It's not to say that it doesn't happen, but the penalties for such accusations are generally pretty severe (as I recall, especially in Sweden) and even without legal ramifications, the personal social issues are a strong deterrent.
Ah, but the women in the Assange case didn't actually report this as a report themselves, they simply went to the police to "ask some questions" and the police decided to file a report. What this means is that technically the women can't be prosecuted for falsely accusing Assange for rape as they didn't (technically anyway).
Another desk suggestion: Make sure that your desks are suitable to all users. I've worked in a few places where the desks worked great as long as you weren't taller than the guy who decided what desks to purchase but if you were 6'4" then you couldn't sit comfortably because your legs couldn't quite fit (supporting metal bar right in front of your knees, not noticeable to anyone shorter than 6' or so but incredibly uncomfortable to those of us who were taller since our knees kept pressing against it). There are other issues as well, e.g. some people like their desk at "lap level" which can be tricky if the supports under the desk surface are thick since you're forced to keep the desk at least 3" or so above your lap even though the actual desk surface is less than 1" thick...
For me ureadahead just crashes and then the boot continues anyway. But hey, at least it sort of works (and it's not like I'm running it on any important systems).
I'm sure you can see how mild anti-corporate sentiments plus a tendency towards some mild OCD-esque behaviors might come to a head on that point.
While I don't really have any OCD tendencies I do have serious issues with visible logos, sometimes you just don't have a choice (try finding a good snowboarding jacket that's actually designed to work well with the way you move your body while snowboarding that doesn't have a logo somewhere on it. No, the $30 fluffy bargain bin noname jacket doesn't count, it may be warm but it's not exactly ideal for snowboarding). When it comes to everyday clothing like t-shirts, pants, socks and such I try to avoid logos and brand names as much as possible though, why should I pay just so I can walk around displaying someone's brand?
Actually, there are plenty of laptops where the stickers leave more of a mark and are harder to remove if you leave them in place.
A colleague of mine and me got identical Dell Precision laptops through work, I removed all stickers immediately, he left his stickers in place for several months. When he finally removed them they left a lot of residue and on top of that the laptop was slightly darker under the stickers (apparently the almost-black gray plastic becomes slightly less almost-black with age/wear and tear). So removing the stickers right away is probably a good idea, a razor and a steady hand helps a lot.
Also, I'm glad my home workstation is a mac, compared to other pre-built computers they definitely have an advantage with no pointless stickers as well as no pile of bloatware to uninstall...
A lot of the weirdness when it comes to our current sex-crime laws come from a short period during which radical feminism was very popular, then several leading figures in the swedish radical feminist movement accidentally revealed themselves to be completely batshit crazy which brought things sort of back to normal, but just like in most other countries the laws stayed.
As for the left and the right, if anything our right-wing "Alliance" is a mix of "baton liberals" (international definition of liberal, not the US one. They basically believe in free trade and freedom for the rich and powerful while everyone else should be kept in check by the threat of violence, drug testing and any other crypto-fascist control measure they can come up with), loud-mouthed christians (who have very little actual political clout as very few people actually vote for them) and conservatives while our "left" is basically the social democrats who are no longer particularly social democrats as they have traveled toward the center, the left (former communist) party which isn't nearly as radical as it once was and the greens.
I'm not sure I like the idea of a British home, when you put the sewage pipes on the outside of your house so "it'll be easier to fix them when they freeze" in a country where the temperature rarely drops below 0C you should be able to spot your error (putting them inside the house and deep enough in the ground means they won't freeze even if the temperature stays at -25C for a month or two, so no need to have them easily accessible "just in case").
1. Not all illegal drugs have been tampered with. Some are pharmaceutical-grade. And weed? Why would anyone screw with weed, at least without telling the buyer if it's dosed.
True, the issue is really quality control, those buying illegal drugs never know what they're getting.
And with weed there was the whole "grit weed" incident a while back. Someone figured out that they could make their weed look more potent and weigh more by spraying it with silica spray. The result? A bunch of people with chest pain and lung damage, all because someone wanted to make a few more bucks...
