To me it's "thought crime". Nobody should be prosecuted for such stuff. What if someone planted child porn on you or your property? What if some impulsive teenager sent you a naked pic of herself/himself? Guaranteeing that stuff is deleted beyond recovery is not so simple nowadays when you have "wear levelling algorithms" etc.
There is no proof that children were hurt by hint, I doubt there is even proof that it was _likely_ that children would be hurt by what he actually did. If he hurt any children or tried to, then sure sentence him for it.
In my opinion everyone should be allowed to be flawed in the privacy of their own homes. Whether it's to think murderous thoughts about other people, or to lust after their neighbour's spouse[1], or consider robbing a bank.
Yes those thoughts ARE wrong. BUT, we are humans, people are flawed, and more importantly, Government, the Judges, and Cops, and Juries are all also human and flawed too.
So to be on the safe side we should just judge people for what they do. And leave it to God to do the judging on thoughts.
If you don't think there's a God, the majority of the people in the world disagree with you. You may think they are stupid, but if you are so smart, you should also realize that it is a very good idea to encourage the concept of having God punish people for wrong thoughts rather than let people do the punishing.
[1] Adultery is a felony in Michigan (and a crime in many countries). If you don't think adultery is serious, maybe you should do a survey and ask married people what they think about it. FWIW, I'm single - from what I see adultery is often very damaging to families and thus society. In contrast some pervert wanking off to simpsons or even child porn isn't going cause any problems to families and society as long as he just keeps it to himself.
Not like he's starting a "PedoPride" or Pedo-rights campaign... I'd draw the line at that - and no that line is not what you think it is, you pervert;).
> Ah, there's the rub, to give us our bit of Shakespeare for the day.
Shakespeare? Wasn't he that pervert who wrote Romeo and Juliet?
Juliet's age to quote him:
But saying o'er what I have said before, My child is yet a stranger in the world. She hath not seen the change of fourteen years. Let two more summers wither in their pride, 'ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
I personally don't see anything wrong with incinerating garbage for energy (the sort that can be incinerated). Especially if some energy would otherwise come from burning coal or oil anyway. This is assuming the incinerators are built so they are less harmful than burning coal or oil.
If you're going to burn oil, might as well use the oil to make plastics first, then when you've recycled the plastic too many times that it's not worth being recycled anymore, burn it for energy. This is why I personally think plastic shopping bags aren't that bad for the environment - since most people can find multiple uses for them before they are finally discarded (recycled/incinerated)- as long as you don't litter with them.
It's like someone patenting a circular wheel, and everyone having to come up with other weird shaped wheels and special mechanisms (or roads) to make them still run kind of smoothly, and patenting their versions as well.
Lastly, if the rate of progress and innovation is supposed to be increasing, that means patent terms should be decreasing.
Same goes for copyrights - if marketing and distribution is supposedly better than the old days, copyright terms should be getting shorter instead of becoming much longer.
So what happens if you throw a party and end up with lots more garbage than normal?
Over here where I live, the cost of labour and living is low. So we have various people going around the neighbourhood collecting newspapers, plastic etc to bring to recycling places which pay them money for it. Some collect paper and newspapers, some collect plastic.
They normally pay you a small sum for a stack of old newspapers, not much $$, but enough so that many people keep them for recycling rather than throw them away.
> As I've said before, all they'd need to do is get us dangled over a big enough debt barrel that we can't pay it off
Why wouldn't the USA be able to pay it off?
I believe the USA owes China money that is payable in US dollars and NOT yuan or renminbi or gold or whatever else.
That's like an amusement park owing China a debt that's payable in amusement park tokens.
Tokens which the amusement park can print more of if really necessary and probably has already been printing like crazy[1].
The amusement park workers are also paid in tokens, but if the park operators are savvy enough they should throw some newly minted higher denomination tokens at the workers to keep them quiet.
Otherwise the workers are going to be very unhappy since the price of oil, wheat, computers, orange juice etc, normally traded in tokens will most certainly go up.
