The submitter doesn't have the privilege of choosing which connotation to use; it's a quote. Unless the man being quoted stood up at the podium and literally said "bull asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk" your argument makes no sense. You can't just change a quote, especially with the intention of changing its meaning by fiddling with connotations and such.
You know, the truth is no one believes any ratings agency except when it's convenient to believe it.
S&P is the ultimate case in point.
First, they get cursed out for rubber stamping a trillion dollars or so in bad mortgages. Fine, they fucked up. But at least 8 out of 10 people believed the rating, against all evidence and all the screaming of the other 2 people, for as long as they could possibly deny the problem.
But now that they've downgraded the US - a nation that has $14.5 trillion dollars in debt and so far plans to almost double that by 2020 - everyone is saying "what do those fuckers know, they're the ones who graded CDOs AAA!".
People hate ratings agencies even more for telling the truth than they do for lying or making gross mistakes. It's impossible to beat a dominant culture of self-righteous delusion.
After all the unilateral shit we've dealt with from paypal, are we surprised to see their founder try to become his own nation?
After all the times we've heard about paypal indefinitely freezing funds without a court order or automatically refunding the buyer in any ebay dispute, this doesn't surpise me; after all the times we've heard them claim they're not a bank and therefore not subject to finance laws (all while holding deposits, issuing debit cards, offering money market accounts, etc.) we should have been surprised if their founder didn't try some hare-brained libertarian scheme to achieve personal sovereignty.
The article is saying (obviously) that Linux is the chosen platform for high-frequency trading, i.e. algorithm-dominated trading that has everything to do with manipulating and responding to the market in nanosecond time frames for a quick buck and nothing to do with making stable, long-term investment decisions.
I'd rather see evidence of a Linux machine in Hitler's bunker than hear about Linux helping Wall Street punks get even further from real, useful activities than they used to be.
Oh shove off you self righteous little twit. I'm hardly demanding that news be entertaining. I'm simply saying that seeing the same damn story five times a week isn't necessary; I remember that license violations are rampant without slashdot shoving down my throat every god damn day.
It's not hypocritical to believe in GPL and simultaneously despise the way intellectual property works in modern life.
I believe in intellectual property where it is public property, something distributed openly and protected from corporate schills who want to strangle the path of innovation lest it lead away from their business model. You can be anti-corporate and against 75 year copyright yet still believe in the value of short legal monopolies and in the good of clearly defining (and protecting) public property.
I feel about long-lasting intellectual property restraints the way I feel about jet fighters: in public hands, yes. In private hands, break out the pitchforks.
We all know you shouldn't steal public property for personal profit, and this theft wasn't unique or creative in any way. Where's the news?
This isn't really any different than stories about random violent crimes or bad weather in other states. It's not relevant to your life, it doesn't teach you anything you didn't know already, and it's only purpose is to generate page views. It's not like I don't care about protecting GPL or preventing corporate malfeasance, I just question how this story tells me anything I didn't already know.
Actually, I did mean freaking. Just because I criticize the sort of people who obsessively avoid swearing or even quoting curses doesn't mean I'm obligated to spout one off just to make a point. I just think it's stupid when people believe it somehow holy or dignified to never use or repeat curses under any circumstances.
If I thought the situation warranted the word 'fucking' I'd have used it. I consider 'freaking' and 'fucking' to have different emotional textures and connotations, and I preferred the first.
It was deliberate diction, not oblivious hypocrisy.
I'm not aware of any profanity filter on slashdot. There's no point to being so obsessively proper, so self-righteous, or so whatever it is you were trying to be that you should choose to bleep out a swear word in a direct quote. Just say the freaking word.
Those massive data centers only existed because Microsoft and Amazon channeled profits through Irish subsidiaries to avoid US taxes. They serve some legitimate functions for customers in the UK as a matter of convenience (why build two data centers?), but they're primarily money laundering centers.
I'd call a few lightning strikes the least of the punishments those data centers - and the entire infrastructures to which they're attached - really deserve.
Because you have to start somewhere. If all human studies used hundreds or thousands of people you'd have not even 1/100th as much research done. We don't have an infinite amount of cash or of decent scientists.
That is NOT a statistically valid sample size.
