Secondly, the strictest speed enforcement in the world will not make the roads safer if they are full of reckless drivers. This is particularly true when you're talking about pedestrian fatalities.
Yeah, pedestrians suffer when all your attention is focused on trying to spot hidden speed cameras. And despite what the law says, the fuckers never put 'em in plain sight. If you got flashed by one hidden behind trees / streetlamps you could probably beat the charge in court due to it being improperly set up.
Another statistic for ya - in Australia, nearly 2000 people die each year on the roads. Over 20,000 die due to smoking related illness. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, "cardiovascular disease remains one of the leading causes of death in Australia, accounting for 47,637 or 36% of deaths in 2004 (ABS 2006a)." So you're more than TWENTY TIMES more likely to die of heart disease due to crappy lifestyle choices than you are to die of motor accidents. Where are the roadside Random Burger Testers?
I read a brilliant piece by Jeremy Clarkson once where he went through all the usual causes of crashes; speeding, alcohol, poor weather conditions, mechanical failure etc. and came to the conclusion that some disturbing percentage of fatalities (30%+ I think) was due to crashes by sober drivers traveling at or below the speed limit on straight roads in good weather.
Actually, the French resistance movement was one of the examples I was thinking of using. Ordinary people risking their own lives and using extraordinary resourcefulness to save total strangers.
Yeah, well our vampire trope was mostly laid down by Bram Stoker, and there was nothing sexy about them back then. They were just a particular kind of mostly-mindless undead with pretty specific rules for how to dispatch them (nothing that doesn't also work on humans, mind you). Later additions by Anne Rice made vampires sexy and mysterious rather than just bloodthirsty and undead. These days they've been romanticised to the point where there are barely any drawbacks to being a vampire (gee thanks Stephanie Meyer).
Likewise, the original Haitian zombies started off the whole "now he's dead, now he's shuffling around" trend. They've slowly been modified by successive media releases since then and the standard zombie trope is now quite removed from its roots.
The problem with any of these "disaster A can't happen" is they always assume humans will band together and act logically which if anything history has taught us in a widespread panic humans are as dangerous and stupid as any other scared animal. To quote MiB "A person is smart, people are dumb, dangerous, panicky animals and you know it.
You know, I love that quote as much as anyone but I'm not convinced it's true. Think of the times when people really HAVE been up against the wall in large numbers, with a cause they believe in, and I think you'll find that in general, we're pretty good in a pinch. Take, for example, the British in WW2. They're having the absolute shit bombed out of them but they stayed organized for the most part and put up a hell of a fight.
It's even worse than that. It's not 20% false positives - it's 19 out of 20 positives are false. FTFA:
If we’re asking, “If I have autism, will the brain scan find it?,” the answer is an encouraging 90% “yes.” But if we change the question to “If the scan says I have autism, do I have the ASD?,” that number plummets to something like 5%.
In other words, this method is roughly as accurate as:
bool hasAutism(void *data) {
return (rand() % 20) == 3;
}
Hey, I love the movies (yes, all 6 of them). I'm not into all this "My Star Wars wang is bigger than yours, because I'm smart enough to only like the old ones!"-stuff.
I believe you mean your "schwartz".:P
Still, the whole Balance thing just seems like a massive plot hole, or major fuck-up or lust-for-power by the Jedi, neither which fits the whole Jedi "thing" they have going. Every other sentence they talk about the Dark Side and Sith and all that jazz, which is natural because this struggle is at the core of the entire series. Considering that, it's a wee bit of a stretch to justify it by saying "Meh, they were probably thinking about something else than the all-encompassing, absolutely vital, potentially major league destructive Balance for 6 movies straight. =P
This was my objection, right from the word 'go', when they started revealing the storyline for Phantom Menace. "Hi, we're the Jedi Council, we rule the galaxy while the Sith are in hiding and there's only two of 'em. And we think bringing 'balance' to the force is a real great idea!" News flash, if you have 12 orange creams and only 2 oreos, you ain't bringing balance without some of the orange creams getting eaten.
If it was consumer focused, this feature would be advertised as a selling point on cell phones. Turns out it's not for several reasons. One is that, in my opinion, commercial radio sucks. I rarely listen to the radio and when I do it's some form of public radio. There's probably a number of size and power constraints as well that result in every single leading cell phone lacking this 'feature.'
Wait, what? Maybe I'm behind the times but my current phone and the two before it had FM radio tuners, not as some massively advertised selling point, just as one more thing the phone could do. Do "leading cell phones" aka iPhones and late model Android phones no longer have this feature?
