It's not irrational to be concerned about something that really does look suspiciously like illegal activity.
And being wrong about such suspicions isn't irrational either. It's just wrong.
And really, if you can't be bothered to think about how other people might justifiably react to the way that you practice things without necessarily knowing all of the details behind them, then I'd argue that you have no business being part of a social community in the first place.
I would argue that it was evidence that something suspicious was going on... not remotely illegal, unless there is an actual law prohibiting the possession of such large amounts of cash.
I know that ideally, a person should never be stopped from doing what they were normally doing just because it looks suspicious to somebody else, even though it's perfectly legal, but being members of a social community, we have at least some obligation to try to consider how things that we are doing could appear to other people, because once we realize how things might look to others, we may realize that we might need to change the way we are doing things.
I remember when I was in college, it was in '02 to give the situation a bit of context, and one of the courses I was taking was a digital electronics course, where part of the course involved building a working digital clock using elementary logic gates and chips only. Most people only worked on this in the electronics lab, but I had bought my own IC's so that I could work on it at home as well. During one of my break periods during the day, I was working on my clock in a relatively quiet hallway of one of the campus buildings... I was doing an experiment with trying to multiplex the power for the LED's, and so there were some neat flashing lights and numbers, when suddenly a campus security guard told me to step away from what I was working on and come with him. I had to go to the campus security office and was questioned by a couple of the security guards there. He initially wasn't going to let me even pack up and bring my electronics stuff with me, but I think upon noticing the panicked look I might have had on my face when he suggested that I leave this expensive stuff there, he relented. In the office, they then asked me some questions about what I was doing there and what I was building, and I replied completely truthfully. One of the security guards said that what I was talking about sounded reasonable, since they knew the professor I had for the course in question and had heard about the course having a clock-building challenge which apparently had been going on there for many years They needed confirmation from the professor, however... and I had to wait for the professor to come down from his office, and see me... confirm that he knew me and that I was genuinely in his class. I was then free to go, and later that evening, in his lecture, he bemusedly related a story to the class about how one of his students got hauled into the security office for apparently building a bomb He suggested that we only work on the project either at home, or else in the lab, telling us that the lab aide could be reached throughout the day anyways, and would unlock the lab for anyone in the course and allow them to work during the day even when it wasn't scheduled lab time.
The experience taught me something about doing things that look suspicious that I hadn't previously considered, even if they are actually entirely innocent, as I was, and being mindful of that fact gives a person a much better state of preparedness for the possible consequences, perhaps even at some point deciding "no, I won't do that", or maybe just changing the circumstances so that it won't look so suspicious in the first place.
No... I believe that so far this year, from what I've seen so far, that honor would go it Thinkgeek.
Thinkgeek has April fools jokes nailed.
Something people would like to see, and at the same time being close enough to what is actually possible that the believability factor is relatively high.
Because it can get in the way of being genuinely informative, which I've actually found stories on slashdot have been known to do from time to time. And this story notwistanding, which has an outlandish enough title to be suspect of a joke before you even start to read the summary, wasting time reading bogus news when you might not initially realize was an april fool's joke, is... well, just that: a waste of time.
Well, I happen to think that even if there is a god, every so-called miracle actually happens through entirely scientifically verifiable causes, if enough information about the phenomenon can actually be studied and known. This isn't so much because I think that such a god must necessarily follow the laws of physics as much as it is that our understanding of the laws of physics are ultimately only based on the things that we observe to actually happen, and so anything that does happen must necessarily appear to follow the laws of physics to us only because we actually define the latter in terms of the former. Otherwise so-called "magical" events don't happen not because of any inherent prohibition, but because that may simply not be part of the way an omnipotent god who created this world necessarily wanted this universe to work, and that the said god did not have any intention to deviate from that design.
I suppose the same nagging question would be left if they were not "of the faith", yes?
Even moreso, in fact.... since in such cases, one would not even be able to attribute it to how a person's faith may have caused their own mind to somehow induce healing in ways that are currently not understood by science.
If it only gets me something with clunky 0.2mm resolution or worse... meh.
I want something that is precise enough to print detailed D&D miniatures and creatures, which means that the smallest details need to be in the neighborhood of about 20microns or so.
