Weird, never heard of Elenin until this article showed up. How do these doomsday scenarios appear? Do people just come up with a story after a bad trip?
At this point, I think that we should drop a few MOABs on various places of FATA.
Cool, drop one of the biggest conventional bombs in the world over a few people in rags. Depending on the country defining it, it already qualifies as a WMD.
Because you know the costs, that's why. The cost for hardware X is Y, for the lowest specification level. For a greater level... it's the same cost and hardware, X and Y. The only thing that changed is the money you paid, everything else is the same. The best course of action is clearly to sell X at a reasonable price, given the cost Y, and don't sell artificially crippled hardware.
IBM didn't sell you the computer and printer, they rented them. It's reasonable that they offered different service levels. They can do whatever they want with the hardware: is theirs and you only care about the SLA.
The itch starts when you buy the stuff. Intel sell you a Ferrari with a switch inside that's stopping it from working at full capacity, and the upgrade is just flipping it. Of course, you would want to upgrade yourself, without paying for such a minimalistic job. That's what got people angry: the metaphorical switch. It costs exactly the same to make a Ferrari and a Fiat 600. Why sell an artificially crippled product?
I said the people were "partly" responsible for the situation they find themselves in.
And I said you are correct, but they are just a small, if not the smallest, cog in the machine.
Why did it take 25 years for the Egyptians to get a thumb out and do something about their situation?
It took 25 years because the Egyptian culture (Arab, in general) had elements that made it possible. It isn't strange that young adults were and are instrumental for the Arab Spring to succeed.
What exactly are the protesters in England trying to accomplish? And spare the "truth and justice" bullshit and layout some concrete reasons and realistic solutions to correct the problems.
Ok, I'll spare you. At this point, they don't want to accomplish anything, they are just angry and/or taking advantage of the chaos around. I never said violence was good, necessary or justified, only that it was hardly a surprise, given the circumstances. I may like pacifism, but I am a pragmatic. As to the specifics, stop alienating the population. I read an article a few months ago about this stuff: pacific protests against corporations that did creative accounting, taxes for the wealthy, cuts for tertiary education, etc. It was really just a matter of time if you ask me. Happened in Greece, Spain, Chile and Argentina. Why wouldn't happen in the UK?
Running government officials out of office might make the mob feel good until they stop and look around and find no one running the store and realize they can not blame anyone except themselves since they no longer have a government to blame. And someone above mentioned violence being a good way of changing things and I totally agree. It's good to have a forest fire every now and then to clean out the dead wood and reinvigorate growth but running through the streets stealing and burning isn't going to accomplish anything. The next global war will most likely be the only solution to changing the entire paradigm of our current civilization. Hopefully enough people will survive and they can start over from scratch and apply the lessons learned if there are actually any records remaining to learn from.
I find absolute chaos somewhat distasteful. I would much rather avoid further disorder, as it makes the whole process of improvement slower.
Don't know why everyone assumes I was talking about violent protests... whatever. You can close your eyes and say "Meh, throw them to jail", or you can bypass the tediousness that this "negative publicity" creates and think about what's going on. Guess what, at this point there's no cause anymore! This is just angry people, opportunists, and sheeple. It's out of control now, but at the beginning they were peaceful protests, and there was a reason. Most likely, if we believe the article GGGPP showed, this started because of alienation and poverty that eventually exploded for the slightest reason. Want to discourage future riots? Don't alienate your citizens.
Those were different times. Martin Luther King was educated and believed in civil societies. Remember that this was just after WW2 and before punk rock, so security, hierarchy and order were a must for those fellas. Race is a great common denominator, makes it easier to have a cohesive group (you can readily identify with your leaders, see). Mohandas Gandhi was a lawyer, a highly learned person, and he too believed in law and order. Finally, they all knew why they were fighting, as their enemy was also highly cohesive: white laws and white people.
The banner of this generation is "Indígnese", "Indignez-vous", "Be pissed". No race or national interests here; you just have to feel angry about your current situation to get involved. There are no leaders and no reason to have them: It's more about figuring out what to do next and people will vote with their attentions and feet. As any self-regulated system, chaos is part of the meal. So what if there's violence, it furthers our goals, as GGPP put it. And why are they rioting? Whom are they rioting against? In a context of exclusion and poverty with no clear antagonist, it may as well be society as a whole. Egypt protesters were at the beginning highly organized and mostly peaceful because there was a defined enemy (the dictator) so even the military recognized this and wouldn't interfere. Until something big happens, these will be the protests in the Western world, at least for a few decades more.
