However, I disagree with part of your latest post. Banning smoking in places where it affects nonsmokers (including stinking up building entrances where smokers congregate to get away from the "not inside" laws) is protecting the nonsmokers who can't otherwise protect themselves. Banning bad eating is not the same kind of protection at all, and isn't even the effective way to protect the non-obese from a shortage of resources caused by the obese.
Banning it doesn't protect by direct harm as in smoke to nonsmokers. It protects from a defect in allocation to mutual resources that can deprive the non-obese. Instead, the causes of obesity should bear their true costs, instead of externalizing them into a healthcare pool even non-obese must share. And indeed the healthcare budgets for the obese should be redirected into stopping the causes of obesity, which include education about diet and exercise, and about the economics of junk food that exploit them. Education about the metabolic distortion of the junk that makes food cheap initially, but costly in health. Like most education that improves self-destructive behavior, the prevention protects the choice to do wrong, but is much cheaper than fixing the damage once it's done. Combine that with charging the risktaking population for the costs of those whose risks materialize into damage, and the problem doesn't affect those outside the risktaker pool.
Just like combining bans that protect nonsmokers from the assault of smoke with taxes and education/advertising that give more smokers the choice to quit (or not start), and insurance premiums that charge for the costs. But even smoking isn't simply banned; only putting smoke on nonsmokers is.
Some actions that are proven to be unacceptably risky are legitimately illegal. Drunk driving is a good example. There are appropriate places where law can prevent serious damage before it's too late. Especially where the harm is irreparable, like when drunk drivers kill or maim people.
Another example: shooting a gun in the air in a suburb is illegal, not just the killing/maiming when the bullet occasionally actually hits someone. Some reckless behavior is legitimately prohibited, even before damage is done, and even if damage is only infrequently caused - when the damage is large enough.
Too many words, including I just have to give people credit for the good acts they actually engage in and U2 has a long list of those indeed. Saying you're not making out someone to be an angel, but then arguing that they're angelic, undermines your point.
Not too "pithy", but too something else for me to bother continuing in this thread. Goodbye.
So if they can let solving it be someone else's problem after they're dead, then they're a compliant group just as I said.
Well, at least the Irish people have the self-preservation to fight their grandfathers' fights. Or maybe it's something else that isn't self-preservation.
What you said is nonsense, because it conflates "Ireland" with "the Irish". The banks that lost the money mostly weren't owned by Irish people - the Anglo Irish Bank was much of the default. The AIB should have been left to lose the money it loaned and spent on whoever, which is what it collected interest against for literally centuries. Yes, any Irish people who defaulted should have been branded deadbeats, and never got money loaned them again - or for a while, depending on the actual result on their credit. Combined with the actual need for banks to loan money to make money, which, even to deadbeats, has a less than 100% chance of failing to be repaid. So correct interest and credit ratings (of the borrowers and of the instruments loaned) would be the correct solution.
Instead the Irish government simply forced the losses primarily the fault of the loaners, the private banks, onto every Irish person. Now and for decades to come; regardless of the person's credit performance. The large majority of those people either didn't borrow, or paid back correctly, but they're all paying the price.
What you said actually applies to the banks. The ones that made so many bad loans that they couldn't pay their obligations should never be loaned money again. Indeed they should be dissolved. And the many frauds and other crimes their executives committed should be punished with jail time. Until then why should Irish banks get loaned any money again, since the system is now proven to be set up to lose it?
Again, you're conflating the Irish people with its government, a government that has bailed out the banks that caused the catastrophe. That is precisely what is wrong in Ireland.
So? I didn't say anyone's an angel, or isn't. I didn't talk about the good Bono has or hasn't done.
I talked about the hope Bono would unite Ireland against the music industry, as suggested by the comment to which I replied. I dismissed that hope because Bono is the music industry, and demonstrated clearly that his music industry is against Ireland when the bottom line favors it and him.
Which does undermine the idea that Bono is generous, as he is taking a share of his many millions away from the country that made it all possible in so many ways, right when it needs the money the most - and when he certainly doesn't need it.
Bono gets all the benefits of his generosity, the price of his admission into the nearly uppermost crust of the entire species. It's because "even" Bono is selfish that we need laws and taxes. Or else the preferred fashionable needy of the moment would get it all, and the places like Ireland that produce far more good than Bono alone (or with his friends) ever could would collapse.
