Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
on
Gambling On Bacteria
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'll agree to the basic situation you put forward, but of course the situation is trickier than just two groups on opposite sides. Within each group are a bunch of sub-groups along the spectrum of "let's make peace now" and "we won't stop until they are all dead!" Even if you get most of the groups to agree to a peaceful arrangement, the sub-groups who don't agree can spoil it for everyone by causing trouble, leading to increased tension and eventual breakdown of the peace arrangement. It's very unlikely anytime soon that you will get 100% buy in from all sub-groups within both sides. The best you can hope for is a peace that is strong enough to withstand the inevitable bombardment by the sub-groups who don't join until support for them fades. And, in a region where violence is an everyday fact of life, this is going to be very tough to do.
Was that before or after Moses got the multi-colored coat from his father and was then swallowed by a big fish? What about when Moses chopped down the cherry tree and said "I cannot tell a lie"?
You don't need to start out blowing up trains and taking school children hostage. You could even start out as a superhero. You're taking down criminals to help out the cops and protect the innocent. Then you start seeing that you're busting the same criminals over and over because the justice system isn't working right (from your perspective... maybe the reality is that a vigilante who contaminates evidence with his actions & doesn't stick around to testify leads to charges that don't stick).
So you start justifying taking harsher action against the worse criminals. After all, that guy that opened fire in the Elementary School would have just killed again had you not taken him out, right? You're still protecting the innocent. And this guy waving a gun around during a mugging? He's just a step away from killing someone. Take him out now and you save even more innocents.
Before you know it, you make one little mistake. (Hey, how were you supposed to know the guy running with the purse was trying to *return* it to the little old lady before you zapped him with your heat vision?) Now everyone thinks *you're* the super-villain. They want to lock you up. But you can't help people if you're locked up so you fight the police... for their own good, of course. Why won't they just let you punish those people you find guilty without getting in your way? They must be part of the corrupt system and equally as guilty as those criminals they set free. Better take them down too. Things will be a lot better when you take over the world.....
This doesn't surprise me (and I seem to be in the minority here who actually finds Twitter useful). I wonder how many Slashdot comments get replied to. Think about it. Suppose you have 10 comments to an article and 5 of those get 1 reply each. You now have 15 comments with only 5 being replied to, or 66% being "ignored". Add a few more second level comments, some third level comments, some "moderated to -1" comments, some jokes which elicit a "+5 Funny" but no replies, etc and you could easily have over 70% of Slashdot comments being "ignored" (where ignored is defined as not have any replies).
9 months earlier? The human gestation period is 40 weeks (or 10 months). Granted, babies can be born early, but being born at 36 weeks (i.e. 9 months) is considered pre-term. Of course, your point could still hold true. A baby born in early September was likely conceived around Thanksgiving. A baby born in late September was likely conceived around Christmas. But a baby conceived around New Year's would likely be born in October.
I find it humorous and perhaps a bit ironic that spammers, in an attempt to bypass spam filters, will often render their message completely unreadable. Congratulations! You've beaten my spam filter. However, even if there was a sliver of a chance that you could fool me into giving you money, you blew it because I have no clue what your message says.
You joke, but last night on Bad Universe on the Discovery channel, Phil Plait was talking about the Martian meteorite that was found in the Antarctic. They showed an electron microscope scan of a region that looked like a cell undergoing mitosis. If this is really Martian life, it would be older than any life on Earth. In fact, it would be possible that life originated on Mars and seeded Earth. We could all really be Martians! (Yes, all speculative at this point, but fun to think about.)
I think the poster meant to say "bill" instead of fee for. You would be given the option of paying a $75 per year fee as an insurance of sorts. If you didn't pay the fee and had a fire, you would recieve a bill for services rendered for the full amount of fighting the fire. (There would be some kind of form that you could sign at when they arrived.) Considering that the full cost would likely be very high (say, $10,000), people would be more likely to pay the $75/year fee than risk the $10,000+ bill.
Of course, if you refused to pay the annual fee and refused to pay for their services, then the firefighters could stick around to make sure your fire spread past your property.
