sar-casm/,sar,kazem/, n: The use of irony to mock or convey contempt. Often misunderstood by netizens of the online discussion site Slashdot, who take everything literally. See also: Derp.
There's this strange, antiquidated notion some people have that a device they spend hundreds of dollars on, are in physical possession of, and which contains a ton of personal information and is the de facto way for the world to get ahold of them, belongs to them. So when these social degenerates are told that they have no say in how their data is used, whether or not they're tracked, what applications they can and cannot use, etc., they get upset.
We should probably just ignore them. Such morally inferior people are just holding back innovation in this country. The idea that you own anything, even your own DNA, is stupid. No poor person should be allowed to own anything -- they'll just misuse it anyway, and deprive society of the benefit of having a corporation own the things they have instead.
It seems like the trend to buy and sell everyone online continues to gain steam. Many stores from Blockbuster to Best Buy, from computer resellers to water purification systems... it seems like if you can get away with not having to touch or interact with the product in person before making a buying decision, that's what people are doing. In droves. One of the few retail areas not significantly affected has been women's clothing. Men, being of somewhat more predictable shapes and sizes, can buy jeans and such online, but women have no such luck. Even here, however, basics like bras, tank tops, t-shirts, shoes, etc., are being displaced by online sales.
It does not surprise me that books are on the list of things people don't need to go to a bookstore to purchase -- most books are purchased based on the recommendation of friends, word of mouth, or reviewers (which, surprise -- print media is giving way to online media...). This is not a good time to be a retail book seller... Barnes and Noble will soon be displaced by Walmart and their ilk; Stores that only sell books won't be around for much longer if they're publicly traded... they'll just be broken up and sold off piece by piece, their valuable commercial real estate being repurposed and the stock thrown out in massive going out of business sales, or simply deposited in a dumpster.
For the last bit, this is probably a desired feature. You'd -want- the device to be able to detect if you're under duress.
You assume that the device would be rigged to do something to help you in that event. "Warning: Elevated blood pressure detected. Access to secure area denied." (a few seconds later) *BANG!* "Okay, bring me the next one, Terrorist Bob."
It would probably be much more effective, and one hell of a lot easier to mail what ever fissile material you have to the local media, claiming to have a bomb...
You're telling me it would be too hard for someone to take a big pile of conventional explosives, grind up the fissile material, and then load it into a rental truck and drive it downtown? Why do you think a bomb means "big mushroom cloud of doom"? It could just be a conventional explosive used against a soft target, but with the added collateral damage of having the entire area contaminated with radioactive debris. And once you're done, claim you'll do it again in 48 hours unless (insert terrorist demand here).
Yes. I can see how the average terrorist would find this plan to be dizzyingly complex, and would opt instead to simply drop it in the post with a note saying "me haz big bang, woo woo."
Hint: they don't want luxury and they don't want peace, until their flags are flying over all corners of the civilized world and their ideas about Islam (not just any brand of Islam either) dominate.
Three billion dollars buys a lot of change in thinking. You can get a Congressman to sell his soul for a lot less.
They are America's sworn enemies. We can't wish or negotiate that away, we have to defend ourselves. And the best defense is a good offense. That's why Obama's administration deserves huge props for taking out Bin Laden. That's how it's done, Dubya. That's how it must always be done.
Yes! We must bomb them! shoot them! Drop nukes! At a cost of many trillions of dollars! Because they don't want money! They don't want to be rich! They're poor, living in mud huts in the desert, and don't wanna change! Not ever! Not one single one! So passionate is their belief, they would happily choose suicide over spending the rest of their days rolling in hundred dollar bills naked! YES! I BELIEVE YOU!
To continue the fascade that a bunch of people who kick it out in the desert and shoot their guns in the air at weekend training camps are evil because they're muslims or whatever, as opposed to people who kick it up in the woods and shoot their guns in the air at weekend training camps here, but aren't? Just a thought.
I'm sure there are terrorists out there... but I'm also reasonably sure they are so few in number as to not be a serious threat. Even if a 9/11 happened every year, it wouldn't be serious, in terms of economic damage and loss of life. However, there are legions of people who have been labelled as such because it's the only way to justify spending trillions of dollars... I mean, what if there were only 300 terrorists in the whole world. What then? We spend a trillion dollars to "contain" them... when we really ought to just pay them 3 billion dollars each to move to a secluded island and live out their remaining days in luxury. Bonus: It would be cheaper than what we've been doing so far...
