Wow, that's even stupider than Atlanta's mass transit.
Atlanta's is shitty, and it doesn't go even slightly as far as it needs to go so no one takes it. By the time you reach the mass transit during your commute, you're 80% of the way there!
But at least it goes to the damn airport, which is actually one of the few useful times to take it, as MARTA long-term parking is a hell of a lot cheaper than airport parking. Assuming you park near the cameras.
What sort of idiotic mass transit doesn't hook up to the other transit systems? Does it go to the Amtrak station, or did they skip that too?
You don't need to memorize it...just recite it over the phone.
I actually think that would be a fun thing to do to these idiotic 'camera guards'. Sit down, near them, on the phone, blatantly describing the place in minute detail, including things like security camera angles and sightlines.
Use a burner phone. If they take it away, pull out another. (It's easy enough to find old cellphones, they don't even need to work. Just make sure the first one does.)
Be sure to be well out of traffic and not breaking any of the other invented rules they can pull on you. Be sure to even have a ticket...it's not your fault you're five hours early for your train.
There are areas for the public within public buildings, and there are areas only for authorized people. Even for public property. And yes, by law, you can only go into authorized areas if you are, in fact, authorized, or you'll be arrested for trespassing. (Or probably just thrown out.)
Don't try to over-complicate things. No one's trying to get anywhere they aren't allowed, they're trying to take pictures where they are allowed.
No kidding. The idiot didn't even bother to think 'Hey, wait, I wonder if there are any safety things that keep propane tanks from exploding.'.
There are only two groups of terrorists that really are dangerous. The military trained ones, like the OK City bomber and the DC sniper, and non-Americans, who probably got training 'on the street', as it is, or at least belong to organizations that know how to plane.
We've never had home grown terrorist who actually had a 'good' plan to kill people, and actually did kill people, and wasn't trained by some professional group to kill people in that way. (And probably no foreign terrorist either, but that's harder to track down.)
Even going back to the left terrorism in the 60s, look at what the Weather Underground managed to do...blow themselves up. And other bomb making groups managed to take out...single offices, with maybe a few people inside them. (And, hell, you can do that with a grenade.)
And look at Eric Robert Rudolph, who did join the military, but was flunked out. Without training, he managed to...totally screw up the Olympic Park bombing, and kill only two people...one via heart attack as the entire park fled, because the idiot didn't bother to hide his bomb. With a tiny bit more knowledge of security, he could have killed at least 100 people, but he managed to flunk out of 'terrorist' also.
There is no evidence that 'amateur terrorists' pose any threat at all. You might have a greater chance to be killed by lightning than terrorists, but you probably have a greater chance being killed by lightning while winning the lottery than being killed by an amateur terrorist.
I want there to be, next to the oxygen masks that drop down, little extensible metal batons. About six inches long, extends to about a foot, with about a pound of weight at the end. Obviously, positioned so they don't hit people on the head on the way down. Or maybe they fall out of the bottoms of the seats.
The captain has a button he can push so they all fall out. And then they're designed to roll everywhere, so it's impossible to collect them all or demand that people hand over theirs. Terrorists show up, weapons for everyone, whee! Even if they take control of the plane, you never know who stuck one up their shirt or in the bend of their seat.
You can't really threaten to kill someone with a baton (At least not in the 'don't move or I'll kill my hostage instantly' sense.), so they're no use to the terrorists. (And, frankly, a baton-like object is easy enough to have gotten on the plane anyway if they wanted them.) All you can do is beat someone up, and even assuming epic fighting skills on the part of the terrorists, no one can fight off a three dozen moderately healthy, even if unskilled, people armed with batons even if they have batons of their own.
Sadly, this isn't plausibly, not only because people are morons who think everyone is best if everyone is 'unarmed', and too stupid to see that humans have been inventing weapons out of non-weapons every since we invented weapons in the first place, but also the weight addition would be rather costly so airlines would fight it.
I'm not sure we need them now that we have cockpit doors that lock, but frankly, adding those would make a hack of lot more sense than worrying about our shoes.
Terrorists wouldn't be using cameras at all. If there was really some reason they needed the layout of the place, they'd get the plans of the building from any of a number of sources, or just draw a map.
If they needed information like location and placement of cameras, they'd simply walk around with a headset and describe the building to someone else.
OTOH, as you pointed out, a camera phone is easy, if for some, unknowable, reason, someone needed pictures of the place. I mean, Get an iPhone, run the video recording app and start recording, blank the screen, walk around with it up to your ear talking to it.
Although it's rather hard to figure out what pictures would convey that people couldn't just remember WRT to terrorist attack...it's not like terrorists are trying to match wallpaper colors. Presumably, they can remember where a damn door is or the fastest escape route or whatever 'secret' information they're collecting. If it's too much to remember at once, they can easily either write it down, or, better, recite it to someone over the phone.
And that's not even getting into all the obvious 'spy camera' stuff that exists and is pretty cheap now.
Well, honestly, for easy of discussion, indicating the person was male would allow the use of male pronoun, and keep the poster from having to say 'that person' all the time. Anyone who takes issue with that would be silly.
But, yes, there was no logical reason to include the race of the person. And, FYI, say 'person of color' has become oddly acceptably recently, although I don't actually understand it, and it's somewhat weird to put "of color" in quotes like that, especially as it adds nothing to the story.
A few people have assumed the guard was the same race, and this was a story about racism, at which point it would be reasonable to mention the race...but, sadly, the poster didn't mention the race of the guard.
In fact, there's not a lot of evidence that the guard even understood what happened. If I was a guard and had a friend who was leaping turnstiles, I sure as hell wouldn't be harassing other people for it...what would be the point? 'Hello, my friend committed a crime, and I'd like to open an official investigation by accusing you, an innocent person, instead of letting him get away with it.'
It's much more likely that was happened was the guard had some sort of monitor or counter, saw that some person went through without paying, and incorrectly figured out that it was the poster. Possibly even because they knew the other person. Or, hell, they didn't, and the jumper randomly walked up and said hi to them in a bit of social engineering, so they assumed the other person was the criminal.
Well, see, there I have to disagree, to some extent.
If society in general can't figure out what a piece of art is trying to say, people shouldn't expect it to be treated as if it's art by society in general. I.e., to some extent, what we consider art is decided by consensus.
