Instead of the locks, TSA-approved or not, what I do is buy some small (4-6") colored cable ties and lock the zippers. (Carry the cable ties in your hand luggage - and don't carry ones long enough that you're going to scare TSA into thinking you want to use them to handcuff someone...)
No lock will stop anyone who wants to get into your bag; the only purpose of them is to, 1) keep your bag's zipper from getting pulled open by accident, and 2) notify you that someone has been in your bag.
The TSA-approved locks fail purpose 2) miserably so they're pointless. However, a colored zip tie has to be cut off and cannot be replaced on the spot, so it serves both purposes pretty well.
This is an audience that might also appreciate this comment on the book from LGM:
I stood in line to get my copy of this book from the local bookstore fearing it might be sold out early. Hot chick on the cover, so far so good. Then I opened it and started reading.
To my chagrin it didn't start out well. I thought well at some point this has to get better. But guess what it doesn't! There's nothing at all about dex rolls, dps builds, searching for traps, sneak attacks, assassins, +4 daggers or anything!
All it is some woman whining about how everyone in her party wouldn't let her make any decisions...I don't even know where to start addressing this stuff. She doesn't even have any daggers! I mean, that's hardly the group leader's fault! She should have loaded out before the quest started!
I see this as being about our own Western civilization-wide existential crisis. What I mean by that follows - noting in advance its ridiculous subjectivity and inaccuracy:
OK, survival & reproduction are basic drives present in a large majority of humans (not quite universal but close) so at a basic level "the purpose of existence" is not and never has been in much doubt. The two big drives beyond reproduction are for pleasure and status. Early civilizations were largely devoted to acquiring and securing the latter for ones descendants and then enjoying as much of the former as possible.
This is never very popular with the 50% of the population who get less of those things than the other 50%. So one wizard scam that held sway for a few thousand years was the claim that all of this was just a prelude to the next life in which all that pleasure and status one lacked in this life would be delivered, as long as you didn't rock the boat in this life. That lasted pretty well and maintained a fairly stable pattern of society (kings-nobles-merchants-peasants) where everyone understood what they were supposed to be doing until a few hundred years ago when the industrial revolution and all that started to screw it up.
Colonization and the industrial revolution and onward sees a string of existential justifications come along, roughly:
* Manifest destiny (runs out of steam when it runs out of "empty" land)
* Utopian socialism (mostly done for when it becomes clear that communist states are no fun)
* Ethnic nationalism & racial superiority (hits a brick wall in WWI which just gets it so mad that it finds a much bigger brick wall to smash its brains out against in WWII)
Now we get the overlap with SF:
* Scientific utopianism (nuclear weapons sort of put the lie to that one)
* Conquer the universe! (universe turns out to be 1. dangerous, 2. expensive, 3. empty, 4. very very very far away with FTL impossible)
* Nanotech/VR/cryptocurrency/online community/THE SINGULARITY will solve all our problems (not so far)
* Extremist green (oddly it is a tough sell to get people to believe that most of them dying is a good plan)
Meanwhile the old standby of "you will go to Heaven and it will be AWESOME" is sounding pretty silly even to the people who still claim to believe in it. And the one modern ideology or existential justification that survived the 20th century intact, corporate capitalism, isn't looking as great as it used to; the idea that it will deliver a future of security, equality and leisure seems ever more implausible as people work harder for a smaller slice of the results.
SF has been part of the popular understanding of these existential justifications for maybe 50-80 years now. And so its record has been tarnished by their repeated failure to match reality. One approach to that is to extrapolate them anyway and make it clear how miserable they would be if you stuck with them. Cyberpunk did that with corporate capitalism. Alaister Reynolds does it with space opera. But there's a limit to how much depression one can take.
If you stick to the old formulas, you wind up writing books that look ridiculous. Even the Mars trilogy - KSR not being anyone's Pangloss - looks ridiculous in light of our inability to accomplish simple things like universal healthcare. And most traditional spaceships-N-aliens stuff might as well be classed as straight fantasy at this point.
So we're dragged back to today, and so maybe what we want to read about is not a society of immortals a thousand years from now but a society of universal health care five years from now. I think that's natural, and probably healthy. I think the fact that near-future SF is more interesting matches what's happening in the society as a whole as those grand societal ambitions crumble in the face of our failure to make progress on our smaller ambitions. As a good example, I just read Metatropolis (Scalzi ed.) and while that was hardly utopian either, it wasn't completely depressing and it did at least have a whiff of potential reality about it that most traditional SF no longer does.
Of course as soon as the next shiny cure-all comes along we'll probably forget it all over again. Unhealthy though it is, I have to admit that I look forward to whatever that might be.
albatross at #86 pretty much sums it up for me. I supported (didn't get to vote for) the guy who had the big sign that said "Change" in front of him, in the hope that there was a sincere recognition that corporatocracy is a disastrous path for the United States. So far, so not-so-good.
