I think what they have in common is both rigidity (eg, A+B=C is a "rule", just as "obey god" is as well) as well as a willingness to follow everything to its logical conclusion (eg, C=B-A and "obey god, god says infidels should die, therefore kill them").
In my highly selective personal experience, engineer/science types are almost always the most inflexible people and often tend towards totalitarian behaviors. This doesn't mean they are all nutjobs and there are degrees of which they are like this (ie, its not an on or off tendency).
Freely flinging "you're a nazi!!111" as some kind of childish insult is pretty idiotic, but claiming that all reasonably intelligent comparisons to Nazi Germany are the "loss" of the argument is nothing short of ridiculous, especially when Nazi germany pretty much epitomizes a modern totalitarian government (propaganda, dictatorship, secret police, militarism, detention camps, etc).
I seem to remember reading about a similar scam where items are bought with stolen credit, shipped to a "mule" who then repackages them and sends them off, generally outside the U.S. These mules have no physical contact with their handlers.
I always wondered why these mules didn't either selectively ship stuff off (hey, international shipping is dodgy..) or just wait until there was enough "good" stuff on hand that they wanted and then sever ties. The same thing holds true with cash transfers -- just wait until there's a large enough sum and keep it.
It might be harder with wire transfers if they know identity infomation about you, but generally speaking you're not dealing with the kind of organized crime that might come after you, and even if you were, a clever person could set themselves up with a more-or-less fake identity up front before getting themselves recruited, thus making it almost impossible to get "caught".
Don't you ever wonder why there have been so few significant arrests of spammers/phishers/etc?
Isn't it trivial for a government agency like the FBI or Treasury to track payments charged to any kind of electronic banking back to the recipient? Wouldn't an investigation "following the money" ultimately lead you to either the thief or at least greatly disrupt his activities? At a minimum it would expose the people that made their transactions work (banks, hosting companies, other otherwise "normal" business people).
A couple of decent RICO prosecutions and you would drive this stuff out of the United States and greatly reduce the scale of it.
But it never happens, and I can only think that somehow the government has somehow turned these people into some espionage rabbit hole and high level prosecutions would disrupt intelligence gathering. Because there is little reason the government couldn't do something about it if they wanted to.
...or at least sell stuff to you, because I don't think there's many places, ESPECIALLY video editing shops, that have all this extra equipment which perfectly mirrors their production equipment, that they can do these tests on, let alone the time and/or personnel to mirror/clone drives, test updates, etc. I've been there, done that in an advertising agency for 13 years, and we barely had IT budgets to make stuff work, let alone have 2x of everything.
At a certain point, you have to trust the vendor to produce stuff that isn't badly broken.
IMHO, as a person who likes his Apple products (Macbook, iPod, iTunes), I think Apple has been remodeled too much along the lines of a consumer electronics company where bugs, broken features and planned obsolescence are the norm, rather than as a computer company where there's some general expectation of only-slightly-broken software.
The situation is bad now not because the carriers have deliberately made the plans and features so complex, both in terms of choices AND in the density and ambiguity of marketing terminology.
Of course we know they do this on purpose, so you either pick a plan too limited and eat a bunch of overage charges, or pick one too broad and pay way more than you need to on a monthly basis.
It probably would have too many unintentional consequences, but I'd almost like to see Congress create an affirmative defense against any civil claim by a creditor if the contract language and/or marketing is deemed "too complex or obtuse for the ordinary person to reasonably understand." You shouldn't have to hire an attorney to buy a phone.
- As a financial instrument, insurance exists to distribute risk, not cost. Anybody who does not understand what the distinction is please vacate the discussion. Technically speaking, insurance is how one distributes risk and some approximation of communist government (in a literal rather than pejorative sense) is how one distributes cost. Trying to use the former to approximate the latter is inefficient and raises the costs for everyone.
You're right, but insurance risk pools are artificially manipulated for the purposes of business profitability. If we had a unified risk pool, the overall cost of care would probably be less since the cost of high risk people would be spread out evenly, instead of ghettoizing them into grossly inefficient government programs.
I've read that 50 year loans are popular in Japan, although it ties in there to much higher real estate costs for property purchase, as well as a greater cultural tendency for the home to be lived in by extended families. So when you turn 80 and pay off the loan, you are still living there, but then so are your kids and their kids.