This is on top of what we consider 'good art', which is much more subjective. But if something is 'art' itself is sorta decided by us too. Society's only going to consider it such if it produces some emotion in some statistically meaningful amount of society. (Which, sadly, a lot of modern art, especially non-representation art, totally fails at.)
A better way of explaining what I mean might be 'failed art'. There's good art, and bad art, and then there's art that fail at actually evoking a response at all. Don't expect other people to see it as art, much like they won't see something as a cake when it, in fact, caught on fire in the oven. Technically that might still be a cake, it was certainly intended to be a cake, but...
Now, of course, almost anyone who's experienced video games considers them art, and even random people who've been introduced to them see art almost immediately. That's not really the problem here...the problem is that Ebert really wants them to not be art, and that's why he says what he says.
I don't know why you're assuming I think video games aren't art. I thought I said pretty clearly that they were.
In fact, there's almost no game that isn't art. Pong, maybe.
And my 'or something' was simply because I've had too many stupid discussions about what 'emotion' is and if something qualifies. Like 'disgust' or 'embarrassment'. Whatever.
Ebert, OTOH, was stupidly asserting that art can't be participatory. When, hilariously, art started as participatory.
The first art was probably people dancing around a fire, and you got up and danced, or sat down and watched, as the mood took you. Then singing got added, and everyone did that. We don't know about the first drawing, but it's likely that everyone did that to whatever extent they wanted, next to everyone else's, like modern graffiti works. And storytelling that altered the story based on the audience response. The first styles of theatre lacked fourth walls (and sometimes even stages!) and the actors involved the audience. Etc, etc.
It's only very recently, comparatively speaking, that we've invented the idea of art separate from the audience, and a lot of the art universe thinks that was a mistake and has been trying to undo it. That art has gotten 'sterile' and art is really the interaction between the artwork and the audience.
Video games are an interesting medium because there's audience participation by default, and it's individual participation on top of that. But that certainly doesn't mean it's not 'art', that's just flatly stupid. If anything, it's more 'art' than TV because it's more participatory.
All performances in front of live audiences, from music to theatre to sitcoms, is participatory art. Anyone who disagrees has never had anything to do with live performances.
And, as I said elsewhere here, art galleries are essentially participatory art themselves. They're laid out so you have the 'experience' of going through them, a level of 'art' on top of the existing art. It's 'art' about how you're allowed to choose to view art, which is pretty damn close to how video games work. (And something like a natural history museum is the same thing except what you're viewing isn't art, but how you're directed to view it is!)
And that's not including art that bills itself as participatory, that actually asks the audience to get in on the act, which is everything from experimental theatre to magic acts to Spamalot to call and response songs.
Current artistic theory actually regards the audience, or at least their response, as part of the art. (Which makes sense, as the entire point of art is the response it causes in the audience.)
I have a feeling trying to poke holes in Ebert's 'logic' is a losing preposition. He's decided they aren't art, and he's not changing his mind, even if he's promised to shut up about that fact.
Did you just say that graphics and music aren't technically part of a game? Huh?
The experience of playing a game isn't art, anymore than watching a movie or seeing a play is art.
But 'the experience of playing a game' is not the game itself. The question is whether the game is art.
You're trying to argue that somehow experiencing a game is different from every other form of art, which you also have to experience.
What you've perhaps failed to notice is that quite a lot of other art is participatory also. Offhand, there's call-and-response songs and a lot of audience participation theatre. In fact, all art with a live audience is participatory, although often the audience is supposed to limit themselves to applause. But that is participating.
And, at a higher level, art galleries are often laid out so that, as you walk though, you will experience art in a specific order, although you can do it slower or faster or double back or do it 'wrong', which is pretty exactly analogous to video games.
So, essentially, you're making two mistakes.
The first mistake is trying to divide art into two halves, the art itself, and an audience who views it, and claiming the second half isn't any sort of art. This is a rather discredited view in the art universe...art has long been regarded as not just what causes an emotional response in people, but the response itself, especially if it somehow 'feedbacks' into the work or other audience members. Aka, watching a movie in movie theater makes you part of the movie, because other audience members are reacting to you also. Even alone, you're reacting to you.
And the second mistake is stating that the words 'video game' somehow refer to the second half. Even if you divide art like that, I don't see why, when talking about a 'movie', we're talking about the art that is distributed, whereas when talking about a video game, we're somehow talking about how someone watches a piece of art. (Art with no name, at that! Hey, everyone, let's go watch a three-3D rendered environment art we can change viewpoints in while some musical art plays while some plotted story art happens! Too bad no one's ever invented a name for that, it's oddly close to 'video art' like movies and TV, except you're playing a game at the same time.)
Anything normally considered a 'movie' is art, as are most books. The only things that aren't would be things like security camera footage or a book listing a million digits of pi. (Hell, even the phone book has art in it, in the ads.)
A lot of people, Ebert included, appear to have defined 'art' to mean 'good art'.
Which is a) subjective, and b) stupidly recursive.
'Art' is a noun. It has a objective definition. It's deliberately created (or stored) thing that is designed to cause an emotional response when people watch (or listen, or experience however) it. Even if it fails, it's still art. That's it. THAT'S WHAT FUCKING ART IS. It is not 'undefined' or 'unknowable' or 'subjective'. It is a real, objective thing.
It is, of course, a definition of something that only exists within the context of humans, which doesn't exist outside human experience, but so are 'sky' and 'pun' and 'door'. And in fact almost everything.
If you want to qualify it, you qualify it with other words. 'Good art', bad art', whatever.
You don't go asserting that things that you don't like that fit within the definition aren't 'really' that thing. That's No True Scotsman at a semantic level, and makes it impossible to actually talk about things.
Art is objective, and any modern video games falls within it. Good art is subjective, and 'fine' art is subjective and pretensions, but art is objective.
In my opinion, art is any created work that evokes a thoughtful and emotional response in me, the viewer/listener.
That is exactly what art is, although I'd qualify it with the fact that for society to consider it art, it must cause such a response in some statistically significant number of people who see it. (Which video games certainly do.)
Oh, and it must have been purposefully designed, or at least purposefully stored, to invoke that response. ('stored' being things like photographs, which are probably of things that would have resulted in that response if you'd actually seen them, but someone got out a camera and managed to keep a copy of it.) It is a response beyond the thing that is pictured, i.e., you just didn't think 'empty field' or 'guy standing there' when you saw it.
