[...] It strikes me as hugely contradictory to outlaw both denying the holocaust and displaying a swastika.
Would you care to argument what is the contradiction, or is the "hugely" already sufficient?
Sure. Denying the holocaust is illegal (and moronic). Forbidding the display of the swastika is hiding from the holocaust. Ignoring for the moment that it's an ancient symbol with multiple interpretations, in Germany it's mostly a reminder of a terrible period in their history. Forbidding its use, even in a game about killing Nazis, falls short of denying the holocaust, but is akin to hiding it.
It's an unfortunate historical relic - Deal with it...
They are exactly doing that.
No, they're not. They're burying their past because it's ugly. They have good reasons for doing that as there is still wide-spread antisemitism and a noticeable population of violent skin-heads (at least last time I was there) and they want to quell that. But, despite their good intentions, hiding legitimate artifacts from WWII (like banning swastikas from video games) is not dealing with the problem, it's burying it.
In my grad-school office, there were posters of the guy accompanied by "his" poetry. They were put up by native Chinese studying abroad, but they loved the dude. And if you exclude the population of China, I'd submit that you've negated the use of the word "universally".
Agreed, though. At least the people that Mao starved were due to dumb-assery rather than malice. But frankly, I'm not convinced that the Nazis were entirely mal-intentioned either. Just homocidelly misguided. Patriotic intentions combined with actions that should have them lined up and shot. And regardless of your intentions, putting somebody in a cyanide shower and torching the corpse plays less well with the public than sending somebody off to a field to starve and saying "Oops" regardless of the head-count.
Hey - If the world didn't have chihuahuas, what would we feed our great danes?
Joke aside, even we're genetically modified these days. The human race is getting taller pretty quickly. Not to mention that boobs and wieners are getting bigger just because of latent biological drives that happen to encourage breeding behavior. But if it happens in a lab, it's evil. If it happens in a bedroom, it's natural. And if it happens in your garden, even the smelly hippies like it (OK - they like the bedroom stuff too, they're just less picky).
Stalin/Lenin, Lenin/Stalin. A bunch of folks half-way around the world that can't even be bothered to learn my language - What do you want from me? =)
Would have been a massively different country had Trotsky not been run out. Hugely different politics than either of those dudes. Not to say that the USSR would have turned into some Utopian commune, but I'll bet there would have been far fewer pointless deaths.
Only on slashdot are computer viruses worse than nukes.
I think it must have been that phrase that confused me... Or the parent post that said "virus writer" rather than virus engineer or wicked micro-biologist...
Still, I think the at-home-terrorist-kits typically include ready-made poisons or diseases like anthrax or small-pox. Do we really have wackos trying to create custom diseases to hit us with? Seems like a lot of trouble.
Trotsky got big enough to be revered and loved (and immortalized as Snowball in Animal Farm), but never big enough to foul things up and be hated like Lenin. He even had the good sense to get assassinated while still popular and published.
What boggles me is that Mao isn't universally hated... Or why Lenin's body hasn't been vandalized...
I'm with you - If I make a video game, I'm shooting evil aliens. I think I'll call it District 9.;-)
Ignoring history (or hiding from it) seems to be the basis of these laws. It strikes me as hugely contradictory to outlaw both denying the holocaust and displaying a swastika. It's an unfortunate historical relic - Deal with it...
Actually that seems perfectly rational in the context given (i.e. some lone wacko developing one at home.)
Threat of a nuke: (Potential damage) * (Ability of wacko to obtain special nuclear material) * (Ability of wacko to use material in a bad way) * (Likelihood of a wacko going through the trouble to jump the hurdles, create, and deploy the bomb) = Pretty low
Threat of a computer virus: (Potential damage) * (Ability of script-kiddie to assemble a nasty virus) * (Likelihood that some script-kiddie might actually do that) = Pretty high
A rogue nuke detonation is far worse than even the worst computer virus we've seen to date, but computer viruses are a more credible threat. That said, neither threat should be ignored as both present very real and potentially disastrous dangers to life as we know it and there are certainly baddies out there pursuing both.