No, I wanted the cornholing and her to get the PhD at Northwestern. When she gave THAT up, she moved back here and became a slacker. And it wasn't like she gave up the PhD program for "me" or wasn't smart enough, she just kind of went into loser meltdown.
I'm a little embarrassed about her. It wasn't the willful submission to vigorous cornholing that caused me to lose respect for her, it was giving up on the free ride to Northwestern for her PhD.
Is aluminum really in that short of a supply, or is it a smelting shortage?
There was a guy on Science Friday, Jerry Woodall of Purdue, who has a process of generating hydrogen from an aluminum alloy. I heard him on Science Friday on NRP and he never mentioned any kind of worldwide shortage of aluminum, although he was largely pushing the fact that the aluminum alloy used as a catalyst in his process was completely recyclable and reusable for the same process.
I have heard there are supply problems related to aluminum smelting limitations, primarily due to the energy required -- in fact, I seem to recall that Iceland of all places is a leading refiner of aluminum due to the geothermal energy resources; its cheaper to ship the ore to Iceland and refine it and ship it out due to the immense "free" geothermal energy.
This girl I once fu^H^Hdated had this crazy, mad-scientist brother who used to put on a "show" on the 4th of July which involved trash bags filled with acetylene he got from some welding place. I think he used model rocket igniters.
Anyway, he kind of won the Darwin award one dry very dry year when static electricity beat him to the punch. He only singed off the hair on his eyebrows and arms and didn't get serious burns or lose eyesight, but he quit the displays.
One day 20 years ago in a college physics test, the teacher (who was a bit of a showman, as I think all college physics teachers are) had a massive looking amp and speaker setup at the front of the lecture hall (a '20s era building with the large lab bench up front). After a few minutes, he looked at us and said "What is the matter with you kids? Don't you know loud music is bad for you!" and went on to explain that he was pumping out about 120 db spl worth of noise at 23Khz and that he was going to demonstrate why we ought not waste money on speakers that claimed 20+ Khz response.
He turned down the frequency generator to about 10Khz (when we realized it was super loud) and then the volume and told everyone to raise their hand and then lower it when they could no longer hear anything. 90% of the class had their hand down when the frequency generator hit about 19Khz, and the ones left were all girls and nobody lasted to 22Khz.
The other one is high fidelity in cars -- even the nicest "riding" car I've ever been in (Jaguar) still has an audible road noise floor which makes fidelity in the car pointless, especially if you're a wanker in a Honda like me.
They seem fairly competent at running an arguably complex system, the NANPA.
What needs to happen is that the 'core' services of root servers and central domain registry need to be run by a not-for-profit who is legally barred by threat of criminal prosecution from any profit making venture related to their service. You could also get this same entity to run a centralized PKI root authority for all the SSL cert vendors.
Then the profit-making crap can be done by everyone else, and when the rules get broken its much easier to cut the sleazy operators out.
In fact, it surprises me that domain registration and SSL PKI root authorities *aren't* run this way and NANPA is.
Up to the last one it was plurality, but there was also a ballot initiative to try IRV on the next election, which someone organization is challenging as violating some obscure state law from the turn of the century.
All that has changed is that PHBs are realizing that helpdesk is replaceable by high school kids and dropouts.
My guess is that PHBs have realized that help desk "skills" have nothing to do with computers and are more aligned with customer service, there's high turnover, and that the help desk's main function isn't really solving problems but creating an interference plane between "real" IT work and general end user complaints.
We have non-partisan city council elections here in Minneapolis and while they are non-partisan in an official sense, everyone knows which party the candidates belong to and the councilors tend to follow all the usual political platforms and biases of the parties they represent. So I don't think that officially making elections non-partisan would help, nor do I think the parties themselves would ever allow this to happen.
There's probably also arguments to be made in favor of party labels, as they allow both the electorate and the political system to more efficiently identify friends/foes.
"Excessive force" is not a criminal charge, at least not in Minnesota. It does not appear in Minnesota's laws and statutes. You can't be accused of killing someone deader than dead.
Some law enforcement officers have been "charged" within their own internal disciplinary system for the use of excessive force relative to their role as police officers (eg, when 6 NYC cops empty Glock 17s at some guy in a doorway), but this is largely a *political* outcome relative to "community outrage" when the cops are white and the person they shoot isn't. It is totally irrelevant to civilian use of deadly force.