What can be done in clear air with line of sight means nothing. The fact that 5ghz has very little building penetration is well known. Its great for single rooms (like restaurants or in the cubical-sphere of an office, but even around the house it can be problematic when trying to penetrate some walls.
Now now, no need to invoke logic in this discussion. The mods already put me down 2 points in 'troll' for pointing out how the FCC is anything but a neutral party in all of this. You keep it up, they'll mod you -99 for being smart.;)
Yes, but commercial airliners aren't built with plugs and sockets. For weight savings, everything is directly hardwired.
So they've managed to skim off maybe 10 pounds off the design of the aircraft, saving some several thousands in fuel costs over the operating life of the aircraft. A reasonable tradeoff considering the chance of the aircraft catching fire and then exploding when it hits the ground, killing everyone on board. *sips tea* Yeah. Makes sense to me. I mean, what's the cost of settling an accidental death claim for 300 people?
Here comes the math!
The cost of failure: A product defect typically weighs in at $2.1 million USD per. So assuming 300 passengers and 10 crew, that's $651 million payout per plane going pop.
The cost savings: Now, a 747 at least uses a gallon of fuel per second, or about 5 gallons per mile (average) on a flight. A typical domestic flight is about 2.5 hours in flight time, or 9,000 gallons of fuel. The weight of the aircraft, empty and unloaded, is about 95,000 pounds. It has 171 miles of wiring. Let's assume that we want to add connectors every 100 feet; That gives us 902,880 connectors. The average weight of a connector we'll say is 1.5 grams. that gives us 1,354,320 grams of extra weight to add connectors, or about 25,031 pounds.
So to add all those extra connectors would add an extra 26.3% cost to fuel. Now, the Dreamliner is slated to have a service life of about 30 years. We don't know how many pressurization cycles that equates to, but we can make an estimated guess. Let's just say 2 flights per day, 5 days a week. That'll be 1,560 flights before retirement then.
The average domestic flight is around 700 miles, we'll say. If the fuel cost before modification is 5 gallons per mile, at $3.30 per gallon... the cost of fuel per flight is $46,200. With the modification, it would cost $57,750.
Fuel cost over life of vehicle (before mod): 72,072,000. Fuel cost over life of vehicle (after mod): 90,090,000. Difference: $18,018,000. Cost on failure: $651 million Failure rate cutoff: 1 in 36
In other words, if a catastrophic failure that could have been prevented with electrical connectors happens more than 1 out of 36 planes, it's worth it. Otherwise, it's not.
With no centralized interoperability specification -- the next iteration of whatever devices operate on that spectrum will interfere destructively with the previous generation. Remember pre-N gear when it first came out? Whole neighborhoods went dark while one guy sat in his basement browsing porn because he'd just gotten home with the latest and greatest from the store. Suddenly, everyone has to upgrade overnight. Then there's channel overlap... some jerk decides to set his wifi to channel 3 instead of 1 or 6 and now half the spectrum is fracked.
There will be no boost in wireless speeds. The only thing this has going for it is 5Ghz doesn't travel as far as 2.4Ghz, which doesn't travel very far anyway... and that'll mean by simple virtue of physics, devices will have a smaller surface area in which they can cause destructive interference.
No, if you ask me, the FCC's incompetence is not accidental... they don't want wireless internet because it would mean all those people they got BILLIONS OF DOLLARS from would be upset. Politics, blah blah. You get the idea. We'll never have high speed, ranged, wireless internet, unless we decide to go pirate and tell them to eat a bag of dicks. (puts finger to ear)
Oh wait... I hear some people have started doing that.
No no, I know. I was just reframing the "black and nebulous art" of airplane maintenance into something easier to digest for slashdotters. It was either that, or a car analogy, and turning a plane into a car just felt wrong.:) The truth is a bit more complicated; But it still boils down to operator error and not a design flaw. Of course, a design that allows someone to plug in one component backwards and have the entire device go up in flames is not a good one, but it's not flawed in the strict sense of the word. It's disappointing that my $500 laptop has a feature that prevents the battery from being plugged in backwards, but a multi-million dollar state of the art aircraft does not.
