"How many customers will they be forced to ban before they realize how much this hurts them and helps their competition?"
I think you are missing the point. The point is that they probably only need to send one letter to scare people into compliance. The ISPs do not have to ban anyone. They can merely forward the media companies letters onto the customer and then let their own sense of perceived "right" and "wrong" deal with it. I would submit that most people would treat it like a citation. Some would get mad and rip it up, some would try and challenge it in court or whatever, but most "citizens" would be scared into compliance. The same as with speeding tickets or any other non violent "crime".
They need only create an atmosphere of fear to try and get people to stop pirating. Right now, downloading a movie has absolutely zero real world repercussions. The idea I am sure, is to change that so now you are receiving an actual addressed letter with your name and address on it confirming that you are a "criminal".
Just another technique that they are using to try and preserve their monopoly. It had to come to this eventually. Real pirates will ignore the letter, but they were never about getting rid of the "real" pirates. Casual downloaders will be scared into compliance. Or at least thats the theory.
Well I have a 75 foot run or so to a projector. The key I have found, is to use DVI to HDMI converters wherever possible. I am not sure why, but i can run 75feet of cheap 20$ monoprice cable, and get perfect results only when using DVI at the video card end.
I guess DVI sends more signal or something? the cable is the same, but using the HDMI output as opposed to the DVI output prevents the cable from working.
I have noticed this on a few different players.
TL:DR: Use an HDMI to DVI adapter at the video card end to do long runs of HDMI cable.
Better than buying overpriced cables thats for sure! HDMI/DVI adapters are like 3 bucks or less.
Well I too know how to drive, but in his picture, it seems as if the arrows are all telling you to go counter to what you would expect. Examining them closer, there is a tiny dot which is i suppose, expected to indicate the presence of the roundabout, but I think it would be hard to design a more counter intuitive street sign.
I would turn left at that roundabout. Because the arrows on the ground CLEARLY indicate that one should turn immediately left when coming up to it.
"people should realize you don't pick up a stick in a parking lot and put it in your computer"... "It's like telling an adult they shouldn't pick up a syringe in a park and stick it in their arm."
Well aside from the fact that I dont usually loose medical devices on the street... How about a more fitting analogy. You are in the parking lot and see a wallet that looks like it has fallen out of someones pocket. Now do you open the wallet to see whats inside? Most people would probably say YES, for a multitude of reasons. But uhoh! the wallet was full of ANTHRAX! and you are now dead.
How was the person supposed to have any idea that a seemingly harmless wallet would have such a negative consequence? A syringe on the ground on the other hand is most likely medical waste. There are very few situations where a person would willingly pick that up, much less stick it in themselves.
Well where I work they get around paying overtime by offering "flex" time. Which is simply a 1:1 time committment. You work 10 hours one day, you can take 2 off on another day. Sucks ass I think, because the ratio should be 1:1.5 or 1:2. They should reward workers for working what really is overtime, instead of simply time shifting your hours.
But thats IT for you!
Because you cant centrally manage or update firefox. Unlike chrome, which has MSI's available and GPO's for administration. Firefox has none of these things. They have been requested for years but mozilla seems to not care one bit about firefox in the enterprise.
That is why we rolled out chrome this year to replace IE. MUCH easier than hand configuring, or coming up with some hack-solution to get firefox onto every machine in an easy to update, easy to centrally manage/configure way.
As to the articles point, does IE support adblock? noscript? Then why would any modern person use it?
pff I guess you forget history then. Apple was going down the tubes at the time. Their OS was buggy, the computers ran on dated power pc chips which simply couldnt compete, and pretty much everyone who wasnt a graphics designer did not want to use a mac. It looked very much like apple would die, and then microsoft came in and gave them all that money. A few years later the ipod and OSX was born, and they went to intel chips as well.
I remember the articles at the time. I remember thinking that microsoft was throwing a bone to apple, so that they wouldn't be considered a monopoly. Not sure if you were in the industry at that time, but it was a common perception. And a correct one. Apple would have surely died if not for microsoft cash in their hour of need. They were in a death spiral in the late 90s, written off and left for dead by all but the most rabid macophiles. The computer wars were over and PC's won.
Not to say that similar to not taking all your antibiotics, the disease came back hard with the iphone and such. But I can't imagine anyone denying that it looked very bleak for a while for them.