Telling the truth, rather than the deliberately manufactured PR, about a celebrity like Bono isn't "going after him". It's the truth, relevant to the attractive hope that's more like a pop song than a social programme.
Of course, you can sue a ham sandwich for being a ham sandwich. Dunno if you'll win - but that never stopped the "music" biz.
If you can sue the government for not having a law, you can sue for anything. That's pure absurdity. If you can win, precisely because there is no law making something illegal, you can win anything.
You could probably even win a suit against the government for not ruling you win.
Obviously any legal system must have either immediate decisions preventing the state from spending more than a second dismissing truly absurd attempts like this one. Better yet, it should allow the time waste, and simply decide in court to not just dismiss the suit, but also permanently ban any lawyer who brought the stupendously frivolous case, and charge damages in the amount of the cost to the government, plus punitive damages to inhibit truly rich fools from just buying up the government's time.
Then we could destroy the "music" biz, and hordes of frivolous lawyers, at once. Finally some good from the modern "music" industry.
Nice hope. But since Bono and U2 moved their music business offshore from Ireland to avoid paying taxes to the country he says produced him (and of course it did), there's no chance. Bono is the music industry, including the bloodsucking evil part.
Why not? The Irish capitulated to its private banks without a fight, agreeing to pay all those (largely foreign, largely British) bankers' stupid debts with their taxes for the rest of their lives, sending the Irish people back into the depths of the world's poorest.
Why wouldn't a new rapist like the "music" business see Ireland's government waving its tattered ass and jump to take its turn? There's still something left to steal, so no time to waste.
Your dogmatic insistence that writing be either poetry or prose exclusively further disqualifies you from judging the quality of Nobel laureates' work.
You're free not to like it, but there are more considered criteria for judging literature than your conventional tastes.
That's too hard. I use computers and the Internet for convenience. Any useful security has to protect my access, while automating the defenses.
Fortunately, using antivirus, firewalls, spam filters, blacklists/whitelists, executing only SW I can trust (with good reasons and auditability), a minimum of reasonable behavior and a load of automated software keeps me in the percentage of people who don't get violated.
The artistic birth of a great artist, told by them in reflection on a potent career, will probably read with great drama. If you don't appreciate it, it reads with melodrama.
The 1961 Nobel literature laureate was Ivo Andri of Yugoslavia, who wrote his works in Serbo-Croatian during WWII, publishing them all in 1945. He was awarded "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country".
A short essay translated by Lazar Pascanovic is Paths:
At the beginning of all roads and paths, at the basis of the very thought of them, lies sharply and indelibly carved the path on which I made my first free steps.
It was in Visegrad, on those hard, irregular, like gnawed away roads, where all is dry and grievous, without beauty, without joy, without the hope of joy, without the right to hope, where a bitter morsel, which has never been eaten, quivers in the throat with every step, where heat and wind and snow and rain eat the ground and the seed in it, and everything that still sprouts and is born, gets stigmatized and bent and bowed so much that, only if it was possible, its other end would be stuck back into the ground, only to push it back into the shapelesness and darkness from which it broke away and sprouted.
Those are the endless paths that, like threads and ribbons, streak the hills and slopes around the town, flowing into the white road or disappearing near the water in the green willow groves. Human and animal urge sketched out those paths, and the necessity has beaten them. There, it's hard for one to leave, to go, to return. One sits there on a stone hiding under a tree, in a dry place or in scarce shade, resting, praying or counting the peasant's earnings. On those paths, that are swept by wind and soiled and cleansed by rain, where one meets only tormented cattle and silent, grim faced people, that is where I conceived my idea of the richness and beauty of the world. That is where I, ignorant and weak and empty-handed, discovered the fragrant, swooning happiness, happy for everything that wasn't there, cannot be there and never will be.
And on all the roads and ways that I passed later in my life, I lived only on that poor happiness, on my Visegrad idea of the richness and beauty of the created world. Because, under all the worldly roads, there has always flowed, visible and palpable only to me, the sharp Visegrad path, from the day I left it, up to this day. Actually, I've used it to measure my step and adjust my walk. And all my life it has never left me.