Any god is, at a minimum, a being with power beyond what man can understand or attain. That might reasonably include violating physical laws, because such capability is beyond our understanding, and thus satisfies the criteria for godlike ability. It doesn't have to, of course... but the reason it isn't challenged for god is because it's still explicitly compatible with the definition of god.
Typically, however, in the definition of a unicorn, there is nothing inherent in the notion which implies that it might possess a body that would necessarily be anything other than otherwise completely normal matter, which follows all of the laws of physics. If you want to add that attribute, you can... but that' doesn't change the fact that the general defintion doesn't have to include that notion.
I'm not saying that what you're saying isn't possible, and could very well be what happened, but that doesn't change the WTF factor when something is supposedly not going to go away without surgery.
Well, I know plenty of non-religious people too... but none of them that I personally know has ever had a medical situation whose resolution was as inexplicable. At least not to the best of my knowledge.
What would be a highly desirable feature in a browser is a way for the user to have to approve any plugins which are installed from outside of the browser. Absolutely *ANY* plugin installed from outside of the browser should, by default, be disabled until the user manually enables it from inside the browser's own plugin manager tool.
No medical diagnosis can be made with 100% confidence
True... but when you see things like tumors or cysts when you're doing an examination, which is later confirmed by ultrasound, and they don't seem to be of a type that would naturally just go away, and their presence is supposedly confirmed by a second technician's examination, and when a followup is done several months later, so that the surgeon will know the full extent of material that needs to be removed in case there was any change, there's suddenly no trace of them sort of makes you go... "huh"?
I'm certain that there's a perfectly natural explanation for stuff like this, but when it happens to somebody you personally know and you watch them go through this whole ordeal, in the end, while you're certainly happy for them in how things turned out, there's still that nagging question left in your mind of "how the fucking hell did that happen?"
I find that nobody takes Metbeans seriously... Android development, for instance, pretty much has to always be done in Eclipse if you want any hope of support, and even if you don't, I don't think that the NBAndroid plugin, which is the Android plugin for Netbeans, has any support at all for native code debugging on the device.
I personally know 3 religious people who have each had, at one time in their lives, a medically diagnosed condition which was being monitored carefully by their physician after discovery, and that spontaneously disappeared from existence after a period of time ranging from a few weeks to almost a year with absolutely no evident medical explanation (for one of them, in particular, one of the last ultrasounds they were to have had before an upcoming surgery was unable to find any evidence of the condition for which they had supposedly needed the operation in the first place, where previous ultrasounds had apparently confirmed it... the condition was suddenly simply gone). In all 3 cases, the doctors they had could offer no reasonable explanation, and only encouraged their patients to be grateful, and all 3 of these people that I know attribute it to having been healed by God.
Is it possible that they were just misdiagnosed the first time, and as further tests were performed, ultimately more reliable results obtained? I dunno... but if that's not the case, then human faith in something has considerably more influence than I think science can reasonably explain.
Is hasn't... but we weren't talking about deities, we were talking about unicorns, which in spite of being mythological, there is no reason to presume such a creature's body would not otherwise exhibit all of the properties of normal matter.
If you're going to not make an assumption that invisible objects otherwise exhibit properties of normal matter such as occupying a finite volume, displacing other matter, etc,then of course all bets are off. But again, I did explicitly say that beginning with such an assumption, you *could* disprove their existence to thje same degree of certainty as any initial assumption.
On the matter of dieties, you can't make any assumptions at all
Visible light covers frequencies from about 380nm to about 780nm. There are 7 defined subsets on that range, and every that color is formed by some combination of them. "pink" is specifically caused by an emission of visible light across all visible frequencies with a distinct peak in the "red" range but outside of the red range, the emission is roughly uniform. How that range of frequencies might be perceived by some other creature would be irrelevant to its name, since we would see it as pink and the other creature would associate that color with what we call pink and in communicating to us whatever that color is, they would say that it was pink.
Inside of the brain, colors don't exist at all, since the skull is an opaque cavity and visible light does not (under ordinary circumstances, at least) hit it.
"pink" is caused by a particular combination of visible frequencies.... other creatures may respond to non-visible portions of the EM spectrum, but it still isn't really pink, regardless of how such a creature might supposedly perceive it.
If you assume that a unicorn has a body that is non-gaseous, you could disprove the existence of an invisible unicorn in the garage by sealing the garage and filling it with water... then measuring the volume of water that you put into the garage compared with the measured volume of the garage. If they are the same, there's nothing invisible in the garage.
