I think the GP covered "old people are talked into handing over their savings" with the bit about deception. If someone is not put under duress of some kind with threat of legal, financial or physical consequences,they haven't been mislead about what they're doing or had important information withheld from them and they take an action of their own free will then it's hard to call them a victim.
It's easy to call them stupid but they're only victims in the same way that people who try to eat angry live bees for the hell of it are victims.
They choose to do something stupid. They could choose otherwise with no consequences. They did the stupid thing, they suffered the consequences. If they're unable to take care of their children as a result of their stupidity they shouldn't be the carers for those children.
If you have no right to make self destructive decisions and every choice can be overridden For Your Own Good then they have no real freedom at all.
gambling has victims in the same way stupidity has victims.
You do foolish things too much and hurt the people around you.
You gamble too much and you hurt the people around you.
The solution of course is to legislate on the root cause- stupidity.
I worked at a dog track for years and I'm of the opinion that the vast majority of the customers were perfectly fine, they just went for a night out now and again.
even amongst the regulars most of them were sane, there was a large crowd of old folks who were there every night who on average I'd guess lost about 15 to 20 euro per night average 3 nights per week and anyone going on 3 nights out of any kind would spend that. A few who were ex dog trainers who might have made a small profit(tote(pool) betting with a large majority of casual betters favors the obsessives who keep track of the dogs and trainers performances).
Of course there were always the occasional ones who made you wonder. in the suites(buisness's rented them for office nights out) you'd get the real stupid behavior. Alpha dog types trying to out-do each other. Watching someone bet on the field(every dog) every race to make sure his ticket was a winner and so convince his workmates that he knew about dogs was depressing.
Declaring bankruptcy when in debt to the tune of 50K and declaring bankruptcy when in debt to the tune of a million makes little difference.
On the other hand losing 50K or losing a million of your personal fortune are 2 very different things.
Loser pays hurts he rich far more and it's vastly superior to the current US system.
It also means lawyers are far less willing to work on bullshit cases suing poor people unless they have a contract ensuring they get paid anyway even if they win and the poor person gets left with a legal bill they'll never be able to pay.
I'd question why the military is using encryption so incredible weak it can be broken by civilians in a short time. It's not like the world lacks for effectively unbreakable encryption.
Even my browser can communicate securely enough that the wikileaks folks wouldn't be able to decrypt it for thousands of years. Military kit is supposed to be superior.
I've wondered though. Many games manage to get people to do long, boring monotonous tasks for minuscule rewards for incredible portions of their lives- Many MMO's come to mind. And people do this of their own free will in their time off.
Could a company be structured on something like a game quest system. Many of the elements are there... Might people respond better in a company where their work is tracked more like in a game? I know that particularly slow, dull, mindless tasks that seem to be a part of every job at some point can be soul crushing yet people will do slow, dull, mindless tasks for nothing more than leveling their mage up another level. Perhaps it's because while it may take weeks of doing the same thing over and over to get that little bar over to the end,every day that little bar is a little further over.
You could set up some kind of XP-like system where harder tasks get more reward/XP.
Small bit of XP for routine/everyday work.(even some kind of leveling-linked thing to alter how much "XP" you get since you don't want that highly paid guy doing work an intern could be doing) Lots of XP for unusual/hard tasks or projects. How do you handle project or task failure? the same way many games handle it- XP loss. Games already have systems for dealing with party quests for when you need groups to work on a project.
Part of the reason doing some crappy monotonous task is so soul crushing is that at the end you have nothing much to show for it. It's the people who do the showy stuff who get most of the reward while people who may do just as much useful work but all in small minor things get far less. If there was some kind of measurement that wasn't purely based on the personal impression that some managers have gotten it might not make people so unhappy to be stuck doing the thankless but necessary jobs. Work out some kind of relationship between "XP" and raises/promotions (perhaps just raises since promotions might not be so suitable) so that someone working in a call center may feel less like crap because while they got shouted at by 100 people today they got (and can see they got) 500 points closer to their next raise with an additional 400 points bonus for good customer ratings and call times, only 2000 points to go...
You might even be able to work in some kind of skill tree system- visually keep track of people's skills, when they've completed a lot of tasks related to the subject, gained qualifications or otherwise proven themselves qualified in an area which could be used to keep track of what tasks they are considered qualified for.
It wouldn't work at all I think trying to shoe-horn it into an existing structure but perhaps in a new and slightly more free-form organization you might be able to make something workable.