Emphasis on the "boring" part. Sci-Fi movies have conditioned us to think that space travel would be "start the journey, press the 'hyper-warp-jump' button, watch a light show out the windows for a minute or so and we're there." Instead, unless we discover some radical new way of traveling through space, it'll be "Start the journey, wait anywhere from a thousand to a hundred thousand years and we're* there." (*Where "we're there", really means "our descendents, born aboard the spaceship, are there even though we're long dead.")
And, even if you could make the trip to this planet in a "reasonable" amount of time, by the time you study the planet and return to Earth, the world will have changed dramatically. Even assuming we somehow cut the trip time to 1,000 years each way (and maybe froze you for the trip to keep you from dying en route), you'd return to a world 2,000+ years more advanced than you left. Imagine someone from Ancient Rome suddenly appearing in the present day and trying to get acclimated. The longer the trip, the worse the reintegration into society. Any manned trip would likely be one-way only at which point, we might as well send a robotic probe which won't need to eat, sleep or breathe.
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
1. If it were some kind of e-mail extension, spam would be more of a problem. There are three kinds of Twitter messages. The normal "timeline" messages of people you follow, mentions and direct messages. Spammers can't send you direct messages or appear in your timeline unless you follow them (and spamming you would get you to unfollow them quickly). They can still use mentions, but there's a limit to how many people one mention can include and Twitter has added a "Report a Spammer" tool which takes spammers down rather quickly. E-mail is a lot easier for spammers than Twitter.
2. 140 characters is the limit because (as other's have said) you need to accommodate SMS users (like myself).
And you can read Twitter messages in an RSS feed format. However, my phone (which isn't a smartphone) can't pull down the latest RSS feed updates via SMS and let me update my RSS feed by sending an SMS message. There are different ways of accomplishing the same thing. Twitter is one way of doing it and it is an easy way for many people.
From one of the comments by the ZA forum moderator: "ZoneAlarm Marketing team has turn off this pop-up alert in ZoneAlarm Free firewall."
The Marketing team has turned off the pop-up alert? Why would the marketing team have control of pop-ups appearing on my system? Sorry, ZoneAlarm, but turning off the pop-up isn't going to fix all of this. I now know that having ZA on my system means that some marketing guy somewhere can make messages appear on my system just to sell a few more pieces of software. I'll be uninstalling ZoneAlarm the first chance I get and will install one of your competitors instead.
I have ZoneAlarm installed on my home PCs and, after updating to the latest version, would notice a "Do you want to upgrade to the paid version" dialog box on every boot. I was annoyed, but decided to give ZA the benefit of the doubt since I've used them for years. With this "virus warning" pop-up (intentionally looking like a "you're infected" pop-up), though, they've lost me. As soon as I can, I'm uninstalling ZA and will install Comodo instead. Thanks for the years of great use, ZoneAlarm. It's a shame you ruined it all in a bad attempt to upsell!
- have intelligence - free will - freedom to love - freedom to make decisions
Putting aliens to one side for the moment, as I don't think Lrrr is going to drop in on us tomorrow, I wonder how he feels about some intelligent animals.
Chimps, gorillas and other primates have been shown to fulfill these requirements to varying degrees. Dolphins have also. Would they baptize a dolphin? (How would you do that? Raise it out of water?)
I wondered if anyone ever asked Koko what gorillas think about a creator. Thanks to a Google search, I turned up this exchange:
Leela: "Someone should tell him." Fry: "Tell me what?" Leela: "Nothing!" Zoidberg: "Well, I have a lot of experience telling patients bad news. So let me break it to him gently. Fry! You have no horse! Your horse is gone! You have no horse in your barn! Where it is, I can't say, but in your barn it's not!"
One of the big problems with "The Media" (and benefits to getting your news via Stewart) is that they seem to have a short attention span.
When a politician says one thing and then, a few months later, completely reverses course for no good reason, few news agencies will hold them to their past words. They will just take the new sound bites and play them over and over. Jon Stewart's team will unearth the old sound bites and play them along with the new ones showing the viewer the shift.
It is one thing if new data/evidence/etc leads a politican to reverse course. I respect (and expect) this. All too often, though, it is just poll numbers, a big campaign contribution or an attempt to spin a bad situation that suddenly causes a shift in policies/words.