While we're looking for other factors, consider that the Wii is substantially cheaper, pushing it from the "I'd only buy one if I really wanted one for myself" category into the "I'd grab one for the kids and for when I have friends over".
I thought the script was written in the 80s to be a dynamic fusion of Pocahontas and Fern Gully? And then Cameron sat on it for 20 years because he couldn't resolve certain stupid plot decisions (like, since when does living in low gravity make you move *faster* and need *stronger* bones? And why not just tow one of those huge floating unobtanium mountains back to the factory and ship it home?) and then decided "ah fuckit, it'll be so shiny they won't care".
I watched it again on Tuesday (a friend bought the DVD) and I'd forgotten how goddamn ANNOYING most of the characters are. Sully and his feckless wide-eyed boy scout act. Ney'tiri's schizoid vacillation at the start between perfect spoken English and broken, barely comprehensible word-soup. Her flipping out at him for the 'wasteful death' of the viperwolves, and then nodding approvingly as he kills some grazing animal later. The way Sully decided that playing Dances with Pterodactyls for three months was more important than saying "oh uh btw guys, they want to dig up your treehouse". The only things that saved the movie for me were (1) glowy things, which I like. (2) the mecha suits. (3) Duke Nukem.
How did we, the people of slashdot, get onto the topic of sex quality to such an indepth fashion? In a thread about perceived quality of video output resolution, streaming, and encoding, of all things? JFC.
What is wrong with you people?!
Pretty simple really. You know how sex is pretty unimportant until you're not getting it? But if you're missing the action, so to speak, you can't talk about anything else?;)
Why would I need to settle? If I keep myself in good shape, I can keep having 20+ girls. Settling for something is stupid if you can have it better.
Why would getting married mean settling? If you feel you're "settling for something" then you SHOULDN'T get married. The only reason to get married is if you feel that your partner is the person you want to be with for your whole life.
You keep having your 20+ casual girls. I'll stick with my one, serious, truly intimate partner.
Refining it? You mean making it incompatible with Debian or any other distros. They contribute almost NOTHING upstream. If they disappeared tomorrow, NOTHING would be affected.
Maybe nothing upstream would be affected, but there are an awful lot of Ubuntu installs out there whose users would notice.
Ubuntu isn't bringing "fresh meat" to the table - these people would have discovered a real linux distro if it weren't for the n00bs who hit on Ubuntu and thought "OMG this is os KEWL!" and then went all fanboi on it. Their server offering is a piece of sh*t.
You sound like you're angry because 'noobs' are using linux and thinking they're 'kewl'. Noobs should never feel kewl, only leet pwners like you should use linux and be kewl, amirite?
No-one (that I know of) runs Ubuntu as a server. They run it as a desktop OS that replaces Windows and requires minimal fucking around to set up and use. Maybe to you tinkering with the OS is the end in itself, but there's a large group of people to whom the computer and OS are merely means to an end and should consume as little time as possible. And there are a lot of people (myself included) who would be running Windows now if Ubuntu weren't so functional out of the box. I'm perfectly capable of setting up other distros, I just enjoy spending my limited computer time actually doing something enjoyable rather than reading documentation and searching through forums to fix stupid configuration problems that a more marketable OS doesn't have in the first place.
If you were trying to do the least you could do, and as such you were caring whether or not the least that you were doing is really the least that could be done by you, to do, then you weren't doing the least least you could do. Of course... if you avoid caring about doing the least you can do, in order to do less, then you're really doing more... aren't you?
When we're talking about the majority of all stock trades being done by these incredibly fast bots, where people are looking for every possible advantage, there are many tricks.
Here's an idea - maybe they're making the price of stocks they're trying to sell fluctuate faster than other stockbots can sample them. Say, you have a company that's trading for $1.00 on average. You rapidly switch the sell price of *your* shares in that stock between $0.90 and $1.50. An opposing system sees your $0.90 and sees what it thinks is an arbitrage opportunity, and decides to buy, but by the time it actually puts in the order, you're now selling at $1.50.
What about when they're brandishing a gun in your face and claiming to be police?
After the number of NCIS episdes where some guy impersonates a cop, pulls the victim over then shoots them in the face? No, the safe option is to assume all police are impersonators trying to kill you.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, the strictest speed enforcement in the world will not make the roads safer if they are full of reckless drivers. This is particularly true when you're talking about pedestrian fatalities.
Yeah, pedestrians suffer when all your attention is focused on trying to spot hidden speed cameras. And despite what the law says, the fuckers never put 'em in plain sight. If you got flashed by one hidden behind trees / streetlamps you could probably beat the charge in court due to it being improperly set up.