Finally, your remarks about responsibility are interesting, to say the least. These people are responsible for their actions, true, because it's the only resource available for them. But what about the prime minister, or the members of the parliament? They made the laws and took the decisions that led to this situation, after all. They are much more responsible for the current state of affairs as they affect the whole country, so why do you leave them outside of your comment? There's no spontaneous generation, this couldn't happen in my city even when somewhat violent and big demonstrations are not uncommon.
...the real bullshit is that in any group that size, there's no way the communication is "secure", in fact it MUST be broadcast (by tweet or whatever) where anyone could see it.
Uh, broadcast encryption exists. In fact, the principle is used for protecting Blu-Ray movies. Have you heard of widespread Blu-Ray piracy?
That's the point of homomorphic computing: to add two encrypted numbers, you need to take that operation and transform it into another one (let's say, for instance, multiplication) that when performed on two encrypted numbers, it will provide the answer, also encrypted.
This is not new. IBM has already done this. The problem is not homomorphic computing, which is easy to accomplish; having HC performed in reasonable time with a strong encryption scheme is...
Feel ya'. An acquaintance of mine failed because "he was a man from the right". But even then you can't generalize, I guess...
When I did Contemporary Social Theory, I answered the questions in the exam as a die-hard engineer. This is a huge deviation from their standards. There's an expression in Argentina for that: "Play the guitar". It means to give answers as broad and general as possible, even for simple questions, supposedly because the student didn't study enough to add details, or to know that the answer is straightforward. My friends on that course, an architect and a political scientist, choked when I told them my audacity.
The professor told me she was surprised by my analytic responses, and my arguments may be argumentatively weak given how succinct was my exam. She gave me a B+ in the end. I guess there are assholes everywhere that would grade you poorly for whatever reasons, but there are also reasonable people out there.
And he marked us all wrong, because -he- hadn't taught us the Ideal Gas Law yet.
Heh, I used recursion once to solve a really simple problem in Programming 101 just to prove I could (most people had just heard of procedures then). The professor smiled back at me and told me that she hadn't taught that yet so she would forgive my inefficient overkill, but she would give me only five minutes to fix it into an iterative version.
tl;dr. Instead of marking the problem wrong, she told me to be smart and not a smart-ass.
First, a disclaimer: I don't know the correct terms since English is not my mother tongue, but bear with me for a moment.:P
This is quite a deviation from gang violence. Those are characterized by value cohesion (even if they are counter-cultural values), and a strict hierarchy and police within the group.
I also read a study from François Dubet, and these acts are somewhat like the "incivilités" of France, in which violence is directed against anything that represents the state, like parks or stuff like that.
I find the best equivalent to be the "barderos" from Argentina. These are groups that are non-cohesive and amoral, in the sense that legal and illegal acts are performed and legitimated. Interestingly, while robbery and violence are accepted, drugs are not, because the need for higher organization and control goes backwards to the way these groups operate. There isn't a sense of belonging, just an instrumental need for a group, and they see it as a way to preserve social ties with a neighborhood that has forsaken them, not as a way to get revenge.
These groups originate mainly because of (a) social/economic exclusion and (b) income distribution inequality. You don't want to leave this problem unattended for more than 10 years, because then the parents' values don't pass onto their children. Implementing a curfew is as useful as praying. They must provide work and education/training for the teenagers and their parents. If they can't get a decent job (of the kind that provides true social mobility), then this problem perpetuates itself, as they only get access to low-income, high-risk, precarious jobs. Also, they must narrow the gap between rich and poor people (there is a higher correlation between income distribution inequality and violence than between unemployment and violence). Just remove the tax breaks for the rich and watch the country flourish.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed.
The most hilarious I've seen are "Turn down the music asshole", "I can hear you f*cking" and "Guess the password now prick"
Weird, never heard of Elenin until this article showed up. How do these doomsday scenarios appear? Do people just come up with a story after a bad trip?
My thoughts exactly :) . It would be insane to submit your hacks.
Man, what's happening with you? Your comments are usually nice, but lately they are just too aggressive or troll-like. Are you getting enough sleep?
At this point, I think that we should drop a few MOABs on various places of FATA.
Cool, drop one of the biggest conventional bombs in the world over a few people in rags. Depending on the country defining it, it already qualifies as a WMD.