I somehow think the good people of UC-Berkeley realize that 24 people is a small sample. Studies of this size are usually done to suggest and design further studies, or because the premise is interesting but that particular team doesn't have the resources for a larger study; everyone who matters understands that these small trials rarely prove anything at all. It's just arrogant and ignorant to trot out sample size arguments in response to every single damn study with less than 1,000 people as if it proves you're smarter than every scientist and grant reviewer involved.
Furthermore, sample size isn't everything. If I pulled 24 frogs all with 13 legs a piece from a lake that I knew to contain 150,000 frogs I would not think "that is NOT a statistically valid sample size", I would think "Jesus Sideways-Hopping Christ, somethings wrong with this lake!". It's quite possible to get data from a small sample that is quite clear and quite certain. Many amazing discoveries in physiology have been made with sample sizes in the single digits. They had to be reproduced with hundreds of other samples by dozens of other people to check method and provide absolute certainty, but they were effectively undeniable as originally published.
The annoying thing is people dumb enough to read a study done on 24 people with any ambiguity at all in the results and go on reporting that it's a new discovery. Well, that and insouciant bastards like you who get off on thinking they're smarter than entire research departments.
EA Games abuse their employees so seriously that I consider buying an EA title even stupider than paying for RIAA product. In fact, many game publishers treat their employees much worse than any RIAA label treats their artists. There are numerous articles and open letters from former EA employees out there documenting the fact that the pay sucks and that working the developers seven days and 90 hours per week are standard practice in the later stages of producing a game. The crunch time that often happens in a contract or project based environment - as a schedule slips or problems are encountered - EA plans on from the very beginning; from the first day of producing a game they consciously plan to work hundreds of salaried employees for hundreds of hours each in uncompensated overtime by the time the game is completed.
I have no idea exactly how prevalent the problem is amongst the video game industry as a whole, but it's well known that EA is far from the only publisher to treat employees like this.
If all you care about is copyright reform, then boycott only music and film, but if you care about workers' rights and human dignity don't you dare buy a video game without thoroughly researching the labor relations history of both the developer and publisher.
Those advocating the ban need to speak with some archeologists and evolutionary anthropologists before making their decisions. These experts now believe that cats and dogs adopted humans as companions, and not the other way around. With cats, agrarian life led to grain storage, which attracted rodents, and some kitties evolved to play nice with humans in order to access all the tasty mice in human settlements. For dogs I don't remember the whole story off-hand.
It was a valid evolutionary step for many animals to prefer and enjoy the company of people; banning pet "ownership" merely leaves dozens of cat and dog sub-species without their proper habitat and social environment.
As Newton said: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Newton was merely quoting when he said this; the original source predates him by 500 years. John of Salisbury first wrote it in 1159. I know it seems pedantic to waste a post on quote attribution, but it's an extremely widespread quotation in nerd circles and not even 1 in 100 people seems to know where it actually came from.
Not to mention that Newton wrote the famous saying in a letter to Robert Hooke, a man with a slight build and severe spinal defect (although these didn't make him especially short), and some authors think it was actually a cutting insult rather than an expression of humility.
There is no excuse whatsoever for modding my last comment a troll. It was patient, clear, and civil to a fault, other than pointing out as an aside the passive-aggressiveness and general pointlessness of the phrase "no offense".
Just because I disagree with you does not mean that everything I say is a deliberate attempt to piss you off.
As for the first one being modded flamebait, please recall that there is no "-1, I disagree with the poster" moderation option.
I'm not sure why people mention that something is tax deductible. If it's worthwhile, that should be obvious regardless of it's tax status. As for the financial aspect, a deduction isn't a serious cash value unless you're quite rich; as I understand deductions they only reduce the amount on which you owe tax, and thus return to most people not even 30% of the cash outlay on the original, deductible expense (depending on the tax brackets through which you move as you calculate your deductions). I suppose you can get satisfaction in giving 70% of the cost from your own pocket and shifting the other 30% from a random government program into something you've chosen yourself, but in raw dollars deductions don't cut a huge amount of ice for people with average incomes.
They have to care what I'm comfortable with if they want my support in building memorials, or if they want me to care about the memorial once it's completed.
