Let me get specific: I guy who had an office near where I used to live, pissed somebody off, and got a parcel bomb. He now has no hands. I guess you think that's a big joke. He doesn't.
Featuring 300,000 bricks, and 4,500 Lego, it was built by the Hong Kong Lego User Group. Yes that exists.
Why not? It's not like The West has a patent on geekitude. If anything, the geek mindset is even more prevalent in Chinese-speaking countries than here. They didn't become so dominant in electronic products by growing rice.
I'll bet there weren't any photos taken of her at rest stops.
No, just the ones that would have been taken when she stopped for gas. Stations on the interstate usually have a lot of security cameras, for obvious reasons.
Nowak was a classic stalker, obsessed with somebody who had no interest in her. She called Oefelein 22 times in one day shortly before setting out to kill his girlfriend. Not exactly Professor Moriarity. More like John Hinckley. Though really, it was just a sordid, ordinary episode, no big master plan. I'm not even going to try to parse the diaper thing.
Fix your sarcasm detector. Despite your contorted logic, all the news reports I've seen indicated that Deeb had a huge number of containers that were manifestly not empty. According to the original story (follow the links in the TFSA) "there were vessels containing chemicals all over the furniture and the floor".
There's hysteria here all right: the standard blogosphere kind where one blogger's ill-informed and angry rants get magnified over and over by a lot of other ill-informed, angry bloggers. And yes, the same goes for goes for the Moonite thing too. People get badly injured on a regular basis because of stuff that happens in secret labs. Same goes for mysterious electronic devices that appear out of nowhere. It happens every day. It's happened to people I know.
If the fire department in this case and the cops in the Moonite stunt had underreacted, and those incidents had turned out to be the real deal, people would be demanding their heads — literally. I don't think they overreacted in either case, but if they did, who can blame them?
A bunch of immature, self-righteous bloggers, that's who.
I gotta ask: WTF was your boss thinking? OK, the sponsor was an idiot, and the fire marshal's cowardice was criminal. But no way should your boss have gone ahead with the shoot. Why didn't he simply refuse, regardless of the fire marshall's failure to do his job. What was he afraid of, getting sued? Losing his job? These are bad things, but not as bad as one of his employees getting his hands blown off while searching for duds.
God save us from self-appointed legal "experts". There's all kinds of stuff you can't be fired for doing. You cannot, for example, fire a Quaker for refusing to sing The Star Spangled Banner.
And before a thousand idiots respond with posts dreaming up complicated examples of when you can fire that Quaker: please don't. I'm not trying to come up with my own legal theory. I'm trying to point out that an understanding of the law cannot come from a few simple-minded generalization like "You can be fired for anything".
For the hundredth time: if you're about to be embroiled in some legal dispute, do not go to an online forum like Slashdot for an explanation of your rights. Go to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. That's probably a lawyer, but it's certainly not a bunch of nerds who consider themselves experts on everything.
Scientists are saying no such thing. The argument is not that a universe that is slightly different could not support any life. The argument is that is could not support human life. For example, Fred Hoyle argued that if certain physical constants were just a little different, carbon atoms could not form ring-shaped molecules. All life as we know it is based on those carbon rings, so those changes would preclude our existence.
And before you start picking at flaws in that argument, let me point out something else you got wrong: the anthropic principle is not standard scientific theory. In fact, many scientists consider the reasoning behind it very sloppy.
Sure, words mean something. But where does the meaning come from? It isn't from some magical place were the meanings are permanently written and cannot be changed. (And a good thing too, since that would make it for hard to adapt language to new ideas.) It comes from usage. And usage changes as the universe changes, or rather as our understanding of the universe changes.
Consider "atom". It used to mean "an indivisible thing". (Still does, in some disciplines.) Scientists have known that atoms are not indivisible for about a century, but I don't think anybody's suggested that they ought to call them something else. People who knew the older meaning of the word thought that phrases like "splitting the atom" sounded kind of funny, but they didn't raise big objections about it. Nowadays, all of us have grown up with a definition of "atom" that includes splitability, and it's the older way of using the word that sounds funny.