Another statistic for ya - in Australia, nearly 2000 people die each year on the roads. Over 20,000 die due to smoking related illness. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, "cardiovascular disease remains one of the leading causes of death in Australia, accounting for 47,637 or 36% of deaths in 2004 (ABS 2006a)." So you're more than TWENTY TIMES more likely to die of heart disease due to crappy lifestyle choices than you are to die of motor accidents. Where are the roadside Random Burger Testers?
I read a brilliant piece by Jeremy Clarkson once where he went through all the usual causes of crashes; speeding, alcohol, poor weather conditions, mechanical failure etc. and came to the conclusion that some disturbing percentage of fatalities (30%+ I think) was due to crashes by sober drivers traveling at or below the speed limit on straight roads in good weather.
Actually, the French resistance movement was one of the examples I was thinking of using. Ordinary people risking their own lives and using extraordinary resourcefulness to save total strangers.
Good call. Hunting wolves in your underpants > hunting wolves from a helicopter.
Yeah, well our vampire trope was mostly laid down by Bram Stoker, and there was nothing sexy about them back then. They were just a particular kind of mostly-mindless undead with pretty specific rules for how to dispatch them (nothing that doesn't also work on humans, mind you). Later additions by Anne Rice made vampires sexy and mysterious rather than just bloodthirsty and undead. These days they've been romanticised to the point where there are barely any drawbacks to being a vampire (gee thanks Stephanie Meyer).
Likewise, the original Haitian zombies started off the whole "now he's dead, now he's shuffling around" trend. They've slowly been modified by successive media releases since then and the standard zombie trope is now quite removed from its roots.
The problem with any of these "disaster A can't happen" is they always assume humans will band together and act logically which if anything history has taught us in a widespread panic humans are as dangerous and stupid as any other scared animal. To quote MiB "A person is smart, people are dumb, dangerous, panicky animals and you know it.
You know, I love that quote as much as anyone but I'm not convinced it's true. Think of the times when people really HAVE been up against the wall in large numbers, with a cause they believe in, and I think you'll find that in general, we're pretty good in a pinch. Take, for example, the British in WW2. They're having the absolute shit bombed out of them but they stayed organized for the most part and put up a hell of a fight.
If we’re asking, “If I have autism, will the brain scan find it?,” the answer is an encouraging 90% “yes.” But if we change the question to “If the scan says I have autism, do I have the ASD?,” that number plummets to something like 5%.
In other words, this method is roughly as accurate as:
bool hasAutism(void *data) {
return (rand() % 20) == 3;
}
Cake and grief counselling will be available after pre-ordering the sequel.
A Starcraft-based MMORPG will fix that! :D
Hey, I love the movies (yes, all 6 of them). I'm not into all this "My Star Wars wang is bigger than yours, because I'm smart enough to only like the old ones!"-stuff.
I believe you mean your "schwartz". :P
Still, the whole Balance thing just seems like a massive plot hole, or major fuck-up or lust-for-power by the Jedi, neither which fits the whole Jedi "thing" they have going. Every other sentence they talk about the Dark Side and Sith and all that jazz, which is natural because this struggle is at the core of the entire series. Considering that, it's a wee bit of a stretch to justify it by saying "Meh, they were probably thinking about something else than the all-encompassing, absolutely vital, potentially major league destructive Balance for 6 movies straight. =P
This was my objection, right from the word 'go', when they started revealing the storyline for Phantom Menace. "Hi, we're the Jedi Council, we rule the galaxy while the Sith are in hiding and there's only two of 'em. And we think bringing 'balance' to the force is a real great idea!" News flash, if you have 12 orange creams and only 2 oreos, you ain't bringing balance without some of the orange creams getting eaten.
If it was consumer focused, this feature would be advertised as a selling point on cell phones. Turns out it's not for several reasons. One is that, in my opinion, commercial radio sucks. I rarely listen to the radio and when I do it's some form of public radio. There's probably a number of size and power constraints as well that result in every single leading cell phone lacking this 'feature.'
Wait, what? Maybe I'm behind the times but my current phone and the two before it had FM radio tuners, not as some massively advertised selling point, just as one more thing the phone could do. Do "leading cell phones" aka iPhones and late model Android phones no longer have this feature?
While we're looking for other factors, consider that the Wii is substantially cheaper, pushing it from the "I'd only buy one if I really wanted one for myself" category into the "I'd grab one for the kids and for when I have friends over".