"It seems like everyone is dodging the truth at the core of the matter. Life isn't fair and some folks get raw deals. The best you can do is the best you can do with the resources you have."
I am pretty sure he was using a resource he had, his freedom, to solve his problem. I wouldn't blame anyone in the USA for doing something similar.
You would have had him play by the rules and quietly die in the gutter? Fuck that! This is america isn't it?? seems like he was just taking an opportunity to rise himself up by his own bootstraps.
Also to me it seems like, regarding healthcare, everyone in the usa is getting a raw deal. I read a bunch of comments and people are happy to be paying *ONLY* $400 a month for their healthcare. I mean for fucks sake! If you think that is a good deal, I would urge you to look at some other countries that don't pay anything, or hardly anything for a flat rate medical care system. Except we don't call universal coverage a "good deal", we call it a human right or the natural order of things. We even take it for granted. The idea here is that one shouldn't have to make or take any kind of "deal" when it comes to their life!
Dealing for your life, doesn't that indicate the devil at work?
"Paying for yourself not practical? I don't smoke and I'm not overweight, and I pay $150/mo for full coverage."
LOL. Are you saying that 150$ a month is a good deal? I pay about $120/ month for extended health for my whole family (3 persons). Thats 80% covered on all dental, optical, Rx (drugs). This is seperate from standard medical care that everyone gets. Obviously all medical procedures (that are not dental, optical, or paying for drugs) are covered 100% by the government such as surgeries, shots, checkups, clinic visits, hospital visits, ambulances... etc.. This is in canada in case you are curious.
You think you have it good? HA! even your comparatively (american) small amount, based on the fact that you are young and have no problems, can not compare with an average person (ie me), in a country with universal healthcare. I am able to support my whole family for the same or less amount!
Just wait till you have a kid or other dependent which may not necessarily be as healthy as you.
Sorry, AGW seems to mean "Man made global warming". What the hell would the other side to that be? You are saying that there are people out there who dont believe that humans have affected the climate?
Are you kidding me?
If people don't believe by this time in global climate change, what with the fucking glaciers melting all around us and shit. Well those people are fucking retards. I think the debate is whether we can fix it or not. I hardly think anyone but the most wound up nutter would straight up deny man made global climate change.
True, but will americans be content to have their country turned into a desert while canada and russia gain all the worlds now arable land? Personally I would be happy with that, being a canadian. But I am sure americans would elect some palinesque warlord to try and use their dwindiling might to try and take our land from us (or russia). This could very well lead to nuclear war which well not killing everyone, would have definite negative effects.
Of course thats all hypothetical. Except for the fact that canada and russia gain alot by global warming, while countries closer to the equator like the usa stand to lose much much more from not ensuring the "status quo" as you say. The status quo is what has made USA the breadbasket of the world.
Whats wrong with the same throw away password for multiple sites? Personally I usually make new usernames for different sites as well, but does it really matter if you didnt? The best someone could do is get your email address, which assumingly, you havent used a "throw away password".for. Or spam some forum account that by definition of it being "throw away worthy" you do not care about?
Otherwise you would have hundreds of unique password and usernames combinations that you would obviously need to write down. I would argue that is less secure.
Shippers really do NOT want to tell their customers, "We lost your cargo," and risk losing them to competitors.
I was under the impression that the way they write these kinds of transoceanic contracts is that you are actually responsible for your cargo. You are responsible for getting it insured, and you are responsible for the loss NOT the shipper. Amazing, but I do remember reading that from some research I did some time ago.
In that case, the shipper doesnt care one bit if your cargo makes it over. I also learned that you would never want to ship something priceless by sea (such as all your possessions in a move) because they basically say that they are not responsible - even if they totally are.
Unfortunately I cannot find any supporting links at this time.
"Anything which deals in absolutes is probably fear and/or ignorance based"
What about not trusting humans with something that can completely fuck up an area, or even the globe, for 10000 years+? Its EXPERIENCE that tells me nuclear power plants are made by the lowest bidder, to barely meet current safeguards, and are not retrofitted to prevent disasters which have been known about since the fucking 70s!! I was once pro nuclear power. I bought all the propaganda about it being safe and clean. This japanese incident has shown me how wrong I was.
