Most Ponzi schemes are not, in fact, mentioned to be Ponzi schemes. They are promoted as an investment in something else, people invest money, people get huge profits back (From later investers or seed money), people tell others to invest, every single person involved is entirely rational assuming they believe the original lie that they're investing in some actual thing.
I mean, if someone says 'Hey, invest in this company I'm invested in. It's paying me 5% a month!', and I check, and, yes, it really is paying them that much, and then I invest, it's a sound financial decision, assuming what I have been told is true is true.
Ponzi scheme are not based on innumeracy, they're based on getting someone to let you hold their money until you flee with it. And you give them a very good and rational reason (You're making a buttload of cash for them.) to let you hold their money. Which is essentially how all conmen work, you trust them to hold your money for you, having been given a very good reason to do so.
You're probably thinking of a 'multilevel pyramid scheme', which is essentially a Ponzi scheme where the people involved are getting paid directly, and with full knowledge, by later investors, which should make it obvious that it is a Ponzi scheme from the start and hence can't actually make money for all involved. Multilevel pyramid scheme are, indeed, for fools who can't do basic math. (Or for amateur conmen who know people won't make money on average, but believe that they can get in enough people that they will make money.)
Also, no, I was talking about the 1970s, where I was scoffing at the 'patents'. The guy I was talking to claimed that car companies had been buying patents for incredibly fuel efficient cars since the early 70s, at which point I had to stop them and say 'You know patents only last 20 years(1), right? And are, by definition, filed publicly at the patent office? So you just actually insisted there were government issued public domain records, which anyone can legally use, that show how to make these imaginary cars you think the car industry is sitting on?'.
It's amazing how many people seem to think that 'buying a patent' will a) keep inventions out of public eyesight, when of course all patents are public, and b) last forever. The 'free energy' conspiracy theories have all sorts of amazing inventions disappear thanks to malicious people 'buying patents', sometimes almost 100 years ago! (Although most of these 'patents' appears to be in 'the 70s', which makes me postulate that these conspiracy theories themselves got off the ground in the 1980s, and thus had the patents dated sanely...but no one's ever updated the dates.)
1) Yes, yes, that's not 100% accurate, in that before 1995 they could be delayed by repeatedly filing provisional patents year after year, and when you stopped you got 17 years. But the theory is is that car company purchased existing patents...you can't purchase a patent that is being deliberately held up like that. And a 35 year patent is pretty hard to believe anyway...I'd actually give 50/50 odds that no such patent exists at all, much less has anything to do with cars or energy.
An SDK on another platform does not count as 'libraries that are part of the operating system', as far as I can tell.
And I don't think the DS SDK works like you'd expect a normal compiler to work...I believe it builds a single binary executable that is the entire OS and game. So the 'operating system' essentially doesn't exist independent of the binary, or, to rephrase, there is no OS. There's a compiled function to, say, draw a pixel on the screen, and a header for that, and if your DS program uses that, it is included in the final binary.
What's more, I think you're wrong. GPL programs can link to Windows DLLs because Windows DLLs do not have restrictive licensing on them. They're commercial, yes, but they have no restrictions on who can link to them, as long as you own a legal copy of them. (Which you got with Windows.)
DS libraries, being part of and included with the SDK, also have the same restrictive licensing as the SDK.
That said, obviously this wouldn't force Nintendo to do anything. It would simply make the distribution of said binaries illegal.
First of all, ScummVM doesn't make any rules about what platforms can run 'their games', for the simply fact that ScummVM does not, in fact, own any games.
All games that ScummVM runs are owned by someone else, and if you want to run them a platform not currently supported by ScummVM, feel free to figure out how do that. Either by porting ScummVM and following the licensing, or writing your own interpreter, or buying one. (There is a DS interpreter for LucasArt games from LucasArt.)
And don't forget to license the game itself from the owner if you wish to sell it, which you have to do regardless of whether or not you're using ScummVM.
Secondly, ScummVM has no rules at all about what platforms it can run on. It has rules against what software it can be linked against, and how it can be compiled, and what you have to do after you distribute it. But absolutely no rules about what platform it runs on.