Some of these things I've sort of seen seen in companies(keeping track of qualifications).
It's probably all madness and foolishness anyway...
From the quantity of material in those RTG's I can't imagine it measurably increasing the background radiation over the whole planet even if one broke up into a fine mist.
Some of them have come down but they built them amazingly tough with a lot of shielding- to the point that the pellets can survive reentry without burning up or breaking apart.
Some family saw the reporter bleeding to death on the ground. They stopped to try to help. They got killed for it. It wasn't clearly marked because it wasn't an ambulance, it was just someone trying to help someone who was dying on the street. I was under the impression that even soldiers don't like people who shoot medics and people carrying wounded.
On a tangent I'm kinda curious what the difference between "insurgent" and "rebel" is.
You're lumping everyone into "the other side". The US is fighting a large number of groups which either hate each other, have no links with each other or have only weak links with each other. It's like lumping Canadians in with Americans and then justifying someone gunning down a crowd in ontario because "they" used torture.
I think it's referring to when the current pope was a bishop. A priest under him was abusing children. The current pope found out and as this guys superior did sweet fuck all. The church gave the pedophile priest a stern telling off and sent him to a new parish. He abused a lot more kids over the years after that in great part because the current pope didn't give a shit about the kids and was more concerned about making sure the church wasn't brought into disrepute.
Why not give reporters a GPS (with ID) to identify where they are and plug that into their maps with troop locations. - Only allow specific ID's - If duplicates show up (spoofed) mark both groups as caution - Require updates morning, mid-day, evening by reporters - This lets 'eyes in the sky' get the information on reporter locations
And whenever a reporter get's too close to something embarrassing or which the military would prefer didn't end up on the news they can be quickly and easily intercepted and diverted.
Reporters are not supposed to be lapdogs reporting only what the military want them to report. They're supposed to get pictures of things the military would prefer they didn't.
I've stated before in this Slashdot I agree it's horrible, but I can find little fault with the gunship so long as the gunship was told the group had weapons.
I'm fairly sure that gunning down people trying to carry the wounded to get medical attention is frowned upon. They quite obviously were carrying wounded and were not carrying weapons.
And? Smoking also reduces your chances of developing Ulcerative Colitis.
Do you do any high risk sports? Do you drink alcohol? Do you stay up far too late when you know you should be getting a healthy nights sleep? Do you ever drive too fast? Do you ever overeat? Do you eat oily or salty foods? Do you eat foods which you know are high in cholesterol? Do you sit too close to the computer screen? Do you do anything which you know is bad for you at all?
This isn't about chocolate. It's about arrogant dickwads like you who think they have the right to dictate how everyone else should live their lives.
We're seeing a low quality low resolution video and yet we can see that. Those guys had the full color full resolution experience in person with binoculars.
It's not asking much to actually look where you're pointing a gun before you pull the trigger especially when nobody, absolutely nobody is firing back.
Short version: there's a few people wandering about, on the street.In the video none of them are obviously carrying anything big, though you can hear the soldiers calling in that the people were carrying AK47's and an RPG. They shoot and kill/wound them all.
Fast forward a little with a few people bleeding to death on the ground some poor sod driving by in a minivan stopsto help and a kid and I think parents try to carry one of the injured/dead people into the car. Over the radio you hear the soldiers calling in that more insurgents are picking up all the weapons and rescuing the wounded and they request permission to fire. Then they shoot and kill them all.
what followed was a coverup and attempts to strongarm wikileaks into not releasing the video.
Lengthier smoking habits--but not more intense ones--seem to reduce the odds of developing Parkinson's disease, according to a study in Neurology. The inverse association between smoking and Parkinson's--the neurodegenerative disease characterized by difficulty in controlling movement and speech--was first reported half a century ago, but this is the first study to separate the number of years smoking from the number of cigarettes smoked per day. Researchers compared the smoking histories of 305,468 elderly subjects, 1,662 of whom had been diagnosed with the disease in the previous decade. Compared to the nonsmokers, subjects who had smoked at least a pack a day for one to nine years were only 4% less likely to develop Parkinson's. But subjects who smoked as many cigarettes a day for more than 30 years had 41% shorter odds of developing the disease. The number of cigarettes a day, however, had no significant independent effect on Parkinson's risk. The results suggest that any Parkinson's-protective effects of tobacco reach saturation at low doses, the researchers said.