Other than that I'm not demanding that anyone care, except that every person has some level of influence over what is acceptable and I'm putting in my small opinion. Not to mention that contrary opinions are usually quite valuable in avoiding serious missteps, even if all they do is help the majority refine their preexisting opinion.
As for why you should care, we're here on a discussion board and there's really no point to this place if no one cares what anyone says.
And by the way, saying "no offense" doesn't decrease the offensiveness of something at all, nor would it in any way whatsoever abrogate you of responsibility for saying something highly offensive. Just don't waste the words to say it; it's a meaningless platitude.
I may be splitting linguistic hairs here, but for my money full-fledged memorials are reserved for humanitarians or political, scientific, and military heroes. Gary Gygax may have done a lot to legitimize and expand the role-playing hobby and even the fantasy genre at large, but ultimately his work was in entertainment, albeit entertainment with legitimate and interesting anthropological/historical roots.
Maybe I have to turn in my nerd card now, but I'm no more comfortable with memorializing Gary Gygax than I am with a marble statue of John Wayne or Madonna. Prima facie, I don't see this as anything but another example of going too far in deifying celebrities and glorifying entertainment at the expense of more important things.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 1
There will actually be 21 billion BTC, not 21 million. And I can't understand any real economic need to set the cap so low or increase the difficulty of mining new coins so rapidly, either - other than to make massive piles of cash for people who've been mining since 2009.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
These are very good points.
It wasn't until bitcoin that I understood the point of constant inflation: it makes credit feasible. You can only borrow safely if you can be almost certain money won't increase in relative value in the future, and to make a borrower feel truly safe currency value should have a near certainty of decreasing somewhat. With significant deflation a possibility you can't even take out a car loan without simultaneously risking indentured servitude; it would be insane to take home or business loans, and I don't mean figuratively insane, either.
Inflation also encourages lending and investing. It's like the Red Queen hypothesis: with inflation eating the valuation of your cash you have to put it to work somehow in hopes of earning more than the rate of inflation.
It seems no one makes loans or investment in bitcoins, and the scam artists - excuse me, properly rewarded early adopters - who minted thousands or millions of coins back when they cost 1/1000th as much processing time to generate still seem to be hoarding and not using them.
It's technically true that they're not a ponzi scheme, but they're still basically a confidence game that at the current trajectories don't seem like any benefit to people who weren't already in the market by mid-2010. Anyone who adopted after that could use them as money laundering and anonymous payments (like Silk Road), but couldn't efficiently generate or purchase them without wasting more fiat currency than the coins are worth in service fees or electricity.
I'm tired of the rhetoric presenting Chinese economic policy as inherently unethical. America has implemented excellent strategies for operating and integrating a government and an economy (at least when they work right), but that doesn't mean we possess moral authority on what's Right and what's Wrong in politics and finance.
These kind of connections between Chinese government and business aren't inherently wrong (or inherently right). They're just different. Murdering protestors and imprisoning reporters is wrong; beating the pants off the USA with a slightly different kind of capitalism is an ethical and moral non-issue.
Never, ever rent an RPG. Or any Rockstar game. You might as well go buy it, even if you have to sell plasma and kidneys. You'll pay more in the long run on many types of games renting than you will buying, and unlike rent-to-own scams that ultimately charge 300% of retail for your item, this time you won't even own it when you're done.
I think the unspoken current of this conversation, however, is if and when it's ethical to use completely deliberate nudging on someone's subconscious. The advertising and pricing phrases you mention still communicate directly, even if they're largely attacking the subconscious by exploiting the lizard brain or playing to societal norms. In contrast, when you talk about applying these sorts of experiments to marketing you'd be asking whether it's ethical to play soothing music if it increases sales by keeping people in the store longer or put the smell of popcorn in the air conditioner at a movie theater. People already do both of those things, and now we're wondering how far you can ethically take that sort of behavior, wherein there's no way at all to perceive that you're being sold on something.
It could also be going literally to our troops. I've heard some military installations, especially foreign operating bases, have very nice digital entertainment options to take the stress out of being in a contested zone (and take the boredom out of being on a military base).
Slashdot Mirror
The submitter doesn't have the privilege of choosing which connotation to use; it's a quote. Unless the man being quoted stood up at the podium and literally said "bull asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk" your argument makes no sense. You can't just change a quote, especially with the intention of changing its meaning by fiddling with connotations and such.