I'm no advocate of "the worse the better" policies of electing Republicans, but I have to say that if the sweep that Democrats made in 2006-2008 on the promise of liberal & progressive policies wasn't enough to tell Democrats to stick together to pass those policies, I don't know what it will take. 60 Democrats in the Senate apparently isn't enough. What will it take? 65? How do they plan to get to 65 without doing anything? Even then, how are these progressive policies going to get passed when the President only intermittently seems willing to use the bully pulpit? (How does the President expect to get re-elected without delivering much for those young & minority voters who sent him to office, for that matter?)
The corrosive belief at the heart of all this is that Americans just want nice bipartisan centrists, when in fact Americans want people who can get things done (whatever they say in polls). To their credit, I think a lot of Democrats (including Pelosi and many other Congressional Democrats) get this. The Blue Dogs do not, and do not seem to understand that they are first in the firing line when Americans watch Congress dither. Obama... well, I just don't know yet. I don't want him to discover this the hard way in 2012.
The "Department of Homeland Security" institutionalized this kind of thinking. To 28% of Californians, 12% of New Yorkers, and 33 million people nationwide, America is their (our) home of choice, but not their "homeland". I saw it as a rearguard action of white nativists trying to lay claim to the definition of "American".
Thing is, I think America is a lot of highly contradictory things. But I like that. I think NASCAR is American and I think Chinatown is American. I think white evangelical Christianity is American and I think Ethiopian-born runners with USA plastered across their chest are American. What I resent is the attempt to claim that America is exclusively those things which (some) white native-born Americans say that it is.
There's a strain of public atheism that seems to have latched onto attacking Islam and giving a pass to Christianity, which strikes me as one of those attempts at a heartwarming reconciliation based on the principle that even if Western atheists and Christians disagree on a lot of things, at least we can all agree that those Muslims are really evil.
The Western clothing taboos are pretty strong and are also enforced through physical force; try walking naked through any American city except maybe Berkeley. And the taboos remain differentiated by gender in the West.
The Islamic clothing taboos are a symptom of misogyny, not a cause. Someone who attacks them without considering what could actually be done to improve the lot of women in Islamic societies pretty much outs themselves as someone who doesn't really care, as just a bandwagon-jumping hater enjoying the opportunity for some self-righteousness.
From the apology: "a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists".
Now that makes me proud. The modern computer industry is a pretty progressive place, and I'm happy to be part of it.
I signed the petition, as a British citizen. In terms of the sincerity of the PM's response, I don't much care; what I care about is that the government responded to the demands of its citizens and made a clear statement taking a progressive view. What happens inside Mr Brown's head is his own business; what he does as the leader of the British government is what matters.
"the class bias that liberal commenters may fail to realize they have"
Thank you for pointing this out. Until you did I had no idea whatsoever that in a largely rural Middle Eastern country with a GDP/capita of $11,000, the subset of the population posting on Twitter might not be a perfectly representative sample of the population as a whole. What a fool I've been in basing my entire assessment of the likelihood of fraud in the election on the number of people posting on each side on #iranelection. A common liberal error, I am told, is that of assuming that absolutely everyone is just like you. Definitely a liberal thing. Yup.
And coincidentally the place she moved is next to another beach filled with extraordinary rocks - perfectly-rounded egg-shaped granite boulders that are pink, white, and blue, like a collection of giant stone easter eggs. A few photos I found, but even they don't really do it justice: 1, 2, 3
Unfortunately people keep stealing them because they're so beautiful. Yes, yes, I realize the problem in me complaining about that given what I just confessed to, and I certainly cannot make a full defense, but it is true that the two beaches are of very different types. The chalk beach is continuously eroded and new flint nodules are uncovered all the time (plus, nobody but me would be stupid enough to drag one across the beach and one up the cliffs). The granite boulder beach formed over tens of thousands of years and the boulders are a finite and small collection - just a few thousand of them - and it would be sad if they were all taken away. The local council has been a culprit, taking many nice large boulders to emplace along an esplanade on a completely different beach. IOKIYAR applies everywhere, I guess.
(Just wanted to say I enjoyed #15 very much too.)
I like rocks too. A friend has a blog about Oakland geology, called, sensibly, "Oakland Geology". He likes rocks really a lot. As an East Bay resident who likes to look at the landscape I find it interesting.
My favourite rocks were probably the flint rings - which I can't find a single photo of online - embedded in the chalk beaches of the North Norfolk coast, hereish. The chalk beaches are bright white chalk filled with rockpools and scattered with loose flints and belemnite fossils. Embedded in the chalk are large circular flint nodules - that is, they are rings, with many odd projections. Most of them are enormous. It is possible - although of course it would have been Very Wrong and Nobody Should Do It - that when I was about 11 I may have hauled one of the smaller rings - probably only 50lbs - up the cliffs to our caravan, into the car, then to grace to our back garden in Norwich for many years. Now I'm wondering if my mother took it to Cornwall when she moved. My 11 year old self will be annoyed if she didn't. That thing was heav. ee.
#174, heresiarch, I don't disagree at all with the idea that imperfect measures are better than nothing, and I feel I've made whatever point I might have on the binary nature of metadata to excessive length already, so perhaps we can leave it at that.