Apparently, once it was realized that Atari couldn't legally distribute the game under any circumstances (Because they can't just give the source away, it has to compilable, and it can't be without the SDK, which they obviously can't give away.), Atari's lawyers then went crazy and decided to threaten ScummVM with a lawsuit for reverse engineering...something.
What, exactly, I don't know, as I don't know what stuff Atari owns that ScummVM reverse engineered.
But threaten they did, at least to the point that ScummVM gave up on the 'distribute the source' and said 'As long as you stop shipping the game, it's fine, we will not sue'.
Legally, it seems unclear if Atari could actually get the source, as the code went through at least two subcontractors, in three different countries. And going to court to get a port to the DS that required the Nintendo SDK (Rendering it illegal to actually distribute binaries of, and impossible to have people compile themselves) seemed of dubious value anyway. So any suit forcing Atari to release the code would be sorta silly anyway.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to make Atari out to be angels, I was simply pointing out that, if not for Nintendo's rules about their SDK, Atari would be fine with just releasing the game OSS. (I mean, it's not as if you can play it without the copyrighted data files, which would not be under the GPL.) Once they realized they couldn't do that, the lawyers said 'Oh, crap, we can't make this legal with both ScummVM and Nintendo, and hence we're legally liable either way. So we're going to have to threaten to countersue one of those guys to make them preemptively drop a suit against us.'.
This does not, in any way, demonstrate that companies need to be careful of how they use GPL code. They do need to be careful of how they use GPL code, but this doesn't demonstrate it at all.
This entire thing would be fine if it wasn't for Nintendo's rules about what can be used on their devices. Atari would just have to make the modifications to ScummVM available somewhere, which it sounds like it was perfectly willing to do until someone realized that OSS violates the agreement with Nintendo, period.
I occasionally end up in debates with people about those things.
And, seriously, there's no better disproof than: If this actually worked, someone would sell a device that powered your toaster or something.
And, no, yammering about 'patents' doesn't cut it. For one thing, various fools have been claiming free energy since the 70s, and, guess what? All those patents are expired.
Or, instead, they could just fix security to start with instead of letting people pay their way around the system.
For starters, get rid of the stupid 'take off your shoes' rule.
Shoes are not, in fact, useful places to hide things. Richard Reid had explosives in his shoes, because he was a total moron, not because shoes are a good hiding place.
For reference, you can trivially fit as much explosives in your pocket. Or in your bra, or taped inside your legs. (Women have been hiding things in their garters forever.)
And there's always that cocaine smuggling option of eating it, and carrying a small detonator. If you're blowing up a plane you're a suicide bomber anyway.
The soles of shoes are tiny. Tiny tiny tiny. You can store the same thickness of stuff that you could fit in a shoe sole on your back...the height and width of your entire back.
Remember, you're just going through a metal detector, not an x-ray. It's just fucking stupid to pretend shoes are the slightest bit relevant to security.
(And shoes soles are also stupid for the reason that the more powerful the explosive, the more volatile it is, so you shouldn't be walking on it.)
And the action of the gun probably doesn't count as an actual 'gun' anywhere but in BATFE regs. You'd avoid a lot of regulation simply by having the gun be clearly inoperable. Especially if it's additionally in a locked case.
I don't actually know how to dance, but I do theatre tech a lot, and sometime watch the choreographers teach people how to dance what are essentially very complicated line dances.
Half those people don't know anything about dancing, but they manage to get the steps and everything down with maybe 20x the dance. I.e., for three minutes of dancing, an hour of practicing that dance. Some take twice as long.
And those are fricking complicated dances, with positioning and hand movements and, oh yeah, singing at the same time. Choreographers fuss over absurd tiny things like positions of the knees and which ways people's faces are pointing.
And I've seen them teach tap dancing. Tap. Fricking. Dancing. At least, it looked and sounded like tap dancing, although it probably, strictly speaking, wasn't very good tap dancing. In Anything Goes, the entire damn cast is up there tap dancing away the titular song.
And I repeat, these are essentially random people who are in the chorus. Not trained actors, not trained dancers, people who sing in a church choir and volunteer for a show, and are often surprised when they learn about the dancing. Every single one of them can be taught to line dance, except the few who are too stiff to move fast enough.
And like I said, these are complicated dances, sometimes with five minutes of different moves, and multiple songs in a show. In something like the foxtrot and waltz, there are about 30 seconds of different moves, and then you just repeat, like you said.
