JennFrank: Looks, like possessions, are things that most people value due to their exclusivity. If you have something as well, theirs becomes less rare and less special. If you paid less than full price (surgery?) it's worse because it makes it look like they overpaid.

I know it's a bit of a stretch to jump from stereo/car envy to body envy, but the attitudes seem similar.

Imagine this discussion with various people.

(Where X is valuable - a new car, stereo, face-lift, etc)
Them: "Look at my new X."
... later ...
You: "Hey, guess what, I just won a free X!"

They'll either be really happy for you, or upset. It's very polarizing. They should be happy for you if they're a friend - a good thing just happened to you. Resentment is often more powerful though and they're just spiteful that you got something without a worthy (in their eyes) price.

What is it world? Should fatties slink in for surgery so their horrid carcasses don't offend, or are they not worthy of such surgery because they're offensive?

A boob-job is a lot cheaper than some lame Hummer H2 and, I'll wager, brings more happiness to the world.

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Agerblic: This will continue until more people like you ride those segregated buses and stand up for women who are being told to move.

If you've got a wife or female friend, get her to sit up front and watch to make sure nobody harasses her. If you don't, sit in the back in the women's section just to muddy the waters.

It's too small of a society to eat itself like that, those bus-beaters are doing more to destroy Israel than the terrorists could.

To make negative whuffie stick it obviously can't be something the user tracks for themselves.

I envision it being fuzzier than Cory seems to portray it. Instead of a specific number of whuffie, I think it'd be a summation of ratings of the person, by people you trust, or are in a web of trust that you build by looking at their other public ratings. In this case, your whuffie would depend who was asking, and who their friends are.

For whuffie to be as accurate as currency you'd need individual tokens for each whuf. 'so and so gives someone else 1 whuffie'. For someone to not just create social credit from sockpuppets, it would have to come from a limited supply. That would require a way to make sure people had only one ID. Or, whuffie wouldn't be creatable and you'd only be able to give what you were given... But then you've got a whuffie recession, etc. Too much complexity.

So I think of it like the friends/foes list on Slashdot, but more tunable and realtime.

Cory?

Apple also deleted forum threads about their poor power cables.

Jere7my, has it occurred to you that you wouldn't see deleted threads?

Enjoy your DRM-laden products. Apple might indeed be trying to monetize this in a nonstandard fashion, but they're still willing to screw you over to do so. And lie about it by hiding the discussion...

Get one of the browser plugins that lets you write notes on other people's sites, like Hoodwink.d, or another.

If Apple starts censoring their forums, start a hidden forum on Apple.com letting people know the truth. There's nothing they can do about it!

TheDigression and Takuan must be trolls, it's not possible to type when you're that full of stupid.

You really need to pull your heads out of your asses and look at what's going on.

This is a defensive weapon, to be used against the weapons (not people) of nations that have sworn, for religious reasons, as have all of the countries near Israel, to destroy every last Jew, drive them into the sea, etc.

To ignore the facts of the matter and bleat like sheep about Israel being the war-monger is the height of idiocy.

The Arab states lambaste Israel for not giving the Palestinians their own country, but the Arab states totally refuse to help. They're far bigger than Israel and have more room for the Palestinians, but their Arab neighbors would rather use them as a pawn against Israel.

If there was any Justice, Israel would have kept the land they captured when they were attacked. Then they'd have plenty of land to give the Palestinians.

Israel isn't perfect, but it wouldn't matter to those around if they were. At every step Israel de-escalates the fighting - at every step nearly every neighbor of their funds terrorism in Israel or wages outright war against them.

If they wanted to commit murder, as those around them do, they could easily do so. They didn't even kill the attacking armies that had inflicted so much damage on them.

Kevinv, defective is defective. Doesn't matter if it's a law or a bug, it still won't do what it should.

Software that doesn't do what you tell it is defective.

Knives that don't cut are defective. It's against the law to murder someone with a knife, but we have a right to have knives which could murder someone.

Similarly, we need software that *could* break the law, not plastic sporks. Not i-tunes, the spork of the media world.

Gregory, the price of a console is irrelevant. The act of a sale, for $0.01, or $500, totally ends the rights of the seller regarding the goods.

Yes, console makers often sell at a loss. That's their risk. You're free to go into stores and buy just the sales (loss leaders). You're allowed to buy new razors all the time and never spend for a blade refill. It's the problem with that business model. But it's not the consumer's problem.

I agree with Duus. Hide 'bad' posts, don't obfuscate them.

Only delete those that would get you sued.

This way people can really see what isn't allowed. I have no idea what the few people in this thread who were partially disemvoweled said, so I don't get to see where the 'line' really is.

Also, with non-threaded communication like this it gets very hard to follow if someone replies to something that is later deleted or disemvoweled.

Something like Slashdot, but with Theresa as a permanent moderator would be good. Threads so people arguing with Garrett wouldn't interfere people talking about tasers. Rude messages hidden so that nobody feels intimidated. Best of all worlds.

Theresa/Mark/etc why the choice of a flat over a threaded forum? Slashdot's nested mode views nicely without continual reloads, etc.

Garrett: Censorship is far more than governmental, parents censor (ideally) television for their children.

You could have weighed in, as some did, saying that they wouldn't watch the video. You tried to convince Mark to not show something like it next time.

My civil liberties are wonderful things, Boing Boing talks about preserving these. Would you prefer that only people who browse shock sites hear about this video, just so those looking for wonderful things don't have to skip down a paragraph?

You seem to have a problem understanding this. You advocate for censorship. That's why I say 'people like you'. You may feel you have a great reason, or that we're being impolite, but it still leads you to try to convince others not to inform themselves.

