Well, I used avalanche as a metaphor - not a simile. The snow flakes on the mountain side does not have the ability to decide if they wish to participate in an avalanche - physics decides that for it.
The press, on the other hand, DOES have the ability to decide, and yes, that does include the hosts.
But consider this - what if no other media had picked up the story and run with it? Would she still have committed suicide? Unfortunately we won't know.
But here's a thought. For all the blame throwing that has happened in that particular case, I find it interesting that I haven't stumbled across a single article with introspection into news organizations' own roles in her suicide. Case in point - it was a rather lame joke, and the Mail Online/Daily Mail turned it into a 3,000 word article the next day, saying in nice big fat letters: "How could they fall for this hoax?"
Nah - that kind of massively overblown reaction and witch hunt couldn't possibly add to the stress she was already under.
Be honest with me here - would this discussion be interesting in those newspapers? The more I read about the nurse, I'm thinking I should sit down and do some journalistic work into the media's role in the situation.
I'm on sick leave and have lots of time on my hands, and I suspect that I would quite love to ream "da man" and society at large.
Those radio personalities were, in some part, responsible for the actions of the nurse for it was they who made the final push.
I don't think they made the final push. One of the nurses three suicide letters criticized senior hospital staff - while I haven't read any of the letters (I don't think they've been made public), I read that as her being violently reamed by administration for what is really a tiny issue.
That being said, according to MailOnline she did blame them for it.
Personally, I don't think the radio hosts were responsible for the final push - what they did was to set off an avalanche of undue criticism, particularly undue, as she didn't do anything other than patch the hosts through to another nurse.
And really, if you read the news after the prank call on December 4th but before the suicide on December 7th, you'd have read about it. Google gives 400+ hits on that search.
ABC News. The Mirror. The Telegraph. The Star. USA Today. Fox News. The list goes on. That's not just a silly joke playing out on some radio show with a limited audience - that's world wide. For fuck's sake, it was covered as basically breaking news that the world HAD to know and be outraged about.
Personally, I can't say if it something that'd make me try suicide again, but I highly doubt I would lay all the blame at the pranksters' feet. Being the victim of a joke isn't always funny even afterwards - but then being subjected to that amount of quite frankly ludicrous public scrutiny of an honest mistake, I wouldn't put it past me to break at that.
So no - even if the nurse laid the blame squarely at the hosts' feet, I will go on record as saying that that is a very unfair and unreasonable claim to make.
People do not commit suicide because of a single thing. It's not the rape alone that makes rape victims suicidal, it's the associated shame, social isolation, finger pointing and blame (it's never the victim's fault) as well, and those come from society - not the rapist, no matter how despicable the crime is.
So what are you saying here - if someone is raped, were previously fine, but then kill themselves because of shame that it is not the rapists fault?
As you quoted, I said "It's not the rape alone". I didn't say "It's not the rape[period]". And as you also quoted I said "it's [society] as well".
Why should a rape victim be ashamed? If you get robbed and stabbed, are you ashamed? Did you somehow ask to be assaulted? No - you didn't, and society at large doesn't blame you for it. But society does blame rape victims, and that adds to the pain that they suffer.
In both cases they started a course of events that lead to someone committing suicide.
I never said they didn't, and I never said they don't carry responsibility. I said you can't pin it on them. It's a subtle difference, I know.
I don't mind people disagreeing with me, but it helps when they actually read and understand what I plainly wrote.
He had a choice - fight and go bankrupt, then to jail. Plead guilty and goto jail, Or take his own life.
That is a really, REALLY unfair claim to make.
And I say that as someone with multiple suicide attempts behind me (yes, I'm a failure, I know), so allow me to rephrase that.
That is a really, REALLY stupid and ignorant claim to make. There - much better.
People do not commit suicide because of a single thing. It's not the rape alone that makes rape victims suicidal, it's the associated shame, social isolation, finger pointing and blame (it's never the victim's fault) as well, and those come from society - not the rapist, no matter how despicable the crime is.
Pinning Swartz' suicide on overzealous prosecutors is as fair as pinning Jacintha Saldanha's suicide on the radio hosts. It may be a contributing factor, but not the only one.
People are WAY too keen to blame a single thing (person or otherwise) as the cause for whatever evil they see, and are WAY too scared of thinking let alone saying that people may have a mental illness. Just look at how quick people are to blame video games for the acts of murderers these days.