Anyone who thinks they can't learn to dance is a fool. Learning to ride a bicycle is harder.
There are, in general, two groups that have higher percentages of openly gay people in them. And in both case, it's probably not because there are more gay people, it's just they're more willing to be 'out' in those groups.
The first group is any other group that has 'outcast' status. Outcasts are, in general, more accepting of other outcasts. Likewise, if someone already is an outcast, coming out of the closet can be easier. Because they'll hardly become more outcast.
The second group, if anyone cares, are the 'secure', usually the financially secure. People who have enough money and whatnot that they actually don't care what other people think of them, because that can't hurt them.
Nevertheless, once you find a good guide, learning is the same - practice practice practice. The more you practice, the easier it gets. Once you realize that embarrassing yourself is no big deal, it gets even easier.
This is one of the problems. A lot of geeks are stuck mentally in high school, where embarrassment seemed lethal. The real world is different in two way.
First of all, most people are polite. Even if you are boring them, and they don't like you, they will just politely attempt to escape. Even if everyone, even you, know what they're really doing, we all pretend they did have some friend on the other side of the room they had to run over and greet, if you'll excuse them for a second.
Everyone has a polite facade called 'tact' and whatnot that means you don't sit there and laugh at people where they can hear you. But behind their back? That brings us to the second difference:
Secondly, the real world is big. If you have a group of friend, I won't lie to you, knowledge of your embarrassment can spread within them. But, hey, they're your friends, it's fine.
But otherwise, if you did something embarrassing, no one's going to talk about you, even people there, even people who you embarrassed yourself with by asking them out when they're way out of your league. Because they have no idea who the hell you are.
Likewise, when you attempt to meet someone else, she will not know of that incident at all.
Get dressed all nice, go somewhere, anywhere, where there will be women, and it is expected you'll talk to strangers, and start interacting with them. Not to actually 'accomplish' anything, but as practice.
To rudely followup to myself, in fact, this is key. Go somewhere else. Somewhere where the people are 'not important'. It is very hard to get up the courage to indicate attraction to someone you know, especially if you're friends. You're always worried 'What if they shoot me down. Will it be awkward afterwards?'.
So drive over to the next town where there's a band playing you like. Or, hell, one you don't like. (Like I said, common interests are not important at all to get over shyness.) Go to a play. The key is to be somewhere you are not normally.
And then you have a bunch of women who you will never see again, and it doesn't matter if they've rejected you. Interact with them.
And, if it help, remember they have no idea who the hell you are.
This guy has the common geek fantasy of running into amazing geek girls and suddenly being able to talk to and interact with them.
Here's a hint: What's keeping geeky men from talking to women is not a lack of shared interests. 50% of the men and women who first talk to each other with romantic inclination have absolutely no idea if they share any interests at first, and the rest only know of one thing, the thing they are currently doing as they meet.
The problem is not that geeky men do not share interests with women, that is just an excuse not to talk to them because they are very shy. If they did find a geeky girl, they might, in fact, become friends, but there's no way that would evolve into a romantic relationship unless they stop being so shy.
So stop worrying about what sort of women you're meeting, and try actually meeting women. Get dressed all nice, go somewhere, anywhere, where there will be women, and it is expected you'll talk to strangers, and start interacting with them. Not to actually 'accomplish' anything, but as practice.
You have to convince yourself 'I am a normal man and I can walk up to a woman I find attractive and talk to her until she indicates she's not interested in my advances, at which point we will peaceably part ways and the world will not have ended. No, she will not be offended, she will not point and laugh, because we are all adults here and this isn't high school. She's just politely excuse herself and go somewhere else.'.
Once you've managed to ingrain that into yourself, then you can worry about 'shared interests', although a better thing to worry about would be 'catching social clues that the person is not interesting in what you're talking about', so you don't geek out around nerdy topics and bore people.
If you're speaking with a female and she is telling you her troubles, sympathize, but do *not* offer suggestions. Ask her about her feelings. She doesn't want you to fix it, she wants you to listen. This is a very powerful point.
This is, in fact, rule #1 for smart guys. Women do not want you to fix things they are complaining about.
