Wow. Too much Fox News FTL. While I certainly agree that the Islamic religion is a particularly nefarious one (only marginally ahead of Christianity, mind you), the vast majority of Muslims are normal people that just happen to believe something differently than you do.
The FBI wouldn't be tracking him if he was actually "a 20 year old community college student who has never done anything [wrong]", as the article says. Maybe he's Ahmadinejad's nephew or something. Can we have some actual reporting?
You are the reason that our civil liberties are being eroded so effectively these days. "He was being investigated by the FBI, therefore he must have been doing something wrong?" Are you insane? Mind you, this is not to say that the FBI is a particularly nefarious organization, but is it ever prudent to give anyone that much unchecked authority? Even if the FBI as an organization was totally beyond reproach (which it isn't), you still need to take into account that it is composed of people, all of whom are imperfect. Sometimes people make mistakes. Other times, people maliciously abuse their authority. I know when this case originally came about, it was revealed that Afifi's friend had made some ill-advised, but obviously non-threatening statements on Reddit. We also know that he is of Middle Eastern descent. Is it not possible that this is all the FBI ever had on him and were grotesquely overstepping their bounds? Please consider these things before you say that sort of bullshit in public again, it really hurts all of us.
P.S. -- What fucking business would it be of the FBI if he were Ahmedinijad's nephew? It is not illegal in the United States to be related to someone!
I am glad to see PKD getting a little love here on/. While Blade Runner is one of the greatest movies ever made, it is definitely not much of a reflection of the vision of Philip K. Dick (which, as a side note, is a good thing, as the novel that Blade Runner is based off of is one of his weaker works). While many movies have been based off of his books, the only one I have seen that really captures the same feel that his novels induce is A Scanner Darkly. It is seriously awesome and worth checking out. As far as his books go, I would have to say Valis is by far his masterpiece, he draws the reader so deeply into his psychosis that I started feeling like I was losing my mind by the end of the book.
Hardware is not necessarily defective simply because it can easily be destroyed with software! A CPU has no way to know what clock speed it is supposed to be running at. Any fool can install a custom ROM on a smartphone with a custom kernel capable of ramping up the stock voltage beyond what the CPU is able to handle. How does that imply that the CPU was defective? Going back to your car analogy -- that is liking blaming the car because the engine seized when you tried to run it for 20,000 miles without an oil change.
I am all for tinkering, jailbreaking, hacking, and otherwise customizing my devices. I do fully understand, however, that any damage that is caused to the device in question is on me. It really is not reasonable for me to expect MS, Motorola, or Apple, for instance, to pay to fix to my phone if I overclock it too high and fry it. I do, however, take issue with them trying to prevent me from doing that to begin with -- that is totally uncalled for. I think that you ought to be able to do whatever you want with something that you own, but you should really have to take responsibility for your own actions.
"Because there is selection and construction involved, different individuals will necessarily disagree on the result. Soulskill doesn't understand this basic fact. Instead, he thinks that because Fox selected some quotes and disregarded others, selected some opinions and disregarded others, they are necessarily wrong."
I agree with you that this approach does not necessarily make the article wrong, if you would take the time to RTFA, you would see that it is, in fact, totally wrong. This little gem for instance:
Carol Lieberman, a psychologist and book author, told FoxNews.com that sexual situations and acts in video games -- highlighted so well in Bulletstorm -- have led to real-world sexual violence.
“The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in video games,” she said.
See? That's just patently false. First off, what increase in rapes? Violent and sexual crime rates are on a downward trend. This is in the middle of a recession, which, historically speaking, is the most reliable predictor of violence that we have. Secondly, even if the rape rate were skyrocketing, how the Hell is this lady supposed to be able to quantify her statement that the increase is rapes is due to video games? That statement was clearly pulled straight from her posterior.
Or how about:
More important, defenders argue that games with excessive violence and sexual content simply don't sell well.
See? Weasel words. This odious statement is being uttered by "defenders" of video games. It is not attributed to anyone. It does not even make sense, and is clearly false if you look at the sales figures.
So, yes, the typical journalism tactics do not necessarily mean that this article is a piece of shit, but this article is an extraordinary piece of shit.
They could achieve near-lossless quality at around 32 kb/s with state-of-the-art codecs.
No. I am an audio engineer and I can tell you that there is no codec in the world good enough to drop below 128k without noticeable loss of quality. Do you have any more "facts" you would like to extract from your rectal cavity?