It is pretty funny, and I think "trust but verify" applies on Twitter like nowhere else before. And you have to be an idiot to believe the stuff that guy was dishing out.
On the other hand it is important that the majority of information sources that we use are reasonably trustworthy. Otherwise, what does "verify" even mean? There is a second problem, which is that people aren't very good at correctly interpreting the lack of information, which especially tends to be the case early on.
Concrete example of both: in the run-up to the Iraq War overt propaganda was being produced to support the idea that Iraq possessed WMD and was a threat to the US. This was in newspapers, on TV, and coming from the US executive branch itself. Generally the information from those sources is reasonably reliable. We don't turn on the news and expect that what they're talking about is complete fiction. So that was an example of the subversion of conventional channels of trust. And there was a very limited ability to verify any of this, because news sources with doubts were in the minority, and it was physically impossible to go to Iraq and check for ourselves.
And further, even if you did interpret the news reports as containing a great deal of uncertainty and speculation and dubious evidence, making the correct interpretation was hard. I think a lot of people's thought process went like this:
1. It would be bad if Iraq had WMD.
2. The evidence for that is pretty shaky.
3. So, the chance of them having WMD is 50%. <-- Oops!
4. 50% is pretty high so we should invade.
We are evolved to be paranoid in our thinking and to highly weight dangerous scenarios even with only shaky evidence. No mouse ever died because it misinterpreted a shadow as a hawk swooping on it, and ran for cover. But jumping at shadows is pretty dangerous for humans.
(Sorry for the aside. Needed to correct a mischaracterization.)
Standard contracts have lots of advantages over ad-hoc contracts, one being that you can form a body of common law about particular kinds of contracts if they are standardized, which means not only can you settle questions in court more quickly and consistently, but you can avoid going to court in the first place once commonplace scenarios have been adjudicated.
Having to specify the specific lengthy set of legal rights and responsibilities one is talking about might make the process of proposing marriage quite tricky. "Will you marry me? And by 'marry' I mean for life and with only one partner and sharing community property and with joint parenting rights of any children we may have and with the option of divorce and exclusive of all others and on Tuesdays you will make me pancakes for breakfast and on Sundays I will rub your feet for no less than 12 minutes and..."
Although, the bit about pancakes sounds okay.
#153: "It sounds like you're arguing that it's impossible to alleviate the negative side effects of technological advances, and so we have to either accept the tech's consequences both good and bad, or go back to subsistence agriculture."
No. That is ridiculous. I said nothing about it being impossible to "alleviate" the impact of technology.
I was very specifically saying that it is impossible to both have a metadata tag attached to a piece of data and yet not have it attached to that piece of data. This is a question of ontology, not technology.
We can talk about methods for avoiding the abuse or accidental misuse of metadata. What we can't do, yet what a lot of people seem to be insisting Amazon ought to have done, is both make it easy and reliable to search for positive GLBT material, and yet have the metadata that makes that possible unavailable for any other use. The processes that produce search results and category indices and the tools to manage metadata both require access to that tag if it exists, and if they have access, there are ways to screw up.
You could implement an ad-hoc rule that says that a particular set of tags are invisible to the processes used to mark books as inappropriate to show (by default) in search results, and maybe Amazon should do so. But that doesn't rule out any number of other ways of screwing up using the tag and causing offense.
Also, congratulations on the new baby! From someone who will be joining you in sleeplessness in October...
(Side note on gender identification by name: it doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be useful for targeted harassment. The scenario we are all afraid of is the Nazi-takeover, right? And while I don't know if they actually did it, they could well have searched census records for characteristically-Jewish last names. It wouldn't be 100% accurate, but it wouldn't have to be. Hence my comment that it's the bigotry and not the metadata we have to worry about.)
#465: "There is a vast (and growing) group of criminal offences which are offences 'of strict liability'"
Yes, I know this. Is this one of them? Should it be?
#463: This is really stretching. The existence of a British law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation is interesting, but criminal law does not usually penalize accidental and harmless violations.
"the criminal offence Amazon uk appeared to be committing does not require intent to be proven"
Are you quite sure about that? I see nothing in the statute to exclude the normal requirement for intent in criminal law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_in_English_law
[A] person acts....'intentionally' with respect to a result when:
(i) it is his purpose to cause it; or
(ii) although it is not his purpose to cause that result, he knows that it would occur in the ordinary course of events if he were to succeed in his purpose of causing some other result.
---
Note several things: "he knows that it would occur", "in the ordinary course of events", "if he were to succeed in his purpose of causing some other result".
None of those applies to someone making an innocent database change in the course of their work, one which - if it had gone as planned - would not have caused the eventual results that occurred when it went wrong. Nor is the always-present danger that "something could go wrong" specific enough to have predicted this particular result.
Negligence - which would still be hard to prove in this case if this person was using procedures that had been used successfully before - is not usually an element of criminal liability, only civil liability.
Oh no, not picked on, embarrassed to have made such a categorical statement about What Will Be, that's all.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 37 |
| 2008 | 25 |
| 2007 | 49 |
| 2006 | 28 |
| 2005 | 6 |
| 2004 | 1 |
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