Especially social problems, even if they ask. It is a trick. They don't realize they're doing it, but it's a trick.
Sympathize with them. Do not offer any suggestions at all. No matter how smart the suggestions are, no matter how much it seems like she's actually asking for ideas, do not offer them. Ask about what she thinks about things, and when you run out of sane ways to repeat that question, ask her what she thinks other people involved might be thinking.
Of course, this really only applies to suggestions, and mostly applies to social stuff. If she asks you to actually do something, feel free to. Or if she asks for movie recommendations or something, go ahead. But steer clear of any advice about 'problems with other people'.
Apache only times out when it isn't 'making progress'. There's no way to say 'I don't care if they're still doing stuff, if they haven't finished making a request in X seconds close the connection'.
I wonder if there's some way of using iptables to close very slow connections. But you need to do it to the outgoing speed.
Something you can say 'If this connection sends less than 10k outwards in a minute, close it'.
Then, these connections would be, if I understand correctly, be closed after a minute.
But, only like other methods, wouldn't block legit access from the same IP, which would interfer with proxies. And it would allow http keepalive connections that actually send data.
Granted, it would also close the keepalive connections that some webbrowers hang around keeping open even when there's no data, too, but those things usually are killed by the web server after 15 seconds or so anyway.
Or, instead, how about you have no damn 'forfeiture' at all?
After you're convicted of a crime, the government should be able to sue you of the proceeds from that crime. (And because they've already convicted you, all they have to prove is that specific thing came from that crime, so the bar's still pretty low, but only after a true criminal conviction.)
And then they should either give the money to your specific victims, if they exist, or they should put it in a general fund for helping victims of crime.
This fund should, obviously, be entirely outside of police control. In fact, the best thing to do might be to have a national fund, or, hell, an actual non-profit organization, or at least a quasi one like the post office. It simply attempts to reimburse people who've been victims of crimes, and don't have any insurance that would cover, the actual cost of the crime, or at least some of it. (Not 'emotional harm'.)
If the TSAs job is to screen for aircraft safety, they have no business whatsoever in reporting moneys which are being legally transported by citizens within the country -- they're simply over-reaching their mandate.
Hell, if their job is to screen for airport safety, they don't even have any business in reporting things that are being transported illegally unless there's some possible aspect of airplane safety.
The more you give random bureaucrats the authority and responsibility to enforce the law, the less people will cooperate with said bureaucrats, the more they will be resented, the more people will smuggle things around them, and the less they'll be able to do their actual fucking job.
Let's ask ourselves, right now, whether or not we want 100 kilos of cocaine a day smuggled through airport security, or 100 kilos of cocaine smuggled around airport security. Now ask yourself which channel it would be easier to get a gun through...the legal channel that's ignoring cocaine and catching guns, or the illegal side channel created because the legal channel was catching them, that doesn't give a fuck what you bring through as long as you have money?
I hope if anything good is to come out of the recent wash of right-wing terrorism, it is convincing liberals of the danger of these kooks and the necessity of the second amendment to keep them in line.
I've been pointing out the dangers of that for years. Sadly, for a very long time, the left's politics in these matters were set by the urban poor who were tricked by demagogues into thinking that guns were the cause of inner-city violence. (Instead of, duh, crime being the cause of that violence.)
Luckily at this point, however, everyone can see that the decades of gun control did not, in fact, do anything. Crime did go done, unrelatedly, but now it's going back up, unrelatedly.
With regard to how wise it was, he did make it to airport security with the cash, so it can't be that bad a decisions.
I'm presuming that the TSA is doing their job well enough that people aren't getting mugged inside security or on planes, but who the hell knows?
That really just leaves him getting off the plane with it and into some vehicle. At which point he's as safe as if he'd driven to the bank before flying. (Assuming the two locations have relatively the same amount of crime.)
Slashdot Mirror
Most Ponzi schemes are not, in fact, mentioned to be Ponzi schemes. They are promoted as an investment in something else, people invest money, people get huge profits back (From later investers or seed money), people tell others to invest, every single person involved is entirely rational assuming they believe the original lie that they're investing in some actual thing.
I mean, if someone says 'Hey, invest in this company I'm invested in. It's paying me 5% a month!', and I check, and, yes, it really is paying them that much, and then I invest, it's a sound financial decision, assuming what I have been told is true is true.