In the moments when I felt tired and poisoned by the world in which, by a bad coincidence, I lived and only miraculously stayed alive, when the sight grew dim and the direction turned uncertain, I would spread before me, like a prayer mat, the hard, poor, divine Visegrad path which cures every pain and nullifies every suffering, because it contains them all and surpasses them all. That way, a couple of times a day, using every calm in the life around me, every pause in a conversation, I would travel a part of that road which should never have been left in the first place. And that is how I will, till the end of my days, invisibly and secretly, still manage to walk the destined length of the Visegrad path. And then, with the end of my life, it will also end. And it will get lost where all the paths are lost, where all the roads and wastelands disappear, where there is no more walk nor effort, where all the earthly roads are tied into a meaningless knot and burned away, like a sparkle of salvation in our eyes that are fading out themselves, because they have lead us to the end and to the truth.
That seems to me the work of a Nobel literature laureate. Though I like Tolkien's writing better, and his stories better than the subject. I expect the Cold War in 1961 gave the Nobel committee the extra reason to nominate a writer in non-Soviet Communist Yugoslavia, who
The rules are simple, even if there are simpler rules. They're also sufficiently complex that sometimes the play is to exploit a surprising combination of the rules. We are, after all, mostly programmers and lawyers.
When I play D&D, my friends and I use to original edition hardcover AD&D rule books. The rules are simple, we all know them, and we all know the books well enough to quickly point at the rule if there's disagreement. We do allow combo spells from the original lists to make new ones, cleared in advance or even on the fly if they're straightforward enough. The players & DM are mostly programmers and lawyers, so we're more interested in the role playing and storytelling than in the rules themselves. And the hunkering down in a man-cave all night to act like 14 year olds.
When nuke plants fail, they nuke a quarter of Japan or Europe. Or the USA, soon enough.
You sound as fetishistic as any other nuke plant booster who ignores the unacceptable cost when these plants go boom. The cost that reasonable people warned you about, but you said would never happen. Now you probably say they happen so infrequently we can ignore them. Or that the same irresponsible corps who let the old ones blow should get new $BILLIONS to run new versions.
It doesn't make you look smart to invent some nonsensical analogy (with misspellings) calling your opponent silly. You're beyond silly: you're a menace.
Hm, I wonder if a smart keyboard ran its own OS, like Android, running an X client over a network to the main PC's X server, if that would secure the aggregated workstation better against keyloggers and other similar devices. Not trusting the local buses, which seem harder to secure. An Optimus keyboard might have the HW to run the OS and X client. A monitor that's just an OS and X server over a gigabit ethernet to the main PC might complete the picture. And maybe the whole thing would then run even faster.
Or maybe that all just kicks the can a little down the road, to where a keylogger or other spyware just infests the "app host" PC at the core.
While I tend to agree with you, we don't have evidence of the US government having a backdoor to your devices. This story is about the Indian government, and how India is spying on the US government. It's the US government getting spied on, which is not exactly the opposite of the US government spying on Americans with device backdoors, but it's closer to the opposite than it is to what you said.
I expect that if "RINOA" gave it to India, that it gave it to the US, too. But until I see evidence of it, it's just an "educated suspicion".
As an American I'm upset enough about Apple, an American corp, along with a Canadian and a Finnish corp, giving India the means by which to spy on my government. I can also get outraged about my government spying on me, but I need some actual evidence before I prioritize that.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right - I read your post wrong.
However, I disagree with part of your latest post. Banning smoking in places where it affects nonsmokers (including stinking up building entrances where smokers congregate to get away from the "not inside" laws) is protecting the nonsmokers who can't otherwise protect themselves. Banning bad eating is not the same kind of protection at all, and isn't even the effective way to protect the non-obese from a shortage of resources caused by the obese.
Banning it doesn't protect by direct harm as in smoke to nonsmokers. It protects from a defect in allocation to mutual resources that can deprive the non-obese. Instead, the causes of obesity should bear their true costs, instead of externalizing them into a healthcare pool even non-obese must share. And indeed the healthcare budgets for the obese should be redirected into stopping the causes of obesity, which include education about diet and exercise, and about the economics of junk food that exploit them. Education about the metabolic distortion of the junk that makes food cheap initially, but costly in health. Like most education that improves self-destructive behavior, the prevention protects the choice to do wrong, but is much cheaper than fixing the damage once it's done. Combine that with charging the risktaking population for the costs of those whose risks materialize into damage, and the problem doesn't affect those outside the risktaker pool.
Just like combining bans that protect nonsmokers from the assault of smoke with taxes and education/advertising that give more smokers the choice to quit (or not start), and insurance premiums that charge for the costs. But even smoking isn't simply banned; only putting smoke on nonsmokers is.