And I have to disagree that 'shock' art isn't art. Although a crucifix in urine probably isn't art, as the shock isn't coming from the second level, the artistic response, but the first level of the fact that things in urine are pretty disgusting, which is most people honestly have an issue with...the whole 'religious' thing is irrelevant.(1)
But attempts to offend at the second level are art. Offense is, indeed, an emotional response. You might not like them, but they are art.
To him, it seems games = kid's stuff, and kid's stuff can't be art.
Statically, the average age of a video gamer is...30.
1) An argument can be made that our various 'phobias' as humans, including things like feeling disgust at excretions (Which we obviously developed to stop getting diseases) are emotional responses, and hence causing them is 'art', but that's something we don't enjoy thinking about at all. We can enjoy thinking about depressing things, or horrific battles, but some stuff we're actually hardwired away from wanting to think about at all, so even if it's technically 'art', it's not art that any person would actually want to see.
I'm sorta with you, although I think that if the vast majority of people can't see the artistic meaning behind something, it's reasonable for society to not consider it art.
Not, I must add, whether or not it's 'good'. Art is the second meaning behind the obvious. If everyone can see that meaning, it's art. even if the meaning is poorly done. If they can't see it, it's not, or at least not art in general. It might be art to some emo nihilist who see emotion in a paper bag flying by in the wind, but it's not art to people in general.
But that's more a problem of 'modern art' than video games. Something might be art to the one person who created it, and five other people might fake some sort of emotional reaction, but, frankly, that's when we should start applying double-blind testing. Let's see if anyone can come up with a consistent emotional reaction to that, and, hell, if they can identify it from random garbage. If not, it ain't art.
But this doesn't apply to video games...almost anyone can explain what mood and style and theme a video game has, and get it mostly consistent. (Except Ebert, who doesn't play the things.) Only art has those things at all.
All video games have background music. They even often have teasers. There's art style, there's lighting, there pacing and script, video games are fricking art by any reasonable standard. Probably closest in concept to movies, but with unique stuff showing up.
Survival horror games often have exactly the same emotional cues as a horror movie, for example. It's hard to see how exactly the same universe and mood and theme and music and suspense suddenly aren't art just because you're controlling the person walking down the hall when zombies break through the ceiling.
Heck, look at Fallout 3. It has art dissonance. The peppy, upbeat music and 50s atmosphere...vs a desolate nuclear wasteland. I've had people walk up and watch me play it who didn't know anything about games, just because it really does look strange and a little disconcerting. Dissonance requires at least two 'art units', where one says one thing, but the other says something completely different.
Theme and style and mood and whatnot make 'art'. Those define art. Video games have been doing ever since someone introduced a decorative menu and some music to try to set a mood. Admittedly, games back then had very little space for anything that wasn't pure gameplay, but we aren't debating if early 80 video games are art, we are presumably talking about current ones, which are art.
That doesn't make them good art, of course. But anyone who argues they're not art doesn't understand what art is.
The problem is, now you've introduced the debate to a rather stupid issue.
Namely, the point of art is to explain something beyond what is actually there. It must invoke emotion or something, or it's just a thing.
That's why 90% of photographs aren't art, but the other 10% are. It's because 90% are trying to show the thing that was photographed, while the other 10% are trying to show how the scene made the person taking the picture feel. It's why this post isn't art, but a haiku of a much shorter length is. There's the actual meaning of the symbols, of what is represented, and then, to be art, there's another meaning on top of that.
The problem arises is that a lot of current 'art' doesn't invoke that second level. It's too obscure, or, as you said, a deliberate attempt to mock the entire process. Hell, a lot of it doesn't even have a first level, or has one that's clearly just been slapped together.
If it doesn't have two levels that the vast majority of people can distinguish, it's entirely reasonable to take a position that it's not 'art' in any meaningful sense. People don't have to enjoy, or even think it's well done, but to think something is art, they at least have to be able to say 'This is supposed to make me sad, although it doesn't really work'. Even bad art should be able to be recognizable as art, because you can see the (crappy) second level. Often current 'art' is not recognizable, or at least not recognizable to the public in general, and thus fails an 'art test'.
Of course, pretty much all games have two levels. Often not well, but they have background music, they usually have thematic lighting, etc, etc. They are art, or at least consist of 'art parts'. They don't fail the 'art test' the same way modern art fails.
Ebert, OTOH, seems to have thought they failed in some other manner, because you had to actively participate in them.
Yeah, if you keep only 14% of the B-G, and 26% of the BB, that's seriously going to skew things. That's, um, 14%*66% vs. 27%*33%. (The most confusing way of writing that math ever.) That gets me.0924 vs 0.0891 per family, or 924 B-G and 891 B-B left per 10000 two-children families.
I wonder if you can get over 50% B-B doing that. Seems like you could. What if the problem was changed to, for example, 'one boy born on a full moon'?
And thanks for explaining all that. It is very unintuitive...OTOH, so is the original 1/3 result in the first place!
No, in 24 states failure to identify yourself is illegal.
This does not mean refusing to do so is legal in other other states. Police officers have discretion, as I said, if they believe a crime is in progress, or going to be committed, and unless a state supreme court or law has said they don't have the right to ask for a name, they have the right to do that.
And, as long as that ability has not been removed, they have the right to arrest you for failing to comply with that lawful request.
Stop and identify laws are specific laws, just like loitering and whatnot are specific laws. The lack of them does not prohibit a police officer from applying the general right of the police to, well, 'harass' people they believe are involved in a crime, requiring them explain who they are and what the hell they're doing and to stop doing it.
Some states have explicitly removed 'ask for name' under the things they can do, on 4th amendment or general privacy grounds, but it's not more than half. Almost half have specifically allowed it, in fact! Often without any belief in criminal activity required at all!
And now I'm arguing in the opposite direction of my post, but that's because the OP just went too far in that direction, and asserted the police could issue orders for any reason whatsoever and arrest people who don't follow them. No. They have to have a reason involving possible criminal activity, at the very least some sort of breach of peace.
You can not be arrested. Period. It is a lawful arrest. Period. Now a judge may disagree and throw out the case but it doesn't change the fact you were lawfully arrested for failure to comply with a lawful order. Do some checking and you'll find no shortage of such arrests.
I do not understand what you're saying here.
You are correct that people often get arrested under this law and the judge throws it out because the police officer's justification was really stupid and didn't even vaguely come near the level of suspicion required for that order. Like the example in the article, although I don't know what UK laws are or what he was charged with.