Ponzi scheme are not based on innumeracy, they're based on getting someone to let you hold their money until you flee with it. And you give them a very good and rational reason (You're making a buttload of cash for them.) to let you hold their money. Which is essentially how all conmen work, you trust them to hold your money for you, having been given a very good reason to do so.
You're probably thinking of a 'multilevel pyramid scheme', which is essentially a Ponzi scheme where the people involved are getting paid directly, and with full knowledge, by later investors, which should make it obvious that it is a Ponzi scheme from the start and hence can't actually make money for all involved. Multilevel pyramid scheme are, indeed, for fools who can't do basic math. (Or for amateur conmen who know people won't make money on average, but believe that they can get in enough people that they will make money.)
Also, no, I was talking about the 1970s, where I was scoffing at the 'patents'. The guy I was talking to claimed that car companies had been buying patents for incredibly fuel efficient cars since the early 70s, at which point I had to stop them and say 'You know patents only last 20 years(1), right? And are, by definition, filed publicly at the patent office? So you just actually insisted there were government issued public domain records, which anyone can legally use, that show how to make these imaginary cars you think the car industry is sitting on?'.
It's amazing how many people seem to think that 'buying a patent' will a) keep inventions out of public eyesight, when of course all patents are public, and b) last forever. The 'free energy' conspiracy theories have all sorts of amazing inventions disappear thanks to malicious people 'buying patents', sometimes almost 100 years ago! (Although most of these 'patents' appears to be in 'the 70s', which makes me postulate that these conspiracy theories themselves got off the ground in the 1980s, and thus had the patents dated sanely...but no one's ever updated the dates.)
1) Yes, yes, that's not 100% accurate, in that before 1995 they could be delayed by repeatedly filing provisional patents year after year, and when you stopped you got 17 years. But the theory is is that car company purchased existing patents...you can't purchase a patent that is being deliberately held up like that. And a 35 year patent is pretty hard to believe anyway...I'd actually give 50/50 odds that no such patent exists at all, much less has anything to do with cars or energy.
An SDK on another platform does not count as 'libraries that are part of the operating system', as far as I can tell.
And I don't think the DS SDK works like you'd expect a normal compiler to work...I believe it builds a single binary executable that is the entire OS and game. So the 'operating system' essentially doesn't exist independent of the binary, or, to rephrase, there is no OS. There's a compiled function to, say, draw a pixel on the screen, and a header for that, and if your DS program uses that, it is included in the final binary.
What's more, I think you're wrong. GPL programs can link to Windows DLLs because Windows DLLs do not have restrictive licensing on them. They're commercial, yes, but they have no restrictions on who can link to them, as long as you own a legal copy of them. (Which you got with Windows.)
DS libraries, being part of and included with the SDK, also have the same restrictive licensing as the SDK.
That said, obviously this wouldn't force Nintendo to do anything. It would simply make the distribution of said binaries illegal.
First of all, ScummVM doesn't make any rules about what platforms can run 'their games', for the simply fact that ScummVM does not, in fact, own any games.
All games that ScummVM runs are owned by someone else, and if you want to run them a platform not currently supported by ScummVM, feel free to figure out how do that. Either by porting ScummVM and following the licensing, or writing your own interpreter, or buying one. (There is a DS interpreter for LucasArt games from LucasArt.)
And don't forget to license the game itself from the owner if you wish to sell it, which you have to do regardless of whether or not you're using ScummVM.
Secondly, ScummVM has no rules at all about what platforms it can run on. It has rules against what software it can be linked against, and how it can be compiled, and what you have to do after you distribute it. But absolutely no rules about what platform it runs on.
Apparently, once it was realized that Atari couldn't legally distribute the game under any circumstances (Because they can't just give the source away, it has to compilable, and it can't be without the SDK, which they obviously can't give away.), Atari's lawyers then went crazy and decided to threaten ScummVM with a lawsuit for reverse engineering...something.
What, exactly, I don't know, as I don't know what stuff Atari owns that ScummVM reverse engineered.
But threaten they did, at least to the point that ScummVM gave up on the 'distribute the source' and said 'As long as you stop shipping the game, it's fine, we will not sue'.
