You old people crack me up.

No, honestly, you arrived pre-cracked.

It may well, somehow, be our fault that you are cracked, but it an absolute certainty that our habits of actually talking to people are superior to yours of sitting at a table or walking down the street with your friends, looking only at your phones, as you busily talk to anyone but the people you're actually with.

Among the healthy and mature, there's no right "not to be offended"; not for men, and not for women. There is 100% equality here.

Such offense is subjective; every possible attempt to minimize it by law boils down to an unworthy suppression of freedom, something that is unhealthy for society no matter how you go about it.

Even when a particular mode of speech, or some consensual/personal action, is pretty much uniformly despised, it's far better to know who says, and therefore has motivation to say, or does, these terribly offensive things, than it is for society to repress these people and then jump up in stark surprise when they move from unseen and unheard to resentful action as a means of kicking back against said repression.

Speech, in many cases, serves as a moderately effective safety valve. You never want to close such a valve and walk away. Because you get this.

If something you look at offends you, look away. If something you hear offends you, stop listening. If something people do offends you, don't participate. Your subjective feelings of offense can never rise to the relevance required to legitimately regulate the behavior of others.

Until something breaks your bones, damages your property/finances, or impugns your reputation, or these things similarly directly affect those for whom you perform the role of parent or guardian, the correct action is to turn to managing your own sensibilities -- rather than trying to control other people's actions.

Now, as to the immature and incompetent, in particular, children: Parents and guardians have a dual responsibility here. In order to be able to execute that responsibility, your home should be a safe haven in the sense of you being able to completely control who, and what information, gets in, and when they get in, and when they must leave. Society owes it to you to see to it that this capacity is readily available to you. Your home should indeed be your castle. To the extent it isn't, society has either failed you, or you have failed your charges. Schools and/or any other situation requiring attendence must likewise be supportive and safe, or society has lost its legitimate right to force your children to attend.

Immaturity:

On the one hand, it is your responsibility to see to it that your charges are not bullying, generally or specifically being an asshole to others. You are responsible for inculcating the understanding that immature and/or insufficiently abled minds can be taken to, and beyond, the brink by bullying, and then you must see to it that this understanding translates into reasonable behavior by your charges (which, by the way, will work to reduce many types of essentially pointless trolling later on.)

On the other, it is also your responsibility to see to it that your charges are not being bullied. You should know where your charges hang out, who they hang with, what the environment is like, and you should step in when that environment, in your estimation, becomes unhealthy. Stepping in may involve a note to someone else's parent or guardian, removing your charge from the harmful environment, or simply providing sufficient perspective so that the behavior is seen in the light of failure of the perpetrator, rather than any kind of lessening of the value or self-image of the target.

Incompetence:

If your charge cannot be taught to healthily handle the speech, displays, or consensual actions of others, then it is your job to see to it that they are not exposed to those things. It is not society's responsibility to turn the entire planet into a padded room for your charge. If you need a padded room, you should build one of your own.

For every story I have heard so far of horrible consequences to bullying, my reaction has been "Where were the parents during all this?"

And I have to ask: If your charges are not being raised with healthy self-images and a strong sense of self, what the fuck are you doing? And why are you doing it? Why are you such a totally shitty parent or guardian? And why do you expect the rest of us to compensate for your failures?

Again, these people's abject failure at parenting does not rise to the level of telling everyone else they can't call someone something when, in fact, it is pretty apparent that something is called for.

Having said that, most online forums and comment sections are not public operations. They're private. And in that role, they have both the power and the right to monitor and control the content and activity on that forum. If you invite people to spend time in what pretty much amounts to an environment you created, then you'd better tell them up front what the limits, if any, are for that environment, and see to it that you are accurate about it. If (points at facebook) you allow your operation to get too large or otherwise out of your effective control, I really don't see how that absolves you in any way from being absolutely clear to all participants that you are not, in fact, able to guarantee any particular kind of environment or control what is going on. And no, burying such things in a veritable tar pit of legalese doesn't suffice. Be plain; be clear; let no user into your "thing" without a road sign that says "alligators!" or whatever else it needs to say. Because it does need to be said.

The very idea of freedom requires a concomitant effort to ensure a competent citizenry. If you create a nation of pearl-clutchers, you will have created an environment where repression is the always go-to of the regulators. To some extent, this is already happening, particularly in nations like England, which has pretty much fallen off the wagon of sanity and is busily engaged in chewing its own tail off. It would be lovely if the USA didn't follow them any (or at least much) further down that road.

Your airline doesn't know you are standing in the security line, and it may not even know you are at the airport. The TSA doesn't know you are there until you hit the boarding pass/id check.

Your MAC address isn't your identity any more than your IP address is. But yes, they can easily snap a photo of you and send it off to the web.

No, they know you've checked in, and they can assume you expect to be there sometime before the flight. They don't know you are there because you don't have to be there to check in.

"I don't want cast aspersions unnecessarily on Abu Dubai — but they're not Canada," said Adams

I think you're okay... They'll both assume you must be talking about the other one.