Only in the most extreme, made-up-circumstances could a person use "too much" force, not be charged with a crime *and* then go on to lose some kind of civil judgement.
There are liability issues when it comes with unconventional loads. Anything that can be deemed as cruel or meant to inflict injury above what is necessary for self defense can open you up to serious litigation. And the ones who get to deem what is and is not cruel? Civil court judge and lawyers. All bets are off on people being sane when someone is going to get paid a million bucks to sue you. Ahh, that's BS. Dead is dead, you can't inflict injury beyond that, and from a criminal perspective it doesn't really matter how you inflict deadly force, its how it is justified (self-defense, generally).
In terms of civil liability, you could be sued for wrongful death, but I don't think there's any way you could lose a wrongful death suit if you were never charged or won a criminal case based on self-defense. In many cases there are specific grants of immunity from civil liability for some uses of deadly force or situations (eg, defense of dwelling or when a victim of a crime).
Its certainly possible to imagine a less common solution where "self-defense" arises as the result of some rogue behavior and the plaintiff's attorney attempts to demonize the self-defense claimant because of their rogue behavior, bad character, drug use, etc, but the type of ammo they used isn't likely to sway a jury in and of itself, even in a borderline situation.
This comes up whenever the topic of using handloads in self-defense weapons comes up. Some claim it increases liability because someone will claim you tried to make "super bullets", but it doesn't make any sense either technically (there's *always* a more powerful gun/cartridge that is NORMALLY more powerful than any one hot-rodded round) nor logically, since dead is dead -- I can't hurt you more than dead.
As far as I know, nobody has ever been able to show an actual court cases where someone received a (increased) punishment based on the lethality or origin of their ammo. If you had the right to kill, it doesn't matter if it was a.25 Auto or a.600 Nitro Express.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what they have in common is both rigidity (eg, A+B=C is a "rule", just as "obey god" is as well) as well as a willingness to follow everything to its logical conclusion (eg, C=B-A and "obey god, god says infidels should die, therefore kill them").
In my highly selective personal experience, engineer/science types are almost always the most inflexible people and often tend towards totalitarian behaviors. This doesn't mean they are all nutjobs and there are degrees of which they are like this (ie, its not an on or off tendency).
I think it has nothing to do with Islam per se.
Freely flinging "you're a nazi!!111" as some kind of childish insult is pretty idiotic, but claiming that all reasonably intelligent comparisons to Nazi Germany are the "loss" of the argument is nothing short of ridiculous, especially when Nazi germany pretty much epitomizes a modern totalitarian government (propaganda, dictatorship, secret police, militarism, detention camps, etc).
I seem to remember reading about a similar scam where items are bought with stolen credit, shipped to a "mule" who then repackages them and sends them off, generally outside the U.S. These mules have no physical contact with their handlers.
I always wondered why these mules didn't either selectively ship stuff off (hey, international shipping is dodgy..) or just wait until there was enough "good" stuff on hand that they wanted and then sever ties. The same thing holds true with cash transfers -- just wait until there's a large enough sum and keep it.
It might be harder with wire transfers if they know identity infomation about you, but generally speaking you're not dealing with the kind of organized crime that might come after you, and even if you were, a clever person could set themselves up with a more-or-less fake identity up front before getting themselves recruited, thus making it almost impossible to get "caught".
Don't you ever wonder why there have been so few significant arrests of spammers/phishers/etc?
Isn't it trivial for a government agency like the FBI or Treasury to track payments charged to any kind of electronic banking back to the recipient? Wouldn't an investigation "following the money" ultimately lead you to either the thief or at least greatly disrupt his activities? At a minimum it would expose the people that made their transactions work (banks, hosting companies, other otherwise "normal" business people).
A couple of decent RICO prosecutions and you would drive this stuff out of the United States and greatly reduce the scale of it.
But it never happens, and I can only think that somehow the government has somehow turned these people into some espionage rabbit hole and high level prosecutions would disrupt intelligence gathering. Because there is little reason the government couldn't do something about it if they wanted to.
It has neat features, too bad it requires a shitpile of dependencies on Windows (Cygwin, Ruby AND Java!?) and doesn't do ssh tunneling or SOCKS proxy.