Legally, it seems unclear if Atari could actually get the source, as the code went through at least two subcontractors, in three different countries. And going to court to get a port to the DS that required the Nintendo SDK (Rendering it illegal to actually distribute binaries of, and impossible to have people compile themselves) seemed of dubious value anyway. So any suit forcing Atari to release the code would be sorta silly anyway.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to make Atari out to be angels, I was simply pointing out that, if not for Nintendo's rules about their SDK, Atari would be fine with just releasing the game OSS. (I mean, it's not as if you can play it without the copyrighted data files, which would not be under the GPL.) Once they realized they couldn't do that, the lawyers said 'Oh, crap, we can't make this legal with both ScummVM and Nintendo, and hence we're legally liable either way. So we're going to have to threaten to countersue one of those guys to make them preemptively drop a suit against us.'.
There is nothing that Atari could possibly do that would magically make Nintendo's SDK be under the GPL.
Seriously, that's the stupidest thing I've heard of in a long time. Atari's actions cannot force Nintendo to GPL their code or modify their license.
This does not, in any way, demonstrate that companies need to be careful of how they use GPL code. They do need to be careful of how they use GPL code, but this doesn't demonstrate it at all.
This entire thing would be fine if it wasn't for Nintendo's rules about what can be used on their devices. Atari would just have to make the modifications to ScummVM available somewhere, which it sounds like it was perfectly willing to do until someone realized that OSS violates the agreement with Nintendo, period.
I occasionally end up in debates with people about those things.
And, seriously, there's no better disproof than: If this actually worked, someone would sell a device that powered your toaster or something.
And, no, yammering about 'patents' doesn't cut it. For one thing, various fools have been claiming free energy since the 70s, and, guess what? All those patents are expired.
Or, instead, they could just fix security to start with instead of letting people pay their way around the system.
For starters, get rid of the stupid 'take off your shoes' rule.
Shoes are not, in fact, useful places to hide things. Richard Reid had explosives in his shoes, because he was a total moron, not because shoes are a good hiding place.
For reference, you can trivially fit as much explosives in your pocket. Or in your bra, or taped inside your legs. (Women have been hiding things in their garters forever.)
And there's always that cocaine smuggling option of eating it, and carrying a small detonator. If you're blowing up a plane you're a suicide bomber anyway.
The soles of shoes are tiny. Tiny tiny tiny. You can store the same thickness of stuff that you could fit in a shoe sole on your back...the height and width of your entire back.
Remember, you're just going through a metal detector, not an x-ray. It's just fucking stupid to pretend shoes are the slightest bit relevant to security.
(And shoes soles are also stupid for the reason that the more powerful the explosive, the more volatile it is, so you shouldn't be walking on it.)
Or just fill up from bathroom taps. It's the same water, you know.
Shotguns are legal pretty much anywhere.
And the action of the gun probably doesn't count as an actual 'gun' anywhere but in BATFE regs. You'd avoid a lot of regulation simply by having the gun be clearly inoperable. Especially if it's additionally in a locked case.
No kidding.
I don't actually know how to dance, but I do theatre tech a lot, and sometime watch the choreographers teach people how to dance what are essentially very complicated line dances.
Half those people don't know anything about dancing, but they manage to get the steps and everything down with maybe 20x the dance. I.e., for three minutes of dancing, an hour of practicing that dance. Some take twice as long.
And those are fricking complicated dances, with positioning and hand movements and, oh yeah, singing at the same time. Choreographers fuss over absurd tiny things like positions of the knees and which ways people's faces are pointing.
And I've seen them teach tap dancing. Tap. Fricking. Dancing. At least, it looked and sounded like tap dancing, although it probably, strictly speaking, wasn't very good tap dancing. In Anything Goes, the entire damn cast is up there tap dancing away the titular song.
And I repeat, these are essentially random people who are in the chorus. Not trained actors, not trained dancers, people who sing in a church choir and volunteer for a show, and are often surprised when they learn about the dancing. Every single one of them can be taught to line dance, except the few who are too stiff to move fast enough.
And like I said, these are complicated dances, sometimes with five minutes of different moves, and multiple songs in a show. In something like the foxtrot and waltz, there are about 30 seconds of different moves, and then you just repeat, like you said.