Ever since autoboxing was added, it's already implicitly overloading operators for all of the object wrappers around atomic types anyways, and it's always implicitly overloaded the + operator for the String object, so the objection that it adds complexity should not be an issue. The only real remaining objection about unreadability that always seems to arise when the subject of operator overloading on user-defined classes is raised is actually entirely isomorphic to complaints about function or variable naming practices where the identifer's name doesn't effectively convey any sense of what the identifier's real purpose is... Java doesn't stop a programmer from using global class name like qxj, for instance, so it makes no sense to prohibit operator overloading merely on the suggestion that the resulting program is harder to read or maintain (and even then, such an identifier may even have a legitimate purpose in certain contexts.... but then, so can operator overloading, which is my point)
Except for our idiotic (no matter from what side of the table you look at it) digital lock protections on copyrighted works, I agree, it's pretty good up here.
Well, presumably, "not doing stupid shit" entails avoiding doing things that have some reasonable chance of costing you any desirable opportunities in the future... whether or not you necessarily personally think that those things are unwise or not.
But ultimately, nobody can be perfectly prescient, or make perfect choices all of the time, and it's a exercise in futility to try. If some future possible employer gets offended at what they find out about you after googling your name, that's unfortunate, but that's also life. Sure, we'd all like it if other people could just forgive and forget any of the past crap that we've done, but nobody else actually *owes* us that. The question, as I said, is not what needs to happen so that other people don't remember, or can't be reminded of what you did, as much as it is what you are planning to do with the rest of your life in spite of that having happened... instead of trying to pretend that you shouldn't have to face up to some unforeseen consequences that might arise from your past choices or actions just because they may be unpleasant.
In the end, assuming you are adult, you are ultimately accountable for yourself. Nobody else is. Make the most of the life you have now, because it's a one-shot deal, and the more time in it that you spend wallowing in regret or wishing that other people wouldn't judge you, the less time is going to be left over for you to really *feel* alive.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not irrational to be concerned about something that really does look suspiciously like illegal activity.
And being wrong about such suspicions isn't irrational either. It's just wrong.
And really, if you can't be bothered to think about how other people might justifiably react to the way that you practice things without necessarily knowing all of the details behind them, then I'd argue that you have no business being part of a social community in the first place.
I would argue that it was evidence that something suspicious was going on... not remotely illegal, unless there is an actual law prohibiting the possession of such large amounts of cash.
I know that ideally, a person should never be stopped from doing what they were normally doing just because it looks suspicious to somebody else, even though it's perfectly legal, but being members of a social community, we have at least some obligation to try to consider how things that we are doing could appear to other people, because once we realize how things might look to others, we may realize that we might need to change the way we are doing things.
I remember when I was in college, it was in '02 to give the situation a bit of context, and one of the courses I was taking was a digital electronics course, where part of the course involved building a working digital clock using elementary logic gates and chips only. Most people only worked on this in the electronics lab, but I had bought my own IC's so that I could work on it at home as well. During one of my break periods during the day, I was working on my clock in a relatively quiet hallway of one of the campus buildings... I was doing an experiment with trying to multiplex the power for the LED's, and so there were some neat flashing lights and numbers, when suddenly a campus security guard told me to step away from what I was working on and come with him. I had to go to the campus security office and was questioned by a couple of the security guards there. He initially wasn't going to let me even pack up and bring my electronics stuff with me, but I think upon noticing the panicked look I might have had on my face when he suggested that I leave this expensive stuff there, he relented. In the office, they then asked me some questions about what I was doing there and what I was building, and I replied completely truthfully. One of the security guards said that what I was talking about sounded reasonable, since they knew the professor I had for the course in question and had heard about the course having a clock-building challenge which apparently had been going on there for many years They needed confirmation from the professor, however... and I had to wait for the professor to come down from his office, and see me... confirm that he knew me and that I was genuinely in his class. I was then free to go, and later that evening, in his lecture, he bemusedly related a story to the class about how one of his students got hauled into the security office for apparently building a bomb He suggested that we only work on the project either at home, or else in the lab, telling us that the lab aide could be reached throughout the day anyways, and would unlock the lab for anyone in the course and allow them to work during the day even when it wasn't scheduled lab time.