Sure it will hurt the USA, but it will hurt China a lot too. So China will have to do a lot of damage control first.
The USA owes China about 2 trillion right? Doesn't seem like it would be a big problem for the Fed Reserve to "not disclose" where two or three more trillions have gone.
That's why I find it funny when the US people say they don't want to pay for other people's healthcare etc, and Obama is evil for wanting to revamp the healthcare.
They're already paying a lot. Medicaid, Medicare, poor people clogging up ER. Poor people getting kicked out of ER till they come back sick enough to be treated in ER;).
And by the stats, they're not getting such a great deal for the amount they pay. Yes many cancer survival rates are higher in the US, but that's if you're covered or can afford it. If you're rich, no problems.
It'll be amazing if Obama and gang could make US healthcare even worse. But I'm not going to bet against it either;).
And that's why going back to a gold standard is stupid.
161000000kg / 6.7 billion = 24 grams per person (or USD850 per person at current high prices).
161000000kg of gold is worth USD5.7 trillion at current prices (USD35359/kg).
The current global economy must be way more than USD6 trillion. If it's 10x more, gold would be 10x more expensive.
So if we use gold as currency, gold would artificially become too/more expensive to use as a material (currently it is used in many common products with no problems).
Gold is too useful as a material to be wasted as a currency.
What also boggles me is they threw away a lot of the stuff - including data they got from the lunar missions.
A lot of the expertise has been lost. People have retired, the factories that built the parts (e.g. those huge Saturn V engines) may no longer exist.
Once you lose the expertise and infrastructure, it costs a lot to rebuild it.
Imagine if we were all nuked into the stone age and only crawled out of the bunkers 5-10 years later. Getting back to the state of fabricating 3GHz x86 chips would take a long time and lots of investment.
"Their submarines are good enough to sneak up on US carriers, and they have demonstrated that they can shoot down satellites. Now I ask myself where the US will be with carriers on the bottom of the oceans and no satellites to coordinate communications for combined arms or provide overhead intelligence. They've chosen a very smart, asymmetric warfare route. They don't need to have ultra high tech main battle tanks capable of taking direct hits from M1's. They don't need hundred million dollar stealth aircraft. They just need lots and lots of reasonably good anti aircraft and anti tank missiles."
But that's not so good. You need aircraft carriers, and plenty of satellites if you are going to fight wars in far away countries. Oh wait...
Lastly, using nuclear missiles against another country with nukes would just get you nuked back. Nuclear missiles are a good deterrent against conventional warfare - e.g. if the USA declares war on , and it looks serious, will just try the MAD method.
If you actually intend to let the prisoners out eventually, it makes more sense to focus on getting as many prisoners as you can to a state where they are safer and better to society than before they entered prison.
While punishment has its place (conditioning behaviour), saying "it's prison, it's punishment" seems to indicate a fixation on punishment, which is generally counterproductive to the above goal.
If you don't actually intend to let the prisoners out eventually, you'd save a lot more time and resources if you just execute them and have no prisons at all.
I played a free MMORPG (runes of magic) for a number of weeks, but I gave up after a while because: 1) they seemed to require massive downloads way too often. They'd screw up their patches too. My internet connection isn't fast, so having to wait hours to download 1GB or 4GB just to play their game is rather deterring.
You'd have thought they'd put a lot more effort into reducing the bandwidth used for updates to cut their costs and increase their user base.
2) the game lags a lot at the wrong times (e.g. when there are more than a few enemies) - maybe it's my internet connection - but a lot of people in certain areas of the game (not the "real world") seemed to complain about the lag too.
Yeah but it gets a bit more inconvenient if you happen to put your project on sourceforge.
Ironically I just started my first SourceForge project[1] (uploaded files, created repo etc) before I saw this. Still, I guess it'll be a while before the US puts my country on the ban list...