Anyone who thinks they can't learn to dance is a fool. Learning to ride a bicycle is harder.
It's the 'outcast' factor.
There are, in general, two groups that have higher percentages of openly gay people in them. And in both case, it's probably not because there are more gay people, it's just they're more willing to be 'out' in those groups.
The first group is any other group that has 'outcast' status. Outcasts are, in general, more accepting of other outcasts. Likewise, if someone already is an outcast, coming out of the closet can be easier. Because they'll hardly become more outcast.
The second group, if anyone cares, are the 'secure', usually the financially secure. People who have enough money and whatnot that they actually don't care what other people think of them, because that can't hurt them.
Homosexual males are 5% of the population, assuming 10% homosexuality in general, which is the common stat assumed.
But I think you did the math right and just said it wrong, or misleadingly. In a field that's 80% male, something like 8% should be gay males.
Nevertheless, once you find a good guide, learning is the same - practice practice practice. The more you practice, the easier it gets. Once you realize that embarrassing yourself is no big deal, it gets even easier.
This is one of the problems. A lot of geeks are stuck mentally in high school, where embarrassment seemed lethal. The real world is different in two way.
First of all, most people are polite. Even if you are boring them, and they don't like you, they will just politely attempt to escape. Even if everyone, even you, know what they're really doing, we all pretend they did have some friend on the other side of the room they had to run over and greet, if you'll excuse them for a second.
Everyone has a polite facade called 'tact' and whatnot that means you don't sit there and laugh at people where they can hear you. But behind their back? That brings us to the second difference:
Secondly, the real world is big. If you have a group of friend, I won't lie to you, knowledge of your embarrassment can spread within them. But, hey, they're your friends, it's fine.
But otherwise, if you did something embarrassing, no one's going to talk about you, even people there, even people who you embarrassed yourself with by asking them out when they're way out of your league. Because they have no idea who the hell you are.
Likewise, when you attempt to meet someone else, she will not know of that incident at all.
Get dressed all nice, go somewhere, anywhere, where there will be women, and it is expected you'll talk to strangers, and start interacting with them. Not to actually 'accomplish' anything, but as practice.
To rudely followup to myself, in fact, this is key. Go somewhere else. Somewhere where the people are 'not important'. It is very hard to get up the courage to indicate attraction to someone you know, especially if you're friends. You're always worried 'What if they shoot me down. Will it be awkward afterwards?'.
So drive over to the next town where there's a band playing you like. Or, hell, one you don't like. (Like I said, common interests are not important at all to get over shyness.) Go to a play. The key is to be somewhere you are not normally.
And then you have a bunch of women who you will never see again, and it doesn't matter if they've rejected you. Interact with them.
And, if it help, remember they have no idea who the hell you are.
This guy has the common geek fantasy of running into amazing geek girls and suddenly being able to talk to and interact with them.
Here's a hint: What's keeping geeky men from talking to women is not a lack of shared interests. 50% of the men and women who first talk to each other with romantic inclination have absolutely no idea if they share any interests at first, and the rest only know of one thing, the thing they are currently doing as they meet.
The problem is not that geeky men do not share interests with women, that is just an excuse not to talk to them because they are very shy. If they did find a geeky girl, they might, in fact, become friends, but there's no way that would evolve into a romantic relationship unless they stop being so shy.
So stop worrying about what sort of women you're meeting, and try actually meeting women. Get dressed all nice, go somewhere, anywhere, where there will be women, and it is expected you'll talk to strangers, and start interacting with them. Not to actually 'accomplish' anything, but as practice.
You have to convince yourself 'I am a normal man and I can walk up to a woman I find attractive and talk to her until she indicates she's not interested in my advances, at which point we will peaceably part ways and the world will not have ended. No, she will not be offended, she will not point and laugh, because we are all adults here and this isn't high school. She's just politely excuse herself and go somewhere else.'.
Once you've managed to ingrain that into yourself, then you can worry about 'shared interests', although a better thing to worry about would be 'catching social clues that the person is not interesting in what you're talking about', so you don't geek out around nerdy topics and bore people.
If you're speaking with a female and she is telling you her troubles, sympathize, but do *not* offer suggestions. Ask her about her feelings. She doesn't want you to fix it, she wants you to listen. This is a very powerful point.