Everybody comes out of high school English thinking that the concepts and definitions they learned there are somehow the real deal, and every other usage is a sign of illiteracy. In reality, "good English" is just a sort of cultural consensus, and a very loose one at that. And that consensus is constantly changing.
That's still scripting. You're just using the script to drive a character-driven story instead of a plot-driven story.
I've seen several attempts to emulate person-to-person interactions in games, and I've always thought the results were pretty lame. You can always see the gimmicks behind the facade: the decision tree, the storing keywords to throw back at you later. I suppose it could be done right if the design team had a lot of creativity, imagination, and psychological insight — not to mention some advanced skills in creating pattern-matching software. Not a lot of motivation to make it happen in id-driven games like GTA.
I agree that would certainly make for a better game. But do you have the slightest idea what you're asking? The software would have to creatively synthesis an outcome based on everything the player did. That's way beyond any "super fancy algorithm" available right now. You're basically talking about "strong" AI: software with the same level of creativity as a human.
That's an ironic suggestion, since the AI in GTA is remarkably poor. (At least in the version I played, GTA III for the PC; I suppose it might have improved in later games.) One example is the inability of NPCs to go from point A to point B if it involves any serious pathfinding. I was once in a parking lot, surrounded by cops, and none of them could get to me, because there was a low wall around the lot, and their travelling skills did not extend to "find the entrance" or "get out of your squad car and step over the wall."
(Does some googling.) OK, you're right, that's a popular approach: releasing sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere to form water particles. (More efficient than just releasing dust, which I thought was the basic idea.) And I certainly agree that this sounds like a very bad idea. Though presumably its advocates have models that supposedly show that acid rain would not occur. Not that I'm arguing that they're right — I'm in no position to say one way or the other.
But when I started this thread, I said nothing about the sulfur dioxide approach — I hadn't previously heard of it. I was talking about a report I'd heard (Australia Radio National? BBC? Can't remember) about the political consequences of this idea. I seem to recall that they spoke in terms of scattering actual particles, not sulfur dioxide aerosol. But perhaps I misremember, or the report didn't focus on details like that.
In any case, I think you'll agree that of the potential side effects of this idea, the risk of starting a world war far outweighs the risk of causing acid rain. Acid rain is not to be sneered at, but it' ecological effects pale in comparison to nuclear war.
OK, that's actually a thoughtful comment, so I'll have to actually think about my answer. (There is no intelligent response to "what goes up must come down.") Assuming that upper atmosphere particulate does actually come back down eventually, then the effect of scattering dust into the upper atmosphere would depend on exactly what kind of dust you scattered. I'm not enough of an expert to guess what nasty side effects are possible, but I doubt that they would include acid rain, which is mostly caused by sulfur dioxide gas.
In any case, the ecological side effects are actually less scary than the political ones. As I said before, this technology represents a global thermostat, and it's all too easy to imagine a world war being fought over control of that thermostat. The ecological effects of fighting a world war with 21st century technology makes global warming look like a minor glitch.
Indeed, a few nuclear weapons might well fix global warming. The downside is that they'd probably render humanity extinct in the process. But hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs!
First of all, by calling it a "balaclava" instead of a "ski mask" they are obviously attempting to conceal its evil nature!
Secondly, stitching "EVIL" onto the ski mask is an obvious attempt to confuse people. You see somebody walking down the street wearing a ski mask, you assume they're up to no good — unless that ski mask has "EVIL" stitched onto it, in which case you assume that it's all a prank, and the person is free to rob banks, take hostages, or whatever.
It's true that GPS devices are radio receivers, not transmitters. But receivers emit signals too, and these are detectable. In countries where you have to pay license fees to operate a TV or radio, they send out detector vans to nab scoflaws. I also recall reading in Spycatcher that MI-5 used them to detect secret shortwave receivers; don't recall how they distinguished KGB agents listening for instructions from Moscow Center from innocent Lawrence Welk fans.