I thought the script was written in the 80s to be a dynamic fusion of Pocahontas and Fern Gully? And then Cameron sat on it for 20 years because he couldn't resolve certain stupid plot decisions (like, since when does living in low gravity make you move *faster* and need *stronger* bones? And why not just tow one of those huge floating unobtanium mountains back to the factory and ship it home?) and then decided "ah fuckit, it'll be so shiny they won't care".
I watched it again on Tuesday (a friend bought the DVD) and I'd forgotten how goddamn ANNOYING most of the characters are. Sully and his feckless wide-eyed boy scout act. Ney'tiri's schizoid vacillation at the start between perfect spoken English and broken, barely comprehensible word-soup. Her flipping out at him for the 'wasteful death' of the viperwolves, and then nodding approvingly as he kills some grazing animal later. The way Sully decided that playing Dances with Pterodactyls for three months was more important than saying "oh uh btw guys, they want to dig up your treehouse". The only things that saved the movie for me were (1) glowy things, which I like. (2) the mecha suits. (3) Duke Nukem.
How did we, the people of slashdot, get onto the topic of sex quality to such an indepth fashion? In a thread about perceived quality of video output resolution, streaming, and encoding, of all things? JFC.
What is wrong with you people?!
Pretty simple really. You know how sex is pretty unimportant until you're not getting it? But if you're missing the action, so to speak, you can't talk about anything else? ;)
If you're having it, you know that it's really not that special after all. Honestly, sex is the second most overrated thing in our cultural landscape.
However, if you're not having it, it starts becoming pretty damn special and important.
Just like if you're getting a steady supply of oxygen, you think it's pretty overrated, until it gets cut off.
Correlation does not imply causation. :P
Why would I need to settle? If I keep myself in good shape, I can keep having 20+ girls. Settling for something is stupid if you can have it better.
Why would getting married mean settling? If you feel you're "settling for something" then you SHOULDN'T get married. The only reason to get married is if you feel that your partner is the person you want to be with for your whole life.
You keep having your 20+ casual girls. I'll stick with my one, serious, truly intimate partner.
Refining it? You mean making it incompatible with Debian or any other distros. They contribute almost NOTHING upstream. If they disappeared tomorrow, NOTHING would be affected.
Maybe nothing upstream would be affected, but there are an awful lot of Ubuntu installs out there whose users would notice.
Ubuntu isn't bringing "fresh meat" to the table - these people would have discovered a real linux distro if it weren't for the n00bs who hit on Ubuntu and thought "OMG this is os KEWL!" and then went all fanboi on it. Their server offering is a piece of sh*t.
You sound like you're angry because 'noobs' are using linux and thinking they're 'kewl'. Noobs should never feel kewl, only leet pwners like you should use linux and be kewl, amirite?
No-one (that I know of) runs Ubuntu as a server. They run it as a desktop OS that replaces Windows and requires minimal fucking around to set up and use. Maybe to you tinkering with the OS is the end in itself, but there's a large group of people to whom the computer and OS are merely means to an end and should consume as little time as possible. And there are a lot of people (myself included) who would be running Windows now if Ubuntu weren't so functional out of the box. I'm perfectly capable of setting up other distros, I just enjoy spending my limited computer time actually doing something enjoyable rather than reading documentation and searching through forums to fix stupid configuration problems that a more marketable OS doesn't have in the first place.
If you were trying to do the least you could do, and as such you were caring whether or not the least that you were doing is really the least that could be done by you, to do, then you weren't doing the least least you could do. Of course... if you avoid caring about doing the least you can do, in order to do less, then you're really doing more... aren't you?
...because if they can prove P!=NP just to cover up a sex scandal, imagine what they could do if they didn't waste time writing press releases.
Hold the best orgy ever?
When we're talking about the majority of all stock trades being done by these incredibly fast bots, where people are looking for every possible advantage, there are many tricks.
Here's an idea - maybe they're making the price of stocks they're trying to sell fluctuate faster than other stockbots can sample them. Say, you have a company that's trading for $1.00 on average. You rapidly switch the sell price of *your* shares in that stock between $0.90 and $1.50. An opposing system sees your $0.90 and sees what it thinks is an arbitrage opportunity, and decides to buy, but by the time it actually puts in the order, you're now selling at $1.50.
the army
The agents are very lucky it wasn't a more Navy Seal with more military training.
Not having an actual agent's badge available to compare, this is somewhat difficult...
What about when they're brandishing a gun in your face and claiming to be police?
After the number of NCIS episdes where some guy impersonates a cop, pulls the victim over then shoots them in the face? No, the safe option is to assume all police are impersonators trying to kill you.