You don't attempt suicide (successfully or otherwise) if you're not mentally ill, be it temporary, short term, long term or chronic.
Yes, he made the choice to take his own life. He also made the choice of knowingly breaking the law (unreasonable or not). Rosa Parks made a similar decision as did Nelson Mandela and many others around the world. But unlike Swartz, they didn't choose to take their own life.
And you can say a lot of things about the US prison system, but I'm pretty sure it is a LOT more comfortable than what Mandela went through.
The single worst offender I can remember, was a mouse with an LED behind the company nameplate so intense, that you could read the name (mirrored) on the ceiling in daylight.
I couldn't sleep with the camera's red light blinking at me regardless of whether or not it was connected to the router at the time.
Easily fixed with tape or a pen.
It's how I fix the issue I have with 99% of all electronic equipment these days, as they seem to insist on being able to illuminate a room with their "LOOK AT ME!!!" lights. And I think that's the first time in pretty much forever, I've ever wanted to use the blink-tag.
This issue is not restricted to DVRs, China doesn't give a fuck, and people in general only care about the price tag.
You mean in the same way that the US doesn't give a fuck? Or the EU. Or any other nation or continent you care to name.
No-one gives a fuck - that's the problem. If the collective we cared, security would be much higher, simply because insecure technology wouldn't sell.
Don't blame China - blame the retailers. Security costs money, and if retailers can save a thousand dollars on a million sales, they'll go with the cheaper alternative if they think it'll sell.
bike shelters costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
No offence, but if you think they're actually building that at that price, you should either report every instance to the police or get your head checked out for a concussion or similar.
Considering that I can find 117 homes each costing less than 100,000 dollars each, your idea is either the result of a conspiracy mind or extreme corruption in local government, and either way you should have someone look into it.
DNA breaks down too rapidly to be intact in soft tissues that old. One of Horner's students managed to find such soft tissues a few years ago, but since DNA has a halflife of about 521 years (depending on the environment), there isn't going to be any DNA left in it.
In every other engineering discipline I can think of, where the word "engineer" actually means something, releasing sloppy and buggy work means you'll either get fired or sued. Possibly both.
Think of your products as buildings or structures. They have to live up to certain standards, have to work when they're put up (ever seen someone replace the foundation of a sky scraper after it's been built?) and have to be stable. Or worse - imagine chemical engineers who designed your drugs, or the mechanical engineers who designed your artificial heart were allowed to be as sloppy as software "engineers" are.
When engineers fail to do their work properly, the fixes are mostly lengthy and expensive, and often have to be paid for by the engineering company, and their products are withdrawn from the market (or buildings and structures closed).
As long as companies make a rule of flat out refusing to make and schedule engineering quality work, I refuse to consider their employees engineers, regardless of their education or working title.
If you have a Ph.D in astrophysics, but you work as a janitor, I'm not going to be calling you Dr. either.
Besides, one of the more fun things to do in any offline type of encyclopaedia is to go to a random page and read something, be it in a skill tree, monsters, Encyclopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia.
There are fewer bit patterns available in a 2K block than in an 8K block.
Yes. There are obviously fewer bit patterns in a 2k block than in an 8k block.
But let's look at the numbers for a moment.
A 2k block has 2,048 bytes and thus 16,384 bits. An 8k block has 8,192 bytes and thus 65,536 bits.
The 2k block has a total of 2^(16,384) different bit patterns. The 8k block has a total of 2^(65,536) different bit patterns.
That's 1,2 * 10^4,932 bit patterns vs 2 * 10^19,728.
Now, it has been estimated, that at the current time, the Universe has a total of 10^80 protons. I don't know how many electrons but let's assume a 1:1 ratio, and let's be generous and say that we can 10^20 bit patterns in a single electron.
You now only need 1.2 * 10^4,832 universes to store every possible 2k block for your lookup table.
I'll keep my fingers crossed for you, and hope that not only is the multiverse theory correct, but that we also discover ways to communicate with them instantly - otherwise your compression system might have some flaws in them...
You don't even NEED a lot of money to get 50 PB of storage.
Granted, you need some, but it's a lot less than people think.
18 months ago, BackBlaze showed how to build a 135 TB server for $7,384, and the price would be just about the same today.