I fucking hate cops. They all believe that if you're in jail that you're guilty, they're only interested in processing cases not justice, and a good majority of cops are just psycho-bullies from grade school who want to shoot a gun.
That's a pretty nasty stereotype. Like all stereotypes, it's actually true for some people, but that doesn't make it any less vicious.
Police power is the kind that's easy to abuse. But there are safeguards: courts, review boards, etc. Often these safeguards are ineffective, but the solution to that is better safeguards. The alternative is to not have any police at all. And that is an invitation for a different group of people to abuse their power.
No if a private citizen does it they go to jail. [engadget.com]
It's not at all obvious from that (angry and low-fact) engadget post the the person in question got in trouble just for using a GPS. The dude was stalking his ex-girlfriend. I'd want to know if she had a stay-away order against him, or if he'd threatened her. Doing these things would certainly justify sending him to jail, with or without his use of a GPS — though the GPS might be considered evidence that he was engaged in stalking.
This is what I hate most about the blogosphere: somebody reads a news item and passes it on in distorted form, out of mental laziness, a need to quote "facts" that support their particular agenda, or whatever. Then thousands of people post this same crap in their own blogs, and you have another outbreak of Blog Rage. Cure: don't quote something you've read in a blog without checking the source — and if the source is another blog, check their source, and so on.
Unless you want to be a party to spreading BS. Hey, it's your right.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to say "Think of the children!"
Let me get specific: I guy who had an office near where I used to live, pissed somebody off, and got a parcel bomb. He now has no hands. I guess you think that's a big joke. He doesn't.
YMBNAH. Slashdot has a Lego story pretty much every week.
Featuring 300,000 bricks, and 4,500 Lego, it was built by the Hong Kong Lego User Group. Yes that exists.
Why not? It's not like The West has a patent on geekitude. If anything, the geek mindset is even more prevalent in Chinese-speaking countries than here. They didn't become so dominant in electronic products by growing rice.
I'll bet there weren't any photos taken of her at rest stops.
No, just the ones that would have been taken when she stopped for gas. Stations on the interstate usually have a lot of security cameras, for obvious reasons.
Nowak was a classic stalker, obsessed with somebody who had no interest in her. She called Oefelein 22 times in one day shortly before setting out to kill his girlfriend. Not exactly Professor Moriarity. More like John Hinckley. Though really, it was just a sordid, ordinary episode, no big master plan. I'm not even going to try to parse the diaper thing.
Fix your sarcasm detector. Despite your contorted logic, all the news reports I've seen indicated that Deeb had a huge number of containers that were manifestly not empty. According to the original story (follow the links in the TFSA) "there were vessels containing chemicals all over the furniture and the floor".
There's hysteria here all right: the standard blogosphere kind where one blogger's ill-informed and angry rants get magnified over and over by a lot of other ill-informed, angry bloggers. And yes, the same goes for goes for the Moonite thing too. People get badly injured on a regular basis because of stuff that happens in secret labs. Same goes for mysterious electronic devices that appear out of nowhere. It happens every day. It's happened to people I know.
If the fire department in this case and the cops in the Moonite stunt had underreacted, and those incidents had turned out to be the real deal, people would be demanding their heads — literally. I don't think they overreacted in either case, but if they did, who can blame them?
A bunch of immature, self-righteous bloggers, that's who.
Nowhere is it stated what proportion of these containers actually contained anything.
Right, they saw hundreds of empty containers and panicked.
I gotta ask: WTF was your boss thinking? OK, the sponsor was an idiot, and the fire marshal's cowardice was criminal. But no way should your boss have gone ahead with the shoot. Why didn't he simply refuse, regardless of the fire marshall's failure to do his job. What was he afraid of, getting sued? Losing his job? These are bad things, but not as bad as one of his employees getting his hands blown off while searching for duds.