This could make a long-time dream come true for me. I use one-time use numbers online but in brick-and-morter transactions (like paying at a restaurant), I still have to give my real credit card number. Perhaps these cards could be made to generate a one-time use number. Then, when I'm paying at the grocery store, they get one number while the pizza place gets a second number. I'm sure there would be some security hurdles to clear but it is a promising development.
My question for Conroy concerning the 430 child pornography sites would be this: If you know about 430 child pornography sites, why aren't you pushing to get them shut down and instead are trying to do the equivalent of covering everyone's eyes? Shouldn't you just get those sites shut down?
Yes, I know they may be out of Conroy's reach, but phrasing the question like that makes it seem like Conroy's trying to ignore these sites instead of fixing the problem. Much like he falsely equated opposing the filter to being pro-child porn.
I actually do build my own PCs, but I was just giving the pre-built options since those are the most comparable to digital cameras and other items you might go into a store and buy.
If I want to buy a digital camera, I can get a Canon, Olympus, Fujifilm, Kodak or a dozen other brand names. These various companies are all vying for my digital camera dollar and so will try to give me the best feature-set for my money.
If I want to buy a computer, I could get a Dell, Hewlett-Packard, eMachines, etc. Same rule applies as above.
If I want to get broadband Internet access, I can go with Time Warner Cable or.... or.... Well, Verizon has DSL which they aren't supporting as well anymore. No FIOS in my area. Other than that, nothing. Most areas have two or less providers. With that, companies know that a person shopping for broadband has a 50-50 chance or 100% change of choosing them (with 2 or 1 providers respectfully). This means they have to do pretty much nothing to get your dollars. They can spar gently with the opposing company (if one exists) to get their churned users, but otherwise they have no incentive to give users great speeds at low prices. Now, if there were a dozen broadband companies serving each area, you'd see low prices and better service.
Unfortunately, the anti-vaccination brigade will read:
"The girl was awarded a settlement due to the vaccine aggrevating a previously existing condition which would have caused her to develop autism anyway."
as:
"The girl was awarded a settlement.... vaccine.... caused.... autism...."
Then, they'll move their goal posts from mercury or multiple vaccines at once or toxins or the number of vaccines (or wherever they are now) to "vaccines can trigger undetected conditions which cause autism so until we can detect these undetected conditions, all vaccines should be stopped."
Slashdot Mirror
I'll agree to the basic situation you put forward, but of course the situation is trickier than just two groups on opposite sides. Within each group are a bunch of sub-groups along the spectrum of "let's make peace now" and "we won't stop until they are all dead!" Even if you get most of the groups to agree to a peaceful arrangement, the sub-groups who don't agree can spoil it for everyone by causing trouble, leading to increased tension and eventual breakdown of the peace arrangement. It's very unlikely anytime soon that you will get 100% buy in from all sub-groups within both sides. The best you can hope for is a peace that is strong enough to withstand the inevitable bombardment by the sub-groups who don't join until support for them fades. And, in a region where violence is an everyday fact of life, this is going to be very tough to do.
Was that before or after Moses got the multi-colored coat from his father and was then swallowed by a big fish? What about when Moses chopped down the cherry tree and said "I cannot tell a lie"?
You don't need to start out blowing up trains and taking school children hostage. You could even start out as a superhero. You're taking down criminals to help out the cops and protect the innocent. Then you start seeing that you're busting the same criminals over and over because the justice system isn't working right (from your perspective... maybe the reality is that a vigilante who contaminates evidence with his actions & doesn't stick around to testify leads to charges that don't stick).
So you start justifying taking harsher action against the worse criminals. After all, that guy that opened fire in the Elementary School would have just killed again had you not taken him out, right? You're still protecting the innocent. And this guy waving a gun around during a mugging? He's just a step away from killing someone. Take him out now and you save even more innocents.
Before you know it, you make one little mistake. (Hey, how were you supposed to know the guy running with the purse was trying to *return* it to the little old lady before you zapped him with your heat vision?) Now everyone thinks *you're* the super-villain. They want to lock you up. But you can't help people if you're locked up so you fight the police... for their own good, of course. Why won't they just let you punish those people you find guilty without getting in your way? They must be part of the corrupt system and equally as guilty as those criminals they set free. Better take them down too. Things will be a lot better when you take over the world.....