I don't know what it is, but slashdot editors just LOVE the hell out of cell phone tracking. I mean, there has probably been a story or two on the subject before now:

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/06/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/07/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/12/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/06/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/1...

Everyone go out and find all the cell phone tracking stories you can, and submit every one to /. They love it when you do that!

What are the odds your family isn't all on a single cellular carrier, making you unable to take advantage of such redundancy?

Verizon and Sprint are compatible, while AT&T and T-Mobile are compatible. And with them all switching to LTE, it's likely they will all be mutually compatible in a few more years, when manufacturers start selling multi-band LTE phones.

Most every post-paid cellular plan includes voice roaming. Even if you're not paying for roaming normally, when you dial 911, all restrictions are dropped, and your cell will connect to any available tower from any provider that it can.

Khallow writes:

And it's worth noting here that despite whatever the American Physical Society or the US Department of Energy has said about cold fusion in 1989, research continues.

In the US it continues among professors emeritus that are dying off now at an epidemic rate.

They aren't really in the way now. I don't expect conservative, perhaps hide-bound institutions to embrace every new concept that comes along, even if in theory, that's their job.

A graduate student who attempts to so much as replicate an existing experiment is putting his entire career in jeopardy, starting with the Texas A&M fiasco where the APS took seriously allegations of fraud against such a graduate student's thesis of fraud. Those allegations were made by a "science journalist" whose main claim to fame is a diet book

There is a huge distance between embracing speculative theories and blanket rejection of experimental results.

It may well have been that no one ever actually refused to look through Galileo's telescope. But the behavior of the scientific establishment toward experimental results is clearly a pattern which, even if nothing of substance is behind cold fusion phenomena, is indictable. (Read "Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed" by Charles Beaudette for multiple examples of such behavior.)

Theories are not experiments. Popperian falsification applies to experimental falsification of theory -- not theoretic falsification of experiment, which is impossible. Indeed, even experiments do not falsify other experiments except to the extent that they demonstrate a hypothesized explanation of experimental error is true. Here again the pattern of behavior by the true believers in fashionable interpretation of physical theory demonstrate time and time again they have made errors reckless that they make the errors of Fleischmann and Pons in their neutron measurements look trivial.

Where do you think, for example, the APS "embraced" experiments by Caltech et al sit on Fig. 3 of Storms's paper?

Clue: They're so far outside anything remotely intellectually honest that they fall way off to the left of the figure -- and _this_ is what your estemed authorities used to claim Fleischmann and Pons were guilty of fraud, incompetence and/or delusion.

Hey! No "your mom" jokes here!

But ... who should back it, and why? Who has a financial interest in you actually retaining a figment of privacy?

Words like "entrapment" change meanings all the time. The specific word "entrapment" already has, by your own admission, at least three meanings, one of which includes the example of someone being entrapped by their emotions. If you think the law should simply use "the dictionary", then you really must think that the law should prohibit people being entrapped by their emotions just as it prohibits the government entrapping them in criminal activity.

In the law, entrapment should be a simple term without room for negotiating intricate meanings, and it can only achieve that by leaving the Webster's or OED behind and defining it in simple terms to mean exactly what is intended.

That's nonsense. "Everyone else" cannot be guilty of entrapment because entrapment can only apply to a government agent because that is how it is defined by law. If I convince you to go rob a bank, you can't point at me and say I'm guilty of entrapment, you can only claim I'm a co-conspirator and should go to jail too. Were I to "entrap" you to rob that bank by appealing to your emotions, I may have "entrapped" you according to one dictionary definition, but you aren't going to avoid jail by arguing that there was "entrapment".

Were I a government agent doing that, neither of us would go to jail. Since entrapment is still an affirmative defense, why you think the government can do it without repercussions is a mystery. Entrapment is a concept that applies ONLY to the government, and is prohibited to them, so how you can say that they can do it while others cannot is, well, I don't really care why you think such an obviously silly thing.

No, I am arguing exactly the point I am trying to make, and which is based on a statement you made in response to someone who pointed out that legal terms often have a very specific meaning. It was the first sentence of your first paragraph (which is called the "topic sentence"), which was:

That they do have a different definition does not encompass whether or not they "should" have different definitions.

You, yourself, pointed out that "entrapment" already has multiple meanings, only one of which should be used in a legal context, and which is why the legal use needs to have a specific limited definition.

So yes, they should have different definitions, because to simply use the dictionary would create laws that are too broad and too open to change as the language changes. That's the point. It's not "two forms of justice", it's one form, well defined.

When it comes to telco it isn't nearly twice as expensive to hit every house as it is to hit every other house. It is much cheaper to have government organizing the digging up of streets and private property than to negotiate with the private and public landholders. Government can cut the cost per user enormously if they engage. I think the article is BS but your refutation is as well.

What you just said is for the average computer user about on par with using a JTAG interface. If you can't walk it's moot whether you should climb 2 or 20 stairs.

Umm... how do these forged drivers get the blessing from MS to be considered drivers that you can install without clicking through half a dozen "this is not the driver you're looking for" screens?