Chocolate is good for you? I'm sure it was really healthy for these girls:
I've never smoked in my life but I detest smug arseholes who think they have the right to dictate how other people should run their lives. Humans are capable of and have every right to make choices to do things which are bad for them.
Eating fatty food, eating high salt food, eating chocolate, smoking, drinking alcohol, using drugs, very high risk sports. All these things are irrational. All these things can hurt or kill you.
but the world contains an unlimited supply of smug arseholes like yourself who are certain, absolutely certain that they Know Better.
You talk about cognitive dissonance and then claim that a high fat, high sugar, mildly addictive substance with little nutritional value like chocolate is good for you. Let be guess- You like chocolate and so you've decided that you couldn't possibly be making a mildly self destructive choice and valuing pleasure over health.
People who consume chocolate live longer? Can anyone say "sample bias". There's similar crap about alcohol where it's claimed that a couple of glasses are somehow good for you because people who consume a glass or 2 a week are healthier. You know how they get those results? They separate people into groups of people who drink a little and people who don't drink and don't take into account people who can't drink because of health problems and so a former alcoholic dying of liver failure will go into the "doesn't drink" group and drag down the life expectancy for the group. Lets see if those lovely studies which show chocolate as healthy factored in if parts of the "non chocolate eating" groups were diabetics already obese and on diets to try to lose the weight or otherwise unable to eat chocolate for health reasons.
Or we could just let your cognitive dissonance continue and assume it's good for you and that you're a perfectly rational actor.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm betting they had it in a password protected winzip file.
I think the GP covered "old people are talked into handing over their savings" with the bit about deception.
If someone is not put under duress of some kind with threat of legal, financial or physical consequences,they haven't been mislead about what they're doing or had important information withheld from them and they take an action of their own free will then it's hard to call them a victim.
It's easy to call them stupid but they're only victims in the same way that people who try to eat angry live bees for the hell of it are victims.
They choose to do something stupid. They could choose otherwise with no consequences. They did the stupid thing, they suffered the consequences.
If they're unable to take care of their children as a result of their stupidity they shouldn't be the carers for those children.
If you have no right to make self destructive decisions and every choice can be overridden For Your Own Good then they have no real freedom at all.
gambling has victims in the same way stupidity has victims.
You do foolish things too much and hurt the people around you.
You gamble too much and you hurt the people around you.
The solution of course is to legislate on the root cause- stupidity.
I worked at a dog track for years and I'm of the opinion that the vast majority of the customers were perfectly fine, they just went for a night out now and again.
even amongst the regulars most of them were sane, there was a large crowd of old folks who were there every night who on average I'd guess lost about 15 to 20 euro per night average 3 nights per week and anyone going on 3 nights out of any kind would spend that. A few who were ex dog trainers who might have made a small profit(tote(pool) betting with a large majority of casual betters favors the obsessives who keep track of the dogs and trainers performances).
Of course there were always the occasional ones who made you wonder.
in the suites(buisness's rented them for office nights out) you'd get the real stupid behavior.
Alpha dog types trying to out-do each other.
Watching someone bet on the field(every dog) every race to make sure his ticket was a winner and so convince his workmates that he knew about dogs was depressing.
You seem to have switched watt and gigawatt.
if 4 megawatts costs $4 million dollars
that's a dollar a watt not a billion dollars a watt.
though I'd be interested in a link about that 4 million dollar reactor producing 4 megawatts.
If the soldiers in question are particularly trigger happy and are too inept to tell the difference between a camera and a bazooka then yes.
no I'm european.
Famous fiction does get published outside the american boarders despite what you may think.
How had he never heard of War of the Worlds?
I mean it's a cultural thing at this point.
At the very least you'd think someone around him would have laughed and let him in on the joke.
If they'd reported that terrorists had attacked, a foreign military or some other remotely plausible threat sure but aliens???
Declaring bankruptcy when in debt to the tune of 50K and declaring bankruptcy when in debt to the tune of a million makes little difference.
On the other hand losing 50K or losing a million of your personal fortune are 2 very different things.
Loser pays hurts he rich far more and it's vastly superior to the current US system.
It also means lawyers are far less willing to work on bullshit cases suing poor people unless they have a contract ensuring they get paid anyway even if they win and the poor person gets left with a legal bill they'll never be able to pay.
I'd question why the military is using encryption so incredible weak it can be broken by civilians in a short time.
It's not like the world lacks for effectively unbreakable encryption.