The experience taught me something about doing things that look suspicious that I hadn't previously considered, even if they are actually entirely innocent, as I was, and being mindful of that fact gives a person a much better state of preparedness for the possible consequences, perhaps even at some point deciding "no, I won't do that", or maybe just changing the circumstances so that it won't look so suspicious in the first place.
Look on the bright side.
You can get more work done today.
No... I believe that so far this year, from what I've seen so far, that honor would go it Thinkgeek.
Thinkgeek has April fools jokes nailed.
Something people would like to see, and at the same time being close enough to what is actually possible that the believability factor is relatively high.
Because it can get in the way of being genuinely informative, which I've actually found stories on slashdot have been known to do from time to time. And this story notwistanding, which has an outlandish enough title to be suspect of a joke before you even start to read the summary, wasting time reading bogus news when you might not initially realize was an april fool's joke, is... well, just that: a waste of time.
Well, I happen to think that even if there is a god, every so-called miracle actually happens through entirely scientifically verifiable causes, if enough information about the phenomenon can actually be studied and known. This isn't so much because I think that such a god must necessarily follow the laws of physics as much as it is that our understanding of the laws of physics are ultimately only based on the things that we observe to actually happen, and so anything that does happen must necessarily appear to follow the laws of physics to us only because we actually define the latter in terms of the former. Otherwise so-called "magical" events don't happen not because of any inherent prohibition, but because that may simply not be part of the way an omnipotent god who created this world necessarily wanted this universe to work, and that the said god did not have any intention to deviate from that design.
Even moreso, in fact.... since in such cases, one would not even be able to attribute it to how a person's faith may have caused their own mind to somehow induce healing in ways that are currently not understood by science.
That's cute, but the printing technology for that looks still way too course for very finely detailed miniatures.
If it only gets me something with clunky 0.2mm resolution or worse... meh.
I want something that is precise enough to print detailed D&D miniatures and creatures, which means that the smallest details need to be in the neighborhood of about 20microns or so.
Any god is, at a minimum, a being with power beyond what man can understand or attain. That might reasonably include violating physical laws, because such capability is beyond our understanding, and thus satisfies the criteria for godlike ability. It doesn't have to, of course... but the reason it isn't challenged for god is because it's still explicitly compatible with the definition of god.
Typically, however, in the definition of a unicorn, there is nothing inherent in the notion which implies that it might possess a body that would necessarily be anything other than otherwise completely normal matter, which follows all of the laws of physics. If you want to add that attribute, you can... but that' doesn't change the fact that the general defintion doesn't have to include that notion.
I'm not saying that what you're saying isn't possible, and could very well be what happened, but that doesn't change the WTF factor when something is supposedly not going to go away without surgery.
Well, I know plenty of non-religious people too... but none of them that I personally know has ever had a medical situation whose resolution was as inexplicable. At least not to the best of my knowledge.
What would be a highly desirable feature in a browser is a way for the user to have to approve any plugins which are installed from outside of the browser. Absolutely *ANY* plugin installed from outside of the browser should, by default, be disabled until the user manually enables it from inside the browser's own plugin manager tool.
True... but when you see things like tumors or cysts when you're doing an examination, which is later confirmed by ultrasound, and they don't seem to be of a type that would naturally just go away, and their presence is supposedly confirmed by a second technician's examination, and when a followup is done several months later, so that the surgeon will know the full extent of material that needs to be removed in case there was any change, there's suddenly no trace of them sort of makes you go... "huh"?
I'm certain that there's a perfectly natural explanation for stuff like this, but when it happens to somebody you personally know and you watch them go through this whole ordeal, in the end, while you're certainly happy for them in how things turned out, there's still that nagging question left in your mind of "how the fucking hell did that happen?"
I find that nobody takes Metbeans seriously... Android development, for instance, pretty much has to always be done in Eclipse if you want any hope of support, and even if you don't, I don't think that the NBAndroid plugin, which is the Android plugin for Netbeans, has any support at all for native code debugging on the device.
If it were, lots of political leaders who happened to make a promise they did not end up keeping could face some serious consequences.