What's next? Maybe a nuke or two, asshole?
Because you know the costs, that's why. The cost for hardware X is Y, for the lowest specification level. For a greater level... it's the same cost and hardware, X and Y. The only thing that changed is the money you paid, everything else is the same. The best course of action is clearly to sell X at a reasonable price, given the cost Y, and don't sell artificially crippled hardware.
IBM didn't sell you the computer and printer, they rented them. It's reasonable that they offered different service levels. They can do whatever they want with the hardware: is theirs and you only care about the SLA.
The itch starts when you buy the stuff. Intel sell you a Ferrari with a switch inside that's stopping it from working at full capacity, and the upgrade is just flipping it. Of course, you would want to upgrade yourself, without paying for such a minimalistic job. That's what got people angry: the metaphorical switch. It costs exactly the same to make a Ferrari and a Fiat 600. Why sell an artificially crippled product?
It's hard sometimes to wade through hordes of trolls and misinformed people, I guess...
Part of coming of age is actually find uses for that key. Clue: check Maniac Mansion (or was it Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis?) and Excel.
They are made from coal, then?
"Whether it would be right to" is just Polite for "we may do it". "Threatens" is the expression in Loaded for "they may do it".
Better yet, BOINC has already solved those issues. Strange that they aren't using it...
I said the people were "partly" responsible for the situation they find themselves in.
And I said you are correct, but they are just a small, if not the smallest, cog in the machine.
Why did it take 25 years for the Egyptians to get a thumb out and do something about their situation?
It took 25 years because the Egyptian culture (Arab, in general) had elements that made it possible. It isn't strange that young adults were and are instrumental for the Arab Spring to succeed.
What exactly are the protesters in England trying to accomplish? And spare the "truth and justice" bullshit and layout some concrete reasons and realistic solutions to correct the problems.
Ok, I'll spare you. At this point, they don't want to accomplish anything, they are just angry and/or taking advantage of the chaos around. I never said violence was good, necessary or justified, only that it was hardly a surprise, given the circumstances. I may like pacifism, but I am a pragmatic. As to the specifics, stop alienating the population. I read an article a few months ago about this stuff: pacific protests against corporations that did creative accounting, taxes for the wealthy, cuts for tertiary education, etc. It was really just a matter of time if you ask me. Happened in Greece, Spain, Chile and Argentina. Why wouldn't happen in the UK?
Running government officials out of office might make the mob feel good until they stop and look around and find no one running the store and realize they can not blame anyone except themselves since they no longer have a government to blame. And someone above mentioned violence being a good way of changing things and I totally agree. It's good to have a forest fire every now and then to clean out the dead wood and reinvigorate growth but running through the streets stealing and burning isn't going to accomplish anything. The next global war will most likely be the only solution to changing the entire paradigm of our current civilization. Hopefully enough people will survive and they can start over from scratch and apply the lessons learned if there are actually any records remaining to learn from.
I find absolute chaos somewhat distasteful. I would much rather avoid further disorder, as it makes the whole process of improvement slower.
Don't know why everyone assumes I was talking about violent protests... whatever. You can close your eyes and say "Meh, throw them to jail", or you can bypass the tediousness that this "negative publicity" creates and think about what's going on. Guess what, at this point there's no cause anymore! This is just angry people, opportunists, and sheeple. It's out of control now, but at the beginning they were peaceful protests, and there was a reason. Most likely, if we believe the article GGGPP showed, this started because of alienation and poverty that eventually exploded for the slightest reason. Want to discourage future riots? Don't alienate your citizens.
Those were different times. Martin Luther King was educated and believed in civil societies. Remember that this was just after WW2 and before punk rock, so security, hierarchy and order were a must for those fellas. Race is a great common denominator, makes it easier to have a cohesive group (you can readily identify with your leaders, see). Mohandas Gandhi was a lawyer, a highly learned person, and he too believed in law and order. Finally, they all knew why they were fighting, as their enemy was also highly cohesive: white laws and white people.
The banner of this generation is "Indígnese", "Indignez-vous", "Be pissed". No race or national interests here; you just have to feel angry about your current situation to get involved. There are no leaders and no reason to have them: It's more about figuring out what to do next and people will vote with their attentions and feet. As any self-regulated system, chaos is part of the meal. So what if there's violence, it furthers our goals, as GGPP put it. And why are they rioting? Whom are they rioting against? In a context of exclusion and poverty with no clear antagonist, it may as well be society as a whole. Egypt protesters were at the beginning highly organized and mostly peaceful because there was a defined enemy (the dictator) so even the military recognized this and wouldn't interfere. Until something big happens, these will be the protests in the Western world, at least for a few decades more.
