The recent arrest of a 23-year-old California man that has allegedly hacked e-mail accounts of more than 170 women and posted sexually explicit pictures found within them to the victims' Facebook accounts, has highlighted the need to limit the amount of personal information posted on various social networks.
Coulter has in the past used her freedom of speech to advocate charging anyone who speaks negatively of the war in Afganistan with 'providing aid and comfort to the enemy' and locking them in prison.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from the consequences of exercising that freedom. That was even literally noted as such in one rather big iteration of the concept (see wikipedia + references).
Example: Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines saying she's ashamed that then-President George W. Bush is from Texas (like herself), and the backlash against the group that followed.
Note also that although you may be imprisoned, you can still send letters with the exact same speech if you wish - though you may then be indicted for this act and your prison term extended.
Of course under current U.S. (I'm presuming to be the context) laws this wouldn't happen anyway and Coulter was just making some headline-able statements to further her shameless self-promotion, but consider you being in the military and privy to detailed active operation plans. Freedom of speech says you can tell the world if you want to. Laws against treason say you'll be screwed if you do. But those laws don't prevent you from telling the world.. it may be a deterrent, perhaps even a strong deterrent, but you can still exercise your freedom of speech.
Compare this to e.g. a dissident in one of those friendly 'great leader' type states where anybody they suspect might exercise their freedom of speech in a manner they disagree with, they'll just lock them up and allow no communication to the outside world, or indeed the aforementioned soldier on a battleground whose communication may well be monitored and redacted (censored) as appropriate (regardless of the relative ineffectiveness of such measures in this technological age).
What's more worrying than people making use of their freedom of speech (which is almost entirely non-worrying) is the collective power of those listening to said speech and often with it the general lack of responsibility on the part of those making said speech when they are aware of said collective power.
Same example: Though the world was generally not aware of Natalie Maines' statement and it netted but a small column in a UK newspaper, this was picked up by politically inclined groups who lobbied hard to have their songs pulled from 'conservative radio' where individual stations decided individually to stop playing their songs; after touting the overseeing company's line, inciting their listeners, and eventually leading to such silliness as burning of CDs and driving over them with a bulldozer and ultimately a change in the Dixie Chicks' music career (for better or for worse).
In fact, I highly recommend reading up on that particular line of events and maybe buy/rent/download the DVD documentary "Shut up and sing" that follows the group from well before the proverbial shit hit the fan to several years after, as it demonstrates the above points fairly well.. though many people take away many different things from seeing it.. from "there shouldn't have been any consequences" to "good! they should have stayed away from politics!"
because traffic won't have to be slowed/halted while this accident is investigated and the car towed?
the lamp post doesn't need repairing?
that tree won't need to be uprooted (depending on damage)?
traffic won't have to be slowed/halted while this occurs?
insurance companies won't be involved (regardless of whether or not they pay any damages)?
I understand what you tried to say, but even in the case of the drunk driver who didn't cause any problems at all at the end of their trip I'd have a problem with it as that's more luck than anything else. (where by 'drunk' I mean 'impaired', not 'blood alcohol level is above the legal limit')
it seems hard to condemn companies too harshly for using a marketing catch-phrase.
Hmm, no.. I'm not finding myself having any trouble doing this whatsoever.
Everybody knew there would be -a standard- referred to as 4G eventually... hijacking that for "marketing catch phrase" purposes gains them no sympathy other than from other marketeers.
Think of it this way.. if Microsoft were to start offering "IE9 with HTML 6 support" where "HTML 6" is not clearly defined, would you have any trouble whatsoever condemning them?
Isn't this what customers want, though? I'm rather serious about that.
Say a company has a website and on that website they obviously have a news area, a contact page (perhaps even a listed e-mail address.. rare as that may be) and because they're not totally stuck-up, they also run a forum.
What happens?
People don't read that website for news.. not even if it had an RSS feed. They expect to get those updates from a Twitter feed.
People don't post to those forums. Why would they? It's probably small and won't get very many eyeballs, even if it -is- the official forum and they can get in touch with the actual business people / engineers there. They expect to just go @SomeCompany on Twitter and get their responses there.
People don't use the e-mail forms... again.. @SomeCompany on Twitter.
Substitute Twitter with facebook / youtube / vimeo in some scenarios.
Note that people will do this even if the company does -not- in fact have an account at these social networking sites. Heck, if nothing else, people will just complain on those sites about the lack of the company being on that site.
So I reckon this is exactly what people want. Even if it's not what they want, they in part brought this unto themselves.