Also, it's been pointed out to you that the family wishes the video to be seen, presumably so people can get annoyed at the very pointlessness and ignobility of being beaten to death in an airport by thugs and do something about it. You might wish to acknowledge the family's wishes here - you claimed to be thinking of them earlier.

Garrett, you're lying now. If your only interest in this was in not seeing 'snuff films', you wouldn't have clicked on the link, or come into the discussion. It was adequately marked.

You came in here to tell Mark, and the rest of the world, that the offer never should have been made. A video of the death which Mark and others clearly feel shows a different side to this than the police reported is something that you think people shouldn't have been exposed to.

You may not think of yourself like a supporter of Fox News, but your instincts are to call for the censoring of things you find offensive.

Over, I might add, the wishes of his family. They obviously and reasonably want to world to see that he didn't deserve to be killed. So what if people see a video of him during the time he died, they're also seeing the national police force murder him at the same time.

Seems the problem is really simple. It's an issue of Hollywood exec lying about profits, using 'industry standards' to avoid being sued over what would otherwise be blatantly illegal.

So we should just do outside audits of movie/tv studios. Pay independent auditors to use real accounting practices instead of hollywood book cooking.

When profits are honestly reported people can sign whatever contracts they want.

Garrett, if someone giving me a video of an event to let me judge it for myself isn't reporting, nothing is.

The vast majority of Canadian citizens do not condone this behavior, especially in the people we pay to maintain the peace. It's easy to miss an event if it's just a sound-bite; 'man killed in Vancouver - police under investigation' - it doesn't tell you anything. But the video is hard to ignore. And it should be. If you're Canadian, your taxes are paying those people. If you're Canadian, you're guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. Most of us didn't really understand this, but if this video helps wake us up it could save many lives.

I'd like to think that the pain of watching a little video to see what the thugs you're financing are doing in your name would be appropriate.

There's always someone like Garrett around, willing to tell you why you shouldn't see things first-hand. Why it's appropriate that your news is censored. In the end it's just to convince you that you need them to think for you. It's because they can't convince anyone who looks at the facts for themselves. They get jobs at Fox News.

Tom. You're someone I'm glad to have as a neighbor.

NE2D, It seems to me that the insurance should be for everything except what it states specifically on paper.

If they aren't going to cover your pregnancy they should put it in writing. Not just as 'preexisting conditions not supported', but an actual list of the things they consider to have been preexisting.

Pregnancy is easily self induced (well, not self...) and so people can easily sign up with the intent of becoming pregnant a month later. To totally cover that but totally not cover someone who signed up in the first month seems ridiculous.

If they were interested in being fair, they'd pro-rate it. Instead they hope you forget to ask, thinking that pregnancy is so basic and obvious that you can't miss it, so if you cared you'd have said something about it (you know, specific list of conditions the company wouldn't support).

The companies are just preying on the few people left who haven't heard that HMOs are essentially a ripoff. (Someone said theirs is different but didn't name it, I'd like to investigate...)

Really, the answer is that people don't want health insurance, they want a health trust. Insurance is something you get in case something very bad happens. A health trust in something you pay into intending to use it over your life. Insurance gets canceled over loopholes, the trust just may not have much in it if you hadn't paid long. Neither will help someone who just gets cancer and needs help, but if a family was paying into a trust they would get to use it anyway they wanted to; no troubles getting the medicines or treatments they need. They could also transfer coverage, as it's just prepaid medical.

It's funny how PeterOliver thinks he's a patriot. He thinks that by supporting the president, right or wrong, he's making us stronger.

He can't see that he's weakening what it meant to be an American. Used to be you could be proud of being in a country that didn't run secret torture facilities. Know what I mean?

It's retards like him. (Sorry Theresa, but it has to be said.) who are getting us into losing wars and wasting the country's entire economic footing to do so. War may need to be fought every now and then, but not against the wrong people for fabricated reasons.

People like PeterOliver who come in here, be they trolls or actual morons, are directly trying to support a warmongering fascist government intent on destroying the USA. The fact that these criminals are 'elected' changes nothing - so was Hitler.

Bush is FUCKING MURDERING PEOPLE in our names. My tax dollars are going to KILL PEOPLE! Cry Godwin if you will, but it's time we realized what's going on.

Iraqi Casualties are over a million. We condemned the Turks as genocidal over 1.5 million. Do we plan to stop at 1.48? Or is it better because there are more Iraqis to murder than there were Armenians? Like the life of a Chinese or Indian person doesn't matter because "there are so many, how could they ever keep track, ha ha."

Saddam Hussein was a fascist dictator who used terror, torture, and illegal war. The USA (Yay freedom!) went into his country and killed him, to bring justice to the world.

We should be able to bring the military home and mop up here, maybe impose democracy before the 2008 elections.

...

Have any of you ever had the discussion: "Didn't anyone recognize what Hitler was doing? Why didn't they stop him?"

Maybe they were talking about it but PeterOliver's grandfather ratted them out to the Nazi SS to patriotically support the leader...

We need to recognize that these people are criminals or we'll wake up one day working at the Zyklon B factory.

BUG_GIRL: Randy Thornhill has absolutely ZERO credibility. He's the one who thinks rape is "adaptive" in humans, and a natural reproductive strategy.

Just because it's not polite to rape someone is no reason to pretend it's not an evolutionary strategy.

It's natural, as in, people are natural and people rape. It's reproductive because sex is involved. It's a strategy because you can choose to do it.

Not only are you unclear on ad hominem arguments, but by your own rules, you're pretty much open season.

Sure, rape is often about violence too, yada yada, but that doesn't excuse lies and personal attacks.