Most of them, in fact, are empty.
So your situation is not at all comparable.
You can be fired for anything.
God save us from self-appointed legal "experts". There's all kinds of stuff you can't be fired for doing. You cannot, for example, fire a Quaker for refusing to sing The Star Spangled Banner.
And before a thousand idiots respond with posts dreaming up complicated examples of when you can fire that Quaker: please don't. I'm not trying to come up with my own legal theory. I'm trying to point out that an understanding of the law cannot come from a few simple-minded generalization like "You can be fired for anything".
For the hundredth time: if you're about to be embroiled in some legal dispute, do not go to an online forum like Slashdot for an explanation of your rights. Go to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. That's probably a lawyer, but it's certainly not a bunch of nerds who consider themselves experts on everything.
Scientists are saying no such thing. The argument is not that a universe that is slightly different could not support any life. The argument is that is could not support human life. For example, Fred Hoyle argued that if certain physical constants were just a little different, carbon atoms could not form ring-shaped molecules. All life as we know it is based on those carbon rings, so those changes would preclude our existence.
And before you start picking at flaws in that argument, let me point out something else you got wrong: the anthropic principle is not standard scientific theory. In fact, many scientists consider the reasoning behind it very sloppy.
Sure, words mean something. But where does the meaning come from? It isn't from some magical place were the meanings are permanently written and cannot be changed. (And a good thing too, since that would make it for hard to adapt language to new ideas.) It comes from usage. And usage changes as the universe changes, or rather as our understanding of the universe changes.
Consider "atom". It used to mean "an indivisible thing". (Still does, in some disciplines.) Scientists have known that atoms are not indivisible for about a century, but I don't think anybody's suggested that they ought to call them something else. People who knew the older meaning of the word thought that phrases like "splitting the atom" sounded kind of funny, but they didn't raise big objections about it. Nowadays, all of us have grown up with a definition of "atom" that includes splitability, and it's the older way of using the word that sounds funny.
Everybody comes out of high school English thinking that the concepts and definitions they learned there are somehow the real deal, and every other usage is a sign of illiteracy. In reality, "good English" is just a sort of cultural consensus, and a very loose one at that. And that consensus is constantly changing.
That's still scripting. You're just using the script to drive a character-driven story instead of a plot-driven story.
I've seen several attempts to emulate person-to-person interactions in games, and I've always thought the results were pretty lame. You can always see the gimmicks behind the facade: the decision tree, the storing keywords to throw back at you later. I suppose it could be done right if the design team had a lot of creativity, imagination, and psychological insight — not to mention some advanced skills in creating pattern-matching software. Not a lot of motivation to make it happen in id-driven games like GTA.
BTW I did read 1984.
So feel free to talk about it.
I agree that would certainly make for a better game. But do you have the slightest idea what you're asking? The software would have to creatively synthesis an outcome based on everything the player did. That's way beyond any "super fancy algorithm" available right now. You're basically talking about "strong" AI: software with the same level of creativity as a human.
That's an ironic suggestion, since the AI in GTA is remarkably poor. (At least in the version I played, GTA III for the PC; I suppose it might have improved in later games.) One example is the inability of NPCs to go from point A to point B if it involves any serious pathfinding. I was once in a parking lot, surrounded by cops, and none of them could get to me, because there was a low wall around the lot, and their travelling skills did not extend to "find the entrance" or "get out of your squad car and step over the wall."
Maybe in the UK. In the US, "ski mask" is the more common term. I've heard "balaclava" used too, but most people probably think it's a Greek desert.
Uh, you did get that my post was humorous, right? Just checking.
(Does some googling.) OK, you're right, that's a popular approach: releasing sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere to form water particles. (More efficient than just releasing dust, which I thought was the basic idea.) And I certainly agree that this sounds like a very bad idea. Though presumably its advocates have models that supposedly show that acid rain would not occur. Not that I'm arguing that they're right — I'm in no position to say one way or the other.