Like I said, the law can be abused. OTOH, there are probably a dozen laws that can be abused that way. Remember that Harvard professor and the cop? That Obama talked to? The cop sent the guy outside, where, as he was still yelling, was then charged with 'disturbing the peace'. A lot of people, me included, thought that was a bit absurd.
But the laws can either let that sort of crap happen, or not let police do anything about crazy people standing in the middle of a sidewalk yelling. Abuses of these laws need to be handled in court and with police training, not with different laws.
And that's an odd admission from me, as I'm generally in favor of enforcing the law has harshly as possible, at all times, to stop police from 'playing favorites', which usually happen in a racist and classist way. Where the rich get a slap on the wrist for drugs and the poor go to jail for a year, that sort of crap. No. Everyone should have the book thrown at them, or only the 'disliked' will have the book thrown at them...and often people are disliked by the police for fairly bigoted reasons.
But there are laws that are specifically for discretion like that, and the police do need to have it and use it. The police really do need the ability to clear onlookers from a hostage situation without getting a damn court order! This works only if such laws have very minor penalties (So abuse isn't such a problem) and if the courts actually stomp on abuse that does happen.
I can see how that would change the odds, but I don't see how it would change them anywhere near that much.
I just did that math, and 6/7 is.86, whereas that squared is.73. So you're sending home that percentage of each. (Aka, all but that percentage minus 1)
I can see how that would change some odds, but not to 52%! That's only a 13% difference in charge to start with, and it somehow made another percentage drop 14%. (And percentages don't add like that anyway.)
Failure to comply with a lawful order is only applicable in situations where the police legally can make you do something, it doesn't give the police any authority to order things in the first place.
Police can require people to do things in a few, specific circumstances. The main ones:
When the person is breaking the law, they can order them to stop (obviously).
They can demand people identify themselves.
Both those are covered under the specific laws, though. Failure to comply with a lawful order is complicated, but here are some examples where it can be used:
Refusing to allow yourself to be arrested via passive resistance. Aka, refusing to hold out your hands to be handcuffed, or to come out of a locked car. (This is not resisting arrest, which requires violence on your part. And this is where the whole concept of locking yourself to things and not having the key came from...the police can't charge you for failure to obey orders you cannot physically obey.)
When there are breaches of the peace, even if that specific person is not committing a criminal act (Aka, ordering a crowd that is unpeacable assembled to disperse. If they do not, they can start arresting random people for that.)
Likewise, if there's been a fight, the police officer can order the two participates to stay away from each other, or even for one of them to leave.
When they have a reasonable suspicion of someone's behavior including lawbreaking, but do not have enough evidence to, or just do not feel like, arresting them. Aka, someone keeps looking inside the car window of a car they admit don't own, and the police officer believes they are going to steal it or break into it....he can order them to leave that car the hell alone.
But they cannot just randomly give orders and demand they be followed. There has to a legally justified reason for the order. And something like 90% of 'Failure to comply with a lawful order' is probably an additional charge to other lawbreaking when the person wouldn't stop breaking the law, like someone who was trespassing and refused to leave even after the police ordered him to.Or, as is listed above, 'loitering'. This is exactly how loitering laws are designed to be used...not to wander up and charge with, but, for the police to have the ability, when they see suspicious behavior, to make the people stop. The police see you loitering, tell you to leave, you don't, they arrest you for refusing to do something they can lawfully do.
This does not mean, of course, that the law is not abused, or even that it's a good idea. But it doesn't let them order whatever they want.
That's just a math problem adding the wrong thing.
For everyone else's benefit who falls for puzzles like that, the problem isn't that 'the number' doesn't add to $30...it shouldn't.
The bill was $25, they paid $30, and got $5 back. Of that $5, the waiter ended up with $2, and each man with $1.
The numbers don't add up to $30, they subtract down from $30, the bill paid, to $25, which they were actually charged. And the men think they subtract down to $27, aka, $9x3, because they don't know about the $2 the waiter stole first.
The question is, how did you get to the universe you're talking about?
Did you go out and grab couples, assign them one boy, and then randomly assign them another child? Or did you find a couple with a boy and one other child, ignoring all the girl + girl couples? Or did you find a couple and you made them tell you the gender of a randomly selected child?
Any of those are, indeed, 50/50 for the other kid.
If, OTOH, you went out and assigned both children randomly, and then made all the girl + girl couples go home, that's entirely different. Or if you filtered the actual universe.
There, you had four equal sets of people, you made one set go home, you have three equal sets...and two of them have a boy and a girl.
What I don't understand is what the hell the day has to do with it.
The fact the answer is the same doesn't mean the odds are, you loon.
But, anyway, if you live in a universe where all people listed have at least one boy, the answer is 1/2.
If you don't, the answer is 1/3.
You think the question is actually implying that, for this question, you're in such a restricted universe. The question the way you phrased it actually is implying such a universe, because the premise is 'two kids, at least one boy'.
But just saying things as part of the hypothetical doesn't make them the 'actual' odds. If I say 'Suppose Mr. Smith won the lottery. What is the probability that he won the lottery?', that doesn't actually demonstrate anything about the odds of winning the lottery.
You get an entirely different answer if you list people who have two children, and then pick someone who has at least one boy out of that list. (Or, pretend to be such a person selected from the list, as the question here is.) There are four possible combinations, and you are filtering out one of them. These results in two answers with girls, and one answer with only boys.
If you don't believe me, take two coins, and flip them. If they are both tails, discard them. If there is at least head, record how many heads there are. You will find that you get twice as many head+tail as you do head+head.
Most of the debating over the issue is which hypothetical universe exactly, is being calculated. Is this a universe consisting of people we selected who had two kids who had one boy? (Aka, no girl + girl parents exist.) In which case, yup, 50/50. Or is this a universe consisting of people who had two kids and then removed one part of them from the possible answers? (Aka, the real universe.)
What if we took 1200 families with two children, and then asked all the ones with at least one boy to step forward?
Of all the families that stepped forward, 1/3 would have boy + girl, 1/3 would have girl + boy, and 1/3 would have boy + boy. (And girl + girl, of course, would not have stepped forward.)
Ergo, 2/3, or 600, of them would have a boy and a girl.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's even stupider than Atlanta's mass transit.
Atlanta's is shitty, and it doesn't go even slightly as far as it needs to go so no one takes it. By the time you reach the mass transit during your commute, you're 80% of the way there!