I personally know 3 religious people who have each had, at one time in their lives, a medically diagnosed condition which was being monitored carefully by their physician after discovery, and that spontaneously disappeared from existence after a period of time ranging from a few weeks to almost a year with absolutely no evident medical explanation (for one of them, in particular, one of the last ultrasounds they were to have had before an upcoming surgery was unable to find any evidence of the condition for which they had supposedly needed the operation in the first place, where previous ultrasounds had apparently confirmed it... the condition was suddenly simply gone). In all 3 cases, the doctors they had could offer no reasonable explanation, and only encouraged their patients to be grateful, and all 3 of these people that I know attribute it to having been healed by God.
Is it possible that they were just misdiagnosed the first time, and as further tests were performed, ultimately more reliable results obtained? I dunno... but if that's not the case, then human faith in something has considerably more influence than I think science can reasonably explain.
Is hasn't... but we weren't talking about deities, we were talking about unicorns, which in spite of being mythological, there is no reason to presume such a creature's body would not otherwise exhibit all of the properties of normal matter.
If you're going to not make an assumption that invisible objects otherwise exhibit properties of normal matter such as occupying a finite volume, displacing other matter, etc,then of course all bets are off. But again, I did explicitly say that beginning with such an assumption, you *could* disprove their existence to thje same degree of certainty as any initial assumption.
On the matter of dieties, you can't make any assumptions at all
Well, like I said... I did begin with an assumption about the unicorn's body, and that it would not violate any actual known laws of physics.
Visible light covers frequencies from about 380nm to about 780nm. There are 7 defined subsets on that range, and every that color is formed by some combination of them. "pink" is specifically caused by an emission of visible light across all visible frequencies with a distinct peak in the "red" range but outside of the red range, the emission is roughly uniform. How that range of frequencies might be perceived by some other creature would be irrelevant to its name, since we would see it as pink and the other creature would associate that color with what we call pink and in communicating to us whatever that color is, they would say that it was pink.
Inside of the brain, colors don't exist at all, since the skull is an opaque cavity and visible light does not (under ordinary circumstances, at least) hit it.
"pink" is caused by a particular combination of visible frequencies.... other creatures may respond to non-visible portions of the EM spectrum, but it still isn't really pink, regardless of how such a creature might supposedly perceive it.
If you assume that a unicorn has a body that is non-gaseous, you could disprove the existence of an invisible unicorn in the garage by sealing the garage and filling it with water... then measuring the volume of water that you put into the garage compared with the measured volume of the garage. If they are the same, there's nothing invisible in the garage.
Ever since autoboxing was added, it's already implicitly overloading operators for all of the object wrappers around atomic types anyways, and it's always implicitly overloaded the + operator for the String object, so the objection that it adds complexity should not be an issue. The only real remaining objection about unreadability that always seems to arise when the subject of operator overloading on user-defined classes is raised is actually entirely isomorphic to complaints about function or variable naming practices where the identifer's name doesn't effectively convey any sense of what the identifier's real purpose is... Java doesn't stop a programmer from using global class name like qxj, for instance, so it makes no sense to prohibit operator overloading merely on the suggestion that the resulting program is harder to read or maintain (and even then, such an identifier may even have a legitimate purpose in certain contexts.... but then, so can operator overloading, which is my point)
Except for our idiotic (no matter from what side of the table you look at it) digital lock protections on copyrighted works, I agree, it's pretty good up here.
Well, presumably, "not doing stupid shit" entails avoiding doing things that have some reasonable chance of costing you any desirable opportunities in the future... whether or not you necessarily personally think that those things are unwise or not.
But ultimately, nobody can be perfectly prescient, or make perfect choices all of the time, and it's a exercise in futility to try. If some future possible employer gets offended at what they find out about you after googling your name, that's unfortunate, but that's also life. Sure, we'd all like it if other people could just forgive and forget any of the past crap that we've done, but nobody else actually *owes* us that. The question, as I said, is not what needs to happen so that other people don't remember, or can't be reminded of what you did, as much as it is what you are planning to do with the rest of your life in spite of that having happened... instead of trying to pretend that you shouldn't have to face up to some unforeseen consequences that might arise from your past choices or actions just because they may be unpleasant.
In the end, assuming you are adult, you are ultimately accountable for yourself. Nobody else is. Make the most of the life you have now, because it's a one-shot deal, and the more time in it that you spend wallowing in regret or wishing that other people wouldn't judge you, the less time is going to be left over for you to really *feel* alive.