[1] a win32 python project that allows quick linking of hotkeys to windows (to allow easier switching amongst arbitrary windows - coz I'm just too stupid to learn how to alt-tab quickly amongst 4 or more windows;) ). Figuring out how to handle MSO2007 Excel/Powerpoint took a while.
e.g. "What is your mother's maiden name?" "Where was your father born?"
OK, you don't have to put the truth in, but I find it ridiculous when sites require their users to have >= 8 character mixed case password with alphanumerics, and then it lets them override that with "What was your first pet's name?".
You're not helping the ignorant and stupid there, they'd actually be safer with their 6 character passwords. If their account gets hacked, it's usually because they got phished, keylogged or they used the same username and password on some forum that got hacked.
I daresay often it's not the unskilled hands that's killing people in hospitals.
It's more likely poor processes. No checklists of important stuff. Not enough training, practice and preparation in critical areas. (and of course dirty hands;) ).
The doctors took cues from two Formula 1 teams: McLaren and Ferrari. The Chief Medical Officer for McLaren racing team watched a video of a hospital handover, studied the footage then asked, "Why is there so much noise and people colliding with each other, doing things that don't need doing? Why not space them out and make an organised list of instructions?" When the doctors met with then Ferrari's technical manager, Nigel Stephney, who watched the video of the handover and he made the following observations:
"I don't understand," Stephney said. "Who's in charge?"... Stephney shook his head in disbelief. Then he asked more questions: did they brief and debrief? Were there check lists? Did they rehearse without a patient? Each time the doctors said no. Stephey explained: "It's not about having the best people and just putting them together--it's about a group of people who can work as a team." Staff were forgetting basic things -- even omitting to switch vital equipment to mains power on reaching the ICU, leaving it on the portable battery system. An hour later the batteries would run out and alarms would sound. Moreover, the medical teams had no briefing for what do do if things did go wrong, being left to use their initiative. Pit-stop crews, by contrast, knew exactly what to do if, for example, a wheel nut rolled away. (Take out the spare in their right hand pocket).
Either way you're going to have people clogging up the system. So it seems better to me to not have people clogging up "ER" with non emergency stuff.
If I am not in a critical state, having 50-100 people ahead of me is very annoying, but I can literally live with that. And I have.
In the country I'm in (Malaysia) there's subsidized healthcare. It isn't the best (Malaysia is a corruption-ridden developing nation after all), but it is cheap. If you're rich you can go to a private hospital (where they might not be that great either, but you can be sure they are more expensive;) ).
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's a good idea to keep the spleen around?
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m177445104341g46/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/health/09diab.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&position=
To me it's "thought crime". Nobody should be prosecuted for such stuff. What if someone planted child porn on you or your property? What if some impulsive teenager sent you a naked pic of herself/himself? Guaranteeing that stuff is deleted beyond recovery is not so simple nowadays when you have "wear levelling algorithms" etc.
;).
There is no proof that children were hurt by hint, I doubt there is even proof that it was _likely_ that children would be hurt by what he actually did. If he hurt any children or tried to, then sure sentence him for it.
In my opinion everyone should be allowed to be flawed in the privacy of their own homes. Whether it's to think murderous thoughts about other people, or to lust after their neighbour's spouse[1], or consider robbing a bank.
Yes those thoughts ARE wrong. BUT, we are humans, people are flawed, and more importantly, Government, the Judges, and Cops, and Juries are all also human and flawed too.
So to be on the safe side we should just judge people for what they do. And leave it to God to do the judging on thoughts.
If you don't think there's a God, the majority of the people in the world disagree with you. You may think they are stupid, but if you are so smart, you should also realize that it is a very good idea to encourage the concept of having God punish people for wrong thoughts rather than let people do the punishing.
[1] Adultery is a felony in Michigan (and a crime in many countries). If you don't think adultery is serious, maybe you should do a survey and ask married people what they think about it. FWIW, I'm single - from what I see adultery is often very damaging to families and thus society. In contrast some pervert wanking off to simpsons or even child porn isn't going cause any problems to families and society as long as he just keeps it to himself.