You're so sure technology cannot be polished and that everything's going to fail, then why risk driving a car?
I didn't say the tech would fail. Also, I don't drive.
why risk going on a bus? the under paid bitter driver might smash into a wall for fun.
Well, considering that most humans have some basic sense of self-preservation and the newspapers aren't exactly filled with reports of crazed bus drivers driving into walls for shits and giggles, I think I'll be fine.
Or why eat out? the underpaid bitter waiter might poo in your food for entertainment.
I rarely eat at restaurants. However, I do occasionally order pizza but I am friendly with the guys who run the local pizza place and I doubt it would be in their best interest to defecate on the food since they want repeat customers. It is also in their best interests not to do anything that would get the health inspectors to shut them down.
Why aren't police officers shooting people for fun?
Actually, it seems that powertripping police officers beating up, tazing and macing people for no good reason isn't all that uncommon. We recently had an incident around here where a group of police officers decided that a drunk man in his 20s was best dealt with by beating him severely, handcuffing him and finally leaving him to die on the floor of their van...
How about requiring an authorization password from the operator - which immediately logs the operator name, time and the location of the prisoner - to guarantee accountability? no. liberal hippies are no better than small minded bigots.
If you can't see how the system can still possibly be abused often enough that your claim of only 0.0001% wrongful "zappings" seems naive then you should probably consider the possibility that you are either biased or a troll.
I think you need to factor in that those taking illegal drugs are taking drugs that have been tampered with by every lowlife imaginable, bathtub meth, heroin that can be really high-grade or practically worthless and so on. Those taking prescription drugs are taking professionally manufactured and tested drugs in doses recommended by their physicians who most likely have a lot of education and experience when it comes to prescribing drugs.
Now, I'm not saying everyone should run out and do heroin or meth, just that this also skews the statistics. If the drugs most legal drug users were using were of the same poor quality as those used by addicts the number of deaths from legal drugs would skyrocket...
Somehow I seriously doubt it would be "less than 1 in a 1000000" that got "zapped" wrongfully. Underpaid, bitter and plain nasty remote operators would most likely love the excuse to "zap" a convict. Add to this that there will most likely be some sort of manual "zap" capability as well and you're more likely to see random convicts getting "zapped" simply as a way to amuse the operators...
The problem is that in order to keep Flash from crashing you pretty much need to run flashblock or noscript which cripples your browsing experience and unfortunately there are sites out there that actually try to obfuscate their javascript and Flash content to trick you into loading their annoying ads.
Basically it's a pain in the ass to keep Flash from hogging resources so most users just don't do it even if they know how to.
Lazy scene groups do this all the time. And they post installation instructions that indicate that they know nothing about *nix systems (and that they assume that "everyone" has a spare Wintel machine available for running their keygen/crack). A favorite of mine was some application that included a file with the extension.bat (non-executable of course) that contained a one-liner along the lines of "echo "127.0.0.1 activation.developer.com" >>/etc/hosts" inside it and the instructions stated that the user should run this "program" by pressing Win-R and typing in the path to the file...
Well, IIRC if you go by the established canon then the weapons in Star Trek are quite "realistic" in the sense that their power output kind of makes sense when extrapolating from our current tech. And the science behind their warp drives do have some (albeit very very little) theoretical merit. Basically, the numbers in the Star Trek universe sort of add up if you apply enough suspension of disbelief.
Now, in the Star Wars universe we have a slightly different situation. Basically, most numbers (and sometimes units) seem to have been dreamed up by Lucas while he was on a week-long meth binge. Tiny hand-operated weapons supposedly have power output comparable to a pile of nukes, their FTL tech seems to have no constraints whatsoever (nor explanation) and for some reason they are able to build autonomous battle droids but they don't seem to have targeting computers on their large vessels...
So yeah, the universes are kind of hard to compare since Star Wars is a lot closer to space opera/fantasy than Star Trek is (and I'm not saying Star Trek is hard sci-fi in any way).