This is, in fact, rule #1 for smart guys. Women do not want you to fix things they are complaining about.
Especially social problems, even if they ask. It is a trick. They don't realize they're doing it, but it's a trick.
Sympathize with them. Do not offer any suggestions at all. No matter how smart the suggestions are, no matter how much it seems like she's actually asking for ideas, do not offer them. Ask about what she thinks about things, and when you run out of sane ways to repeat that question, ask her what she thinks other people involved might be thinking.
Of course, this really only applies to suggestions, and mostly applies to social stuff. If she asks you to actually do something, feel free to. Or if she asks for movie recommendations or something, go ahead. But steer clear of any advice about 'problems with other people'.
Apache only times out when it isn't 'making progress'. There's no way to say 'I don't care if they're still doing stuff, if they haven't finished making a request in X seconds close the connection'.
I wonder if there's some way of using iptables to close very slow connections. But you need to do it to the outgoing speed.
Something you can say 'If this connection sends less than 10k outwards in a minute, close it'.
Then, these connections would be, if I understand correctly, be closed after a minute.
But, only like other methods, wouldn't block legit access from the same IP, which would interfer with proxies. And it would allow http keepalive connections that actually send data.
Granted, it would also close the keepalive connections that some webbrowers hang around keeping open even when there's no data, too, but those things usually are killed by the web server after 15 seconds or so anyway.
You can use fcgid to run PHP in a different process, and then safely run apache multi-threaded. Just FYI for those using PHP.
It's also a good deal faster, and more stable to boot.
Or, instead, how about you have no damn 'forfeiture' at all?
After you're convicted of a crime, the government should be able to sue you of the proceeds from that crime. (And because they've already convicted you, all they have to prove is that specific thing came from that crime, so the bar's still pretty low, but only after a true criminal conviction.)
And then they should either give the money to your specific victims, if they exist, or they should put it in a general fund for helping victims of crime.
This fund should, obviously, be entirely outside of police control. In fact, the best thing to do might be to have a national fund, or, hell, an actual non-profit organization, or at least a quasi one like the post office. It simply attempts to reimburse people who've been victims of crimes, and don't have any insurance that would cover, the actual cost of the crime, or at least some of it. (Not 'emotional harm'.)
If the TSAs job is to screen for aircraft safety, they have no business whatsoever in reporting moneys which are being legally transported by citizens within the country -- they're simply over-reaching their mandate.
Hell, if their job is to screen for airport safety, they don't even have any business in reporting things that are being transported illegally unless there's some possible aspect of airplane safety.
The more you give random bureaucrats the authority and responsibility to enforce the law, the less people will cooperate with said bureaucrats, the more they will be resented, the more people will smuggle things around them, and the less they'll be able to do their actual fucking job.
Let's ask ourselves, right now, whether or not we want 100 kilos of cocaine a day smuggled through airport security, or 100 kilos of cocaine smuggled around airport security. Now ask yourself which channel it would be easier to get a gun through...the legal channel that's ignoring cocaine and catching guns, or the illegal side channel created because the legal channel was catching them, that doesn't give a fuck what you bring through as long as you have money?
Interesting question, isn't it?
I hope if anything good is to come out of the recent wash of right-wing terrorism, it is convincing liberals of the danger of these kooks and the necessity of the second amendment to keep them in line.
I've been pointing out the dangers of that for years. Sadly, for a very long time, the left's politics in these matters were set by the urban poor who were tricked by demagogues into thinking that guns were the cause of inner-city violence. (Instead of, duh, crime being the cause of that violence.)
Luckily at this point, however, everyone can see that the decades of gun control did not, in fact, do anything. Crime did go done, unrelatedly, but now it's going back up, unrelatedly.
With regard to how wise it was, he did make it to airport security with the cash, so it can't be that bad a decisions.
I'm presuming that the TSA is doing their job well enough that people aren't getting mugged inside security or on planes, but who the hell knows?
That really just leaves him getting off the plane with it and into some vehicle. At which point he's as safe as if he'd driven to the bank before flying. (Assuming the two locations have relatively the same amount of crime.)
They have him as long as no one's pried the guns from his cold, dead hands.