You know, the truth is no one believes any ratings agency except when it's convenient to believe it.
S&P is the ultimate case in point.
First, they get cursed out for rubber stamping a trillion dollars or so in bad mortgages. Fine, they fucked up. But at least 8 out of 10 people believed the rating, against all evidence and all the screaming of the other 2 people, for as long as they could possibly deny the problem.
But now that they've downgraded the US - a nation that has $14.5 trillion dollars in debt and so far plans to almost double that by 2020 - everyone is saying "what do those fuckers know, they're the ones who graded CDOs AAA!".
People hate ratings agencies even more for telling the truth than they do for lying or making gross mistakes. It's impossible to beat a dominant culture of self-righteous delusion.
After all the unilateral shit we've dealt with from paypal, are we surprised to see their founder try to become his own nation?
After all the times we've heard about paypal indefinitely freezing funds without a court order or automatically refunding the buyer in any ebay dispute, this doesn't surpise me; after all the times we've heard them claim they're not a bank and therefore not subject to finance laws (all while holding deposits, issuing debit cards, offering money market accounts, etc.) we should have been surprised if their founder didn't try some hare-brained libertarian scheme to achieve personal sovereignty.
This is the very last place I like seeing Linux.
The article is saying (obviously) that Linux is the chosen platform for high-frequency trading, i.e. algorithm-dominated trading that has everything to do with manipulating and responding to the market in nanosecond time frames for a quick buck and nothing to do with making stable, long-term investment decisions.
I'd rather see evidence of a Linux machine in Hitler's bunker than hear about Linux helping Wall Street punks get even further from real, useful activities than they used to be.
Oh shove off you self righteous little twit. I'm hardly demanding that news be entertaining. I'm simply saying that seeing the same damn story five times a week isn't necessary; I remember that license violations are rampant without slashdot shoving down my throat every god damn day.
It's not hypocritical to believe in GPL and simultaneously despise the way intellectual property works in modern life.
I believe in intellectual property where it is public property, something distributed openly and protected from corporate schills who want to strangle the path of innovation lest it lead away from their business model. You can be anti-corporate and against 75 year copyright yet still believe in the value of short legal monopolies and in the good of clearly defining (and protecting) public property.
I feel about long-lasting intellectual property restraints the way I feel about jet fighters: in public hands, yes. In private hands, break out the pitchforks.
We all know you shouldn't steal public property for personal profit, and this theft wasn't unique or creative in any way. Where's the news?
This isn't really any different than stories about random violent crimes or bad weather in other states. It's not relevant to your life, it doesn't teach you anything you didn't know already, and it's only purpose is to generate page views. It's not like I don't care about protecting GPL or preventing corporate malfeasance, I just question how this story tells me anything I didn't already know.
I like news that tells me something...new.
And by 'freaking', of course, you mean 'fucking'.
Actually, I did mean freaking. Just because I criticize the sort of people who obsessively avoid swearing or even quoting curses doesn't mean I'm obligated to spout one off just to make a point. I just think it's stupid when people believe it somehow holy or dignified to never use or repeat curses under any circumstances.
If I thought the situation warranted the word 'fucking' I'd have used it. I consider 'freaking' and 'fucking' to have different emotional textures and connotations, and I preferred the first.
It was deliberate diction, not oblivious hypocrisy.
Bullshit.
That's the word, Trepidity, go ahead and say it.
I'm not aware of any profanity filter on slashdot. There's no point to being so obsessively proper, so self-righteous, or so whatever it is you were trying to be that you should choose to bleep out a swear word in a direct quote. Just say the freaking word.
Those massive data centers only existed because Microsoft and Amazon channeled profits through Irish subsidiaries to avoid US taxes. They serve some legitimate functions for customers in the UK as a matter of convenience (why build two data centers?), but they're primarily money laundering centers.
I'd call a few lightning strikes the least of the punishments those data centers - and the entire infrastructures to which they're attached - really deserve.
Why do research like this on just 24 people?
Because you have to start somewhere. If all human studies used hundreds or thousands of people you'd have not even 1/100th as much research done. We don't have an infinite amount of cash or of decent scientists.
That is NOT a statistically valid sample size.