Not like he's starting a "PedoPride" or Pedo-rights campaign... I'd draw the line at that - and no that line is not what you think it is, you pervert
> Ah, there's the rub, to give us our bit of Shakespeare for the day.
Shakespeare? Wasn't he that pervert who wrote Romeo and Juliet?
Juliet's age to quote him:
But saying o'er what I have said before, My child is yet a stranger in the world. She hath not seen the change of fourteen years. Let two more summers wither in their pride, 'ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
http://www.twelfth-night.info/clicknotes/romeo/T12.html
She was younger than fourteen.
Not sure. This guy seems to think so: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html
But in WWII, I'm not sure the launch crew, builders and the designers etc were paid much in salaries ;).
And the V2 didn't really have much in terms of controls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2#Technical_details
Had much lower performance etc.
Even if they can do it cheaper they'll just charge slightly lower than the competition :).
I personally don't see anything wrong with incinerating garbage for energy (the sort that can be incinerated). Especially if some energy would otherwise come from burning coal or oil anyway. This is assuming the incinerators are built so they are less harmful than burning coal or oil.
If you're going to burn oil, might as well use the oil to make plastics first, then when you've recycled the plastic too many times that it's not worth being recycled anymore, burn it for energy. This is why I personally think plastic shopping bags aren't that bad for the environment - since most people can find multiple uses for them before they are finally discarded (recycled/incinerated)- as long as you don't litter with them.
Same goes for paper.
It's like someone patenting a circular wheel, and everyone having to come up with other weird shaped wheels and special mechanisms (or roads) to make them still run kind of smoothly, and patenting their versions as well.
Lastly, if the rate of progress and innovation is supposed to be increasing, that means patent terms should be decreasing.
Same goes for copyrights - if marketing and distribution is supposedly better than the old days, copyright terms should be getting shorter instead of becoming much longer.
Do no double plus ungood you mean.
Trust Google, Google is your friend.
Do you still doubt Google? Perhaps you should visit the Bright Vision Re-Education Center to get things straightened out.
> And yes, he did step in front of the radar to warm himself up.
Did he say what it felt like?
So what happens if you throw a party and end up with lots more garbage than normal?
Over here where I live, the cost of labour and living is low. So we have various people going around the neighbourhood collecting newspapers, plastic etc to bring to recycling places which pay them money for it. Some collect paper and newspapers, some collect plastic.
They normally pay you a small sum for a stack of old newspapers, not much $$, but enough so that many people keep them for recycling rather than throw them away.
> If a secret service wants someone dead, the guy just commits suicide.
That one seems like a botched job to me. Blunt gardening knife? And they have to make the results of the post mortem secret for 70 years?
One of the reasons why the space shuttle is so expensive is because it is designed to bring a lot of stuff _down_ intact.
;).
The other launch vehicles just bring stuff up. They are in comparison just a wrapper around rocket fuel
> As I've said before, all they'd need to do is get us dangled over a big enough debt barrel that we can't pay it off
Why wouldn't the USA be able to pay it off?
I believe the USA owes China money that is payable in US dollars and NOT yuan or renminbi or gold or whatever else.
That's like an amusement park owing China a debt that's payable in amusement park tokens.
Tokens which the amusement park can print more of if really necessary and probably has already been printing like crazy[1].
The amusement park workers are also paid in tokens, but if the park operators are savvy enough they should throw some newly minted higher denomination tokens at the workers to keep them quiet.
Otherwise the workers are going to be very unhappy since the price of oil, wheat, computers, orange juice etc, normally traded in tokens will most certainly go up.
Sure it will hurt the USA, but it will hurt China a lot too. So China will have to do a lot of damage control first.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aEfuO342uoj8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ECLxK2YTs
The USA owes China about 2 trillion right? Doesn't seem like it would be a big problem for the Fed Reserve to "not disclose" where two or three more trillions have gone.