That's $56,696/TB for a total of $2,834,800
For what Kim has in mind for Mega, 3 million in storage hardware isn't exactly surprising. In fact I'd be surprised if they haven't budgeted for a lot more than that.
Actually, the best way to demonstrate what happens without any kind of regulation at all, is to look at what is going on in Nigeria:
Almost 1.9 million barrels have have been spilled into the Niger river delta in the 20 years between 1976 and 1996 in close to 4,900 different incidents, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that this is going to reduce in the future.
See, in Nigeria there seems to be absolutely no business consequences to any kind of oil spills or accidents, so when the expenses of fixing a problem is greater than the expenses of the losses of oil, there's no incentive to pay for a fix.
After all, the only ones feeling the consequences is the local population, and they obviously aren't worth much to anyone.
As a... well, I'm never sure if I should use the term "suicide survivor" or "failed suicider"... anyway, as one of those, allow me to respond to your polite request for having some shame with an equally polite "no".
Just because you don't like sick jokes about certain subjects, doesn't mean the rest of us don't.
To some of us, humour is a stress reliever and coping mechanism - telling us that we shouldn't use it, trying to shame and ostracise us for using it, is in fact likely to make us more inclined to follow in Aaron Swartz' footsteps.
There are few things as life affirming as laughter, and some of us have a really hard time finding those laughs in everyday situations.
Laughter is one of the very few parts of the universal human vocabulary, it is delightfully infectious and as far as I know the only emotion that is basically a one way street. I.e. once you start giggling and laughing, it is almost impossible to stop, whereas someone really sad or depressed will almost always start to laugh when faced with others laughing.
I do agree with you though, that the jokers in here should take a long hard look at themselves, but for very different reasons. I think anyone who can make light of a sad situation makes life more bearable, and for people like me, that is a life saver.
Believe it or not, I know people who said that a 32" TV was too big for their living room, people who swore that they'd never need internet for more than check email once a day, people who claimed that they'd never have anything other than a landline etc.
You'd be amazed at what we're capable of doing, once we see advantages.
Personally I don't understand the fascination with TVs. I'd much rather have a projector and a retractable screen - that way I don't need to clear away a ton of shelve space.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I used avalanche as a metaphor - not a simile. The snow flakes on the mountain side does not have the ability to decide if they wish to participate in an avalanche - physics decides that for it.
The press, on the other hand, DOES have the ability to decide, and yes, that does include the hosts.
But consider this - what if no other media had picked up the story and run with it? Would she still have committed suicide? Unfortunately we won't know.
But here's a thought. For all the blame throwing that has happened in that particular case, I find it interesting that I haven't stumbled across a single article with introspection into news organizations' own roles in her suicide. Case in point - it was a rather lame joke, and the Mail Online/Daily Mail turned it into a 3,000 word article the next day, saying in nice big fat letters: "How could they fall for this hoax?"
Nah - that kind of massively overblown reaction and witch hunt couldn't possibly add to the stress she was already under.
That same paper has an article: Being stressed is as damaging for your heart as smoking five cigarettes a day
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2250106/Stress-bad-heart-smoking-cigarettes-day.html 18 December 2012.
Be honest with me here - would this discussion be interesting in those newspapers? The more I read about the nurse, I'm thinking I should sit down and do some journalistic work into the media's role in the situation.
I'm on sick leave and have lots of time on my hands, and I suspect that I would quite love to ream "da man" and society at large.
Good idea or dead at conception?
I don't think they made the final push. One of the nurses three suicide letters criticized senior hospital staff - while I haven't read any of the letters (I don't think they've been made public), I read that as her being violently reamed by administration for what is really a tiny issue.
That being said, according to MailOnline she did blame them for it.
Personally, I don't think the radio hosts were responsible for the final push - what they did was to set off an avalanche of undue criticism, particularly undue, as she didn't do anything other than patch the hosts through to another nurse.
And really, if you read the news after the prank call on December 4th but before the suicide on December 7th, you'd have read about it. Google gives 400+ hits on that search.
ABC News. The Mirror. The Telegraph. The Star. USA Today. Fox News. The list goes on. That's not just a silly joke playing out on some radio show with a limited audience - that's world wide. For fuck's sake, it was covered as basically breaking news that the world HAD to know and be outraged about.