So basically, the user reached back behind the power supply while fiddling and bumped the 110/220V switch, and it caught fire. Naturally, they didn't say anything to the tech after setting the switch back besides, "It just caught fire! All by itself!"
The user in this case is a giant airline company, and tech support would be Boeing. The FAA, of course, is the QA manager, who reviewed the call, and after reading the ticket closure notes, facepalmed, leaned back into his chair, and took a deep draft of coffee.
Well, at least the way I hear it used on the news, American conservatives are very different from Chinese and Russian conservatives.
Perhaps then, you should stop accepting what you hear on the news without critical analysis. It is invariably biased in some fashion, usually by lies of omission -- the most common of which, is that Group A is somehow so different from Group B as to be worthy of differential treatment. It does not make good news to say "We are 99.5% like these other people, but because of this singular thing in which we differ slightly in opinion on, we must dislike them." No, good news is "They are evil bastards with no redeeming qualities and we must punish them for this!" It feels better, more righteous. It satisfies our need for order in the world, this idea that the good are rewarded and the bad punished... and curiously, the good are always defined as "us" and the bad defined as "them."
Alas, American conservatives are not so different from conservatives anywhere else. Perhaps superficially. Perhaps in a great many ways that really don't matter... no different from driving on the left versus the right side of the road, or in how we dress or the slang we banter about. But it doesn't feel as emotionally satisfying. We want to be part of the superior group... therefore, some other group must be inferior, even if the inferiority is entirely socially constructed. And because we want this, we are eager to overlook similarity. Some people are eager to the point of violent opposition, like you are.
Twenty thousand years of human evolution says we are very, very much alike... and I assure you, every news channel, in every country, everywhere, says the same thing: "We're not like them!" Even if, on the whole, we very much are.
The average american, and average slashdot poster is CLUELESS about politics.
As opposed to the average citizen of any other country? Why is it necessary to hold the average american up to some special standard?
Reality is the average american is too ignorant/stupid to have any kind of informed political view of america given the huge amount of propaganda that pervades their media and education system.
Reality is... every first world country has a government with a bureaucratic process so dense as to blunt, if not entirely dissipate, any creative process for change. You say they're ignorant and stupid, but that's an ignorant and stupid attitude. The truth is, most people aren't interested in politics because its emotionally painful if one becomes overly-involved. That's not an unintelligent response to a hopelessly and needlessly complex system designed specifically to be resistant to intelligent and thoughtful discourse.
You simply picked the one with the largest military and economy in the world to shit on, for no other reason than because you want to pull it down for your own emotional gratification. How you managed to get this to be labelled "+5 insightful" is simply saying that a great many people also have such emotional needs... but having offered no proof or objective analysis, "insightful" is not the word I would use to describe your reaction. But then, there is no "+5, I Agree Because I Have Emotional Needs That Depend On Crapping On Others" option.
Now, can your brain rewire itself? Research suggests that yes, it can.
Which is an incredibly dull and obvious conclusion. Of course it can: Otherwise we'd still think and act like infant children. All we've managed to do here is look closely enough at the brain that we can start to see landscape features and make inferences from that which are broadly true for others which have similar features. Which is no small achievement, but this is confirmatory research -- it tells us something we already knew, to a high degree of confidence.
So how does this work in a traditionally free country like America...
Please stop. You're suggesting that the brains from one country are somehow different from that of another country. If we change 'country' out for 'race', it should be painfully obvious what the problem here is.
American conservatives are afraid to place their fates into the hands of the elected experts on human happiness.
You really shouldn't comment on the complex political landscape of another country whose citizens you apparently have little regular contact with. It makes you look like an idiot. No, "american" conservatives are just like "british" conservatives which are just like "african" conservatives, which are just like every conservative. Ever. The definition of conservativism doesn't change because of the country you're in. Perhaps its expression does, but the study here isn't about expression, but reaction. In that, conservatives broadly and as an aggregate group, are simply risk-averse. And because of how the human mind operates, an unknown risk is almost always subjectively larger in a person's mind than a known one. This is why we spent trillions of dollars combatting terrorism (an unknown risk) while both retrospectively and at the time, it could have easily been shown that a known risk (drunk driving) costs far more lives.
To extrapolate from a specific behavior (risk aversion) a complete political ideology is... at best... dubious.