I'll stick with Putty.
...or at least sell stuff to you, because I don't think there's many places, ESPECIALLY video editing shops, that have all this extra equipment which perfectly mirrors their production equipment, that they can do these tests on, let alone the time and/or personnel to mirror/clone drives, test updates, etc. I've been there, done that in an advertising agency for 13 years, and we barely had IT budgets to make stuff work, let alone have 2x of everything.
At a certain point, you have to trust the vendor to produce stuff that isn't badly broken.
IMHO, as a person who likes his Apple products (Macbook, iPod, iTunes), I think Apple has been remodeled too much along the lines of a consumer electronics company where bugs, broken features and planned obsolescence are the norm, rather than as a computer company where there's some general expectation of only-slightly-broken software.
I'm with you.
The situation is bad now not because the carriers have deliberately made the plans and features so complex, both in terms of choices AND in the density and ambiguity of marketing terminology.
Of course we know they do this on purpose, so you either pick a plan too limited and eat a bunch of overage charges, or pick one too broad and pay way more than you need to on a monthly basis.
It probably would have too many unintentional consequences, but I'd almost like to see Congress create an affirmative defense against any civil claim by a creditor if the contract language and/or marketing is deemed "too complex or obtuse for the ordinary person to reasonably understand." You shouldn't have to hire an attorney to buy a phone.
- As a financial instrument, insurance exists to distribute risk, not cost. Anybody who does not understand what the distinction is please vacate the discussion. Technically speaking, insurance is how one distributes risk and some approximation of communist government (in a literal rather than pejorative sense) is how one distributes cost. Trying to use the former to approximate the latter is inefficient and raises the costs for everyone.
You're right, but insurance risk pools are artificially manipulated for the purposes of business profitability. If we had a unified risk pool, the overall cost of care would probably be less since the cost of high risk people would be spread out evenly, instead of ghettoizing them into grossly inefficient government programs.
Powered External SATA.
PEeSATA anyone?
I've read that 50 year loans are popular in Japan, although it ties in there to much higher real estate costs for property purchase, as well as a greater cultural tendency for the home to be lived in by extended families. So when you turn 80 and pay off the loan, you are still living there, but then so are your kids and their kids.
Why a 24 hour limitation?
I may be weird, but I often will watch a longer (>90 mins) movie in 2 or 3 chunks, sometimes over a period of a week.
I still think Netflix is pretty close to ideal; I can keep them as long as I want, and for $15/mo I can beat $4 rentals even at my leisurely pace.
No, I wanted the cornholing and her to get the PhD at Northwestern. When she gave THAT up, she moved back here and became a slacker. And it wasn't like she gave up the PhD program for "me" or wasn't smart enough, she just kind of went into loser meltdown.
But this was almost 20 years ago.
I'm a little embarrassed about her. It wasn't the willful submission to vigorous cornholing that caused me to lose respect for her, it was giving up on the free ride to Northwestern for her PhD.
I think you're one of the first people to state this -- its not just peak oil, it is peak everything.
Is it just paranoia, or is it really a civilization-ending possibility?
Is aluminum really in that short of a supply, or is it a smelting shortage?
There was a guy on Science Friday, Jerry Woodall of Purdue, who has a process of generating hydrogen from an aluminum alloy. I heard him on Science Friday on NRP and he never mentioned any kind of worldwide shortage of aluminum, although he was largely pushing the fact that the aluminum alloy used as a catalyst in his process was completely recyclable and reusable for the same process.
I have heard there are supply problems related to aluminum smelting limitations, primarily due to the energy required -- in fact, I seem to recall that Iceland of all places is a leading refiner of aluminum due to the geothermal energy resources; its cheaper to ship the ore to Iceland and refine it and ship it out due to the immense "free" geothermal energy.
This girl I once fu^H^Hdated had this crazy, mad-scientist brother who used to put on a "show" on the 4th of July which involved trash bags filled with acetylene he got from some welding place. I think he used model rocket igniters.
Anyway, he kind of won the Darwin award one dry very dry year when static electricity beat him to the punch. He only singed off the hair on his eyebrows and arms and didn't get serious burns or lose eyesight, but he quit the displays.