Personally, I can't say if it something that'd make me try suicide again, but I highly doubt I would lay all the blame at the pranksters' feet. Being the victim of a joke isn't always funny even afterwards - but then being subjected to that amount of quite frankly ludicrous public scrutiny of an honest mistake, I wouldn't put it past me to break at that.
So no - even if the nurse laid the blame squarely at the hosts' feet, I will go on record as saying that that is a very unfair and unreasonable claim to make.
As you quoted, I said "It's not the rape alone". I didn't say "It's not the rape[period]". And as you also quoted I said "it's [society] as well".
Why should a rape victim be ashamed? If you get robbed and stabbed, are you ashamed? Did you somehow ask to be assaulted? No - you didn't, and society at large doesn't blame you for it. But society does blame rape victims, and that adds to the pain that they suffer.
I never said they didn't, and I never said they don't carry responsibility. I said you can't pin it on them. It's a subtle difference, I know.
I don't mind people disagreeing with me, but it helps when they actually read and understand what I plainly wrote.
That is a really, REALLY unfair claim to make.
And I say that as someone with multiple suicide attempts behind me (yes, I'm a failure, I know), so allow me to rephrase that.
That is a really, REALLY stupid and ignorant claim to make. There - much better.
People do not commit suicide because of a single thing. It's not the rape alone that makes rape victims suicidal, it's the associated shame, social isolation, finger pointing and blame (it's never the victim's fault) as well, and those come from society - not the rapist, no matter how despicable the crime is.
Pinning Swartz' suicide on overzealous prosecutors is as fair as pinning Jacintha Saldanha's suicide on the radio hosts. It may be a contributing factor, but not the only one.
People are WAY too keen to blame a single thing (person or otherwise) as the cause for whatever evil they see, and are WAY too scared of thinking let alone saying that people may have a mental illness. Just look at how quick people are to blame video games for the acts of murderers these days.
You don't attempt suicide (successfully or otherwise) if you're not mentally ill, be it temporary, short term, long term or chronic.
Yes, he made the choice to take his own life. He also made the choice of knowingly breaking the law (unreasonable or not). Rosa Parks made a similar decision as did Nelson Mandela and many others around the world. But unlike Swartz, they didn't choose to take their own life.
And you can say a lot of things about the US prison system, but I'm pretty sure it is a LOT more comfortable than what Mandela went through.
The single worst offender I can remember, was a mouse with an LED behind the company nameplate so intense, that you could read the name (mirrored) on the ceiling in daylight.
Easily fixed with tape or a pen.
It's how I fix the issue I have with 99% of all electronic equipment these days, as they seem to insist on being able to illuminate a room with their "LOOK AT ME!!!" lights. And I think that's the first time in pretty much forever, I've ever wanted to use the blink-tag.
You mean in the same way that the US doesn't give a fuck? Or the EU. Or any other nation or continent you care to name.
No-one gives a fuck - that's the problem. If the collective we cared, security would be much higher, simply because insecure technology wouldn't sell.
Don't blame China - blame the retailers. Security costs money, and if retailers can save a thousand dollars on a million sales, they'll go with the cheaper alternative if they think it'll sell.
Race to the bottom and all that.
The bed you sleep on isn't free either, but since you've already paid for it, you are meeting your needs for a comfortable sleep by spending $0.
Isn't all of Antarctica technically the Northern parts?
Does it count as one, if I was thinking "please let it be that" before I clicked?
No offence, but if you think they're actually building that at that price, you should either report every instance to the police or get your head checked out for a concussion or similar.
Considering that I can find 117 homes each costing less than 100,000 dollars each, your idea is either the result of a conspiracy mind or extreme corruption in local government, and either way you should have someone look into it.
He does that quite often using a chronograph
DNA breaks down too rapidly to be intact in soft tissues that old. One of Horner's students managed to find such soft tissues a few years ago, but since DNA has a halflife of about 521 years (depending on the environment), there isn't going to be any DNA left in it.
In every other engineering discipline I can think of, where the word "engineer" actually means something, releasing sloppy and buggy work means you'll either get fired or sued. Possibly both.
Think of your products as buildings or structures. They have to live up to certain standards, have to work when they're put up (ever seen someone replace the foundation of a sky scraper after it's been built?) and have to be stable. Or worse - imagine chemical engineers who designed your drugs, or the mechanical engineers who designed your artificial heart were allowed to be as sloppy as software "engineers" are.
