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Comment Re:no (Score 1) 637

"The main strength of our species isn't that we're all really smart, it's that one really smart guy comes along once in a while and tames fire, invents the spear, invents pottery, invents calculus, etc, and the rest of us can learn from that person."

The spread of smarts (IQ?) is what works in our social species. Progress rests on our ongoing cultural store of knowledge, and individuals, no matter their IQ, are not pivotal in society's progress -- another individual will always come along who can see and voice it just as well.

The species, our society, move forward, the more we leave behind superficial and ideologically based rankings --and-- our pedestal obsessions.

We need to value everyone more.

Comment Re:Vote With Your Wallet (Score 2) 90

"apparently I need to be a shit-ton clearer when posting on this site, because people here love to interpret things as negatively as possible so they can have a mental breakdown"

It's a big problem: things like people being unclear, people expecting everyone to have the same reference points, and people interpreting to fit their perspective. For example:

"Trade only in games / movies / music / books / etc that you can legally share with others. When media that can't be shared can't be sold ... that will be the end of piracy and a great day for all of humanity."

"When you talk about sharing, I know for a fact you're talking about copying and giving someone that copy so they don't have to pay for it"

Government

Submission + - Cash-Strapped States Burdened by Expensive Data Security Breaches (darkreading.com)

CowboyRobot writes: "As budgets are pinched by reduced tax collection, many U.S. states are facing a possibility of not being able to handle the ever-increasing number of data breaches. 70% of state chief information security officers (CISOs) reported a data breach this year, each of which can cost up to $5M in some states. "82 percent of the state CISOs point to phishing and pharming as the top threats to their agencies, a threat they say will continue in 2013, followed by social engineering, increasingly sophisticated malware threats, and mobile devices." The full 2012 Deloitte-National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Cybersecurity Study is available here (PDF)"
Privacy

Submission + - Got a Criminal Record? See You on Apple Maps!

theodp writes: With its 295 pages of drawings, Apple's pending patent application for a System and Method for Anonymous Location Based Services covers a lot of ground, including a plan to map the homes of those with criminal records and make the info available to via a GPS-based service. From the application "A policeman may activate a mobile police automobile device (i.e. RDPS) in a police car for automatic delivery of a person's criminal record as the policeman drives by the location of a person's house. The police establishment configures criminal record content, or pointers thereto, along with the location of the residence that is believed to harbor the person with a record. As the policeman drives by locations with addresses of known offenders, the RDPS displays applicable criminal data.' So, can we expect to see this feature on Apple Maps someday?

Submission + - Supreme Court to hear First Sale Doctrine case (cnn.com)

Registered Coward v2 writes: SCOTUS is set to hear a case to determine how copyright law and the doctrine of first sale applies to copyrighted works bought overseas, imported to the US and then sold. The case involves a foreign student who imported textbooks from Asia and the resold them in the US to help fund his education. He was sued by the publisher, lost and was ordered to pay $600k in damages. Now SCOTUS gets to weigh in on the issue.

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