In short, if humans fuck up nuclear power, they shouldn't be doing anything with it! I refuse to believe that this was an "accident" any more than you can have a nuclear weapon "accident". Multiple safeguards and proceedures have to be circumvented to lead to an accident with nuclear power, and what we are currently doing is clearly not safe enough, not accident proof enough. Maybe it never can be when humans are involved. Especially when a few simple mistakes can have repercussions for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.
It's simply no longer worth the risk in my opinion.
If you cannot measure all of the variables, how can you say its not, for all intents and purposes, random?
If we assume everything is determined by biology, or whatever, and you accept that we cannot necessarily see all the variables that go into creating a consciousness, then how can you then predict anything, when you dont have all the inital variables? (and perhaps never will)
I can easily make that simpler. Simply change the plus sign into a little picture of an alarm clock. Or they could change it to the words "add an alarm".
Why would anyone naturally assume a plus symbol has anything to do with alarms? I wouldn't assume that, and I would only click it because I am trying to experiment and figure out what things do by clicking every button.
Its stupid minimalist UI thats the problem. Designers trying to be more artistic than simple. I mean look at google chrome! You cant find anything because they have gone out of there way to hide everything of value (including the URL bar now!). Pretty soon there will be just one big button on everything that reads your mind and does exactly what you want. A designers dream perhaps, but a nightmare to anyone who values their sense of control. Microsoft has been trying to read users minds for years, and thats one of the reasons they are despised. Personally, I hate it when technology thinks for me. Mostly because technology is stupid!
Filezilla can do automatic bans. I am sure your favourite FTP server can do that as well. 5 failed login attempts = auto ban for 3 hours. That solved all our problems in the office.
For home, just running an FTP server on a different port got rid of these kind of attacks completely. Of course, blocking hinet and other chinese netblocks works as well. You have a lot of options here.
"hunters in America are so effective that we need to pass laws to prevent them from killing off all the wildlife in the country"
You think zombies are like a deer shot from a helicopter with an AK? please.. a zombie war would be all close quarters combat, multiple targets, all actively hunting you as well. If you were able to reload in time to kill the waves upon waves of humans coming at you, you would have to go for mostly headshots. Another concern which hunters do not have.
American hunters are the exact opposite of what it would take to defeat a zombie infestation. For instance, you will not be chugging beer in your quads while you pick off some defenceless non intelligent prey. Its almost the exact opposite of the skills you would need. Knowing how to aim long distance and keep quiet are great for bison or whatever, but zombies? Whole different ballgame.
In most zombie lore, they overcome you with sheer numbers. Animals tend to run the other way when they get shot. Zombies would most likely run right at you begging for more.
Most likely the victors would be like the movie cliches - twitch arcade gamers, or people that know how to run and hide. When i picture an "american hunter" i picture a middle aged overweight guy in flannel. Not exactly the most swift or agile type of human out there.
"Though you could introduce a "swear jar" feature easily enough, whereby using certain words in general chat on most servers would net you a fine, Demolition Man style"
I think you missed the moral of demolition man as it applies to your anecdote. The "advanced" society claimed that small steps such as outlawing swearing made everything safer, when really it just made everyone into greater noobs who were then ill prepared, evolutionarily, when real danger came.
The only way to fight trolls is to ignore them. Getting "creative" simply feeds into their troll games. This is a stupid idea from an increasingly ideologically dangerous developer. Makes me wish I didnt have hundreds of dollars worth of games locked up with them thats for sure.
Apparently, there is no central configuration for the phones (hardware) and all the phones need to be locally configured. That is just what i have heard about asterisk VS ccm. Because asterisk is all orientated towards POTS line cards and not IP phones. It was designed as an analog system, with some digital tacked onto it as an after thought. Meanwhile the new cisco call manager has polished their SIP support (i have heard, we dont have it yet) so that most things that you need SCCP for have now been reimplemented in SIP on ccm.
For instance, how would you centrally assign multiple lines to a phone? hand edit every xml file on the tftp server? your gonna do that for 2000 phones?
Of course im not an asterisk expert, but I am a collector of anecdotes. Cisco Call manager has been pretty rock solid for us. I cant even remember any major issue in the last 5 years.
"Comcast: "We want your money. Please sign-up for service." ME: "Fuck you." (hangs-up on comcast sales idiot)"
You (then implicitly): Does without internet service because corporations have purchased laws preserving their monopoly and outlawing competition in certain areas. Corporation doesn't give a fuck about your $50 a month service fee and barrels happily along.