Finally, your remarks about responsibility are interesting, to say the least. These people are responsible for their actions, true, because it's the only resource available for them. But what about the prime minister, or the members of the parliament? They made the laws and took the decisions that led to this situation, after all. They are much more responsible for the current state of affairs as they affect the whole country, so why do you leave them outside of your comment? There's no spontaneous generation, this couldn't happen in my city even when somewhat violent and big demonstrations are not uncommon.
Want to know what it accomplishes? Nothing.
People would be better in the US if, instead of whining on the internet, they get up and protest.
Crap, I modded you Overrated instead of Funny, replying to reset your score. :(
...the real bullshit is that in any group that size, there's no way the communication is "secure", in fact it MUST be broadcast (by tweet or whatever) where anyone could see it.
Uh, broadcast encryption exists. In fact, the principle is used for protecting Blu-Ray movies. Have you heard of widespread Blu-Ray piracy?
A few friends of mine told me that London is, indeed, filled with cameras and quite 1984-esque, although the countryside is not bad at all.
That's the point of homomorphic computing: to add two encrypted numbers, you need to take that operation and transform it into another one (let's say, for instance, multiplication) that when performed on two encrypted numbers, it will provide the answer, also encrypted.
This is not new. IBM has already done this. The problem is not homomorphic computing, which is easy to accomplish; having HC performed in reasonable time with a strong encryption scheme is...
Feel ya'. An acquaintance of mine failed because "he was a man from the right". But even then you can't generalize, I guess...
When I did Contemporary Social Theory, I answered the questions in the exam as a die-hard engineer. This is a huge deviation from their standards. There's an expression in Argentina for that: "Play the guitar". It means to give answers as broad and general as possible, even for simple questions, supposedly because the student didn't study enough to add details, or to know that the answer is straightforward. My friends on that course, an architect and a political scientist, choked when I told them my audacity.
The professor told me she was surprised by my analytic responses, and my arguments may be argumentatively weak given how succinct was my exam. She gave me a B+ in the end. I guess there are assholes everywhere that would grade you poorly for whatever reasons, but there are also reasonable people out there.
And he marked us all wrong, because -he- hadn't taught us the Ideal Gas Law yet.
Heh, I used recursion once to solve a really simple problem in Programming 101 just to prove I could (most people had just heard of procedures then). The professor smiled back at me and told me that she hadn't taught that yet so she would forgive my inefficient overkill, but she would give me only five minutes to fix it into an iterative version.
tl;dr. Instead of marking the problem wrong, she told me to be smart and not a smart-ass.
First, a disclaimer: I don't know the correct terms since English is not my mother tongue, but bear with me for a moment. :P
This is quite a deviation from gang violence. Those are characterized by value cohesion (even if they are counter-cultural values), and a strict hierarchy and police within the group.
I also read a study from François Dubet, and these acts are somewhat like the "incivilités" of France, in which violence is directed against anything that represents the state, like parks or stuff like that.
I find the best equivalent to be the "barderos" from Argentina. These are groups that are non-cohesive and amoral, in the sense that legal and illegal acts are performed and legitimated. Interestingly, while robbery and violence are accepted, drugs are not, because the need for higher organization and control goes backwards to the way these groups operate. There isn't a sense of belonging, just an instrumental need for a group, and they see it as a way to preserve social ties with a neighborhood that has forsaken them, not as a way to get revenge.
These groups originate mainly because of (a) social/economic exclusion and (b) income distribution inequality. You don't want to leave this problem unattended for more than 10 years, because then the parents' values don't pass onto their children. Implementing a curfew is as useful as praying. They must provide work and education/training for the teenagers and their parents. If they can't get a decent job (of the kind that provides true social mobility), then this problem perpetuates itself, as they only get access to low-income, high-risk, precarious jobs. Also, they must narrow the gap between rich and poor people (there is a higher correlation between income distribution inequality and violence than between unemployment and violence). Just remove the tax breaks for the rich and watch the country flourish.
The debt ceiling may have increased with Clinton (don't know), but debt was on heavy decline when he left.
The architect screams "Fuck! This wasn't the deepest well on Earth! It was a tower!"