This doesn't surprise me (and I seem to be in the minority here who actually finds Twitter useful). I wonder how many Slashdot comments get replied to. Think about it. Suppose you have 10 comments to an article and 5 of those get 1 reply each. You now have 15 comments with only 5 being replied to, or 66% being "ignored". Add a few more second level comments, some third level comments, some "moderated to -1" comments, some jokes which elicit a "+5 Funny" but no replies, etc and you could easily have over 70% of Slashdot comments being "ignored" (where ignored is defined as not have any replies).
9 months earlier? The human gestation period is 40 weeks (or 10 months). Granted, babies can be born early, but being born at 36 weeks (i.e. 9 months) is considered pre-term. Of course, your point could still hold true. A baby born in early September was likely conceived around Thanksgiving. A baby born in late September was likely conceived around Christmas. But a baby conceived around New Year's would likely be born in October.
I find it humorous and perhaps a bit ironic that spammers, in an attempt to bypass spam filters, will often render their message completely unreadable. Congratulations! You've beaten my spam filter. However, even if there was a sliver of a chance that you could fool me into giving you money, you blew it because I have no clue what your message says.
You joke, but last night on Bad Universe on the Discovery channel, Phil Plait was talking about the Martian meteorite that was found in the Antarctic. They showed an electron microscope scan of a region that looked like a cell undergoing mitosis. If this is really Martian life, it would be older than any life on Earth. In fact, it would be possible that life originated on Mars and seeded Earth. We could all really be Martians! (Yes, all speculative at this point, but fun to think about.)
Specifically, the Parents Television Council had the louder voice. They're the ones who generate over 90% of the complaints about TV programs.
Have we learned nothing from Chairface Chippendale? The laser would stop partway through and we'll be left with a moon proclaiming "CHA"!
I think the poster meant to say "bill" instead of fee for. You would be given the option of paying a $75 per year fee as an insurance of sorts. If you didn't pay the fee and had a fire, you would recieve a bill for services rendered for the full amount of fighting the fire. (There would be some kind of form that you could sign at when they arrived.) Considering that the full cost would likely be very high (say, $10,000), people would be more likely to pay the $75/year fee than risk the $10,000+ bill.
Of course, if you refused to pay the annual fee and refused to pay for their services, then the firefighters could stick around to make sure your fire spread past your property.
Emphasis on the "boring" part. Sci-Fi movies have conditioned us to think that space travel would be "start the journey, press the 'hyper-warp-jump' button, watch a light show out the windows for a minute or so and we're there." Instead, unless we discover some radical new way of traveling through space, it'll be "Start the journey, wait anywhere from a thousand to a hundred thousand years and we're* there." (*Where "we're there", really means "our descendents, born aboard the spaceship, are there even though we're long dead.")
And, even if you could make the trip to this planet in a "reasonable" amount of time, by the time you study the planet and return to Earth, the world will have changed dramatically. Even assuming we somehow cut the trip time to 1,000 years each way (and maybe froze you for the trip to keep you from dying en route), you'd return to a world 2,000+ years more advanced than you left. Imagine someone from Ancient Rome suddenly appearing in the present day and trying to get acclimated. The longer the trip, the worse the reintegration into society. Any manned trip would likely be one-way only at which point, we might as well send a robotic probe which won't need to eat, sleep or breathe.
From their FAQ ( http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/ ):
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
1. If it were some kind of e-mail extension, spam would be more of a problem. There are three kinds of Twitter messages. The normal "timeline" messages of people you follow, mentions and direct messages. Spammers can't send you direct messages or appear in your timeline unless you follow them (and spamming you would get you to unfollow them quickly). They can still use mentions, but there's a limit to how many people one mention can include and Twitter has added a "Report a Spammer" tool which takes spammers down rather quickly. E-mail is a lot easier for spammers than Twitter.
2. 140 characters is the limit because (as other's have said) you need to accommodate SMS users (like myself).
And you can read Twitter messages in an RSS feed format. However, my phone (which isn't a smartphone) can't pull down the latest RSS feed updates via SMS and let me update my RSS feed by sending an SMS message. There are different ways of accomplishing the same thing. Twitter is one way of doing it and it is an easy way for many people.
From one of the comments by the ZA forum moderator: "ZoneAlarm Marketing team has turn off this pop-up alert in ZoneAlarm Free firewall."