The storyline was so, so, so, apparent that there was no surprise or plot twists or anything and there definitely was no suspense (go watch Psycho or something, then come back about suspense).
Well, considering how poorly executed most plot twists and moments of suspense are in roughly 99% of all movies out there I actually found it rather relieving that Avatar didn't have a bunch of "gotcha!" moments that anyone with an IQ above room temperature could spot thirty minutes in advance. Really, if you feel the need to put a plot twist in your movie at least make it clever and new, if it's the same plot twist that's been used oh so many times before then it'll just annoy the audience (or at least those of us who actually pay attention to the plot).
And that's not to say the plot of Avatar was good, just that they at least seemed to resist their urges to add pointless gotchas and plot twists.
And that's exactly what business owners are saying all over the world every time workers point out that they have rights. What's next? moving the production to outer space?
I take it you're american and living in a "right to work" (or whatever they call it) state? Because in the rest of the civilized world there are laws to protect everyone, not just employers...
As I stated, compared to many other countries Swedish rape laws are pretty strict, lots of things that would not be considered rape in other countries are considered to be rape in Sweden (legally at least).
Also, Assange, Wikileaks and the Pirate party hav been in the media a lot in Sweden. And by "in the media" I mean "on the front page". So I'd guess most people here do know about Assange and Wikileaks.
Well, swedish law classifies a lot of things as "rape" that wouldn't be rape in other countries (this can be seen by looking at swedish rape statistics before and after the relevant changes to the law).
Also, from the article you linked: "
The figures can however be somewhat distorted as it is often only assault rapes by strangers and aggravated acquaintance rapes that are reported in many of these countries - as was the case in Sweden 40 years ago.".
Why would we bother with the ugly kludge that NAT is if we can just use global addressing and stateful firewalls? It's not like we've always had NAT on the internet (well, in one way or another, but it hasn't been the de-facto standard for connecting client machines until quite recently).
I still miss my university days when all the workstations in the computer labs were accessible from the internet (although firewalled pretty heavily for everything but SSH if you weren't on the university's network or the student-run campus network).
Well, I suspect that in the right (machine) language it could very well be possible to put together the necessary instructions for generating a perfectly simulated brain, the problem is that we have little clue when it comes to what instructions to feed our imagined brain simulation hardware. Also, when/if we do figure out how to simulate a brain accurately our code will most likely at first be very crude and un-optimized.
You should check out the Ubuntu forums after a new release, it's obvious that they tend to overlook things they shouldn't be overlooking.
Over the years they've managed some pretty neat fuck-ups such as replacing the disk encryption system without testing if it was possible to migrate encrypted volumes (it wasn't, not without serious pains anyway) and randomly breaking all sorts of "little" things.
And I have no idead what they've done with the networking subsystem but I'd love to know why Ubuntu is the only OS/distro I'm consistently having network issues with (if I enable IPv6 on an interface using the GUI tools it nukes the entire interface and sometimes the only thing that helps is wiping the config for that interface and either rebooting or restarting everything but the kernel). This is on several machines and networks and a problem I have not had with Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, OS X or any other OS with IPv6 support...
Oh, and I just loved how my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop decided that since I already had a font package it wanted to install installed when upgrading to 10.04 LTS it should deinstall the xserver-xorg-core package without telling me...
Yes, Ubuntu has issues since it tries to stay bleeding edge and isn't nearly as concerned with stability as many more mature distros are.
I know plenty of BSD guys who are very much "hackerish" and consider themselves hackers, they just tend to be a bit more picky about things working properly. Yeah, I remember the late 90s as those dark days when every other app I downloaded wouldn't compile or run because it was written under the assumption that every *nix was just like x86 Linux in every way, and when the devs wouldn't even accept patches to fix their apps because it wasn't a problem for them that did breed a bit of resentment toward the average Linux application developer...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not to say that it doesn't happen, but the penalties for such accusations are generally pretty severe (as I recall, especially in Sweden) and even without legal ramifications, the personal social issues are a strong deterrent.