But at least it goes to the damn airport, which is actually one of the few useful times to take it, as MARTA long-term parking is a hell of a lot cheaper than airport parking. Assuming you park near the cameras.
What sort of idiotic mass transit doesn't hook up to the other transit systems? Does it go to the Amtrak station, or did they skip that too?
You don't need to memorize it...just recite it over the phone.
I actually think that would be a fun thing to do to these idiotic 'camera guards'. Sit down, near them, on the phone, blatantly describing the place in minute detail, including things like security camera angles and sightlines.
Use a burner phone. If they take it away, pull out another. (It's easy enough to find old cellphones, they don't even need to work. Just make sure the first one does.)
Be sure to be well out of traffic and not breaking any of the other invented rules they can pull on you. Be sure to even have a ticket...it's not your fault you're five hours early for your train.
See what, exactly, they do.
There are areas for the public within public buildings, and there are areas only for authorized people. Even for public property. And yes, by law, you can only go into authorized areas if you are, in fact, authorized, or you'll be arrested for trespassing. (Or probably just thrown out.)
Don't try to over-complicate things. No one's trying to get anywhere they aren't allowed, they're trying to take pictures where they are allowed.
No kidding. The idiot didn't even bother to think 'Hey, wait, I wonder if there are any safety things that keep propane tanks from exploding.'.
There are only two groups of terrorists that really are dangerous. The military trained ones, like the OK City bomber and the DC sniper, and non-Americans, who probably got training 'on the street', as it is, or at least belong to organizations that know how to plane.
We've never had home grown terrorist who actually had a 'good' plan to kill people, and actually did kill people, and wasn't trained by some professional group to kill people in that way. (And probably no foreign terrorist either, but that's harder to track down.)
Even going back to the left terrorism in the 60s, look at what the Weather Underground managed to do...blow themselves up. And other bomb making groups managed to take out...single offices, with maybe a few people inside them. (And, hell, you can do that with a grenade.)
And look at Eric Robert Rudolph, who did join the military, but was flunked out. Without training, he managed to...totally screw up the Olympic Park bombing, and kill only two people...one via heart attack as the entire park fled, because the idiot didn't bother to hide his bomb. With a tiny bit more knowledge of security, he could have killed at least 100 people, but he managed to flunk out of 'terrorist' also.
There is no evidence that 'amateur terrorists' pose any threat at all. You might have a greater chance to be killed by lightning than terrorists, but you probably have a greater chance being killed by lightning while winning the lottery than being killed by an amateur terrorist.
I want there to be, next to the oxygen masks that drop down, little extensible metal batons. About six inches long, extends to about a foot, with about a pound of weight at the end. Obviously, positioned so they don't hit people on the head on the way down. Or maybe they fall out of the bottoms of the seats.
The captain has a button he can push so they all fall out. And then they're designed to roll everywhere, so it's impossible to collect them all or demand that people hand over theirs. Terrorists show up, weapons for everyone, whee! Even if they take control of the plane, you never know who stuck one up their shirt or in the bend of their seat.
You can't really threaten to kill someone with a baton (At least not in the 'don't move or I'll kill my hostage instantly' sense.), so they're no use to the terrorists. (And, frankly, a baton-like object is easy enough to have gotten on the plane anyway if they wanted them.) All you can do is beat someone up, and even assuming epic fighting skills on the part of the terrorists, no one can fight off a three dozen moderately healthy, even if unskilled, people armed with batons even if they have batons of their own.
Sadly, this isn't plausibly, not only because people are morons who think everyone is best if everyone is 'unarmed', and too stupid to see that humans have been inventing weapons out of non-weapons every since we invented weapons in the first place, but also the weight addition would be rather costly so airlines would fight it.
I'm not sure we need them now that we have cockpit doors that lock, but frankly, adding those would make a hack of lot more sense than worrying about our shoes.
Terrorists wouldn't be using cameras at all. If there was really some reason they needed the layout of the place, they'd get the plans of the building from any of a number of sources, or just draw a map.
If they needed information like location and placement of cameras, they'd simply walk around with a headset and describe the building to someone else.
OTOH, as you pointed out, a camera phone is easy, if for some, unknowable, reason, someone needed pictures of the place. I mean, Get an iPhone, run the video recording app and start recording, blank the screen, walk around with it up to your ear talking to it.
Although it's rather hard to figure out what pictures would convey that people couldn't just remember WRT to terrorist attack...it's not like terrorists are trying to match wallpaper colors. Presumably, they can remember where a damn door is or the fastest escape route or whatever 'secret' information they're collecting. If it's too much to remember at once, they can easily either write it down, or, better, recite it to someone over the phone.
And that's not even getting into all the obvious 'spy camera' stuff that exists and is pretty cheap now.
Well, honestly, for easy of discussion, indicating the person was male would allow the use of male pronoun, and keep the poster from having to say 'that person' all the time. Anyone who takes issue with that would be silly.
But, yes, there was no logical reason to include the race of the person. And, FYI, say 'person of color' has become oddly acceptably recently, although I don't actually understand it, and it's somewhat weird to put "of color" in quotes like that, especially as it adds nothing to the story.
A few people have assumed the guard was the same race, and this was a story about racism, at which point it would be reasonable to mention the race...but, sadly, the poster didn't mention the race of the guard.
In fact, there's not a lot of evidence that the guard even understood what happened. If I was a guard and had a friend who was leaping turnstiles, I sure as hell wouldn't be harassing other people for it...what would be the point? 'Hello, my friend committed a crime, and I'd like to open an official investigation by accusing you, an innocent person, instead of letting him get away with it.'
It's much more likely that was happened was the guard had some sort of monitor or counter, saw that some person went through without paying, and incorrectly figured out that it was the poster. Possibly even because they knew the other person. Or, hell, they didn't, and the jumper randomly walked up and said hi to them in a bit of social engineering, so they assumed the other person was the criminal.
Well, see, there I have to disagree, to some extent.
If society in general can't figure out what a piece of art is trying to say, people shouldn't expect it to be treated as if it's art by society in general. I.e., to some extent, what we consider art is decided by consensus.
This is on top of what we consider 'good art', which is much more subjective. But if something is 'art' itself is sorta decided by us too. Society's only going to consider it such if it produces some emotion in some statistically meaningful amount of society. (Which, sadly, a lot of modern art, especially non-representation art, totally fails at.)