One day 20 years ago in a college physics test, the teacher (who was a bit of a showman, as I think all college physics teachers are) had a massive looking amp and speaker setup at the front of the lecture hall (a '20s era building with the large lab bench up front). After a few minutes, he looked at us and said "What is the matter with you kids? Don't you know loud music is bad for you!" and went on to explain that he was pumping out about 120 db spl worth of noise at 23Khz and that he was going to demonstrate why we ought not waste money on speakers that claimed 20+ Khz response.
He turned down the frequency generator to about 10Khz (when we realized it was super loud) and then the volume and told everyone to raise their hand and then lower it when they could no longer hear anything. 90% of the class had their hand down when the frequency generator hit about 19Khz, and the ones left were all girls and nobody lasted to 22Khz.
The other one is high fidelity in cars -- even the nicest "riding" car I've ever been in (Jaguar) still has an audible road noise floor which makes fidelity in the car pointless, especially if you're a wanker in a Honda like me.
They seem fairly competent at running an arguably complex system, the NANPA.
What needs to happen is that the 'core' services of root servers and central domain registry need to be run by a not-for-profit who is legally barred by threat of criminal prosecution from any profit making venture related to their service. You could also get this same entity to run a centralized PKI root authority for all the SSL cert vendors.
Then the profit-making crap can be done by everyone else, and when the rules get broken its much easier to cut the sleazy operators out.
In fact, it surprises me that domain registration and SSL PKI root authorities *aren't* run this way and NANPA is.
Up to the last one it was plurality, but there was also a ballot initiative to try IRV on the next election, which someone organization is challenging as violating some obscure state law from the turn of the century.
All that has changed is that PHBs are realizing that helpdesk is replaceable by high school kids and dropouts.
My guess is that PHBs have realized that help desk "skills" have nothing to do with computers and are more aligned with customer service, there's high turnover, and that the help desk's main function isn't really solving problems but creating an interference plane between "real" IT work and general end user complaints.
We have non-partisan city council elections here in Minneapolis and while they are non-partisan in an official sense, everyone knows which party the candidates belong to and the councilors tend to follow all the usual political platforms and biases of the parties they represent. So I don't think that officially making elections non-partisan would help, nor do I think the parties themselves would ever allow this to happen.
There's probably also arguments to be made in favor of party labels, as they allow both the electorate and the political system to more efficiently identify friends/foes.
I need to do that soon. My IBM model M looks pretty gross at this point.
What I really should be doing is stocking up on PS/2->USB connectors so I'm able to use it with the future USB-3 only motherboards.
So when you say your cock is bigger than his, does that mean longer, thicker, perhaps a more pronounced head, or just kind of meatier?
"Excessive force" is not a criminal charge, at least not in Minnesota. It does not appear in Minnesota's laws and statutes. You can't be accused of killing someone deader than dead.
Some law enforcement officers have been "charged" within their own internal disciplinary system for the use of excessive force relative to their role as police officers (eg, when 6 NYC cops empty Glock 17s at some guy in a doorway), but this is largely a *political* outcome relative to "community outrage" when the cops are white and the person they shoot isn't. It is totally irrelevant to civilian use of deadly force.
Only in the most extreme, made-up-circumstances could a person use "too much" force, not be charged with a crime *and* then go on to lose some kind of civil judgement.
In terms of civil liability, you could be sued for wrongful death, but I don't think there's any way you could lose a wrongful death suit if you were never charged or won a criminal case based on self-defense. In many cases there are specific grants of immunity from civil liability for some uses of deadly force or situations (eg, defense of dwelling or when a victim of a crime).
Its certainly possible to imagine a less common solution where "self-defense" arises as the result of some rogue behavior and the plaintiff's attorney attempts to demonize the self-defense claimant because of their rogue behavior, bad character, drug use, etc, but the type of ammo they used isn't likely to sway a jury in and of itself, even in a borderline situation.
This comes up whenever the topic of using handloads in self-defense weapons comes up. Some claim it increases liability because someone will claim you tried to make "super bullets", but it doesn't make any sense either technically (there's *always* a more powerful gun/cartridge that is NORMALLY more powerful than any one hot-rodded round) nor logically, since dead is dead -- I can't hurt you more than dead.
As far as I know, nobody has ever been able to show an actual court cases where someone received a (increased) punishment based on the lethality or origin of their ammo. If you had the right to kill, it doesn't matter if it was a