Well put. The fact that the "small" regional conflicts are actually news-worthy is a huge step forward. They're tragic and we'd all like to see things progress to the point where they're non-existent, but they'd be totally under the radar if we were experiencing something on the scale of WWII (or gods help us WWIII).
...If you count in USA, EU, Russia and China thats pretty much 70% of the world. Now just create the same for Africa and we're close to 90%...
Sorry to nit-pick, but you may be neglecting a couple of very populous nuclear powers. I'm thinking of a fairly large mostly-Hindu nation that neighbors a "recently" formed largely Muslim nation that together house well over a billion people?
I don't entirely understand the fight though. Is MS suing these folks for damage done only to their company directly? Or possibly for some kind of defamation by making Windows appear insecure? Or are they suing on behalf of everyone affected by these ass-hats? Like a class-action thing on behalf of everyone with a computer?
Why would GPS be necessary? It seems like an intrusive and expensive solution. If you get a new car, get an odometer statement for your records - Also present it when you register your car (I realize this step requires a little bit of cooperation between state and fed). Each year when you file your taxes, report the odometer readings on any registered vehicles. When you sell/destroy your car, you're responsible for the close-out mileage (maybe a fiery wreckage exemption).
It's far from a perfect solution (possibilities for fraud, including mileage traveled on privately maintained roads, etc.), but it's pretty simple and fairly implementable.
Not a legend, your link just separates them out as not being major rabies carriers. Here in New Mexico, we get cases of hantavirus every year, which certainly is carries by mice and rats. We also typically get several cases of plague every year. And, while the little rodents don't directly communicate the disease to humans, they make a pretty efficient transport device for the critters that do.
Hey, if you were in the cross-hairs when I suggested that a more practical solution for her might be a station-wagon, you'd have bought her whatever she wanted too! Still, at this point we're in that golden zone where having it stolen would suck for both us and the criminal.
Still, most credit cards hold a liability of about $50 for the user, typically waived by the issuer in the case of fraud. Why do we sweat that when we've got at least $10k parked overnight in our drive-way. Sure, it's easier to steal CC#'s en masse, but as an individual I just do due diligence and don't sweat it.
I'm more at risk of somebody going through my trash.
I think people really underestimate dangers like that. We had a secretary who refused to use her purchase card over the Net (phone only) - Presumably the same with her personal cards. Why would you trust the integrity of some random voice on the other end of the phone more than an automated system? Not to mention trusting business owners to responsibly take care of your digits instead of leak them (intentionally or negligently)? I just take comfort that my liability is low on the cards I use and try not to let the dangerous numbers leak.
I think my biggest liability right now (barring kidnapping for ransom or some random thing like that) is somebody stealing my wife's SUV...
What I really liked about their plug was this (FTA):
Cybercrime is now larger than the international drug trade...
I don't have numbers, but my B.S. meter is going off the charts. I humbly request a definition of "bigger". If they mean that more people are affected by cybercrime than are directly involved in the international drug trade, then OK. But if you count even indirect supporters of the drug trade, that falls apart - They claim 10 million people were victims of cybercrime last year - You can't tell me that there are fewer than 10 million people supporting the illegal drug trade right now. No way. Even if they're talking about $$, I still call shenanigans - The drug trade is BIG money. If somebody has numbers contradicting that balance, please share, but that quote reeks of FUD.
I realize that I'm demanding citations without providing any - It still sounds fishy.
I'm perfectly happy with my situation. A boss who is pleasant, willing to go to bat w/ HR/training/ES&H/upper management/whoever, has no technical skills, accepts that he has no technical skills, and yields to recommendations from us underlings on most issues that won't affect his performance review.
On a side note, The IT Crowd may amuse some. Brit show with an incompetent IT boss, a pair of competent IT grunts, and bad English humor (humour?).
Cube was entertaining in several regards. I dug the fact that the set was, as you mentioned, a couple of cubes. I dug the underlying premise of the government project gone awry. But for a lot of the smaller details, you really had to turn your brain off.