A better way of explaining what I mean might be 'failed art'. There's good art, and bad art, and then there's art that fail at actually evoking a response at all. Don't expect other people to see it as art, much like they won't see something as a cake when it, in fact, caught on fire in the oven. Technically that might still be a cake, it was certainly intended to be a cake, but...
Now, of course, almost anyone who's experienced video games considers them art, and even random people who've been introduced to them see art almost immediately. That's not really the problem here...the problem is that Ebert really wants them to not be art, and that's why he says what he says.
I don't know why you're assuming I think video games aren't art. I thought I said pretty clearly that they were.
In fact, there's almost no game that isn't art. Pong, maybe.
And my 'or something' was simply because I've had too many stupid discussions about what 'emotion' is and if something qualifies. Like 'disgust' or 'embarrassment'. Whatever.
Ebert, OTOH, was stupidly asserting that art can't be participatory. When, hilariously, art started as participatory.
The first art was probably people dancing around a fire, and you got up and danced, or sat down and watched, as the mood took you. Then singing got added, and everyone did that. We don't know about the first drawing, but it's likely that everyone did that to whatever extent they wanted, next to everyone else's, like modern graffiti works. And storytelling that altered the story based on the audience response. The first styles of theatre lacked fourth walls (and sometimes even stages!) and the actors involved the audience. Etc, etc.
It's only very recently, comparatively speaking, that we've invented the idea of art separate from the audience, and a lot of the art universe thinks that was a mistake and has been trying to undo it. That art has gotten 'sterile' and art is really the interaction between the artwork and the audience.
Video games are an interesting medium because there's audience participation by default, and it's individual participation on top of that. But that certainly doesn't mean it's not 'art', that's just flatly stupid. If anything, it's more 'art' than TV because it's more participatory.
All performances in front of live audiences, from music to theatre to sitcoms, is participatory art. Anyone who disagrees has never had anything to do with live performances.
And, as I said elsewhere here, art galleries are essentially participatory art themselves. They're laid out so you have the 'experience' of going through them, a level of 'art' on top of the existing art. It's 'art' about how you're allowed to choose to view art, which is pretty damn close to how video games work. (And something like a natural history museum is the same thing except what you're viewing isn't art, but how you're directed to view it is!)
And that's not including art that bills itself as participatory, that actually asks the audience to get in on the act, which is everything from experimental theatre to magic acts to Spamalot to call and response songs.
Current artistic theory actually regards the audience, or at least their response, as part of the art. (Which makes sense, as the entire point of art is the response it causes in the audience.)
I have a feeling trying to poke holes in Ebert's 'logic' is a losing preposition. He's decided they aren't art, and he's not changing his mind, even if he's promised to shut up about that fact.
Did you just say that graphics and music aren't technically part of a game? Huh?
The experience of playing a game isn't art, anymore than watching a movie or seeing a play is art.
But 'the experience of playing a game' is not the game itself. The question is whether the game is art.
You're trying to argue that somehow experiencing a game is different from every other form of art, which you also have to experience.
What you've perhaps failed to notice is that quite a lot of other art is participatory also. Offhand, there's call-and-response songs and a lot of audience participation theatre. In fact, all art with a live audience is participatory, although often the audience is supposed to limit themselves to applause. But that is participating.
And, at a higher level, art galleries are often laid out so that, as you walk though, you will experience art in a specific order, although you can do it slower or faster or double back or do it 'wrong', which is pretty exactly analogous to video games.
So, essentially, you're making two mistakes.
The first mistake is trying to divide art into two halves, the art itself, and an audience who views it, and claiming the second half isn't any sort of art. This is a rather discredited view in the art universe...art has long been regarded as not just what causes an emotional response in people, but the response itself, especially if it somehow 'feedbacks' into the work or other audience members. Aka, watching a movie in movie theater makes you part of the movie, because other audience members are reacting to you also. Even alone, you're reacting to you.
And the second mistake is stating that the words 'video game' somehow refer to the second half. Even if you divide art like that, I don't see why, when talking about a 'movie', we're talking about the art that is distributed, whereas when talking about a video game, we're somehow talking about how someone watches a piece of art. (Art with no name, at that! Hey, everyone, let's go watch a three-3D rendered environment art we can change viewpoints in while some musical art plays while some plotted story art happens! Too bad no one's ever invented a name for that, it's oddly close to 'video art' like movies and TV, except you're playing a game at the same time.)
Anything normally considered a 'movie' is art, as are most books. The only things that aren't would be things like security camera footage or a book listing a million digits of pi. (Hell, even the phone book has art in it, in the ads.)
A lot of people, Ebert included, appear to have defined 'art' to mean 'good art'.
Which is a) subjective, and b) stupidly recursive.
'Art' is a noun. It has a objective definition. It's deliberately created (or stored) thing that is designed to cause an emotional response when people watch (or listen, or experience however) it. Even if it fails, it's still art. That's it. THAT'S WHAT FUCKING ART IS. It is not 'undefined' or 'unknowable' or 'subjective'. It is a real, objective thing.
It is, of course, a definition of something that only exists within the context of humans, which doesn't exist outside human experience, but so are 'sky' and 'pun' and 'door'. And in fact almost everything.
If you want to qualify it, you qualify it with other words. 'Good art', bad art', whatever.
You don't go asserting that things that you don't like that fit within the definition aren't 'really' that thing. That's No True Scotsman at a semantic level, and makes it impossible to actually talk about things.
Art is objective, and any modern video games falls within it. Good art is subjective, and 'fine' art is subjective and pretensions, but art is objective.
In my opinion, art is any created work that evokes a thoughtful and emotional response in me, the viewer/listener.
That is exactly what art is, although I'd qualify it with the fact that for society to consider it art, it must cause such a response in some statistically significant number of people who see it. (Which video games certainly do.)
Oh, and it must have been purposefully designed, or at least purposefully stored, to invoke that response. ('stored' being things like photographs, which are probably of things that would have resulted in that response if you'd actually seen them, but someone got out a camera and managed to keep a copy of it.) It is a response beyond the thing that is pictured, i.e., you just didn't think 'empty field' or 'guy standing there' when you saw it.
And I have to disagree that 'shock' art isn't art. Although a crucifix in urine probably isn't art, as the shock isn't coming from the second level, the artistic response, but the first level of the fact that things in urine are pretty disgusting, which is most people honestly have an issue with...the whole 'religious' thing is irrelevant.(1)
But attempts to offend at the second level are art. Offense is, indeed, an emotional response. You might not like them, but they are art.