Question: Which is easier for a citizen to change, the behavior of a corporation who can purchase laws? Or an elected government which allows laws to be purchased.
Doing without essential services in order to try and teach a corporation a "lesson" isnt my idea of fun. Legislating that corporation to behave fairly and not back me into a corner, is much more societally workable. I mean I HATE the current conservative government in canada right now. But I do not hate the idea of government or government in general. This is a big difference between the way americans think, and the rest of the world.
Well its not just the "geek" who prefers metric. Go to any country in the world besides the usa and everyone, even down to the most uneducated brute prefers metric temperature, metric measurement and metric distances.
Its quite a bit harder to add fractions than decimals. I am pretty sure thats like a universal, and americans have simply "learned" to be proficient at fractions.
Base 10 is ALWAYS easier than what, base 16? base 12? even the units arent the same base numbers!! madness!!
Your wikipedia passage only really applies to the usa as most other countries all converted at some point to metric and the populations didnt revolt against their centralized authority.
Perhaps the problem of americans distrusting their government so much wouldn't be such a problem if they converted to metric. Perhaps their distrust of government would be diminished if the government successfully pushed through these measures, held your hands and said "see its not so bad!" Perhaps it will lead to a social revolt in that americans will finaly realize that their government is THEIRS. Not some opposing force in a manufactured duality.
I get what you are trying to say with this, but honestly when everyone says its safe, yet these kind of "accidents" can still occur it makes you step back and really weigh the positives and negatives.
For instance, in these plants they are using plutonium mox fuel. That shit has a halflife of 20,000 years. So it wont be completely nonreactive for approximately 250,000 years or 12000 human generations. Sure it shouldn't happen, and there were no doubt many mistakes by this particular company. But even if it is a possibility that this would happen, and it obviously is, should we not reconsider the long term environmental and other effects when we are possibly going to be affecting forward 12000 generations in the future?
So far in my life time (30 years) there have been 3 major nuclear accidents. Does this not at least warrant a second look? There are plenty of these unsafe plants active in the world, and yes I am aware there are safe reactor designs (CANDU). But when you factor in human greed, nuke plants run by the lowest bidder, should we even be doing it?
I was VERY pro nuclear power before this complete mess that has happened. Even though we will run out of uranium by 2100, even though fuel stays reactive for tens of thousands of years. But honestly, if the japanese cant even do it right, what hope do we have for any country out there?
The timescales alone are enough to make one pause. Can you really trust the next 12,000 generations of man to not have any accidents with spent fuel? Is that something that we should be burdening our future generations with for a short term gain today?
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I think you are missing the point. The point is that they probably only need to send one letter to scare people into compliance. The ISPs do not have to ban anyone. They can merely forward the media companies letters onto the customer and then let their own sense of perceived "right" and "wrong" deal with it.
I would submit that most people would treat it like a citation. Some would get mad and rip it up, some would try and challenge it in court or whatever, but most "citizens" would be scared into compliance. The same as with speeding tickets or any other non violent "crime".
They need only create an atmosphere of fear to try and get people to stop pirating. Right now, downloading a movie has absolutely zero real world repercussions. The idea I am sure, is to change that so now you are receiving an actual addressed letter with your name and address on it confirming that you are a "criminal".
Just another technique that they are using to try and preserve their monopoly. It had to come to this eventually. Real pirates will ignore the letter, but they were never about getting rid of the "real" pirates. Casual downloaders will be scared into compliance. Or at least thats the theory.
Well I have a 75 foot run or so to a projector. The key I have found, is to use DVI to HDMI converters wherever possible. I am not sure why, but i can run 75feet of cheap 20$ monoprice cable, and get perfect results only when using DVI at the video card end.
I guess DVI sends more signal or something? the cable is the same, but using the HDMI output as opposed to the DVI output prevents the cable from working.
I have noticed this on a few different players.
TL:DR: Use an HDMI to DVI adapter at the video card end to do long runs of HDMI cable.
Better than buying overpriced cables thats for sure! HDMI/DVI adapters are like 3 bucks or less.
Well I too know how to drive, but in his picture, it seems as if the arrows are all telling you to go counter to what you would expect. Examining them closer, there is a tiny dot which is i suppose, expected to indicate the presence of the roundabout, but I think it would be hard to design a more counter intuitive street sign.