Still it's certainly unique enough to be included in a discussion on sci-fi corridors. The corridors were square holes leading to an identical cube. How cool is that?
Not sci-fi, but Closet Land also ranks on minimal set design. Basically it's 2 people in an interrogation room. The only break from that that I can remember were a couple of flash-back scenes in a closet. Significantly less set than even Clerks.
I actually enjoy being a mutant. Beats the hell out of being some single-cell swamp dweller. Hell, even if you're in the 6000 year-old earth crowd, I like the fact that we've got a few more choices then would be available from pairing Adam and Eve's very limited set of chromosomes.
You obviously just don't see the humorous side of the D-Day landing.
Oh wait... Oh shit... Really? Tourists quacking on board? God, that's at least a little awful...
Was making a fresh, entertaining tour bus/boat just too damned difficult? Or was just displaying these tragic relics of our history as a race just not profitable?
Man, this story just got a little less entertaining.
Mighty strong words from somebody using a sig containing obviously copyrighted material. Oh, wait...
Seriously though. If this company was using a carefully crafted quacking noise to attract customers, I could see possibly protecting it. But FTA it seems like they're just trying to trademark the idea of having their customers use duck-calls to quack during the tour. If I'm on a tour, or just driving around, and I feel like quacking, I'll quack goddammit. If it's an organized event using calls that have been passed around, so be it - I'll quack with the group. How in the hell can you trademark having a group of people quack?!?
if the matix thought us anything, that's about the time humanity gets enslaved as power source:(
That bugged the hell out of me with the whole premise, not that I didn't enjoy the movie (pity there were no sequels). What part of "Life is endothermic" don't you understand?!?
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[...] It strikes me as hugely contradictory to outlaw both denying the holocaust and displaying a swastika.
Would you care to argument what is the contradiction, or is the "hugely" already sufficient?
Sure. Denying the holocaust is illegal (and moronic). Forbidding the display of the swastika is hiding from the holocaust. Ignoring for the moment that it's an ancient symbol with multiple interpretations, in Germany it's mostly a reminder of a terrible period in their history. Forbidding its use, even in a game about killing Nazis, falls short of denying the holocaust, but is akin to hiding it.
It's an unfortunate historical relic - Deal with it...
They are exactly doing that.
No, they're not. They're burying their past because it's ugly. They have good reasons for doing that as there is still wide-spread antisemitism and a noticeable population of violent skin-heads (at least last time I was there) and they want to quell that. But, despite their good intentions, hiding legitimate artifacts from WWII (like banning swastikas from video games) is not dealing with the problem, it's burying it.
In my grad-school office, there were posters of the guy accompanied by "his" poetry. They were put up by native Chinese studying abroad, but they loved the dude. And if you exclude the population of China, I'd submit that you've negated the use of the word "universally".
Agreed, though. At least the people that Mao starved were due to dumb-assery rather than malice. But frankly, I'm not convinced that the Nazis were entirely mal-intentioned either. Just homocidelly misguided. Patriotic intentions combined with actions that should have them lined up and shot. And regardless of your intentions, putting somebody in a cyanide shower and torching the corpse plays less well with the public than sending somebody off to a field to starve and saying "Oops" regardless of the head-count.
Hey - If the world didn't have chihuahuas, what would we feed our great danes?
Joke aside, even we're genetically modified these days. The human race is getting taller pretty quickly. Not to mention that boobs and wieners are getting bigger just because of latent biological drives that happen to encourage breeding behavior. But if it happens in a lab, it's evil. If it happens in a bedroom, it's natural. And if it happens in your garden, even the smelly hippies like it (OK - they like the bedroom stuff too, they're just less picky).
Stalin/Lenin, Lenin/Stalin. A bunch of folks half-way around the world that can't even be bothered to learn my language - What do you want from me? =)
Would have been a massively different country had Trotsky not been run out. Hugely different politics than either of those dudes. Not to say that the USSR would have turned into some Utopian commune, but I'll bet there would have been far fewer pointless deaths.