But when I started this thread, I said nothing about the sulfur dioxide approach — I hadn't previously heard of it. I was talking about a report I'd heard (Australia Radio National? BBC? Can't remember) about the political consequences of this idea. I seem to recall that they spoke in terms of scattering actual particles, not sulfur dioxide aerosol. But perhaps I misremember, or the report didn't focus on details like that.
In any case, I think you'll agree that of the potential side effects of this idea, the risk of starting a world war far outweighs the risk of causing acid rain. Acid rain is not to be sneered at, but it' ecological effects pale in comparison to nuclear war.
OK, that's actually a thoughtful comment, so I'll have to actually think about my answer. (There is no intelligent response to "what goes up must come down.") Assuming that upper atmosphere particulate does actually come back down eventually, then the effect of scattering dust into the upper atmosphere would depend on exactly what kind of dust you scattered. I'm not enough of an expert to guess what nasty side effects are possible, but I doubt that they would include acid rain, which is mostly caused by sulfur dioxide gas.
In any case, the ecological side effects are actually less scary than the political ones. As I said before, this technology represents a global thermostat, and it's all too easy to imagine a world war being fought over control of that thermostat. The ecological effects of fighting a world war with 21st century technology makes global warming look like a minor glitch.
Indeed, a few nuclear weapons might well fix global warming. The downside is that they'd probably render humanity extinct in the process. But hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs!
First of all, by calling it a "balaclava" instead of a "ski mask" they are obviously attempting to conceal its evil nature!
Secondly, stitching "EVIL" onto the ski mask is an obvious attempt to confuse people. You see somebody walking down the street wearing a ski mask, you assume they're up to no good — unless that ski mask has "EVIL" stitched onto it, in which case you assume that it's all a prank, and the person is free to rob banks, take hostages, or whatever.
YMBNAH.
My point being that there are other factors to consider besides gravity. "What goes up must come down" is not a law of physics.
Thirteen-year-olds are no longer allowed to compete in the Olympics, mainly because of pedophiles like you!
Gravity operates on the moon too. Should we be worried about it falling down?
It's true that GPS devices are radio receivers, not transmitters. But receivers emit signals too, and these are detectable. In countries where you have to pay license fees to operate a TV or radio, they send out detector vans to nab scoflaws. I also recall reading in Spycatcher that MI-5 used them to detect secret shortwave receivers; don't recall how they distinguished KGB agents listening for instructions from Moscow Center from innocent Lawrence Welk fans.
I fucking hate cops. They all believe that if you're in jail that you're guilty, they're only interested in processing cases not justice, and a good majority of cops are just psycho-bullies from grade school who want to shoot a gun.
That's a pretty nasty stereotype. Like all stereotypes, it's actually true for some people, but that doesn't make it any less vicious.
Police power is the kind that's easy to abuse. But there are safeguards: courts, review boards, etc. Often these safeguards are ineffective, but the solution to that is better safeguards. The alternative is to not have any police at all. And that is an invitation for a different group of people to abuse their power.
No if a private citizen does it they go to jail. [engadget.com]
It's not at all obvious from that (angry and low-fact) engadget post the the person in question got in trouble just for using a GPS. The dude was stalking his ex-girlfriend. I'd want to know if she had a stay-away order against him, or if he'd threatened her. Doing these things would certainly justify sending him to jail, with or without his use of a GPS — though the GPS might be considered evidence that he was engaged in stalking.
This is what I hate most about the blogosphere: somebody reads a news item and passes it on in distorted form, out of mental laziness, a need to quote "facts" that support their particular agenda, or whatever. Then thousands of people post this same crap in their own blogs, and you have another outbreak of Blog Rage. Cure: don't quote something you've read in a blog without checking the source — and if the source is another blog, check their source, and so on.
Unless you want to be a party to spreading BS. Hey, it's your right.