I would turn left at that roundabout. Because the arrows on the ground CLEARLY indicate that one should turn immediately left when coming up to it.
Well aside from the fact that I dont usually loose medical devices on the street... How about a more fitting analogy. You are in the parking lot and see a wallet that looks like it has fallen out of someones pocket. Now do you open the wallet to see whats inside? Most people would probably say YES, for a multitude of reasons. But uhoh! the wallet was full of ANTHRAX! and you are now dead.
How was the person supposed to have any idea that a seemingly harmless wallet would have such a negative consequence? A syringe on the ground on the other hand is most likely medical waste. There are very few situations where a person would willingly pick that up, much less stick it in themselves.
Well where I work they get around paying overtime by offering "flex" time. Which is simply a 1:1 time committment. You work 10 hours one day, you can take 2 off on another day. Sucks ass I think, because the ratio should be 1:1.5 or 1:2. They should reward workers for working what really is overtime, instead of simply time shifting your hours.
But thats IT for you!
Because you cant centrally manage or update firefox. Unlike chrome, which has MSI's available and GPO's for administration. Firefox has none of these things. They have been requested for years but mozilla seems to not care one bit about firefox in the enterprise.
That is why we rolled out chrome this year to replace IE. MUCH easier than hand configuring, or coming up with some hack-solution to get firefox onto every machine in an easy to update, easy to centrally manage/configure way.
As to the articles point, does IE support adblock? noscript? Then why would any modern person use it?
pff I guess you forget history then. Apple was going down the tubes at the time. Their OS was buggy, the computers ran on dated power pc chips which simply couldnt compete, and pretty much everyone who wasnt a graphics designer did not want to use a mac. It looked very much like apple would die, and then microsoft came in and gave them all that money. A few years later the ipod and OSX was born, and they went to intel chips as well.
I remember the articles at the time. I remember thinking that microsoft was throwing a bone to apple, so that they wouldn't be considered a monopoly. Not sure if you were in the industry at that time, but it was a common perception. And a correct one. Apple would have surely died if not for microsoft cash in their hour of need. They were in a death spiral in the late 90s, written off and left for dead by all but the most rabid macophiles. The computer wars were over and PC's won.
Not to say that similar to not taking all your antibiotics, the disease came back hard with the iphone and such. But I can't imagine anyone denying that it looked very bleak for a while for them.
I am pretty sure he was using a resource he had, his freedom, to solve his problem. I wouldn't blame anyone in the USA for doing something similar.
You would have had him play by the rules and quietly die in the gutter? Fuck that! This is america isn't it?? seems like he was just taking an opportunity to rise himself up by his own bootstraps.
Also to me it seems like, regarding healthcare, everyone in the usa is getting a raw deal. I read a bunch of comments and people are happy to be paying *ONLY* $400 a month for their healthcare. I mean for fucks sake! If you think that is a good deal, I would urge you to look at some other countries that don't pay anything, or hardly anything for a flat rate medical care system. Except we don't call universal coverage a "good deal", we call it a human right or the natural order of things. We even take it for granted. The idea here is that one shouldn't have to make or take any kind of "deal" when it comes to their life!
Dealing for your life, doesn't that indicate the devil at work?
LOL. Are you saying that 150$ a month is a good deal? I pay about $120/ month for extended health for my whole family (3 persons). Thats 80% covered on all dental, optical, Rx (drugs). This is seperate from standard medical care that everyone gets. Obviously all medical procedures (that are not dental, optical, or paying for drugs) are covered 100% by the government such as surgeries, shots, checkups, clinic visits, hospital visits, ambulances... etc.. This is in canada in case you are curious.
You think you have it good? HA! even your comparatively (american) small amount, based on the fact that you are young and have no problems, can not compare with an average person (ie me), in a country with universal healthcare. I am able to support my whole family for the same or less amount!
Just wait till you have a kid or other dependent which may not necessarily be as healthy as you.
Sorry, AGW seems to mean "Man made global warming". What the hell would the other side to that be? You are saying that there are people out there who dont believe that humans have affected the climate?
Are you kidding me?
If people don't believe by this time in global climate change, what with the fucking glaciers melting all around us and shit. Well those people are fucking retards. I think the debate is whether we can fix it or not. I hardly think anyone but the most wound up nutter would straight up deny man made global climate change.