It's not hardwired: If it were, we'd be able to do these scans at birth or an early age and find similar patterns. But we don't. Which means the brain's structure changes in order to specialize in certain thought and behavior patterns. The fact that this applies to politics as well as, say, geospatial, tasks, should be absolutely no surprise.
It's disengenuous to suggest these things are hard-wired because they imply they cannot be changed. Except they can: I've known many people who, after experiencing a significant emotional event, altered their politics, religious affiliation, and even base personality traits. The human brain is exceptionally malleable. This study only offers a snapshot at a particular point in time and suggests that if certain structural properties are present, the thinking pattern is likely to be of a certain type. It does not say whether that structure was present before, after, or the extent to which it can be changed, and if so, how quickly.
It's like taking a photograph of a car driving down the road and assuming that it's on that road, and only that road, forever.
I see logic like this all the time, but people seem to forget that they drive to work everyday just fine -- and that's a linear process. You can't predict what the other drivers will do, there may be an accident, you may be late... But you're going to drive the same distance every day.
People are getting hungup on measurements of time, and progress bars, like life, is based on distance. Whether it's number of operations, or number of miles, the principle is the same. Progress bars that move backwards is stupid: It means the programmer is attempting to measure the wrong thing.
Listen, Corporate Overlords, you know that little buzzer or dinger that goes off incessantly whenever I leave the lights on or don't buckle up and you think it's a "feature"? The first week of every car I've ever owned is spent taking apart the dashboard and removing that feature, and then pulverizing it with a hammer and throwing the remains on a base of burning coals. I shit you not, I'm serious about that crap.
Try putting cameras and microphones in things, and you'll find them equally under-appreciated in my household. That is, assuming I feel there are no better choices on the market... if even one of your competitors opts out, that's where my dollars go. Don't tempt me.
Guys, how is this any different than "cloud" computing, or "cluster" computing, or pretty much the overwhelming majority of technical terms. Zip, unzip, explode, compress... yes, if I stopped and thought about it, I'd probably consider it perverted. And cloud computing doesn't mean we're all hovering above our cubes playing magical harps. Getting hungup on terminology is neither productive nor interesting.
The term "cyberspace" may be stupid, but it refers to something that is very real: The internet may just be a collection of wires, boxes with circuit boards in it, and a lot of ones and zeroes, but that is not how people look at it, anymore than they look at their car as a collection of fiberglass, steel bolts, and rubber. And the problems of the digital world aren't terribly hard to comprehend, nor do most of them require radical change in how we think about it.
Those of us under the age of 40 can conceptualize this "brave new world" quite well, and make moral and ethical decisions about it. Most of us understand and agree that privacy is a right, online and off. We may disagree about the particulars, but not the substance. Same with file sharing: Most of us are against people "pirating" for profit, but likewise have little objection to Joe Average maintaining his own personal collection of downloaded music and movies. This isn't hard for us to understand.
However, for people who grew up without computers, and are reluctant to embrace them, and still carry around Nokia phones from ten years ago because it's "more like a phone"... well, those people are more easily swayed by certain wealthy interests to look at it as a confusing and nebulous thing, and turn to said interests for guidance. Afterall... if you're rich, you must have done something right. There is a disconnect between our legislators (most of whom are 50+ years of age) and the general population (median age: 35).
The problems of "cyberspace" actually has nothing to do with technology: It has to do with people. Specifically, old people. Boomers. These people have taken an unwarranted familiarity with the technology and made bad decision after bad decision, institutionalizing ignorance and stupidity because that's what they were told to do. And that, really, is the only problem here.
You just ensured DHS VIPR teams will harass, molest and radiate every person that gets within a block of every Superbowl venue from here on.
Yup. Because all it takes is a couple of teenagers pulling a prank for our government to whip out the disintegrator rays and their flying armchairs and start zapping people while screaming "We're saving you motherf--ers! ZAP! SAFE! ZAP! SAFE!"
Slashdot Mirror
No, you should own the device you have purchased.
sar-casm /,sar,kazem/, n: The use of irony to mock or convey contempt. Often misunderstood by netizens of the online discussion site Slashdot, who take everything literally. See also: Derp.
Why is there so much outrage at this?