That's why I find it funny when the US people say they don't want to pay for other people's healthcare etc, and Obama is evil for wanting to revamp the healthcare.
;).
;).
They're already paying a lot. Medicaid, Medicare, poor people clogging up ER. Poor people getting kicked out of ER till they come back sick enough to be treated in ER
And by the stats, they're not getting such a great deal for the amount they pay. Yes many cancer survival rates are higher in the US, but that's if you're covered or can afford it. If you're rich, no problems.
It'll be amazing if Obama and gang could make US healthcare even worse. But I'm not going to bet against it either
And that's why going back to a gold standard is stupid.
161000000kg / 6.7 billion = 24 grams per person (or USD850 per person at current high prices).
161000000kg of gold is worth USD5.7 trillion at current prices (USD35359/kg).
The current global economy must be way more than USD6 trillion. If it's 10x more, gold would be 10x more expensive.
So if we use gold as currency, gold would artificially become too/more expensive to use as a material (currently it is used in many common products with no problems).
Gold is too useful as a material to be wasted as a currency.
What also boggles me is they threw away a lot of the stuff - including data they got from the lunar missions.
A lot of the expertise has been lost. People have retired, the factories that built the parts (e.g. those huge Saturn V engines) may no longer exist.
Once you lose the expertise and infrastructure, it costs a lot to rebuild it.
Imagine if we were all nuked into the stone age and only crawled out of the bunkers 5-10 years later. Getting back to the state of fabricating 3GHz x86 chips would take a long time and lots of investment.
"Their submarines are good enough to sneak up on US carriers, and they have demonstrated that they can shoot down satellites. Now I ask myself where the US will be with carriers on the bottom of the oceans and no satellites to coordinate communications for combined arms or provide overhead intelligence. They've chosen a very smart, asymmetric warfare route. They don't need to have ultra high tech main battle tanks capable of taking direct hits from M1's. They don't need hundred million dollar stealth aircraft. They just need lots and lots of reasonably good anti aircraft and anti tank missiles."
But that's not so good. You need aircraft carriers, and plenty of satellites if you are going to fight wars in far away countries. Oh wait...
Lastly, using nuclear missiles against another country with nukes would just get you nuked back. Nuclear missiles are a good deterrent against conventional warfare - e.g. if the USA declares war on , and it looks serious, will just try the MAD method.
> What the fuck? It's prison. It's punishment.
If you actually intend to let the prisoners out eventually, it makes more sense to focus on getting as many prisoners as you can to a state where they are safer and better to society than before they entered prison.
While punishment has its place (conditioning behaviour), saying "it's prison, it's punishment" seems to indicate a fixation on punishment, which is generally counterproductive to the above goal.
If you don't actually intend to let the prisoners out eventually, you'd save a lot more time and resources if you just execute them and have no prisons at all.
I played a free MMORPG (runes of magic) for a number of weeks, but I gave up after a while because:
1) they seemed to require massive downloads way too often. They'd screw up their patches too. My internet connection isn't fast, so having to wait hours to download 1GB or 4GB just to play their game is rather deterring.
You'd have thought they'd put a lot more effort into reducing the bandwidth used for updates to cut their costs and increase their user base.
2) the game lags a lot at the wrong times (e.g. when there are more than a few enemies) - maybe it's my internet connection - but a lot of people in certain areas of the game (not the "real world") seemed to complain about the lag too.
Yeah but it gets a bit more inconvenient if you happen to put your project on sourceforge.
;) ). Figuring out how to handle MSO2007 Excel/Powerpoint took a while.
Ironically I just started my first SourceForge project[1] (uploaded files, created repo etc) before I saw this. Still, I guess it'll be a while before the US puts my country on the ban list...
[1] a win32 python project that allows quick linking of hotkeys to windows (to allow easier switching amongst arbitrary windows - coz I'm just too stupid to learn how to alt-tab quickly amongst 4 or more windows
Was that a butterfly wooshing by? ;)
But they have those in almost every system now.
e.g.