Ah, but the women in the Assange case didn't actually report this as a report themselves, they simply went to the police to "ask some questions" and the police decided to file a report. What this means is that technically the women can't be prosecuted for falsely accusing Assange for rape as they didn't (technically anyway).
Another desk suggestion: Make sure that your desks are suitable to all users. I've worked in a few places where the desks worked great as long as you weren't taller than the guy who decided what desks to purchase but if you were 6'4" then you couldn't sit comfortably because your legs couldn't quite fit (supporting metal bar right in front of your knees, not noticeable to anyone shorter than 6' or so but incredibly uncomfortable to those of us who were taller since our knees kept pressing against it). There are other issues as well, e.g. some people like their desk at "lap level" which can be tricky if the supports under the desk surface are thick since you're forced to keep the desk at least 3" or so above your lap even though the actual desk surface is less than 1" thick...
For me ureadahead just crashes and then the boot continues anyway. But hey, at least it sort of works (and it's not like I'm running it on any important systems).
I'm sure you can see how mild anti-corporate sentiments plus a tendency towards some mild OCD-esque behaviors might come to a head on that point.
While I don't really have any OCD tendencies I do have serious issues with visible logos, sometimes you just don't have a choice (try finding a good snowboarding jacket that's actually designed to work well with the way you move your body while snowboarding that doesn't have a logo somewhere on it. No, the $30 fluffy bargain bin noname jacket doesn't count, it may be warm but it's not exactly ideal for snowboarding). When it comes to everyday clothing like t-shirts, pants, socks and such I try to avoid logos and brand names as much as possible though, why should I pay just so I can walk around displaying someone's brand?
Actually, there are plenty of laptops where the stickers leave more of a mark and are harder to remove if you leave them in place.
A colleague of mine and me got identical Dell Precision laptops through work, I removed all stickers immediately, he left his stickers in place for several months. When he finally removed them they left a lot of residue and on top of that the laptop was slightly darker under the stickers (apparently the almost-black gray plastic becomes slightly less almost-black with age/wear and tear). So removing the stickers right away is probably a good idea, a razor and a steady hand helps a lot.
Also, I'm glad my home workstation is a mac, compared to other pre-built computers they definitely have an advantage with no pointless stickers as well as no pile of bloatware to uninstall...
Wow, you really don't know much about Sweden.
A lot of the weirdness when it comes to our current sex-crime laws come from a short period during which radical feminism was very popular, then several leading figures in the swedish radical feminist movement accidentally revealed themselves to be completely batshit crazy which brought things sort of back to normal, but just like in most other countries the laws stayed.
As for the left and the right, if anything our right-wing "Alliance" is a mix of "baton liberals" (international definition of liberal, not the US one. They basically believe in free trade and freedom for the rich and powerful while everyone else should be kept in check by the threat of violence, drug testing and any other crypto-fascist control measure they can come up with), loud-mouthed christians (who have very little actual political clout as very few people actually vote for them) and conservatives while our "left" is basically the social democrats who are no longer particularly social democrats as they have traveled toward the center, the left (former communist) party which isn't nearly as radical as it once was and the greens.
I'm not sure I like the idea of a British home, when you put the sewage pipes on the outside of your house so "it'll be easier to fix them when they freeze" in a country where the temperature rarely drops below 0C you should be able to spot your error (putting them inside the house and deep enough in the ground means they won't freeze even if the temperature stays at -25C for a month or two, so no need to have them easily accessible "just in case").
1. Not all illegal drugs have been tampered with. Some are pharmaceutical-grade. And weed? Why would anyone screw with weed, at least without telling the buyer if it's dosed.
True, the issue is really quality control, those buying illegal drugs never know what they're getting.
And with weed there was the whole "grit weed" incident a while back. Someone figured out that they could make their weed look more potent and weigh more by spraying it with silica spray. The result? A bunch of people with chest pain and lung damage, all because someone wanted to make a few more bucks...