And yes.. I realize that part of the reason is because it is oh-so-public. Blaming Company X for a problem with Product Y on Twitter tends to get re-tweeted and picked up right-quick. Saying so on the company's own forum tends to lead to relatively bland responses. So companies, too, brought this requirement to be on social networking sites unto themselves.
But certainly neither party should complain about the development of these tools (and Cisco's is hardly the first).
The good name that's slowly but surely turning sour in favor of the 'LibreOffice' fork? (which I do hope they plan on changing real soon)
it -should- complain, yes.... but the reason why people are groaning at Microsoft on this issue is the same reason they're groaning about the UAC prompts. With UAC prompts, lazy people get trained to 'just click Yes', thus severely reducing the effectiveness of the prompt. That this happens in other operating systems, albeit usually on a CLI, is apparently not an issue.
With the mixed content warning, you get an even worse problem from lazy people. The end-user will just click 'yes' as otherwise some silly little game just won't work, while on the developer's side there's some guy in a boardroom going "we're getting complaints from users that the site uses mixed content when running third party content X. How can we fix that?" and a site developer going "well ideally all of the content should be https.. but as we're dealing with third party content we have no direct control over, we could drop everything back to http" and a decision-maker going "make it so."
*eyes mods* Flamebait, huh? Yeah, that's pretty much the treatment people with FF problems get in general, I guess. Thankfully there's also people like surveyork.
surveyork: I'll give that a shot, thanks!
Arnold's success at entrancing 12-year-old boys by shooting huge guns has vaulted him to a position of power from which he will blandly urge the Court to create a new exception to the First Amendment: violent entertainment aimed at 12-year-old boys.
The huge guns that he shot in movies which were all rated PG-13 or well above?
PG-13: The 6th Day, Last Action Hero
R: T1, T2, T3, Collateral Damage, End of Days, Eraser, True Lies, Total Recall (secondary rating), Red Heat, Running Man, Predator, Raw Deal, Commando, Conan the Barbarian*
X: Total Recall (original rating)
* Conan the Barbarian wasn't guns.. but what the hey.
There is no particular irony here on the part of Arnold Schwarzenegger even if he would have had a say about the ratings of these movies and whether or not legislation would be allowed to prevent the sale of these movies to 12-year olds.
The real irony is that despite these clear ratings that have been on the boxes since VHS and in many instances even included prior to the movie's starting, these 12-year olds and younger end up watching them anyway.
What that says about ratings and the proposed 'violent video game' legislation I'll leave to those who care. I just wish news sites would quit suggesting it's ironic that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be putting a signature under this thing and go back to watching Alanis Morisette videos unless they dig up a statement from him in which he encourages 12-year olds to watch the aforementioned movies.
That's what I first thought as well, but it doesn't make sense?
Let's say you set an event notification for "100 seconds from now". Let's say 'now' is 0s, so that you get the event at exactly 100s.
Now a time change comes along at 50s, which sets the clock back 50s.
So when the clock ticks through 100s for the event notification to occur, the clock ticks through to 50s, time change makes that 0s, then the clock again ticks through to 50s, triggering the event, and the clock ticks merrily onward from there.
The event thus comes at the new 50s, not at the new 100s.
I.e. the alarm goes off -before- it should have gone off. The bug as stated in the story, however, has the alarm going off -after-.. essentially at 150s. I think.
So if an alarm is set for "7 hours from now", and the clock ticks go like this:
0h, 1h, 2h, 3h/2h, 3h, 4h, 5h, 6h, 7h, 8h, 9h.
And the alarm says "in 7 hours I should go off", rather than "at 7am I should go off", it would look like this:
0h, 1h, 2h, 3h/3h, 4h, 5h, 6h, 7h, 8h, 9h, 10h.
Thus making the alarm go off at 6am - not the 8am in the story.
Did I mention I'm confused?
( I do hate DST as well, for this very reason, but I still can't fathom the bug. )
Dear Firef *waits 9 seconds* ox. Please di *waits 5 seconds* e.
Signed-
The *waits 30 seconds* Internet.
in before "what add-ons and plug-ins do you have installed":
A. The ones that make FireFox actually worth using.
B. None when I last reproduced the above scenario and that made for a very fun browsing experience all day long, let me tell you. Please, by all means, ask me to do that again after changing some undocumented about:config value. I have time and sanity to waste (as evidenced by posting comments at
Time to give Chrome another shot, despite its inane UI (if I want more screen real estate for the page I'm visiting, I'll hit fullscreen, and keep my useful menus and button on-screen otherwise, thanks).