"What is your mother's maiden name?"
"Where was your father born?"
OK, you don't have to put the truth in, but I find it ridiculous when sites require their users to have >= 8 character mixed case password with alphanumerics, and then it lets them override that with "What was your first pet's name?".
You're not helping the ignorant and stupid there, they'd actually be safer with their 6 character passwords. If their account gets hacked, it's usually because they got phished, keylogged or they used the same username and password on some forum that got hacked.
I daresay often it's not the unskilled hands that's killing people in hospitals.
It's more likely poor processes. No checklists of important stuff. Not enough training, practice and preparation in critical areas. (and of course dirty hands ;) ).
See:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1527497/Ferrari-pit-stop-saves-Alexanders-life.html
and:
http://shimworld.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/operation-pit-stop-lessons-from-the-fast-lane/
The doctors took cues from two Formula 1 teams: McLaren and Ferrari. The Chief Medical Officer for McLaren racing team watched a video of a hospital handover, studied the footage then asked, "Why is there so much noise and people colliding with each other, doing things that don't need doing? Why not space them out and make an organised list of instructions?" When the doctors met with then Ferrari's technical manager, Nigel Stephney, who watched the video of the handover and he made the following observations:
"I don't understand," Stephney said. "Who's in charge?" ... Stephney shook his head in disbelief. Then he asked more questions: did they brief and debrief? Were there check lists? Did they rehearse without a patient? Each time the doctors said no. Stephey explained: "It's not about having the best people and just putting them together--it's about a group of people who can work as a team." Staff were forgetting basic things -- even omitting to switch vital equipment to mains power on reaching the ICU, leaving it on the portable battery system. An hour later the batteries would run out and alarms would sound. Moreover, the medical teams had no briefing for what do do if things did go wrong, being left to use their initiative. Pit-stop crews, by contrast, knew exactly what to do if, for example, a wheel nut rolled away. (Take out the spare in their right hand pocket).
> QuickTime no longer enables the system tray icon by default and has not for a long time.
Good to see some progress. But they're not going to get in my good books so easily. After all:
> The QuickTime installer only contains QuickTime, the iTunes installer contains both iTunes and QuickTime.
Sure maybe TODAY it does. But every now and then Apple "thinks different" see:
1) http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/92938/want-quicktime-apple-forces-you-to-install-itunes-to-get-it.html
2) http://digg.com/software/Download_Quicktime_7_Without_Being_Forced_to_Install_iTunes
3) http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005533.html
So, no thanks.
Maybe I'll switch if Adobe started forcing people to install Acrobat Reader even though they only want Flash Player...
> Sounds like you're using Windows. Try using Flash on any other platform.
No thanks. At home I use Windows, FreeBSD and Linux. I do the "desktop stuff" (videos, games etc) on Windows.
So flash is crap on the Mac, and quicktime is crap on Windows. Not surprised actually.
FWIW, Quicktime using 30%-40% CPU to play Youtube videos doesn't sound that great, but maybe that's due to the 1.5GHz G4.
I thought the powerpc G4 had fancy instructions? Does quicktime use them to speed stuff up?
How much CPU does quicktime on the newer Intel Macs use to playback youtube videos?
> Untrue. Low cost only (there are small fees). And (sometimes very long!) queues..
In the USA it seems the poor often sit in the _emergency_rooms_ of hospitals to get medical treatment. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/336126/emergency_room_abuse_the_poor_use_emergency.html
Either way you're going to have people clogging up the system. So it seems better to me to not have people clogging up "ER" with non emergency stuff.
If I am not in a critical state, having 50-100 people ahead of me is very annoying, but I can literally live with that. And I have.
In the country I'm in (Malaysia) there's subsidized healthcare. It isn't the best (Malaysia is a corruption-ridden developing nation after all), but it is cheap. If you're rich you can go to a private hospital (where they might not be that great either, but you can be sure they are more expensive ;) ).