There's this strange, antiquidated notion some people have that a device they spend hundreds of dollars on, are in physical possession of, and which contains a ton of personal information and is the de facto way for the world to get ahold of them, belongs to them. So when these social degenerates are told that they have no say in how their data is used, whether or not they're tracked, what applications they can and cannot use, etc., they get upset.
We should probably just ignore them. Such morally inferior people are just holding back innovation in this country. The idea that you own anything, even your own DNA, is stupid. No poor person should be allowed to own anything -- they'll just misuse it anyway, and deprive society of the benefit of having a corporation own the things they have instead.
It seems like the trend to buy and sell everyone online continues to gain steam. Many stores from Blockbuster to Best Buy, from computer resellers to water purification systems... it seems like if you can get away with not having to touch or interact with the product in person before making a buying decision, that's what people are doing. In droves. One of the few retail areas not significantly affected has been women's clothing. Men, being of somewhat more predictable shapes and sizes, can buy jeans and such online, but women have no such luck. Even here, however, basics like bras, tank tops, t-shirts, shoes, etc., are being displaced by online sales.
It does not surprise me that books are on the list of things people don't need to go to a bookstore to purchase -- most books are purchased based on the recommendation of friends, word of mouth, or reviewers (which, surprise -- print media is giving way to online media...). This is not a good time to be a retail book seller... Barnes and Noble will soon be displaced by Walmart and their ilk; Stores that only sell books won't be around for much longer if they're publicly traded... they'll just be broken up and sold off piece by piece, their valuable commercial real estate being repurposed and the stock thrown out in massive going out of business sales, or simply deposited in a dumpster.
but nor did it show much really negative side effects,
Cancer, miscarriages, naked pictures, violation of federal and international laws regarding child pornography, hiring of actual pedophiles, rapists, and murderers to run the machines...
Yeah. No really negative side effects here. Move along, Citizen.
For the last bit, this is probably a desired feature. You'd -want- the device to be able to detect if you're under duress.
You assume that the device would be rigged to do something to help you in that event. "Warning: Elevated blood pressure detected. Access to secure area denied." (a few seconds later) *BANG!* "Okay, bring me the next one, Terrorist Bob."
Never assume security is there to help you.
"But what about the terrorists?"
Government: Approval Denied.
It would probably be much more effective, and one hell of a lot easier to mail what ever fissile material you have to the local media, claiming to have a bomb...
You're telling me it would be too hard for someone to take a big pile of conventional explosives, grind up the fissile material, and then load it into a rental truck and drive it downtown? Why do you think a bomb means "big mushroom cloud of doom"? It could just be a conventional explosive used against a soft target, but with the added collateral damage of having the entire area contaminated with radioactive debris. And once you're done, claim you'll do it again in 48 hours unless (insert terrorist demand here).
Yes. I can see how the average terrorist would find this plan to be dizzyingly complex, and would opt instead to simply drop it in the post with a note saying "me haz big bang, woo woo."
Hint: they don't want luxury and they don't want peace, until their flags are flying over all corners of the civilized world and their ideas about Islam (not just any brand of Islam either) dominate.
Three billion dollars buys a lot of change in thinking. You can get a Congressman to sell his soul for a lot less.
They are America's sworn enemies. We can't wish or negotiate that away, we have to defend ourselves. And the best defense is a good offense. That's why Obama's administration deserves huge props for taking out Bin Laden. That's how it's done, Dubya. That's how it must always be done.
Yes! We must bomb them! shoot them! Drop nukes! At a cost of many trillions of dollars! Because they don't want money! They don't want to be rich! They're poor, living in mud huts in the desert, and don't wanna change! Not ever! Not one single one! So passionate is their belief, they would happily choose suicide over spending the rest of their days rolling in hundred dollar bills naked! YES! I BELIEVE YOU!
Also, your fly is down.
Seriously, what's the point of that Obama quote?
To continue the fascade that a bunch of people who kick it out in the desert and shoot their guns in the air at weekend training camps are evil because they're muslims or whatever, as opposed to people who kick it up in the woods and shoot their guns in the air at weekend training camps here, but aren't? Just a thought.