Only on slashdot are computer viruses worse than nukes.
I think it must have been that phrase that confused me... Or the parent post that said "virus writer " rather than virus engineer or wicked micro-biologist...
Still, I think the at-home-terrorist-kits typically include ready-made poisons or diseases like anthrax or small-pox. Do we really have wackos trying to create custom diseases to hit us with? Seems like a lot of trouble.
Trotsky got big enough to be revered and loved (and immortalized as Snowball in Animal Farm), but never big enough to foul things up and be hated like Lenin. He even had the good sense to get assassinated while still popular and published.
What boggles me is that Mao isn't universally hated... Or why Lenin's body hasn't been vandalized...
I'm with you - If I make a video game, I'm shooting evil aliens. I think I'll call it District 9. ;-)
Ignoring history (or hiding from it) seems to be the basis of these laws. It strikes me as hugely contradictory to outlaw both denying the holocaust and displaying a swastika. It's an unfortunate historical relic - Deal with it...
Actually that seems perfectly rational in the context given (i.e. some lone wacko developing one at home.)
Threat of a nuke: (Potential damage) * (Ability of wacko to obtain special nuclear material) * (Ability of wacko to use material in a bad way) * (Likelihood of a wacko going through the trouble to jump the hurdles, create, and deploy the bomb) = Pretty low
Threat of a computer virus: (Potential damage) * (Ability of script-kiddie to assemble a nasty virus) * (Likelihood that some script-kiddie might actually do that) = Pretty high
A rogue nuke detonation is far worse than even the worst computer virus we've seen to date, but computer viruses are a more credible threat. That said, neither threat should be ignored as both present very real and potentially disastrous dangers to life as we know it and there are certainly baddies out there pursuing both.
Well put. The fact that the "small" regional conflicts are actually news-worthy is a huge step forward. They're tragic and we'd all like to see things progress to the point where they're non-existent, but they'd be totally under the radar if we were experiencing something on the scale of WWII (or gods help us WWIII).
...If you count in USA, EU, Russia and China thats pretty much 70% of the world. Now just create the same for Africa and we're close to 90%...
Sorry to nit-pick, but you may be neglecting a couple of very populous nuclear powers. I'm thinking of a fairly large mostly-Hindu nation that neighbors a "recently" formed largely Muslim nation that together house well over a billion people?
I don't entirely understand the fight though. Is MS suing these folks for damage done only to their company directly? Or possibly for some kind of defamation by making Windows appear insecure? Or are they suing on behalf of everyone affected by these ass-hats? Like a class-action thing on behalf of everyone with a computer?
It's not clear what Google is planning on charging...
FTA, about $8 per book (including the pair of $1 fees going to ODB and Google), although a definite price hasn't been set.
$8 seems pretty fair to me...
Why would GPS be necessary? It seems like an intrusive and expensive solution. If you get a new car, get an odometer statement for your records - Also present it when you register your car (I realize this step requires a little bit of cooperation between state and fed). Each year when you file your taxes, report the odometer readings on any registered vehicles. When you sell/destroy your car, you're responsible for the close-out mileage (maybe a fiery wreckage exemption).
It's far from a perfect solution (possibilities for fraud, including mileage traveled on privately maintained roads, etc.), but it's pretty simple and fairly implementable.
Not a legend, your link just separates them out as not being major rabies carriers. Here in New Mexico, we get cases of hantavirus every year, which certainly is carries by mice and rats. We also typically get several cases of plague every year. And, while the little rodents don't directly communicate the disease to humans, they make a pretty efficient transport device for the critters that do.
Hey, if you were in the cross-hairs when I suggested that a more practical solution for her might be a station-wagon, you'd have bought her whatever she wanted too! Still, at this point we're in that golden zone where having it stolen would suck for both us and the criminal.