Fail. Verizon advertises the device to be used for this sort of thing. Accusing someone of "sucking up bandwidth" for using a device they paid good money for, in the manner that it was advertised, is ludicrous. Do you work for Verizon?
That's all well and good in a perfect world, but that is completely unrealistic. Try calling your boss and telling him/her that you will be unable to make it in because you are a little sleepy and can't drive. Furthermore, it strikes me as insane to completely ignore the question of degree. That would be akin to levying the same penalty to a guy with a gram of pot as you would to the guy that was caught with 40 kilos. It just doesn't make sense on any level.
I think that the punishments actually need to be more lenient for some and stricter for others. Let's imagine two scenarios here:
John Q. Public had one beer too many and got pulled over on the way home from the restaurant. He blew a 0.09% on the breathalyser. Realistically, he is no more a threat to other drivers that someone who is a little sleepy. He should get, at most, a hefty ticket ($200-$400) for his first offence.
Drunky McShitface, on the other hand, felt that it was OK to down 17 beers and then try to drive home. When he was pulled over, he blew a 0.35% then fell over and vomited on the cop. He should be arrested, thrown in jail for 3-12 months, and never be eligible to get his licence again.
The first scenario is a mistake that anyone could make. The second amounts to attempted murder, and is inexcusable.
This. A 0.08% BAC will theoretically make you more likely to get into an accident, but no more than if you hadn't gotten quite enough sleep the night before. It is insane to punish a driver with a BAC of 0.10% in the same manner that you would punish the 0.30% guy.
I'm sure that a 0.08% BAC does decrease coordination and attention, but so do many, many other things. Like being a little bit tired. Or being pissed about that fight you had with your girlfriend. There does need to be a reasonable distinction between people that are barely over the limit and the guys that need to be carried to their car because they cannot walk straight.
Yet we have been expecting self-driving cars since the 70's... I highly doubt we will see self driving cars for individuals for at least another 50 years.
I'm not so sure that it will be as long as you think -- the tech was a long way off in the 70's but it is very close to solid enough. It just needs to be cleaned up and implemented. Hell, it is already being implemented in the self-parking cars and the intelligent cruise control. There will be some resistance to self-driving cars, but I think that the results will speak for themselves very shortly after they are implemented.
I agree. Attacking an airport is clearly such a unique idea that nobody would have ever been able to conceive of it had they not seen it in a video game first.
I had already compiled a fairly extensive list of reasons I would not want a Windows phone, such as the fact that I don't want a phone that blue screens and/or needs to be rebooted twice a day. Now you can add massive spying by an "unnamed third party" (who we swear is not the FBI) into the mix. No thanks.
What are they hoping to accomplish here? What do they have to lose by people installing other O/S'es on their hardware? They are spending all this time and money engineering a solution to... what? Keeping legitimate consumers from wanting to buy their product? I have a Moto Droid, and was planning on upgrading to the Droid X, but I will most certainly be going HTC for my next phone purchase.
I happen to have paid for astrological readings many times.
Why? If you are going to pay to get life advice from an impartial source, see a therapist. I can guarantee you that you will get a whole lot more out of it.
It is a fact that Palin put out a map with crosshairs over Gifford's district. It is a fact that Giffords spoke publicly about where that could lead.
Palin brought gunsights to the fight. Now she's facing criticism. If she can't take it, she shouldn't start it.
I hate to have to defend such an odious fool as Sarah Palin, but it must be said that the shooter in this case is a dangerously deranged man, seemingly suffering from a case of schizophrenia. Your insinuation that the political rhetoric was responsible for this shooting is no different than when all of the clowns marched out to blame the Columbine shooting on Marilyn Manson and Doom, except your argument is even worse, as there is no evidence to suggest that the shooter had any affiliation with right wing politics whatsoever. The man is seriously mentally ill, that is all there is to it.
The insanity defense really is not the get out of jail free card that many seem to think it is. First of all, it very rarely works. Secondly, when someone is found not guilty by reason of insanity, they are forcibly committed to a mental institution that is for all intents and purposes, a prison. The only difference is that the guilty party does not have a fixed length sentence -- they are there until the doctors in charge of them decide that they are fit to regain society. In almost all cases, this turns out to be a longer length of time than the prison sentence that the accused would have gotten were they found guilty.