You've never drunk a case of beer yourself? In 2h, that's only 1 beer every 5 minutes. Which is over 4.5 minutes to recover after each chug.
I recommend Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Some actions that are proven to be unacceptably risky are legitimately illegal. Drunk driving is a good example. There are appropriate places where law can prevent serious damage before it's too late. Especially where the harm is irreparable, like when drunk drivers kill or maim people.
Another example: shooting a gun in the air in a suburb is illegal, not just the killing/maiming when the bullet occasionally actually hits someone. Some reckless behavior is legitimately prohibited, even before damage is done, and even if damage is only infrequently caused - when the damage is large enough.
Only the most radical strawman peddlers could say that I concluded any alcohol = drunk.
Your post is total bullshit, since it's nothing but straw men and wrong facts.
Too many words, including I just have to give people credit for the good acts they actually engage in and U2 has a long list of those indeed. Saying you're not making out someone to be an angel, but then arguing that they're angelic, undermines your point.
Not too "pithy", but too something else for me to bother continuing in this thread. Goodbye.
So if they can let solving it be someone else's problem after they're dead, then they're a compliant group just as I said.
Well, at least the Irish people have the self-preservation to fight their grandfathers' fights. Or maybe it's something else that isn't self-preservation.
What you said is nonsense, because it conflates "Ireland" with "the Irish". The banks that lost the money mostly weren't owned by Irish people - the Anglo Irish Bank was much of the default. The AIB should have been left to lose the money it loaned and spent on whoever, which is what it collected interest against for literally centuries. Yes, any Irish people who defaulted should have been branded deadbeats, and never got money loaned them again - or for a while, depending on the actual result on their credit. Combined with the actual need for banks to loan money to make money, which, even to deadbeats, has a less than 100% chance of failing to be repaid. So correct interest and credit ratings (of the borrowers and of the instruments loaned) would be the correct solution.
Instead the Irish government simply forced the losses primarily the fault of the loaners, the private banks, onto every Irish person. Now and for decades to come; regardless of the person's credit performance. The large majority of those people either didn't borrow, or paid back correctly, but they're all paying the price.
What you said actually applies to the banks. The ones that made so many bad loans that they couldn't pay their obligations should never be loaned money again. Indeed they should be dissolved. And the many frauds and other crimes their executives committed should be punished with jail time. Until then why should Irish banks get loaned any money again, since the system is now proven to be set up to lose it?
Again, you're conflating the Irish people with its government, a government that has bailed out the banks that caused the catastrophe. That is precisely what is wrong in Ireland.
So? I didn't say anyone's an angel, or isn't. I didn't talk about the good Bono has or hasn't done.
I talked about the hope Bono would unite Ireland against the music industry, as suggested by the comment to which I replied. I dismissed that hope because Bono is the music industry, and demonstrated clearly that his music industry is against Ireland when the bottom line favors it and him.
Which does undermine the idea that Bono is generous, as he is taking a share of his many millions away from the country that made it all possible in so many ways, right when it needs the money the most - and when he certainly doesn't need it.
Bono gets all the benefits of his generosity, the price of his admission into the nearly uppermost crust of the entire species. It's because "even" Bono is selfish that we need laws and taxes. Or else the preferred fashionable needy of the moment would get it all, and the places like Ireland that produce far more good than Bono alone (or with his friends) ever could would collapse.
Telling the truth, rather than the deliberately manufactured PR, about a celebrity like Bono isn't "going after him". It's the truth, relevant to the attractive hope that's more like a pop song than a social programme.
I have a copy of Chainmail. Try it with critical hits from ICE! Your miniatures never worked harder.
You're against banning drunk driving? I'm against banning stabbing people in the eye with a lit cigarette.
See how your analogy doesn't work?
Of course, you can sue a ham sandwich for being a ham sandwich. Dunno if you'll win - but that never stopped the "music" biz.
If you can sue the government for not having a law, you can sue for anything. That's pure absurdity. If you can win, precisely because there is no law making something illegal, you can win anything.
You could probably even win a suit against the government for not ruling you win.
Obviously any legal system must have either immediate decisions preventing the state from spending more than a second dismissing truly absurd attempts like this one. Better yet, it should allow the time waste, and simply decide in court to not just dismiss the suit, but also permanently ban any lawyer who brought the stupendously frivolous case, and charge damages in the amount of the cost to the government, plus punitive damages to inhibit truly rich fools from just buying up the government's time.