Still, most credit cards hold a liability of about $50 for the user, typically waived by the issuer in the case of fraud. Why do we sweat that when we've got at least $10k parked overnight in our drive-way. Sure, it's easier to steal CC#'s en masse, but as an individual I just do due diligence and don't sweat it.
I'm more at risk of somebody going through my trash.
I think people really underestimate dangers like that. We had a secretary who refused to use her purchase card over the Net (phone only) - Presumably the same with her personal cards. Why would you trust the integrity of some random voice on the other end of the phone more than an automated system? Not to mention trusting business owners to responsibly take care of your digits instead of leak them (intentionally or negligently)? I just take comfort that my liability is low on the cards I use and try not to let the dangerous numbers leak.
I think my biggest liability right now (barring kidnapping for ransom or some random thing like that) is somebody stealing my wife's SUV...
What I really liked about their plug was this (FTA):
Cybercrime is now larger than the international drug trade...
I don't have numbers, but my B.S. meter is going off the charts. I humbly request a definition of "bigger". If they mean that more people are affected by cybercrime than are directly involved in the international drug trade, then OK. But if you count even indirect supporters of the drug trade, that falls apart - They claim 10 million people were victims of cybercrime last year - You can't tell me that there are fewer than 10 million people supporting the illegal drug trade right now. No way. Even if they're talking about $$, I still call shenanigans - The drug trade is BIG money. If somebody has numbers contradicting that balance, please share, but that quote reeks of FUD.
I realize that I'm demanding citations without providing any - It still sounds fishy.
I'm perfectly happy with my situation. A boss who is pleasant, willing to go to bat w/ HR/training/ES&H/upper management/whoever, has no technical skills, accepts that he has no technical skills, and yields to recommendations from us underlings on most issues that won't affect his performance review.
On a side note, The IT Crowd may amuse some. Brit show with an incompetent IT boss, a pair of competent IT grunts, and bad English humor (humour?).
Cube was entertaining in several regards. I dug the fact that the set was, as you mentioned, a couple of cubes. I dug the underlying premise of the government project gone awry. But for a lot of the smaller details, you really had to turn your brain off.
Still it's certainly unique enough to be included in a discussion on sci-fi corridors. The corridors were square holes leading to an identical cube. How cool is that?
Not sci-fi, but Closet Land also ranks on minimal set design. Basically it's 2 people in an interrogation room. The only break from that that I can remember were a couple of flash-back scenes in a closet. Significantly less set than even Clerks.
Future tech caused huge drama in the Jetsons' universe. Do you not remember the ongoing epic battle between Cogsley's Cogs and Spacely's Sprockets?
I actually enjoy being a mutant. Beats the hell out of being some single-cell swamp dweller. Hell, even if you're in the 6000 year-old earth crowd, I like the fact that we've got a few more choices then would be available from pairing Adam and Eve's very limited set of chromosomes.
You obviously just don't see the humorous side of the D-Day landing.
Oh wait... Oh shit... Really? Tourists quacking on board? God, that's at least a little awful...
Was making a fresh, entertaining tour bus/boat just too damned difficult? Or was just displaying these tragic relics of our history as a race just not profitable?
Man, this story just got a little less entertaining.
FTA, Ride the Duck uses Wacky Quackers (apparently proprietary). The calls that Bay Quackers uses are apparently offensively similar.
And yes, this does make a joke out of our court system.
Mighty strong words from somebody using a sig containing obviously copyrighted material. Oh, wait...
Seriously though. If this company was using a carefully crafted quacking noise to attract customers, I could see possibly protecting it. But FTA it seems like they're just trying to trademark the idea of having their customers use duck-calls to quack during the tour. If I'm on a tour, or just driving around, and I feel like quacking, I'll quack goddammit. If it's an organized event using calls that have been passed around, so be it - I'll quack with the group. How in the hell can you trademark having a group of people quack?!?
if the matix thought us anything, that's about the time humanity gets enslaved as power source :(
That bugged the hell out of me with the whole premise, not that I didn't enjoy the movie (pity there were no sequels). What part of "Life is endothermic" don't you understand?!?