (and I'm not just talking about/.ers), are very able to survive and pass on their genetic information.
I could get into why I don't believe in evolution, but I'm not in the mood for that kind of abuse today:-)
it means they're upscaling from 720 to 768, which is pitiful.
Is that based on personal experience? There are some very good scaling/deinterlacing systems out there. If you have the right hardware (or software), upscaling from 720 to 768 (or even downscaling from 1080 to 768) will look just fine. If you have bad scaling, upscaling by a factor of 2 or 3 will look "chunky", just like SDTV looks very bad on some HDTVs, while on others it only looks "blurry".
I believe it's safe to say that using someone's gait to determine their relative guilt/innocence, ranks right up there with dumping a woman in a river to see if she's a witch.
Don't be absurd. Using gait analysis for identification is not new. They wouldn't use it to determine guilt.
If the malaria-resistant gene and the fluorescent-green-eye gene are somehow linked? Would the count of green-eyed mosquitoes necessarily match the count of malaria-resistant ones after several generations?
From the test results document (it appears to me, anyway, that this is test they're talking about in the article):
With IDNs, the domain names stored in the DNS servers are ordinary
domain names just like before. The names stored have no special properties
that makes it possible for the DNS servers to single out the IDN domains.
There is no reason to believe that IDNs would make the DNS system as a
whole behave different from its normal behaviour. Nevertheless, for prudence
ICANN has asked that it be tested that this assumption is true.
I looked at this because I wanted to see what some of these internationalized URLs looked like, and they were all regular ascii urls. I'm not really sure what this test proved.
But I assume we all here understand the difference between an action which violates another's rights (e.g. theft), versus an action which does not.
Never assume. The line isn't always so clear. I've known people who think laws against drug use are immoral, while at the same time think cigarettes should be banned because of societal cost. Or people who argue against the death penalty saying, "what if you're wrong?", but have no problem with legal abortion (What if you're wrong and life does begin at conception?). I'm sure there is evidence of the "societal costs" of prostitution, gambling, drug and alcohol use, etc. I'm not saying all such things should be made illegal, just that there might be room for reasonable people to disagree on whether someone engaged in those activities is "only hurting himself" or "violating another's rights".
Few people are wise enough to understand the distinction between moral and political. Observe the common practice of equating right/wrong with legal/illegal. How many Americans understand Oliver North's point, that often it is morally correct to break the law?
Few people get it. And even fewer societies manage to legislate it, in the form of legally protecting immoral behavior. America, the alleged bastion of "separation of church and state", just can't resist the urge to ban anything even vaguely self-destructive. Well, except maybe for Nevada.
Wow! You are so wise!
People who complain about legislating morality are generally people who disagree with those particular morals. I can understand that a state's laws can be in conflict with one's personal morals to the point where obeying the law is immoral (to that individual) but that doesn't mean that law and morality should not be connected!
Nearly all laws are about morals. Some are obvious (murder, theft), some less so. But most laws are there to say - this is right, this is wrong. "Polluting the earth is wrong" is a value judgment. "Discriminating on the basis of race is wrong", "Driving recklessly is wrong", "Copyright holders deserve to be paid for electronic copies of a work", "All customers' packets are created equal" - all value judgments. Not all morals are religious. All states can and do "legislate morality".
Sure a public network might be more likely to provide universal access (IMO, that's the only valid point in the whole article). OTOH, a public owned network would almost certainly be BAD at: controlling costs, customer service, innovation, network maintenance, and quality. If all you want is universal access, leave it private and legislate that one aspect. If you want to ensure "net neutrality", you can legislate that as well. Personally, I don't see why this is something that needs to be regulated. I live in a rural area, and while I can't get cable or DSL, we get WDSL from a private, local company.
I never really did quite understand this kind of thing. Someone tell me if this analogy is at all applicable to this experiment: if you hold up two combs together with slightly different-sized teeth, you will see bands of light and dark that are wider than the actual teeth. Now if you move one comb in relation to the other the bands much faster than either comb is moving. However, the leading edge of the combined (no pun intended) wave is still limited by the front edge of the combs - so no information goes faster than the fastest comb. I majored in physics (long ago) so be as technical as you like in your explanation. I've seen several articles on this sort of thing but none of them had enough details for me to really grasp what was going on.