Then we could destroy the "music" biz, and hordes of frivolous lawyers, at once. Finally some good from the modern "music" industry.
The orange ones fuck you up REAL good.
Nice hope. But since Bono and U2 moved their music business offshore from Ireland to avoid paying taxes to the country he says produced him (and of course it did), there's no chance. Bono is the music industry, including the bloodsucking evil part.
Why not? The Irish capitulated to its private banks without a fight, agreeing to pay all those (largely foreign, largely British) bankers' stupid debts with their taxes for the rest of their lives, sending the Irish people back into the depths of the world's poorest.
Why wouldn't a new rapist like the "music" business see Ireland's government waving its tattered ass and jump to take its turn? There's still something left to steal, so no time to waste.
Your dogmatic insistence that writing be either poetry or prose exclusively further disqualifies you from judging the quality of Nobel laureates' work.
You're free not to like it, but there are more considered criteria for judging literature than your conventional tastes.
It evokes the steps along a path that turns through many critical turning points. Which is the literal and thematic subject.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. However, consistency among subject, theme and technique is more objective, and you missed it.
That's too hard. I use computers and the Internet for convenience. Any useful security has to protect my access, while automating the defenses.
Fortunately, using antivirus, firewalls, spam filters, blacklists/whitelists, executing only SW I can trust (with good reasons and auditability), a minimum of reasonable behavior and a load of automated software keeps me in the percentage of people who don't get violated.
The artistic birth of a great artist, told by them in reflection on a potent career, will probably read with great drama. If you don't appreciate it, it reads with melodrama.
The 1961 Nobel literature laureate was Ivo Andri of Yugoslavia, who wrote his works in Serbo-Croatian during WWII, publishing them all in 1945. He was awarded "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country".
A short essay translated by Lazar Pascanovic is Paths :
That seems to me the work of a Nobel literature laureate. Though I like Tolkien's writing better, and his stories better than the subject. I expect the Cold War in 1961 gave the Nobel committee the extra reason to nominate a writer in non-Soviet Communist Yugoslavia, who
The rules are simple, even if there are simpler rules. They're also sufficiently complex that sometimes the play is to exploit a surprising combination of the rules. We are, after all, mostly programmers and lawyers.
When I play D&D, my friends and I use to original edition hardcover AD&D rule books. The rules are simple, we all know them, and we all know the books well enough to quickly point at the rule if there's disagreement. We do allow combo spells from the original lists to make new ones, cleared in advance or even on the fly if they're straightforward enough. The players & DM are mostly programmers and lawyers, so we're more interested in the role playing and storytelling than in the rules themselves. And the hunkering down in a man-cave all night to act like 14 year olds.
When nuke plants fail, they nuke a quarter of Japan or Europe. Or the USA, soon enough.
You sound as fetishistic as any other nuke plant booster who ignores the unacceptable cost when these plants go boom. The cost that reasonable people warned you about, but you said would never happen. Now you probably say they happen so infrequently we can ignore them. Or that the same irresponsible corps who let the old ones blow should get new $BILLIONS to run new versions.
It doesn't make you look smart to invent some nonsensical analogy (with misspellings) calling your opponent silly. You're beyond silly: you're a menace.
Hm, I wonder if a smart keyboard ran its own OS, like Android, running an X client over a network to the main PC's X server, if that would secure the aggregated workstation better against keyloggers and other similar devices. Not trusting the local buses, which seem harder to secure. An Optimus keyboard might have the HW to run the OS and X client. A monitor that's just an OS and X server over a gigabit ethernet to the main PC might complete the picture. And maybe the whole thing would then run even faster.
Or maybe that all just kicks the can a little down the road, to where a keylogger or other spyware just infests the "app host" PC at the core.
While I tend to agree with you, we don't have evidence of the US government having a backdoor to your devices. This story is about the Indian government, and how India is spying on the US government. It's the US government getting spied on, which is not exactly the opposite of the US government spying on Americans with device backdoors, but it's closer to the opposite than it is to what you said.
I expect that if "RINOA" gave it to India, that it gave it to the US, too. But until I see evidence of it, it's just an "educated suspicion".
As an American I'm upset enough about Apple, an American corp, along with a Canadian and a Finnish corp, giving India the means by which to spy on my government. I can also get outraged about my government spying on me, but I need some actual evidence before I prioritize that.