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Wow. Too much Fox News FTL. While I certainly agree that the Islamic religion is a particularly nefarious one (only marginally ahead of Christianity, mind you), the vast majority of Muslims are normal people that just happen to believe something differently than you do.
The FBI wouldn't be tracking him if he was actually "a 20 year old community college student who has never done anything [wrong]", as the article says. Maybe he's Ahmadinejad's nephew or something. Can we have some actual reporting?
You are the reason that our civil liberties are being eroded so effectively these days. "He was being investigated by the FBI, therefore he must have been doing something wrong?" Are you insane? Mind you, this is not to say that the FBI is a particularly nefarious organization, but is it ever prudent to give anyone that much unchecked authority? Even if the FBI as an organization was totally beyond reproach (which it isn't), you still need to take into account that it is composed of people, all of whom are imperfect. Sometimes people make mistakes. Other times, people maliciously abuse their authority. I know when this case originally came about, it was revealed that Afifi's friend had made some ill-advised, but obviously non-threatening statements on Reddit. We also know that he is of Middle Eastern descent. Is it not possible that this is all the FBI ever had on him and were grotesquely overstepping their bounds? Please consider these things before you say that sort of bullshit in public again, it really hurts all of us.
P.S. -- What fucking business would it be of the FBI if he were Ahmedinijad's nephew? It is not illegal in the United States to be related to someone!
I am glad to see PKD getting a little love here on /. While Blade Runner is one of the greatest movies ever made, it is definitely not much of a reflection of the vision of Philip K. Dick (which, as a side note, is a good thing, as the novel that Blade Runner is based off of is one of his weaker works). While many movies have been based off of his books, the only one I have seen that really captures the same feel that his novels induce is A Scanner Darkly. It is seriously awesome and worth checking out. As far as his books go, I would have to say Valis is by far his masterpiece, he draws the reader so deeply into his psychosis that I started feeling like I was losing my mind by the end of the book.
Just no.
Dihydrogen monoxide? That stuff ought to be banned! It can cause death if it is inhaled, and is the chief component of acid rain!
Hardware is not necessarily defective simply because it can easily be destroyed with software! A CPU has no way to know what clock speed it is supposed to be running at. Any fool can install a custom ROM on a smartphone with a custom kernel capable of ramping up the stock voltage beyond what the CPU is able to handle. How does that imply that the CPU was defective? Going back to your car analogy -- that is liking blaming the car because the engine seized when you tried to run it for 20,000 miles without an oil change.
I am all for tinkering, jailbreaking, hacking, and otherwise customizing my devices. I do fully understand, however, that any damage that is caused to the device in question is on me. It really is not reasonable for me to expect MS, Motorola, or Apple, for instance, to pay to fix to my phone if I overclock it too high and fry it. I do, however, take issue with them trying to prevent me from doing that to begin with -- that is totally uncalled for. I think that you ought to be able to do whatever you want with something that you own, but you should really have to take responsibility for your own actions.
"Because there is selection and construction involved, different individuals will necessarily disagree on the result. Soulskill doesn't understand this basic fact. Instead, he thinks that because Fox selected some quotes and disregarded others, selected some opinions and disregarded others, they are necessarily wrong."
I agree with you that this approach does not necessarily make the article wrong, if you would take the time to RTFA, you would see that it is, in fact, totally wrong. This little gem for instance:
See? That's just patently false. First off, what increase in rapes? Violent and sexual crime rates are on a downward trend. This is in the middle of a recession, which, historically speaking, is the most reliable predictor of violence that we have. Secondly, even if the rape rate were skyrocketing, how the Hell is this lady supposed to be able to quantify her statement that the increase is rapes is due to video games? That statement was clearly pulled straight from her posterior.
Or how about:
See? Weasel words. This odious statement is being uttered by "defenders" of video games. It is not attributed to anyone. It does not even make sense, and is clearly false if you look at the sales figures.
So, yes, the typical journalism tactics do not necessarily mean that this article is a piece of shit, but this article is an extraordinary piece of shit.
They could achieve near-lossless quality at around 32 kb/s with state-of-the-art codecs.
No. I am an audio engineer and I can tell you that there is no codec in the world good enough to drop below 128k without noticeable loss of quality. Do you have any more "facts" you would like to extract from your rectal cavity?
Fail. Verizon advertises the device to be used for this sort of thing. Accusing someone of "sucking up bandwidth" for using a device they paid good money for, in the manner that it was advertised, is ludicrous. Do you work for Verizon?