I'm sure there are terrorists out there... but I'm also reasonably sure they are so few in number as to not be a serious threat. Even if a 9/11 happened every year, it wouldn't be serious, in terms of economic damage and loss of life. However, there are legions of people who have been labelled as such because it's the only way to justify spending trillions of dollars... I mean, what if there were only 300 terrorists in the whole world. What then? We spend a trillion dollars to "contain" them... when we really ought to just pay them 3 billion dollars each to move to a secluded island and live out their remaining days in luxury. Bonus: It would be cheaper than what we've been doing so far...
What can be done in clear air with line of sight means nothing. The fact that 5ghz has very little building penetration is well known. Its great for single rooms (like restaurants or in the cubical-sphere of an office, but even around the house it can be problematic when trying to penetrate some walls.
Now now, no need to invoke logic in this discussion. The mods already put me down 2 points in 'troll' for pointing out how the FCC is anything but a neutral party in all of this. You keep it up, they'll mod you -99 for being smart. ;)
Yes, but commercial airliners aren't built with plugs and sockets. For weight savings, everything is directly hardwired.
So they've managed to skim off maybe 10 pounds off the design of the aircraft, saving some several thousands in fuel costs over the operating life of the aircraft. A reasonable tradeoff considering the chance of the aircraft catching fire and then exploding when it hits the ground, killing everyone on board. *sips tea* Yeah. Makes sense to me. I mean, what's the cost of settling an accidental death claim for 300 people?
Here comes the math!
The cost of failure:
A product defect typically weighs in at $2.1 million USD per. So assuming 300 passengers and 10 crew, that's $651 million payout per plane going pop.
The cost savings:
Now, a 747 at least uses a gallon of fuel per second, or about 5 gallons per mile (average) on a flight. A typical domestic flight is about 2.5 hours in flight time, or 9,000 gallons of fuel. The weight of the aircraft, empty and unloaded, is about 95,000 pounds. It has 171 miles of wiring. Let's assume that we want to add connectors every 100 feet; That gives us 902,880 connectors. The average weight of a connector we'll say is 1.5 grams. that gives us 1,354,320 grams of extra weight to add connectors, or about 25,031 pounds.
So to add all those extra connectors would add an extra 26.3% cost to fuel. Now, the Dreamliner is slated to have a service life of about 30 years. We don't know how many pressurization cycles that equates to, but we can make an estimated guess. Let's just say 2 flights per day, 5 days a week. That'll be 1,560 flights before retirement then.
The average domestic flight is around 700 miles, we'll say. If the fuel cost before modification is 5 gallons per mile, at $3.30 per gallon... the cost of fuel per flight is $46,200. With the modification, it would cost $57,750.
Fuel cost over life of vehicle (before mod): 72,072,000.
Fuel cost over life of vehicle (after mod): 90,090,000.
Difference: $18,018,000.
Cost on failure: $651 million
Failure rate cutoff: 1 in 36
In other words, if a catastrophic failure that could have been prevented with electrical connectors happens more than 1 out of 36 planes, it's worth it. Otherwise, it's not.
With no centralized interoperability specification -- the next iteration of whatever devices operate on that spectrum will interfere destructively with the previous generation. Remember pre-N gear when it first came out? Whole neighborhoods went dark while one guy sat in his basement browsing porn because he'd just gotten home with the latest and greatest from the store. Suddenly, everyone has to upgrade overnight. Then there's channel overlap... some jerk decides to set his wifi to channel 3 instead of 1 or 6 and now half the spectrum is fracked.
There will be no boost in wireless speeds. The only thing this has going for it is 5Ghz doesn't travel as far as 2.4Ghz, which doesn't travel very far anyway... and that'll mean by simple virtue of physics, devices will have a smaller surface area in which they can cause destructive interference.
No, if you ask me, the FCC's incompetence is not accidental... they don't want wireless internet because it would mean all those people they got BILLIONS OF DOLLARS from would be upset. Politics, blah blah. You get the idea. We'll never have high speed, ranged, wireless internet, unless we decide to go pirate and tell them to eat a bag of dicks. (puts finger to ear)
Oh wait... I hear some people have started doing that.
No no, I know. I was just reframing the "black and nebulous art" of airplane maintenance into something easier to digest for slashdotters. It was either that, or a car analogy, and turning a plane into a car just felt wrong. :) The truth is a bit more complicated; But it still boils down to operator error and not a design flaw. Of course, a design that allows someone to plug in one component backwards and have the entire device go up in flames is not a good one, but it's not flawed in the strict sense of the word. It's disappointing that my $500 laptop has a feature that prevents the battery from being plugged in backwards, but a multi-million dollar state of the art aircraft does not.