To him, it seems games = kid's stuff, and kid's stuff can't be art.
Statically, the average age of a video gamer is...30.
1) An argument can be made that our various 'phobias' as humans, including things like feeling disgust at excretions (Which we obviously developed to stop getting diseases) are emotional responses, and hence causing them is 'art', but that's something we don't enjoy thinking about at all. We can enjoy thinking about depressing things, or horrific battles, but some stuff we're actually hardwired away from wanting to think about at all, so even if it's technically 'art', it's not art that any person would actually want to see.
I'm sorta with you, although I think that if the vast majority of people can't see the artistic meaning behind something, it's reasonable for society to not consider it art.
Not, I must add, whether or not it's 'good'. Art is the second meaning behind the obvious. If everyone can see that meaning, it's art. even if the meaning is poorly done. If they can't see it, it's not, or at least not art in general. It might be art to some emo nihilist who see emotion in a paper bag flying by in the wind, but it's not art to people in general.
But that's more a problem of 'modern art' than video games. Something might be art to the one person who created it, and five other people might fake some sort of emotional reaction, but, frankly, that's when we should start applying double-blind testing. Let's see if anyone can come up with a consistent emotional reaction to that, and, hell, if they can identify it from random garbage. If not, it ain't art.
But this doesn't apply to video games...almost anyone can explain what mood and style and theme a video game has, and get it mostly consistent. (Except Ebert, who doesn't play the things.) Only art has those things at all.
All video games have background music. They even often have teasers. There's art style, there's lighting, there pacing and script, video games are fricking art by any reasonable standard. Probably closest in concept to movies, but with unique stuff showing up.
Survival horror games often have exactly the same emotional cues as a horror movie, for example. It's hard to see how exactly the same universe and mood and theme and music and suspense suddenly aren't art just because you're controlling the person walking down the hall when zombies break through the ceiling.
Heck, look at Fallout 3. It has art dissonance. The peppy, upbeat music and 50s atmosphere...vs a desolate nuclear wasteland. I've had people walk up and watch me play it who didn't know anything about games, just because it really does look strange and a little disconcerting. Dissonance requires at least two 'art units', where one says one thing, but the other says something completely different.
Theme and style and mood and whatnot make 'art'. Those define art. Video games have been doing ever since someone introduced a decorative menu and some music to try to set a mood. Admittedly, games back then had very little space for anything that wasn't pure gameplay, but we aren't debating if early 80 video games are art, we are presumably talking about current ones, which are art.
That doesn't make them good art, of course. But anyone who argues they're not art doesn't understand what art is.
The problem is, now you've introduced the debate to a rather stupid issue.
Namely, the point of art is to explain something beyond what is actually there. It must invoke emotion or something, or it's just a thing.
That's why 90% of photographs aren't art, but the other 10% are. It's because 90% are trying to show the thing that was photographed, while the other 10% are trying to show how the scene made the person taking the picture feel. It's why this post isn't art, but a haiku of a much shorter length is. There's the actual meaning of the symbols, of what is represented, and then, to be art, there's another meaning on top of that.
The problem arises is that a lot of current 'art' doesn't invoke that second level. It's too obscure, or, as you said, a deliberate attempt to mock the entire process. Hell, a lot of it doesn't even have a first level, or has one that's clearly just been slapped together.
If it doesn't have two levels that the vast majority of people can distinguish, it's entirely reasonable to take a position that it's not 'art' in any meaningful sense. People don't have to enjoy, or even think it's well done, but to think something is art, they at least have to be able to say 'This is supposed to make me sad, although it doesn't really work'. Even bad art should be able to be recognizable as art, because you can see the (crappy) second level. Often current 'art' is not recognizable, or at least not recognizable to the public in general, and thus fails an 'art test'.
Of course, pretty much all games have two levels. Often not well, but they have background music, they usually have thematic lighting, etc, etc. They are art, or at least consist of 'art parts'. They don't fail the 'art test' the same way modern art fails.
Ebert, OTOH, seems to have thought they failed in some other manner, because you had to actively participate in them.
Oh, okay. I was thinking the other way around.
Yeah, if you keep only 14% of the B-G, and 26% of the BB, that's seriously going to skew things. That's, um, 14%*66% vs. 27%*33%. (The most confusing way of writing that math ever.) That gets me .0924 vs 0.0891 per family, or 924 B-G and 891 B-B left per 10000 two-children families.
I wonder if you can get over 50% B-B doing that. Seems like you could. What if the problem was changed to, for example, 'one boy born on a full moon'?
And thanks for explaining all that. It is very unintuitive...OTOH, so is the original 1/3 result in the first place!
Actually in most states they can't.
No, in 24 states failure to identify yourself is illegal.
This does not mean refusing to do so is legal in other other states. Police officers have discretion, as I said, if they believe a crime is in progress, or going to be committed, and unless a state supreme court or law has said they don't have the right to ask for a name, they have the right to do that.
And, as long as that ability has not been removed, they have the right to arrest you for failing to comply with that lawful request.
Stop and identify laws are specific laws, just like loitering and whatnot are specific laws. The lack of them does not prohibit a police officer from applying the general right of the police to, well, 'harass' people they believe are involved in a crime, requiring them explain who they are and what the hell they're doing and to stop doing it.
Some states have explicitly removed 'ask for name' under the things they can do, on 4th amendment or general privacy grounds, but it's not more than half. Almost half have specifically allowed it, in fact! Often without any belief in criminal activity required at all!
And now I'm arguing in the opposite direction of my post, but that's because the OP just went too far in that direction, and asserted the police could issue orders for any reason whatsoever and arrest people who don't follow them. No. They have to have a reason involving possible criminal activity, at the very least some sort of breach of peace.
You can not be arrested. Period. It is a lawful arrest. Period. Now a judge may disagree and throw out the case but it doesn't change the fact you were lawfully arrested for failure to comply with a lawful order. Do some checking and you'll find no shortage of such arrests.
I do not understand what you're saying here.
You are correct that people often get arrested under this law and the judge throws it out because the police officer's justification was really stupid and didn't even vaguely come near the level of suspicion required for that order. Like the example in the article, although I don't know what UK laws are or what he was charged with.
Like I said, the law can be abused. OTOH, there are probably a dozen laws that can be abused that way. Remember that Harvard professor and the cop? That Obama talked to? The cop sent the guy outside, where, as he was still yelling, was then charged with 'disturbing the peace'. A lot of people, me included, thought that was a bit absurd.