I somehow think the good people of UC-Berkeley realize that 24 people is a small sample. Studies of this size are usually done to suggest and design further studies, or because the premise is interesting but that particular team doesn't have the resources for a larger study; everyone who matters understands that these small trials rarely prove anything at all. It's just arrogant and ignorant to trot out sample size arguments in response to every single damn study with less than 1,000 people as if it proves you're smarter than every scientist and grant reviewer involved.
Furthermore, sample size isn't everything. If I pulled 24 frogs all with 13 legs a piece from a lake that I knew to contain 150,000 frogs I would not think "that is NOT a statistically valid sample size", I would think "Jesus Sideways-Hopping Christ, somethings wrong with this lake!". It's quite possible to get data from a small sample that is quite clear and quite certain. Many amazing discoveries in physiology have been made with sample sizes in the single digits. They had to be reproduced with hundreds of other samples by dozens of other people to check method and provide absolute certainty, but they were effectively undeniable as originally published.
The annoying thing is people dumb enough to read a study done on 24 people with any ambiguity at all in the results and go on reporting that it's a new discovery. Well, that and insouciant bastards like you who get off on thinking they're smarter than entire research departments.
. I will buy Mass Effect 3 as soon as it's out.
EA Games abuse their employees so seriously that I consider buying an EA title even stupider than paying for RIAA product. In fact, many game publishers treat their employees much worse than any RIAA label treats their artists. There are numerous articles and open letters from former EA employees out there documenting the fact that the pay sucks and that working the developers seven days and 90 hours per week are standard practice in the later stages of producing a game. The crunch time that often happens in a contract or project based environment - as a schedule slips or problems are encountered - EA plans on from the very beginning; from the first day of producing a game they consciously plan to work hundreds of salaried employees for hundreds of hours each in uncompensated overtime by the time the game is completed.
I have no idea exactly how prevalent the problem is amongst the video game industry as a whole, but it's well known that EA is far from the only publisher to treat employees like this. If all you care about is copyright reform, then boycott only music and film, but if you care about workers' rights and human dignity don't you dare buy a video game without thoroughly researching the labor relations history of both the developer and publisher.
Those advocating the ban need to speak with some archeologists and evolutionary anthropologists before making their decisions. These experts now believe that cats and dogs adopted humans as companions, and not the other way around. With cats, agrarian life led to grain storage, which attracted rodents, and some kitties evolved to play nice with humans in order to access all the tasty mice in human settlements. For dogs I don't remember the whole story off-hand.
It was a valid evolutionary step for many animals to prefer and enjoy the company of people; banning pet "ownership" merely leaves dozens of cat and dog sub-species without their proper habitat and social environment.
As Newton said: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Newton was merely quoting when he said this; the original source predates him by 500 years. John of Salisbury first wrote it in 1159. I know it seems pedantic to waste a post on quote attribution, but it's an extremely widespread quotation in nerd circles and not even 1 in 100 people seems to know where it actually came from.
Not to mention that Newton wrote the famous saying in a letter to Robert Hooke, a man with a slight build and severe spinal defect (although these didn't make him especially short), and some authors think it was actually a cutting insult rather than an expression of humility.
Alright, that's it.
There is no excuse whatsoever for modding my last comment a troll. It was patient, clear, and civil to a fault, other than pointing out as an aside the passive-aggressiveness and general pointlessness of the phrase "no offense".
Just because I disagree with you does not mean that everything I say is a deliberate attempt to piss you off.
As for the first one being modded flamebait, please recall that there is no "-1, I disagree with the poster" moderation option.
Get a fucking life and leave me alone!
I'm not sure why people mention that something is tax deductible. If it's worthwhile, that should be obvious regardless of it's tax status. As for the financial aspect, a deduction isn't a serious cash value unless you're quite rich; as I understand deductions they only reduce the amount on which you owe tax, and thus return to most people not even 30% of the cash outlay on the original, deductible expense (depending on the tax brackets through which you move as you calculate your deductions). I suppose you can get satisfaction in giving 70% of the cost from your own pocket and shifting the other 30% from a random government program into something you've chosen yourself, but in raw dollars deductions don't cut a huge amount of ice for people with average incomes.
They have to care what I'm comfortable with if they want my support in building memorials, or if they want me to care about the memorial once it's completed.