Even my browser can communicate securely enough that the wikileaks folks wouldn't be able to decrypt it for thousands of years.
Military kit is supposed to be superior.
The entire city he's living in is a war zone.
I've wondered though.
Many games manage to get people to do long, boring monotonous tasks for minuscule rewards for incredible portions of their lives- Many MMO's come to mind.
And people do this of their own free will in their time off.
Could a company be structured on something like a game quest system. ,every day that little bar is a little further over.
Many of the elements are there...
Might people respond better in a company where their work is tracked more like in a game?
I know that particularly slow, dull, mindless tasks that seem to be a part of every job at some point can be soul crushing yet people will do slow, dull, mindless tasks for nothing more than leveling their mage up another level.
Perhaps it's because while it may take weeks of doing the same thing over and over to get that little bar over to the end
You could set up some kind of XP-like system where harder tasks get more reward/XP.
Small bit of XP for routine/everyday work.(even some kind of leveling-linked thing to alter how much "XP" you get since you don't want that highly paid guy doing work an intern could be doing)
Lots of XP for unusual/hard tasks or projects.
How do you handle project or task failure? the same way many games handle it- XP loss.
Games already have systems for dealing with party quests for when you need groups to work on a project.
Part of the reason doing some crappy monotonous task is so soul crushing is that at the end you have nothing much to show for it.
It's the people who do the showy stuff who get most of the reward while people who may do just as much useful work but all in small minor things get far less.
If there was some kind of measurement that wasn't purely based on the personal impression that some managers have gotten it might not make people so unhappy to be stuck doing the thankless but necessary jobs.
Work out some kind of relationship between "XP" and raises/promotions (perhaps just raises since promotions might not be so suitable) so that someone working in a call center may feel less like crap because while they got shouted at by 100 people today they got (and can see they got) 500 points closer to their next raise with an additional 400 points bonus for good customer ratings and call times, only 2000 points to go...
You might even be able to work in some kind of skill tree system- visually keep track of people's skills, when they've completed a lot of tasks related to the subject, gained qualifications or otherwise proven themselves qualified in an area which could be used to keep track of what tasks they are considered qualified for.
It wouldn't work at all I think trying to shoe-horn it into an existing structure but perhaps in a new and slightly more free-form organization you might be able to make something workable.
Some of these things I've sort of seen seen in companies(keeping track of qualifications).
It's probably all madness and foolishness anyway...
From the quantity of material in those RTG's I can't imagine it measurably increasing the background radiation over the whole planet even if one broke up into a fine mist.
Some of them have come down but they built them amazingly tough with a lot of shielding- to the point that the pellets can survive reentry without burning up or breaking apart.
Some family saw the reporter bleeding to death on the ground.
They stopped to try to help.
They got killed for it.
It wasn't clearly marked because it wasn't an ambulance, it was just someone trying to help someone who was dying on the street.
I was under the impression that even soldiers don't like people who shoot medics and people carrying wounded.
On a tangent I'm kinda curious what the difference between "insurgent" and "rebel" is.
You're lumping everyone into "the other side".
The US is fighting a large number of groups which either hate each other, have no links with each other or have only weak links with each other.
It's like lumping Canadians in with Americans and then justifying someone gunning down a crowd in ontario because "they" used torture.
"government of the people, by the people"
I think it's referring to when the current pope was a bishop.
A priest under him was abusing children.
The current pope found out and as this guys superior did sweet fuck all.
The church gave the pedophile priest a stern telling off and sent him to a new parish.
He abused a lot more kids over the years after that in great part because the current pope didn't give a shit about the kids and was more concerned about making sure the church wasn't brought into disrepute.
Why not give reporters a GPS (with ID) to identify where they are and plug that into their maps with troop locations.
- Only allow specific ID's
- If duplicates show up (spoofed) mark both groups as caution
- Require updates morning, mid-day, evening by reporters
- This lets 'eyes in the sky' get the information on reporter locations
And whenever a reporter get's too close to something embarrassing or which the military would prefer didn't end up on the news they can be quickly and easily intercepted and diverted.
Reporters are not supposed to be lapdogs reporting only what the military want them to report.
They're supposed to get pictures of things the military would prefer they didn't.
I've stated before in this Slashdot I agree it's horrible, but I can find little fault with the gunship so long as the gunship was told the group had weapons.
I'm fairly sure that gunning down people trying to carry the wounded to get medical attention is frowned upon.