But the laws can either let that sort of crap happen, or not let police do anything about crazy people standing in the middle of a sidewalk yelling. Abuses of these laws need to be handled in court and with police training, not with different laws.
And that's an odd admission from me, as I'm generally in favor of enforcing the law has harshly as possible, at all times, to stop police from 'playing favorites', which usually happen in a racist and classist way. Where the rich get a slap on the wrist for drugs and the poor go to jail for a year, that sort of crap. No. Everyone should have the book thrown at them, or only the 'disliked' will have the book thrown at them...and often people are disliked by the police for fairly bigoted reasons.
But there are laws that are specifically for discretion like that, and the police do need to have it and use it. The police really do need the ability to clear onlookers from a hostage situation without getting a damn court order! This works only if such laws have very minor penalties (So abuse isn't such a problem) and if the courts actually stomp on abuse that does happen.
I can see how that would change the odds, but I don't see how it would change them anywhere near that much.
I just did that math, and 6/7 is .86, whereas that squared is .73. So you're sending home that percentage of each. (Aka, all but that percentage minus 1)
I can see how that would change some odds, but not to 52%! That's only a 13% difference in charge to start with, and it somehow made another percentage drop 14%. (And percentages don't add like that anyway.)
Uh, no.
Failure to comply with a lawful order is only applicable in situations where the police legally can make you do something, it doesn't give the police any authority to order things in the first place.
Police can require people to do things in a few, specific circumstances. The main ones:
When the person is breaking the law, they can order them to stop (obviously).
They can demand people identify themselves.
Both those are covered under the specific laws, though. Failure to comply with a lawful order is complicated, but here are some examples where it can be used:
Refusing to allow yourself to be arrested via passive resistance. Aka, refusing to hold out your hands to be handcuffed, or to come out of a locked car. (This is not resisting arrest, which requires violence on your part. And this is where the whole concept of locking yourself to things and not having the key came from...the police can't charge you for failure to obey orders you cannot physically obey.)
When there are breaches of the peace, even if that specific person is not committing a criminal act (Aka, ordering a crowd that is unpeacable assembled to disperse. If they do not, they can start arresting random people for that.)
Likewise, if there's been a fight, the police officer can order the two participates to stay away from each other, or even for one of them to leave.
When they have a reasonable suspicion of someone's behavior including lawbreaking, but do not have enough evidence to, or just do not feel like, arresting them. Aka, someone keeps looking inside the car window of a car they admit don't own, and the police officer believes they are going to steal it or break into it....he can order them to leave that car the hell alone.
But they cannot just randomly give orders and demand they be followed. There has to a legally justified reason for the order. And something like 90% of 'Failure to comply with a lawful order' is probably an additional charge to other lawbreaking when the person wouldn't stop breaking the law, like someone who was trespassing and refused to leave even after the police ordered him to.Or, as is listed above, 'loitering'. This is exactly how loitering laws are designed to be used...not to wander up and charge with, but, for the police to have the ability, when they see suspicious behavior, to make the people stop. The police see you loitering, tell you to leave, you don't, they arrest you for refusing to do something they can lawfully do.
This does not mean, of course, that the law is not abused, or even that it's a good idea. But it doesn't let them order whatever they want.
Erm, it's not like that at all.
That's just a math problem adding the wrong thing.
For everyone else's benefit who falls for puzzles like that, the problem isn't that 'the number' doesn't add to $30...it shouldn't.
The bill was $25, they paid $30, and got $5 back. Of that $5, the waiter ended up with $2, and each man with $1.
The numbers don't add up to $30, they subtract down from $30, the bill paid, to $25, which they were actually charged. And the men think they subtract down to $27, aka, $9x3, because they don't know about the $2 the waiter stole first.
What the hell does number of wives or biblical customs have to do with anything?
Exactly. I used exactly that analogy above.
The question is, how did you get to the universe you're talking about?
Did you go out and grab couples, assign them one boy, and then randomly assign them another child? Or did you find a couple with a boy and one other child, ignoring all the girl + girl couples? Or did you find a couple and you made them tell you the gender of a randomly selected child?
Any of those are, indeed, 50/50 for the other kid.
If, OTOH, you went out and assigned both children randomly, and then made all the girl + girl couples go home, that's entirely different. Or if you filtered the actual universe.
There, you had four equal sets of people, you made one set go home, you have three equal sets...and two of them have a boy and a girl.
What I don't understand is what the hell the day has to do with it.
That's a dumb puzzle.
What if Johnny's a nickname?
Or what if he's dead? (She would still be 'his mom', but he probably would not be included in the kid enumeration.)
Not to mention, of course, 'three kids' and 'only three kids' aren't the same thing. I'd put the word 'only' in there if asking.
The fact the answer is the same doesn't mean the odds are, you loon.
But, anyway, if you live in a universe where all people listed have at least one boy, the answer is 1/2.
If you don't, the answer is 1/3.
You think the question is actually implying that, for this question, you're in such a restricted universe. The question the way you phrased it actually is implying such a universe, because the premise is 'two kids, at least one boy'.
But just saying things as part of the hypothetical doesn't make them the 'actual' odds. If I say 'Suppose Mr. Smith won the lottery. What is the probability that he won the lottery?', that doesn't actually demonstrate anything about the odds of winning the lottery.
You get an entirely different answer if you list people who have two children, and then pick someone who has at least one boy out of that list. (Or, pretend to be such a person selected from the list, as the question here is.) There are four possible combinations, and you are filtering out one of them. These results in two answers with girls, and one answer with only boys.
If you don't believe me, take two coins, and flip them. If they are both tails, discard them. If there is at least head, record how many heads there are. You will find that you get twice as many head+tail as you do head+head.
Most of the debating over the issue is which hypothetical universe exactly, is being calculated. Is this a universe consisting of people we selected who had two kids who had one boy? (Aka, no girl + girl parents exist.) In which case, yup, 50/50. Or is this a universe consisting of people who had two kids and then removed one part of them from the possible answers? (Aka, the real universe.)
Yes, but that's not what we did.
What if we took 1200 families with two children, and then asked all the ones with at least one boy to step forward?
Of all the families that stepped forward, 1/3 would have boy + girl, 1/3 would have girl + boy, and 1/3 would have boy + boy. (And girl + girl, of course, would not have stepped forward.)
Ergo, 2/3, or 600, of them would have a boy and a girl.