Other than that I'm not demanding that anyone care, except that every person has some level of influence over what is acceptable and I'm putting in my small opinion. Not to mention that contrary opinions are usually quite valuable in avoiding serious missteps, even if all they do is help the majority refine their preexisting opinion.
As for why you should care, we're here on a discussion board and there's really no point to this place if no one cares what anyone says.
And by the way, saying "no offense" doesn't decrease the offensiveness of something at all, nor would it in any way whatsoever abrogate you of responsibility for saying something highly offensive. Just don't waste the words to say it; it's a meaningless platitude.
I may be splitting linguistic hairs here, but for my money full-fledged memorials are reserved for humanitarians or political, scientific, and military heroes. Gary Gygax may have done a lot to legitimize and expand the role-playing hobby and even the fantasy genre at large, but ultimately his work was in entertainment, albeit entertainment with legitimate and interesting anthropological/historical roots.
Maybe I have to turn in my nerd card now, but I'm no more comfortable with memorializing Gary Gygax than I am with a marble statue of John Wayne or Madonna. Prima facie, I don't see this as anything but another example of going too far in deifying celebrities and glorifying entertainment at the expense of more important things.
There will actually be 21 billion BTC, not 21 million. And I can't understand any real economic need to set the cap so low or increase the difficulty of mining new coins so rapidly, either - other than to make massive piles of cash for people who've been mining since 2009.
These are very good points.
It wasn't until bitcoin that I understood the point of constant inflation: it makes credit feasible. You can only borrow safely if you can be almost certain money won't increase in relative value in the future, and to make a borrower feel truly safe currency value should have a near certainty of decreasing somewhat. With significant deflation a possibility you can't even take out a car loan without simultaneously risking indentured servitude; it would be insane to take home or business loans, and I don't mean figuratively insane, either.
Inflation also encourages lending and investing. It's like the Red Queen hypothesis: with inflation eating the valuation of your cash you have to put it to work somehow in hopes of earning more than the rate of inflation.
It seems no one makes loans or investment in bitcoins, and the scam artists - excuse me, properly rewarded early adopters - who minted thousands or millions of coins back when they cost 1/1000th as much processing time to generate still seem to be hoarding and not using them.
It's technically true that they're not a ponzi scheme, but they're still basically a confidence game that at the current trajectories don't seem like any benefit to people who weren't already in the market by mid-2010. Anyone who adopted after that could use them as money laundering and anonymous payments (like Silk Road), but couldn't efficiently generate or purchase them without wasting more fiat currency than the coins are worth in service fees or electricity.
I'm afraid I misread the headline as something much, much cooler.
Did anyone else read that Harvard had invented a "cheap swarm of killbots?"
Because that would be awesome.
I'm tired of the rhetoric presenting Chinese economic policy as inherently unethical. America has implemented excellent strategies for operating and integrating a government and an economy (at least when they work right), but that doesn't mean we possess moral authority on what's Right and what's Wrong in politics and finance.
These kind of connections between Chinese government and business aren't inherently wrong (or inherently right). They're just different. Murdering protestors and imprisoning reporters is wrong; beating the pants off the USA with a slightly different kind of capitalism is an ethical and moral non-issue.
Never, ever rent an RPG. Or any Rockstar game. You might as well go buy it, even if you have to sell plasma and kidneys. You'll pay more in the long run on many types of games renting than you will buying, and unlike rent-to-own scams that ultimately charge 300% of retail for your item, this time you won't even own it when you're done.
I think the unspoken current of this conversation, however, is if and when it's ethical to use completely deliberate nudging on someone's subconscious. The advertising and pricing phrases you mention still communicate directly, even if they're largely attacking the subconscious by exploiting the lizard brain or playing to societal norms. In contrast, when you talk about applying these sorts of experiments to marketing you'd be asking whether it's ethical to play soothing music if it increases sales by keeping people in the store longer or put the smell of popcorn in the air conditioner at a movie theater. People already do both of those things, and now we're wondering how far you can ethically take that sort of behavior, wherein there's no way at all to perceive that you're being sold on something.
It could also be going literally to our troops. I've heard some military installations, especially foreign operating bases, have very nice digital entertainment options to take the stress out of being in a contested zone (and take the boredom out of being on a military base).