True, but will americans be content to have their country turned into a desert while canada and russia gain all the worlds now arable land? Personally I would be happy with that, being a canadian. But I am sure americans would elect some palinesque warlord to try and use their dwindiling might to try and take our land from us (or russia). This could very well lead to nuclear war which well not killing everyone, would have definite negative effects.
Of course thats all hypothetical. Except for the fact that canada and russia gain alot by global warming, while countries closer to the equator like the usa stand to lose much much more from not ensuring the "status quo" as you say. The status quo is what has made USA the breadbasket of the world.
Whats wrong with the same throw away password for multiple sites? Personally I usually make new usernames for different sites as well, but does it really matter if you didnt? The best someone could do is get your email address, which assumingly, you havent used a "throw away password".for. Or spam some forum account that by definition of it being "throw away worthy" you do not care about?
Otherwise you would have hundreds of unique password and usernames combinations that you would obviously need to write down. I would argue that is less secure.
I was under the impression that the way they write these kinds of transoceanic contracts is that you are actually responsible for your cargo. You are responsible for getting it insured, and you are responsible for the loss NOT the shipper. Amazing, but I do remember reading that from some research I did some time ago.
In that case, the shipper doesnt care one bit if your cargo makes it over. I also learned that you would never want to ship something priceless by sea (such as all your possessions in a move) because they basically say that they are not responsible - even if they totally are.
Unfortunately I cannot find any supporting links at this time.
its a text file genius.
What about not trusting humans with something that can completely fuck up an area, or even the globe, for 10000 years+?
Its EXPERIENCE that tells me nuclear power plants are made by the lowest bidder, to barely meet current safeguards, and are not retrofitted to prevent disasters which have been known about since the fucking 70s!!
I was once pro nuclear power. I bought all the propaganda about it being safe and clean. This japanese incident has shown me how wrong I was.
In short, if humans fuck up nuclear power, they shouldn't be doing anything with it! I refuse to believe that this was an "accident" any more than you can have a nuclear weapon "accident". Multiple safeguards and proceedures have to be circumvented to lead to an accident with nuclear power, and what we are currently doing is clearly not safe enough, not accident proof enough. Maybe it never can be when humans are involved. Especially when a few simple mistakes can have repercussions for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.
It's simply no longer worth the risk in my opinion.
If you cannot measure all of the variables, how can you say its not, for all intents and purposes, random?
If we assume everything is determined by biology, or whatever, and you accept that we cannot necessarily see all the variables that go into creating a consciousness, then how can you then predict anything, when you dont have all the inital variables? (and perhaps never will)
I can easily make that simpler. Simply change the plus sign into a little picture of an alarm clock. Or they could change it to the words "add an alarm".
Why would anyone naturally assume a plus symbol has anything to do with alarms? I wouldn't assume that, and I would only click it because I am trying to experiment and figure out what things do by clicking every button.
Its stupid minimalist UI thats the problem. Designers trying to be more artistic than simple. I mean look at google chrome! You cant find anything because they have gone out of there way to hide everything of value (including the URL bar now!). Pretty soon there will be just one big button on everything that reads your mind and does exactly what you want. A designers dream perhaps, but a nightmare to anyone who values their sense of control. Microsoft has been trying to read users minds for years, and thats one of the reasons they are despised. Personally, I hate it when technology thinks for me. Mostly because technology is stupid!
Filezilla can do automatic bans. I am sure your favourite FTP server can do that as well. 5 failed login attempts = auto ban for 3 hours. That solved all our problems in the office.
For home, just running an FTP server on a different port got rid of these kind of attacks completely. Of course, blocking hinet and other chinese netblocks works as well. You have a lot of options here.
You think zombies are like a deer shot from a helicopter with an AK? please.. a zombie war would be all close quarters combat, multiple targets, all actively hunting you as well. If you were able to reload in time to kill the waves upon waves of humans coming at you, you would have to go for mostly headshots. Another concern which hunters do not have.
American hunters are the exact opposite of what it would take to defeat a zombie infestation. For instance, you will not be chugging beer in your quads while you pick off some defenceless non intelligent prey. Its almost the exact opposite of the skills you would need. Knowing how to aim long distance and keep quiet are great for bison or whatever, but zombies? Whole different ballgame.
In most zombie lore, they overcome you with sheer numbers. Animals tend to run the other way when they get shot. Zombies would most likely run right at you begging for more.