...this wouldn't even be a question. Of course more pay will attract more qualified teachers -- as long as the pay is actually tied to the qualifications (and this is the govt we're talking about, so you can't just assume they'll understand that). I'm a computer programmer and one of my co-workers is a former match teacher. He went in with high ideals and good intentions and got burned out. He said the main reason he quit was that the compensation was entirely based on seniority -- you could be the best teacher in the school or the worst and it wouldn't affect your pay.
And yes, Coach James and Mrs Johnson the social studies teacher would probably complain about how much the math and science teachers get paid.
Slashdot Mirror
This from the party that claimed the Florida elections were rigged and had all these Floridians saying, "I voted, but my vote didn't count!". Isn't this a little like pouring salt on the wound?
I agree there's a downside to this, and people can misuse information, and I don't think all concept of privacy should be abolished, but trying to control the storage of information is probably an unwinnable battle. Educating people on how and when information about them may be stored might be the best we can do. It's an interesting idea, though.
I mean you really summed up the whole issue <subliminal>and pizza</subliminal>!
However, you are obviously way too smart to be trained in the way you suggest <subliminal>give me your steam account info</subliminal>!
Well put. If a story came out that
The funny thing is, the "patchwork" appearance of less populated areas on Google earth is probably NOT evidence of the photos coming from different sources. You can get very high resolutions from satellite imagery. I always assumed the low-res areas were due to storage limitations of Google's servers - I mean, why store detailed images of every square mile of the pacific ocean?
I don't doubt evolution so much because of scientific evidence to the contrary, but because of a lack of evidence for it. Trying to prove or disprove a process that spans millions of years is not trivial, and I became suspicious partially because of people like you who do not even consider the matter open to debate, and get so angry about anyone expressing doubt.
You could argue that the human "big brain" is an evolutionary dead end of sorts, because we now respond to environmental pressures by inventing tools and medicines. Humans who would be very "unfit" from a purely physical point of view (and I'm not just talking about /.ers), are very able to survive and pass on their genetic information.
I could get into why I don't believe in evolution, but I'm not in the mood for that kind of abuse today :-)
Don't be absurd. Using gait analysis for identification is not new. They wouldn't use it to determine guilt.
If the malaria-resistant gene and the fluorescent-green-eye gene are somehow linked? Would the count of green-eyed mosquitoes necessarily match the count of malaria-resistant ones after several generations?
People who complain about legislating morality are generally people who disagree with those particular morals. I can understand that a state's laws can be in conflict with one's personal morals to the point where obeying the law is immoral (to that individual) but that doesn't mean that law and morality should not be connected!
Nearly all laws are about morals. Some are obvious (murder, theft), some less so. But most laws are there to say - this is right, this is wrong. "Polluting the earth is wrong" is a value judgment. "Discriminating on the basis of race is wrong", "Driving recklessly is wrong", "Copyright holders deserve to be paid for electronic copies of a work", "All customers' packets are created equal" - all value judgments. Not all morals are religious. All states can and do "legislate morality".
Sure a public network might be more likely to provide universal access (IMO, that's the only valid point in the whole article). OTOH, a public owned network would almost certainly be BAD at: controlling costs, customer service, innovation, network maintenance, and quality. If all you want is universal access, leave it private and legislate that one aspect. If you want to ensure "net neutrality", you can legislate that as well. Personally, I don't see why this is something that needs to be regulated. I live in a rural area, and while I can't get cable or DSL, we get WDSL from a private, local company.
I never really did quite understand this kind of thing. Someone tell me if this analogy is at all applicable to this experiment: if you hold up two combs together with slightly different-sized teeth, you will see bands of light and dark that are wider than the actual teeth. Now if you move one comb in relation to the other the bands much faster than either comb is moving. However, the leading edge of the combined (no pun intended) wave is still limited by the front edge of the combs - so no information goes faster than the fastest comb. I majored in physics (long ago) so be as technical as you like in your explanation. I've seen several articles on this sort of thing but none of them had enough details for me to really grasp what was going on.
And yes, Coach James and Mrs Johnson the social studies teacher would probably complain about how much the math and science teachers get paid.