You're so sure technology cannot be polished and that everything's going to fail, then why risk driving a car?
I didn't say the tech would fail. Also, I don't drive.
why risk going on a bus? the under paid bitter driver might smash into a wall for fun.
Well, considering that most humans have some basic sense of self-preservation and the newspapers aren't exactly filled with reports of crazed bus drivers driving into walls for shits and giggles, I think I'll be fine.
Or why eat out? the underpaid bitter waiter might poo in your food for entertainment.
I rarely eat at restaurants. However, I do occasionally order pizza but I am friendly with the guys who run the local pizza place and I doubt it would be in their best interest to defecate on the food since they want repeat customers. It is also in their best interests not to do anything that would get the health inspectors to shut them down.
Why aren't police officers shooting people for fun?
Actually, it seems that powertripping police officers beating up, tazing and macing people for no good reason isn't all that uncommon. We recently had an incident around here where a group of police officers decided that a drunk man in his 20s was best dealt with by beating him severely, handcuffing him and finally leaving him to die on the floor of their van...
How about requiring an authorization password from the operator - which immediately logs the operator name, time and the location of the prisoner - to guarantee accountability? no. liberal hippies are no better than small minded bigots.
If you can't see how the system can still possibly be abused often enough that your claim of only 0.0001% wrongful "zappings" seems naive then you should probably consider the possibility that you are either biased or a troll.
I think you need to factor in that those taking illegal drugs are taking drugs that have been tampered with by every lowlife imaginable, bathtub meth, heroin that can be really high-grade or practically worthless and so on. Those taking prescription drugs are taking professionally manufactured and tested drugs in doses recommended by their physicians who most likely have a lot of education and experience when it comes to prescribing drugs.
Now, I'm not saying everyone should run out and do heroin or meth, just that this also skews the statistics. If the drugs most legal drug users were using were of the same poor quality as those used by addicts the number of deaths from legal drugs would skyrocket...
Somehow I seriously doubt it would be "less than 1 in a 1000000" that got "zapped" wrongfully. Underpaid, bitter and plain nasty remote operators would most likely love the excuse to "zap" a convict. Add to this that there will most likely be some sort of manual "zap" capability as well and you're more likely to see random convicts getting "zapped" simply as a way to amuse the operators...
Yet I could name dozens (myself included) who knew what an SQL injection was (and how to avoid them) long before graduating.
The problem is that in order to keep Flash from crashing you pretty much need to run flashblock or noscript which cripples your browsing experience and unfortunately there are sites out there that actually try to obfuscate their javascript and Flash content to trick you into loading their annoying ads.
Basically it's a pain in the ass to keep Flash from hogging resources so most users just don't do it even if they know how to.
Lazy scene groups do this all the time. And they post installation instructions that indicate that they know nothing about *nix systems (and that they assume that "everyone" has a spare Wintel machine available for running their keygen/crack). A favorite of mine was some application that included a file with the extension .bat (non-executable of course) that contained a one-liner along the lines of "echo "127.0.0.1 activation.developer.com" >> /etc/hosts" inside it and the instructions stated that the user should run this "program" by pressing Win-R and typing in the path to the file...
Well, IIRC if you go by the established canon then the weapons in Star Trek are quite "realistic" in the sense that their power output kind of makes sense when extrapolating from our current tech. And the science behind their warp drives do have some (albeit very very little) theoretical merit. Basically, the numbers in the Star Trek universe sort of add up if you apply enough suspension of disbelief.
Now, in the Star Wars universe we have a slightly different situation. Basically, most numbers (and sometimes units) seem to have been dreamed up by Lucas while he was on a week-long meth binge. Tiny hand-operated weapons supposedly have power output comparable to a pile of nukes, their FTL tech seems to have no constraints whatsoever (nor explanation) and for some reason they are able to build autonomous battle droids but they don't seem to have targeting computers on their large vessels...
So yeah, the universes are kind of hard to compare since Star Wars is a lot closer to space opera/fantasy than Star Trek is (and I'm not saying Star Trek is hard sci-fi in any way).