Most likely the victors would be like the movie cliches - twitch arcade gamers, or people that know how to run and hide. When i picture an "american hunter" i picture a middle aged overweight guy in flannel. Not exactly the most swift or agile type of human out there.
I think you missed the moral of demolition man as it applies to your anecdote. The "advanced" society claimed that small steps such as outlawing swearing made everything safer, when really it just made everyone into greater noobs who were then ill prepared, evolutionarily, when real danger came.
The only way to fight trolls is to ignore them. Getting "creative" simply feeds into their troll games. This is a stupid idea from an increasingly ideologically dangerous developer. Makes me wish I didnt have hundreds of dollars worth of games locked up with them thats for sure.
Apparently, there is no central configuration for the phones (hardware) and all the phones need to be locally configured. That is just what i have heard about asterisk VS ccm. Because asterisk is all orientated towards POTS line cards and not IP phones. It was designed as an analog system, with some digital tacked onto it as an after thought. Meanwhile the new cisco call manager has polished their SIP support (i have heard, we dont have it yet) so that most things that you need SCCP for have now been reimplemented in SIP on ccm.
For instance, how would you centrally assign multiple lines to a phone? hand edit every xml file on the tftp server? your gonna do that for 2000 phones?
Of course im not an asterisk expert, but I am a collector of anecdotes. Cisco Call manager has been pretty rock solid for us. I cant even remember any major issue in the last 5 years.
You (then implicitly): Does without internet service because corporations have purchased laws preserving their monopoly and outlawing competition in certain areas. Corporation doesn't give a fuck about your $50 a month service fee and barrels happily along.
Question: Which is easier for a citizen to change, the behavior of a corporation who can purchase laws? Or an elected government which allows laws to be purchased.
Doing without essential services in order to try and teach a corporation a "lesson" isnt my idea of fun. Legislating that corporation to behave fairly and not back me into a corner, is much more societally workable. I mean I HATE the current conservative government in canada right now. But I do not hate the idea of government or government in general. This is a big difference between the way americans think, and the rest of the world.
Well its not just the "geek" who prefers metric. Go to any country in the world besides the usa and everyone, even down to the most uneducated brute prefers metric temperature, metric measurement and metric distances.
Its quite a bit harder to add fractions than decimals. I am pretty sure thats like a universal, and americans have simply "learned" to be proficient at fractions.
Base 10 is ALWAYS easier than what, base 16? base 12? even the units arent the same base numbers!! madness!!
Your wikipedia passage only really applies to the usa as most other countries all converted at some point to metric and the populations didnt revolt against their centralized authority.
Perhaps the problem of americans distrusting their government so much wouldn't be such a problem if they converted to metric. Perhaps their distrust of government would be diminished if the government successfully pushed through these measures, held your hands and said "see its not so bad!" Perhaps it will lead to a social revolt in that americans will finaly realize that their government is THEIRS. Not some opposing force in a manufactured duality.
Whats wrong with saying 9.5 million litres? Why use an obscure term like megalitres? Is it just because americans don't get the metric system?
I get what you are trying to say with this, but honestly when everyone says its safe, yet these kind of "accidents" can still occur it makes you step back and really weigh the positives and negatives.
For instance, in these plants they are using plutonium mox fuel. That shit has a halflife of 20,000 years. So it wont be completely nonreactive for approximately 250,000 years or 12000 human generations. Sure it shouldn't happen, and there were no doubt many mistakes by this particular company. But even if it is a possibility that this would happen, and it obviously is, should we not reconsider the long term environmental and other effects when we are possibly going to be affecting forward 12000 generations in the future?
So far in my life time (30 years) there have been 3 major nuclear accidents. Does this not at least warrant a second look? There are plenty of these unsafe plants active in the world, and yes I am aware there are safe reactor designs (CANDU). But when you factor in human greed, nuke plants run by the lowest bidder, should we even be doing it?
I was VERY pro nuclear power before this complete mess that has happened. Even though we will run out of uranium by 2100, even though fuel stays reactive for tens of thousands of years. But honestly, if the japanese cant even do it right, what hope do we have for any country out there?
The timescales alone are enough to make one pause. Can you really trust the next 12,000 generations of man to not have any accidents with spent fuel? Is that something that we should be burdening our future generations with for a short term gain today?
Further reading: 'No safe levels' of radiation in Japan