When engineers fail to do their work properly, the fixes are mostly lengthy and expensive, and often have to be paid for by the engineering company, and their products are withdrawn from the market (or buildings and structures closed).
As long as companies make a rule of flat out refusing to make and schedule engineering quality work, I refuse to consider their employees engineers, regardless of their education or working title.
If you have a Ph.D in astrophysics, but you work as a janitor, I'm not going to be calling you Dr. either.
Besides, one of the more fun things to do in any offline type of encyclopaedia is to go to a random page and read something, be it in a skill tree, monsters, Encyclopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia.
Yes. There are obviously fewer bit patterns in a 2k block than in an 8k block.
But let's look at the numbers for a moment.
A 2k block has 2,048 bytes and thus 16,384 bits.
An 8k block has 8,192 bytes and thus 65,536 bits.
The 2k block has a total of 2^(16,384) different bit patterns.
The 8k block has a total of 2^(65,536) different bit patterns.
That's 1,2 * 10^4,932 bit patterns vs 2 * 10^19,728.
Now, it has been estimated, that at the current time, the Universe has a total of 10^80 protons. I don't know how many electrons but let's assume a 1:1 ratio, and let's be generous and say that we can 10^20 bit patterns in a single electron.
You now only need 1.2 * 10^4,832 universes to store every possible 2k block for your lookup table.
I'll keep my fingers crossed for you, and hope that not only is the multiverse theory correct, but that we also discover ways to communicate with them instantly - otherwise your compression system might have some flaws in them ...
You don't even NEED a lot of money to get 50 PB of storage.
Granted, you need some, but it's a lot less than people think.
18 months ago, BackBlaze showed how to build a 135 TB server for $7,384, and the price would be just about the same today.
That's $56,696/TB for a total of $2,834,800
For what Kim has in mind for Mega, 3 million in storage hardware isn't exactly surprising. In fact I'd be surprised if they haven't budgeted for a lot more than that.
That's actually a brilliant ad.
Easily the best ad I've seen in ages, as it really takes the piss out of the company's own ads.
He might not be AS much of an idol, but he'd still be as big an idol as say Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox or Phil Plait.
Are you seriously suggesting that humans didn't have weapons until the bronze age?
Wait, we can make submarines that withstand 1,000 atmospheres, but we can't make spheres that can withstand 1?
Actually, the best way to demonstrate what happens without any kind of regulation at all, is to look at what is going on in Nigeria:
Almost 1.9 million barrels have have been spilled into the Niger river delta in the 20 years between 1976 and 1996 in close to 4,900 different incidents, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that this is going to reduce in the future.
See, in Nigeria there seems to be absolutely no business consequences to any kind of oil spills or accidents, so when the expenses of fixing a problem is greater than the expenses of the losses of oil, there's no incentive to pay for a fix.
After all, the only ones feeling the consequences is the local population, and they obviously aren't worth much to anyone.
As a ... well, I'm never sure if I should use the term "suicide survivor" or "failed suicider" ... anyway, as one of those, allow me to respond to your polite request for having some shame with an equally polite "no".
Just because you don't like sick jokes about certain subjects, doesn't mean the rest of us don't.
To some of us, humour is a stress reliever and coping mechanism - telling us that we shouldn't use it, trying to shame and ostracise us for using it, is in fact likely to make us more inclined to follow in Aaron Swartz' footsteps.
There are few things as life affirming as laughter, and some of us have a really hard time finding those laughs in everyday situations.
Laughter is one of the very few parts of the universal human vocabulary, it is delightfully infectious and as far as I know the only emotion that is basically a one way street. I.e. once you start giggling and laughing, it is almost impossible to stop, whereas someone really sad or depressed will almost always start to laugh when faced with others laughing.
I do agree with you though, that the jokers in here should take a long hard look at themselves, but for very different reasons. I think anyone who can make light of a sad situation makes life more bearable, and for people like me, that is a life saver.
Are you suggesting that we should start raping more in order to reduce the amount of porn? ;)
Believe it or not, I know people who said that a 32" TV was too big for their living room, people who swore that they'd never need internet for more than check email once a day, people who claimed that they'd never have anything other than a landline etc.
You'd be amazed at what we're capable of doing, once we see advantages.
Personally I don't understand the fascination with TVs. I'd much rather have a projector and a retractable screen - that way I don't need to clear away a ton of shelve space.