Reminds me more of Quikwriting, actually...
http://slashdot.org/hardware/99/04/29/1734246.shtml
http://cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/
I see a lot of posts with hate for DST.. that's fine, I'd be happy if it were abolished as well.
But now back to there being a bug in how the alarm thing is handled on the iPhone. How does that bug even exist?
If the alarm is set for a particular time, say "7am".. then what does it matter whether or not the clock went back an hour at 3am?
I can understand the alarm app going a bit batty if the clock went back at 8am (essentially the alarm going off -twice- that day), but given the actual circumstances... how did the alarm decide that it should instead be going off at 8am? The clock, presumably, does give the correct time.. so it's not like its internal time functions don't know what time it actually is. I'm confused. Is this just some manner of shoddy coding going on?
What's worse is how Apple is handling it... i.e. 'not'. Most of America (some states ignore DST already) is up for its DST change next week. I guess most people are now warned by the media attention (where was that when it was NZ / AU?).
Speak for yourself when you say 'we'.
People who used daguerrotypes weren't exactly exactly numbering in the millions... the camera, plates, development equipment, etc. required cost a pretty penny even back then.
So let's take an objective look at things... I don't know which size that particular photo was, but one site on the interwebs lists as the largest daguerrotype plate a 6.5 x 8.5 inch plate. That's -huge-, but let's roll with it.
Now let's see what other photography equipment you're not likely to find with a typical tourist... how about a LEAF APTUS-II digital back? It's only 53.7mm x 40.3mm and has a resolution of 10,320 x 7,752 pixels.
Let's blow that sensor up to the size of that plate. The aspects don't quite match.. Losing a bit off the length there you're left with 52.7x40.3mm and 10,127 x 7,752 pixels.
So now on 8.5" we've got 10,127 pixels or ~1,191.4DPI and on 6.5" we've got 7,752 pixels or ~1192.6DPI.
Let's call it a round 1190DPI. I'd say that's pretty tight and you'd need at least a magnifying glass to see details no larger than a few pixels - which the blobby messes from the photograph discussed can pretty much be labeled as. (Note that the two photos in the article linked to are different photos - the detail from the photo referenced in the 'microscopy' section can be found on the original page: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/10/22/130754296/first-photo-of-a-human-being-ever )
That's not even counting large format digital camera backs or -scanning- digital backs (sure, exposure sucks, but daguerrotypes weren't exactly 1/800s wonders either - the second image was a 10-minute exposure) that will give you a much greater resolution yet.
And all that without the fuss and nasty chemicals and a result you can copy again and again and physically handle any which way you want (other than setting it on fire and electrocuting it, I suppose) without fear of smudging off the exposed elements, etc.
Then again.. most people don't care to have that much resolution in the first place. The primary mode of display these days is on the internet. While that's gone beyond the 800x600 'e-mail size' photos, by far the most gallery sites still do not post a full 5MP picture, never mind the 10MP that's just about standard now, unless it's a site specifically for great photos or panorama photos (which you most certainly would need a microscope for if printed out at the size specified above.).
In that respect.. it certainly is interesting.. and makes me wonder why so many people still buy into the megapixel race.
More to the point - although I too find GP poster's "get a life" assessment more than a little lacking in substance* - how does it explain people who are relatively new to games playing through them in just a day, too?
Perhaps it's the need for console games to 'help' the player a bit by simplifying things that also finds its way into PC gaming?
Perhaps it's simply the genre of games being released nowadays (a pretty much linear FPS can be played through in a few hours as long as you're familiar with FPS games in general.. shoot everything that moves, hope none of the victims were important (Half Life 1 - Can't shoot the scientists in Half Life 2.. how disappointing). Hunting down pixels in CountDown (Access Software) will still take you several days no matter how often you've played Monkey Island, LOOM, The Dig, etc.)
Perhaps it's the milking of games with downloadable content, 'episodes', and the focus on multiplayer, dimishing the single player experience.
Probably a combination of things.. but since the question doesn't ask for a cause, merely a yes/no answer, I'll go with: Yes.
* If you have a job, family, etc, then all that means is that instead of playing it through on the same day in 6 hours, you play it through over the course of two months in half hour stints. Guess what? That still means it was just 6 hours - where an older game might have been 12 hours.. whether that's 12 hours in 1 day or 12 hours over the course of 4 months doesn't change that it was 12 hours.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood
