Hello again, everyone. Today, this day, started with great potential...and then went expensively downhill in a hurry. I'd like to talk to whomever diced up my character to tell them that Absentmindedness is not a fun disadvantage to take, especially in a situation where you really can't spare money for stupid things that are your own damn fault.
Up top, we have a brilliant description of what genderqueerness can encompass. And some good news - Maryland joins the caucus of states that are marriage-equal.
And then, there was the priest that walked out on a funeral when the lesbian daughter came to receive Eucharist from him, and the laity (and a retired priest) that showed grace, compassion, and virtue in the final sacrament of the Catholic Chruch.
Elsewhere, a suggestion to call the conservative bluff about who is subsidizing and who is being subsidized and have all the liberal states go Galt and stop supporting the conservative ones. The theory is that, based on how much blue states put in for taxes versus red states, the red states will be able to make their society the way they want to...and then everyone can watch as it runs out of money and falls into disrepair. Or at least has to admit who is right and who is wrong.
I think we did this once before. Something about blue uniforms and grey uniforms and a general that preferred to scorch the earth of everywhere he went. And things not being fully resolved, even after a meeting at the Appamatox court house. Do we want to spark that again? Even if it's true that it would likely turn out the same way again?
Paypal is leveraging their status as a virtual e-commerce transaction monopoly to try and force publishers and others to not carry content they believe is objectionable. The threat is that Paypal will deactivate their accounts, cutting off their revenue supply. And the content they consider objectionable is remarkably ill-defined, so it would cut off giant swaths of already-published work, too.![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
namaah_darling explains why Paypal doing this is wrong, why it's worth raising a very large and loud protest over the matter, and how it will likely affect people who depend on the revenue stream that Paypal makes easy to attain. In short, if you like your indie publishers and porn writers, it's worth telling Paypal that they're doing a great job facilitating commerce...and that's exactly the business they should stay in.
On that same vein, a U.S. federal judge issued a court order to a company in California to take down a .com registered through a non-U.S. registrar that operated nowhere in the United States because teh site was in violation of the laws of the state of Maryland. The company complied. So a company that does not operate anywhere in the United States is taken down because the company at the root of administering the .com domains does and is ordered to do so. How many principles of sovreignty were just violated? And where does this leave U.S. companies if another country orders they be taken down because it's a violation of their laws to offer such products or have such images available?
Finally, as of March 1, Google may have merged all of your Google identities into a single item. Or mistakenly merged your Google identity with someone else, if you and your housemates happen to share a computer or two. The post containes methods that one can use to attempt to retain some amount of privacy against the merging. Perhaps this is the fruit of the Google+ endeavour, and the bigger push to put real names and faces when it comes to profiles that Google's data creates and then sells.
Domestically, I suppose, The Dead Pool unexpectedly calls in propagandist Andrew Breitbart at 43. Breitbart's confrontational style and willingness to selectively edit in his mission made him less of a journalist but well-suited to the Internet medium. He will probably be one of the saints of the pantheon that Arizona sheriffs investigating the birth certificate of the President and judges sending "jokes" that suggest that the President's mother was a drunken slut that was impregnated by a dog, resulting in said President venerate every time they bring the dead argument back to life for their own gain (Said judge should be sacked immediately because of his demonstrated inability to be the neutral arbiter of the law his job requires.)
After remarks that called a law student a slut, said her parents would be ashamed of her, and indicated that he believed that the only reason women would need insurance companies to pay for birth control was because they were so promiscuous, advertisers and radio stations have been shunning Rush Limbaugh's show. He's not helping his cause with fake and insincere apologies after the fact.
After a Supreme Court ruling that said GPS tracking actually does require warrants, the FBI turned off several of their GPS bugs...but not before they knew where they were and retrieved them. Which meant having to petition a court to turn them on a bit long enough to know where they are.
Speaking of the courts, a federal appeals court said that the State of California can take DNA samples of anyone arrested for a felony crime, regardless of whether they were charged or convicted of that crime. The ACLU says there's a lot more that someone can get from DNA than from fingerprinting, and that there's a lot that the state does with that DNA.
In technology and the sciences, while wealthy people and politicians want you to believe that poor people are the most dishonest and ill-behaved, a study suggests that the rich are most likely to cheat and to extoll the virtues of greed. And furthermore, if you nudge someone's attitudes and beliefs toward making them feel richer, they also nudge in the direction of being greedy and dishonest. Wired also carries the story and some details of the study's metrics.
The case of the defendant ordered to decrypt a hard drive so that it could be used as evidence has not run up to the Fourth Amendment showdown it would be...because law enforcememnt got the drive decrypted without forcing the defendant to give up the password. It could be that a co-defendant's paassword worked to open up the drive. And thus, we are bereft of a case where excellent law could be made.
In Cook County, Illinois, a judge struck down Illinois' law that forbids the recording of conversations unless all parties consent for being overbroad. The challenge against it was for a person selling art patches who was discovered with a recording device that was recording the conversation between him and the police. Not because, y'know, citizens should have the right to record their interactions with the police.
Finally, according to a Pew study, lots of people enable privacy controls, about half of them find them difficult, and quite a few of us have posted stuff we regret. Additionally, pulling into the main findings of the privacy study, the higher education level that someone has, the more they report having trouble with the privacy controls of their social networking sites. But that's not explored a whole lot...
Into opinions, where Mr. Meyers insists that if one has the biological capability to have children, one is always and forever a woman, no matter what pronouns one prefers nor what one presents as, and that to argue otherwise fundamentally perverts the meaning of "man" and "woman" such that both are useless. He also advocates that the best way to deal with such an argument, should one encounter it, is to strike the person making the argument across the face with a crowbar. Such is the refuge of someone purporting to be about the power of words. In response,rho points out that the costs of having a society that allows people to be abusive to others far outweigh any perceived benefits, using their own example, but also more generally. The hidden costs add up quickly, and that's just in financial matters.
Two gentlemen argue that the practice of killing infants should be permitted anywhere where the practice of abortion is permitted, because the reasons for aborting and the reason for infanticide are the same regarding diseases and quality of life issues. [Well, they did, anyway. The article no longer exists, and thus, we can no longer debate whether this is satire or serious.]
Last for tonight, the suggestion that Glee is being shown from the viewpoint of Will Shuster...but that Will Shuster is not a long-suffering school teacher against insufferable odds, but a Nice Guy with a persecution complex and megalomaniacal tendencies. Might help explain some of the Issues.
Up top, we have a brilliant description of what genderqueerness can encompass. And some good news - Maryland joins the caucus of states that are marriage-equal.
And then, there was the priest that walked out on a funeral when the lesbian daughter came to receive Eucharist from him, and the laity (and a retired priest) that showed grace, compassion, and virtue in the final sacrament of the Catholic Chruch.
Elsewhere, a suggestion to call the conservative bluff about who is subsidizing and who is being subsidized and have all the liberal states go Galt and stop supporting the conservative ones. The theory is that, based on how much blue states put in for taxes versus red states, the red states will be able to make their society the way they want to...and then everyone can watch as it runs out of money and falls into disrepair. Or at least has to admit who is right and who is wrong.
I think we did this once before. Something about blue uniforms and grey uniforms and a general that preferred to scorch the earth of everywhere he went. And things not being fully resolved, even after a meeting at the Appamatox court house. Do we want to spark that again? Even if it's true that it would likely turn out the same way again?
Paypal is leveraging their status as a virtual e-commerce transaction monopoly to try and force publishers and others to not carry content they believe is objectionable. The threat is that Paypal will deactivate their accounts, cutting off their revenue supply. And the content they consider objectionable is remarkably ill-defined, so it would cut off giant swaths of already-published work, too.
namaah_darling explains why Paypal doing this is wrong, why it's worth raising a very large and loud protest over the matter, and how it will likely affect people who depend on the revenue stream that Paypal makes easy to attain. In short, if you like your indie publishers and porn writers, it's worth telling Paypal that they're doing a great job facilitating commerce...and that's exactly the business they should stay in.On that same vein, a U.S. federal judge issued a court order to a company in California to take down a .com registered through a non-U.S. registrar that operated nowhere in the United States because teh site was in violation of the laws of the state of Maryland. The company complied. So a company that does not operate anywhere in the United States is taken down because the company at the root of administering the .com domains does and is ordered to do so. How many principles of sovreignty were just violated? And where does this leave U.S. companies if another country orders they be taken down because it's a violation of their laws to offer such products or have such images available?
Finally, as of March 1, Google may have merged all of your Google identities into a single item. Or mistakenly merged your Google identity with someone else, if you and your housemates happen to share a computer or two. The post containes methods that one can use to attempt to retain some amount of privacy against the merging. Perhaps this is the fruit of the Google+ endeavour, and the bigger push to put real names and faces when it comes to profiles that Google's data creates and then sells.
Domestically, I suppose, The Dead Pool unexpectedly calls in propagandist Andrew Breitbart at 43. Breitbart's confrontational style and willingness to selectively edit in his mission made him less of a journalist but well-suited to the Internet medium. He will probably be one of the saints of the pantheon that Arizona sheriffs investigating the birth certificate of the President and judges sending "jokes" that suggest that the President's mother was a drunken slut that was impregnated by a dog, resulting in said President venerate every time they bring the dead argument back to life for their own gain (Said judge should be sacked immediately because of his demonstrated inability to be the neutral arbiter of the law his job requires.)
After remarks that called a law student a slut, said her parents would be ashamed of her, and indicated that he believed that the only reason women would need insurance companies to pay for birth control was because they were so promiscuous, advertisers and radio stations have been shunning Rush Limbaugh's show. He's not helping his cause with fake and insincere apologies after the fact.
After a Supreme Court ruling that said GPS tracking actually does require warrants, the FBI turned off several of their GPS bugs...but not before they knew where they were and retrieved them. Which meant having to petition a court to turn them on a bit long enough to know where they are.
Speaking of the courts, a federal appeals court said that the State of California can take DNA samples of anyone arrested for a felony crime, regardless of whether they were charged or convicted of that crime. The ACLU says there's a lot more that someone can get from DNA than from fingerprinting, and that there's a lot that the state does with that DNA.
In technology and the sciences, while wealthy people and politicians want you to believe that poor people are the most dishonest and ill-behaved, a study suggests that the rich are most likely to cheat and to extoll the virtues of greed. And furthermore, if you nudge someone's attitudes and beliefs toward making them feel richer, they also nudge in the direction of being greedy and dishonest. Wired also carries the story and some details of the study's metrics.
The case of the defendant ordered to decrypt a hard drive so that it could be used as evidence has not run up to the Fourth Amendment showdown it would be...because law enforcememnt got the drive decrypted without forcing the defendant to give up the password. It could be that a co-defendant's paassword worked to open up the drive. And thus, we are bereft of a case where excellent law could be made.
In Cook County, Illinois, a judge struck down Illinois' law that forbids the recording of conversations unless all parties consent for being overbroad. The challenge against it was for a person selling art patches who was discovered with a recording device that was recording the conversation between him and the police. Not because, y'know, citizens should have the right to record their interactions with the police.
Finally, according to a Pew study, lots of people enable privacy controls, about half of them find them difficult, and quite a few of us have posted stuff we regret. Additionally, pulling into the main findings of the privacy study, the higher education level that someone has, the more they report having trouble with the privacy controls of their social networking sites. But that's not explored a whole lot...
Into opinions, where Mr. Meyers insists that if one has the biological capability to have children, one is always and forever a woman, no matter what pronouns one prefers nor what one presents as, and that to argue otherwise fundamentally perverts the meaning of "man" and "woman" such that both are useless. He also advocates that the best way to deal with such an argument, should one encounter it, is to strike the person making the argument across the face with a crowbar. Such is the refuge of someone purporting to be about the power of words. In response,
rho points out that the costs of having a society that allows people to be abusive to others far outweigh any perceived benefits, using their own example, but also more generally. The hidden costs add up quickly, and that's just in financial matters.Two gentlemen argue that the practice of killing infants should be permitted anywhere where the practice of abortion is permitted, because the reasons for aborting and the reason for infanticide are the same regarding diseases and quality of life issues. [Well, they did, anyway. The article no longer exists, and thus, we can no longer debate whether this is satire or serious.]
Last for tonight, the suggestion that Glee is being shown from the viewpoint of Will Shuster...but that Will Shuster is not a long-suffering school teacher against insufferable odds, but a Nice Guy with a persecution complex and megalomaniacal tendencies. Might help explain some of the Issues.