They quite obviously were carrying wounded and were not carrying weapons.
And?
Smoking also reduces your chances of developing Ulcerative Colitis.
Do you do any high risk sports?
Do you drink alcohol?
Do you stay up far too late when you know you should be getting a healthy nights sleep?
Do you ever drive too fast?
Do you ever overeat?
Do you eat oily or salty foods?
Do you eat foods which you know are high in cholesterol?
Do you sit too close to the computer screen?
Do you do anything which you know is bad for you at all?
This isn't about chocolate.
It's about arrogant dickwads like you who think they have the right to dictate how everyone else should live their lives.
pretty much.
And if it's a situation where the other side has little ability to retaliate in kind you're pretty much home free for ignoring it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik#t=7m30s
Watch from 7 minutes 30 seconds.
We're seeing a low quality low resolution video and yet we can see that.
Those guys had the full color full resolution experience in person with binoculars.
It's not asking much to actually look where you're pointing a gun before you pull the trigger especially when nobody, absolutely nobody is firing back.
The part where they're not in America?
Short version: there's a few people wandering about, on the street.In the video none of them are obviously carrying anything big, though you can hear the soldiers calling in that the people were carrying AK47's and an RPG.
They shoot and kill/wound them all.
Fast forward a little with a few people bleeding to death on the ground some poor sod driving by in a minivan stopsto help and a kid and I think parents try to carry one of the injured/dead people into the car.
Over the radio you hear the soldiers calling in that more insurgents are picking up all the weapons and rescuing the wounded and they request permission to fire.
Then they shoot and kill them all.
what followed was a coverup and attempts to strongarm wikileaks into not releasing the video.
We can all find quotes for the health benefits for just about anything.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904575131611338379340.html
Lengthier smoking habits--but not more intense ones--seem to reduce the odds of developing Parkinson's disease, according to a study in Neurology. The inverse association between smoking and Parkinson's--the neurodegenerative disease characterized by difficulty in controlling movement and speech--was first reported half a century ago, but this is the first study to separate the number of years smoking from the number of cigarettes smoked per day. Researchers compared the smoking histories of 305,468 elderly subjects, 1,662 of whom had been diagnosed with the disease in the previous decade. Compared to the nonsmokers, subjects who had smoked at least a pack a day for one to nine years were only 4% less likely to develop Parkinson's. But subjects who smoked as many cigarettes a day for more than 30 years had 41% shorter odds of developing the disease. The number of cigarettes a day, however, had no significant independent effect on Parkinson's risk. The results suggest that any Parkinson's-protective effects of tobacco reach saturation at low doses, the researchers said.
Chocolate is good for you?
I'm sure it was really healthy for these girls:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/chocolate%20fatty/markd2009/singletrack/sexy_women.jpg
I've never smoked in my life but I detest smug arseholes who think they have the right to dictate how other people should run their lives.
Humans are capable of and have every right to make choices to do things which are bad for them.
Eating fatty food, eating high salt food, eating chocolate, smoking, drinking alcohol, using drugs, very high risk sports.
All these things are irrational.
All these things can hurt or kill you.
but the world contains an unlimited supply of smug arseholes like yourself who are certain, absolutely certain that they Know Better.
You talk about cognitive dissonance and then claim that a high fat, high sugar, mildly addictive substance with little nutritional value like chocolate is good for you.
Let be guess- You like chocolate and so you've decided that you couldn't possibly be making a mildly self destructive choice and valuing pleasure over health.
People who consume chocolate live longer?
Can anyone say "sample bias".
There's similar crap about alcohol where it's claimed that a couple of glasses are somehow good for you because people who consume a glass or 2 a week are healthier.
You know how they get those results?
They separate people into groups of people who drink a little and people who don't drink and don't take into account people who can't drink because of health problems and so a former alcoholic dying of liver failure will go into the "doesn't drink" group and drag down the life expectancy for the group.
Lets see if those lovely studies which show chocolate as healthy factored in if parts of the "non chocolate eating" groups were diabetics already obese and on diets to try to lose the weight or otherwise unable to eat chocolate for health reasons.
Or we could just let your cognitive dissonance continue and assume it's good for you and that you're a perfectly rational actor.
he's referring to the risk in aggregate.
Take a license plate. each place has a 1:39 chance of having A.
a plate with 1 character has a 1:39 of having an A.
as you add more characters the probability of *at least one* character being an A approaches 1.