Can't they make an idiot proof power plug?
Because idiots are much more resourceful than ordinary people.
So basically, the user reached back behind the power supply while fiddling and bumped the 110/220V switch, and it caught fire. Naturally, they didn't say anything to the tech after setting the switch back besides, "It just caught fire! All by itself!"
The user in this case is a giant airline company, and tech support would be Boeing. The FAA, of course, is the QA manager, who reviewed the call, and after reading the ticket closure notes, facepalmed, leaned back into his chair, and took a deep draft of coffee.
Herp derp derp herp derp
-- 4Chan
Well, at least the way I hear it used on the news, American conservatives are very different from Chinese and Russian conservatives.
Perhaps then, you should stop accepting what you hear on the news without critical analysis. It is invariably biased in some fashion, usually by lies of omission -- the most common of which, is that Group A is somehow so different from Group B as to be worthy of differential treatment. It does not make good news to say "We are 99.5% like these other people, but because of this singular thing in which we differ slightly in opinion on, we must dislike them." No, good news is "They are evil bastards with no redeeming qualities and we must punish them for this!" It feels better, more righteous. It satisfies our need for order in the world, this idea that the good are rewarded and the bad punished... and curiously, the good are always defined as "us" and the bad defined as "them."
Alas, American conservatives are not so different from conservatives anywhere else. Perhaps superficially. Perhaps in a great many ways that really don't matter... no different from driving on the left versus the right side of the road, or in how we dress or the slang we banter about. But it doesn't feel as emotionally satisfying. We want to be part of the superior group... therefore, some other group must be inferior, even if the inferiority is entirely socially constructed. And because we want this, we are eager to overlook similarity. Some people are eager to the point of violent opposition, like you are.
Twenty thousand years of human evolution says we are very, very much alike... and I assure you, every news channel, in every country, everywhere, says the same thing: "We're not like them!" Even if, on the whole, we very much are.
The average american, and average slashdot poster is CLUELESS about politics.
As opposed to the average citizen of any other country? Why is it necessary to hold the average american up to some special standard?
Reality is the average american is too ignorant/stupid to have any kind of informed political view of america given the huge amount of propaganda that pervades their media and education system.
Reality is... every first world country has a government with a bureaucratic process so dense as to blunt, if not entirely dissipate, any creative process for change. You say they're ignorant and stupid, but that's an ignorant and stupid attitude. The truth is, most people aren't interested in politics because its emotionally painful if one becomes overly-involved. That's not an unintelligent response to a hopelessly and needlessly complex system designed specifically to be resistant to intelligent and thoughtful discourse.
You simply picked the one with the largest military and economy in the world to shit on, for no other reason than because you want to pull it down for your own emotional gratification. How you managed to get this to be labelled "+5 insightful" is simply saying that a great many people also have such emotional needs... but having offered no proof or objective analysis, "insightful" is not the word I would use to describe your reaction. But then, there is no "+5, I Agree Because I Have Emotional Needs That Depend On Crapping On Others" option.
Now, can your brain rewire itself? Research suggests that yes, it can.
Which is an incredibly dull and obvious conclusion. Of course it can: Otherwise we'd still think and act like infant children. All we've managed to do here is look closely enough at the brain that we can start to see landscape features and make inferences from that which are broadly true for others which have similar features. Which is no small achievement, but this is confirmatory research -- it tells us something we already knew, to a high degree of confidence.
So how does this work in a traditionally free country like America...
Please stop. You're suggesting that the brains from one country are somehow different from that of another country. If we change 'country' out for 'race', it should be painfully obvious what the problem here is.
American conservatives are afraid to place their fates into the hands of the elected experts on human happiness.
You really shouldn't comment on the complex political landscape of another country whose citizens you apparently have little regular contact with. It makes you look like an idiot. No, "american" conservatives are just like "british" conservatives which are just like "african" conservatives, which are just like every conservative. Ever. The definition of conservativism doesn't change because of the country you're in. Perhaps its expression does, but the study here isn't about expression, but reaction. In that, conservatives broadly and as an aggregate group, are simply risk-averse. And because of how the human mind operates, an unknown risk is almost always subjectively larger in a person's mind than a known one. This is why we spent trillions of dollars combatting terrorism (an unknown risk) while both retrospectively and at the time, it could have easily been shown that a known risk (drunk driving) costs far more lives.