The storyline was so, so, so, apparent that there was no surprise or plot twists or anything and there definitely was no suspense (go watch Psycho or something, then come back about suspense).
Well, considering how poorly executed most plot twists and moments of suspense are in roughly 99% of all movies out there I actually found it rather relieving that Avatar didn't have a bunch of "gotcha!" moments that anyone with an IQ above room temperature could spot thirty minutes in advance. Really, if you feel the need to put a plot twist in your movie at least make it clever and new, if it's the same plot twist that's been used oh so many times before then it'll just annoy the audience (or at least those of us who actually pay attention to the plot).
And that's not to say the plot of Avatar was good, just that they at least seemed to resist their urges to add pointless gotchas and plot twists.
Well, if you tell your NTP client to use those ten servers for setting the time chances are your computer's clock will be very accurate.
And that's exactly what business owners are saying all over the world every time workers point out that they have rights. What's next? moving the production to outer space?
Thanks for trolling, have a nice day.
I take it you're american and living in a "right to work" (or whatever they call it) state? Because in the rest of the civilized world there are laws to protect everyone, not just employers...
As I stated, compared to many other countries Swedish rape laws are pretty strict, lots of things that would not be considered rape in other countries are considered to be rape in Sweden (legally at least).
Also, Assange, Wikileaks and the Pirate party hav been in the media a lot in Sweden. And by "in the media" I mean "on the front page". So I'd guess most people here do know about Assange and Wikileaks.
Well, swedish law classifies a lot of things as "rape" that wouldn't be rape in other countries (this can be seen by looking at swedish rape statistics before and after the relevant changes to the law).
Also, from the article you linked: " The figures can however be somewhat distorted as it is often only assault rapes by strangers and aggravated acquaintance rapes that are reported in many of these countries - as was the case in Sweden 40 years ago.".
Why would we bother with the ugly kludge that NAT is if we can just use global addressing and stateful firewalls? It's not like we've always had NAT on the internet (well, in one way or another, but it hasn't been the de-facto standard for connecting client machines until quite recently).
I still miss my university days when all the workstations in the computer labs were accessible from the internet (although firewalled pretty heavily for everything but SSH if you weren't on the university's network or the student-run campus network).
Well, I suspect that in the right (machine) language it could very well be possible to put together the necessary instructions for generating a perfectly simulated brain, the problem is that we have little clue when it comes to what instructions to feed our imagined brain simulation hardware. Also, when/if we do figure out how to simulate a brain accurately our code will most likely at first be very crude and un-optimized.
You should check out the Ubuntu forums after a new release, it's obvious that they tend to overlook things they shouldn't be overlooking.
Over the years they've managed some pretty neat fuck-ups such as replacing the disk encryption system without testing if it was possible to migrate encrypted volumes (it wasn't, not without serious pains anyway) and randomly breaking all sorts of "little" things.
And I have no idead what they've done with the networking subsystem but I'd love to know why Ubuntu is the only OS/distro I'm consistently having network issues with (if I enable IPv6 on an interface using the GUI tools it nukes the entire interface and sometimes the only thing that helps is wiping the config for that interface and either rebooting or restarting everything but the kernel). This is on several machines and networks and a problem I have not had with Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, OS X or any other OS with IPv6 support...
Oh, and I just loved how my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop decided that since I already had a font package it wanted to install installed when upgrading to 10.04 LTS it should deinstall the xserver-xorg-core package without telling me...
Yes, Ubuntu has issues since it tries to stay bleeding edge and isn't nearly as concerned with stability as many more mature distros are.
I know plenty of BSD guys who are very much "hackerish" and consider themselves hackers, they just tend to be a bit more picky about things working properly. Yeah, I remember the late 90s as those dark days when every other app I downloaded wouldn't compile or run because it was written under the assumption that every *nix was just like x86 Linux in every way, and when the devs wouldn't even accept patches to fix their apps because it wasn't a problem for them that did breed a bit of resentment toward the average Linux application developer...