That's all well and good in a perfect world, but that is completely unrealistic. Try calling your boss and telling him/her that you will be unable to make it in because you are a little sleepy and can't drive. Furthermore, it strikes me as insane to completely ignore the question of degree. That would be akin to levying the same penalty to a guy with a gram of pot as you would to the guy that was caught with 40 kilos. It just doesn't make sense on any level.
I think that the punishments actually need to be more lenient for some and stricter for others. Let's imagine two scenarios here:
John Q. Public had one beer too many and got pulled over on the way home from the restaurant. He blew a 0.09% on the breathalyser. Realistically, he is no more a threat to other drivers that someone who is a little sleepy. He should get, at most, a hefty ticket ($200-$400) for his first offence.
Drunky McShitface, on the other hand, felt that it was OK to down 17 beers and then try to drive home. When he was pulled over, he blew a 0.35% then fell over and vomited on the cop. He should be arrested, thrown in jail for 3-12 months, and never be eligible to get his licence again.
The first scenario is a mistake that anyone could make. The second amounts to attempted murder, and is inexcusable.
This. A 0.08% BAC will theoretically make you more likely to get into an accident, but no more than if you hadn't gotten quite enough sleep the night before. It is insane to punish a driver with a BAC of 0.10% in the same manner that you would punish the 0.30% guy.
I'm sure that a 0.08% BAC does decrease coordination and attention, but so do many, many other things. Like being a little bit tired. Or being pissed about that fight you had with your girlfriend. There does need to be a reasonable distinction between people that are barely over the limit and the guys that need to be carried to their car because they cannot walk straight.
Yet we have been expecting self-driving cars since the 70's... I highly doubt we will see self driving cars for individuals for at least another 50 years.
I'm not so sure that it will be as long as you think -- the tech was a long way off in the 70's but it is very close to solid enough. It just needs to be cleaned up and implemented. Hell, it is already being implemented in the self-parking cars and the intelligent cruise control. There will be some resistance to self-driving cars, but I think that the results will speak for themselves very shortly after they are implemented.
I agree. Attacking an airport is clearly such a unique idea that nobody would have ever been able to conceive of it had they not seen it in a video game first.
I had already compiled a fairly extensive list of reasons I would not want a Windows phone, such as the fact that I don't want a phone that blue screens and/or needs to be rebooted twice a day. Now you can add massive spying by an "unnamed third party" (who we swear is not the FBI) into the mix. No thanks.
...a well regulated web would make it harder for priests to share their favorite "Altar Boys Gone Wild" videos.
What are they hoping to accomplish here? What do they have to lose by people installing other O/S'es on their hardware? They are spending all this time and money engineering a solution to... what? Keeping legitimate consumers from wanting to buy their product? I have a Moto Droid, and was planning on upgrading to the Droid X, but I will most certainly be going HTC for my next phone purchase.
That is true, but it is much less awesome.
for the last time it is: "I could'NT care less"
That would actually be couldn't. You should check your spelling before you go all grammar gestapo on people...
They apparently took my cancer away though. I would call this one a wash...
I happen to have paid for astrological readings many times.
Why? If you are going to pay to get life advice from an impartial source, see a therapist. I can guarantee you that you will get a whole lot more out of it.
It is a fact that Palin put out a map with crosshairs over Gifford's district. It is a fact that Giffords spoke publicly about where that could lead.
Palin brought gunsights to the fight. Now she's facing criticism. If she can't take it, she shouldn't start it.
I hate to have to defend such an odious fool as Sarah Palin, but it must be said that the shooter in this case is a dangerously deranged man, seemingly suffering from a case of schizophrenia. Your insinuation that the political rhetoric was responsible for this shooting is no different than when all of the clowns marched out to blame the Columbine shooting on Marilyn Manson and Doom, except your argument is even worse, as there is no evidence to suggest that the shooter had any affiliation with right wing politics whatsoever. The man is seriously mentally ill, that is all there is to it.
The insanity defense really is not the get out of jail free card that many seem to think it is. First of all, it very rarely works. Secondly, when someone is found not guilty by reason of insanity, they are forcibly committed to a mental institution that is for all intents and purposes, a prison. The only difference is that the guilty party does not have a fixed length sentence -- they are there until the doctors in charge of them decide that they are fit to regain society. In almost all cases, this turns out to be a longer length of time than the prison sentence that the accused would have gotten were they found guilty.