To extrapolate from a specific behavior (risk aversion) a complete political ideology is... at best... dubious.
It's not hardwired: If it were, we'd be able to do these scans at birth or an early age and find similar patterns. But we don't. Which means the brain's structure changes in order to specialize in certain thought and behavior patterns. The fact that this applies to politics as well as, say, geospatial, tasks, should be absolutely no surprise.
It's disengenuous to suggest these things are hard-wired because they imply they cannot be changed. Except they can: I've known many people who, after experiencing a significant emotional event, altered their politics, religious affiliation, and even base personality traits. The human brain is exceptionally malleable. This study only offers a snapshot at a particular point in time and suggests that if certain structural properties are present, the thinking pattern is likely to be of a certain type. It does not say whether that structure was present before, after, or the extent to which it can be changed, and if so, how quickly.
It's like taking a photograph of a car driving down the road and assuming that it's on that road, and only that road, forever.
I see logic like this all the time, but people seem to forget that they drive to work everyday just fine -- and that's a linear process. You can't predict what the other drivers will do, there may be an accident, you may be late... But you're going to drive the same distance every day.
People are getting hungup on measurements of time, and progress bars, like life, is based on distance. Whether it's number of operations, or number of miles, the principle is the same. Progress bars that move backwards is stupid: It means the programmer is attempting to measure the wrong thing.
Listen, Corporate Overlords, you know that little buzzer or dinger that goes off incessantly whenever I leave the lights on or don't buckle up and you think it's a "feature"? The first week of every car I've ever owned is spent taking apart the dashboard and removing that feature, and then pulverizing it with a hammer and throwing the remains on a base of burning coals. I shit you not, I'm serious about that crap.
Try putting cameras and microphones in things, and you'll find them equally under-appreciated in my household. That is, assuming I feel there are no better choices on the market... if even one of your competitors opts out, that's where my dollars go. Don't tempt me.
Signed, Interested Customer
Guys, how is this any different than "cloud" computing, or "cluster" computing, or pretty much the overwhelming majority of technical terms. Zip, unzip, explode, compress... yes, if I stopped and thought about it, I'd probably consider it perverted. And cloud computing doesn't mean we're all hovering above our cubes playing magical harps. Getting hungup on terminology is neither productive nor interesting.
The term "cyberspace" may be stupid, but it refers to something that is very real: The internet may just be a collection of wires, boxes with circuit boards in it, and a lot of ones and zeroes, but that is not how people look at it, anymore than they look at their car as a collection of fiberglass, steel bolts, and rubber. And the problems of the digital world aren't terribly hard to comprehend, nor do most of them require radical change in how we think about it.
Those of us under the age of 40 can conceptualize this "brave new world" quite well, and make moral and ethical decisions about it. Most of us understand and agree that privacy is a right, online and off. We may disagree about the particulars, but not the substance. Same with file sharing: Most of us are against people "pirating" for profit, but likewise have little objection to Joe Average maintaining his own personal collection of downloaded music and movies. This isn't hard for us to understand.
However, for people who grew up without computers, and are reluctant to embrace them, and still carry around Nokia phones from ten years ago because it's "more like a phone"... well, those people are more easily swayed by certain wealthy interests to look at it as a confusing and nebulous thing, and turn to said interests for guidance. Afterall... if you're rich, you must have done something right. There is a disconnect between our legislators (most of whom are 50+ years of age) and the general population (median age: 35).
The problems of "cyberspace" actually has nothing to do with technology: It has to do with people. Specifically, old people. Boomers. These people have taken an unwarranted familiarity with the technology and made bad decision after bad decision, institutionalizing ignorance and stupidity because that's what they were told to do. And that, really, is the only problem here.
You just ensured DHS VIPR teams will harass, molest and radiate every person that gets within a block of every Superbowl venue from here on.
Yup. Because all it takes is a couple of teenagers pulling a prank for our government to whip out the disintegrator rays and their flying armchairs and start zapping people while screaming "We're saving you motherf--ers! ZAP! SAFE! ZAP! SAFE!"