The Marketing team has turned off the pop-up alert? Why would the marketing team have control of pop-ups appearing on my system? Sorry, ZoneAlarm, but turning off the pop-up isn't going to fix all of this. I now know that having ZA on my system means that some marketing guy somewhere can make messages appear on my system just to sell a few more pieces of software. I'll be uninstalling ZoneAlarm the first chance I get and will install one of your competitors instead.
I have ZoneAlarm installed on my home PCs and, after updating to the latest version, would notice a "Do you want to upgrade to the paid version" dialog box on every boot. I was annoyed, but decided to give ZA the benefit of the doubt since I've used them for years. With this "virus warning" pop-up (intentionally looking like a "you're infected" pop-up), though, they've lost me. As soon as I can, I'm uninstalling ZA and will install Comodo instead. Thanks for the years of great use, ZoneAlarm. It's a shame you ruined it all in a bad attempt to upsell!
Easy. If they escaped double-quotes (") to "e; then this wouldn't happen because the code wouldn't be able to escape the href section of the link.
He lists the requirements for having a soul as:
- have intelligence
- free will
- freedom to love
- freedom to make decisions
Putting aliens to one side for the moment, as I don't think Lrrr is going to drop in on us tomorrow, I wonder how he feels about some intelligent animals.
Chimps, gorillas and other primates have been shown to fulfill these requirements to varying degrees. Dolphins have also. Would they baptize a dolphin? (How would you do that? Raise it out of water?)
I wondered if anyone ever asked Koko what gorillas think about a creator. Thanks to a Google search, I turned up this exchange:
Francine Patterson: "Who is God?"
Koko: "Me."
Patterson: "Who created the world?"
Koko: "Another woman."
(Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_12_131/ai_n8569017/?tag=content;col1 )
Somehow, I don't think Koko's religious outlook would gel with the Vatican's. ;-)
Or, to butcher an obligatory Futurama:
Leela: "Someone should tell him."
Fry: "Tell me what?"
Leela: "Nothing!"
Zoidberg: "Well, I have a lot of experience telling patients bad news. So let me break it to him gently. Fry! You have no horse! Your horse is gone! You have no horse in your barn! Where it is, I can't say, but in your barn it's not!"
One of the big problems with "The Media" (and benefits to getting your news via Stewart) is that they seem to have a short attention span.
When a politician says one thing and then, a few months later, completely reverses course for no good reason, few news agencies will hold them to their past words. They will just take the new sound bites and play them over and over. Jon Stewart's team will unearth the old sound bites and play them along with the new ones showing the viewer the shift.
It is one thing if new data/evidence/etc leads a politican to reverse course. I respect (and expect) this. All too often, though, it is just poll numbers, a big campaign contribution or an attempt to spin a bad situation that suddenly causes a shift in policies/words.
This could make a long-time dream come true for me. I use one-time use numbers online but in brick-and-morter transactions (like paying at a restaurant), I still have to give my real credit card number. Perhaps these cards could be made to generate a one-time use number. Then, when I'm paying at the grocery store, they get one number while the pizza place gets a second number. I'm sure there would be some security hurdles to clear but it is a promising development.
My question for Conroy concerning the 430 child pornography sites would be this: If you know about 430 child pornography sites, why aren't you pushing to get them shut down and instead are trying to do the equivalent of covering everyone's eyes? Shouldn't you just get those sites shut down?
Yes, I know they may be out of Conroy's reach, but phrasing the question like that makes it seem like Conroy's trying to ignore these sites instead of fixing the problem. Much like he falsely equated opposing the filter to being pro-child porn.
I actually do build my own PCs, but I was just giving the pre-built options since those are the most comparable to digital cameras and other items you might go into a store and buy.
If I want to buy a digital camera, I can get a Canon, Olympus, Fujifilm, Kodak or a dozen other brand names. These various companies are all vying for my digital camera dollar and so will try to give me the best feature-set for my money.
If I want to buy a computer, I could get a Dell, Hewlett-Packard, eMachines, etc. Same rule applies as above.
If I want to get broadband Internet access, I can go with Time Warner Cable or.... or.... Well, Verizon has DSL which they aren't supporting as well anymore. No FIOS in my area. Other than that, nothing. Most areas have two or less providers. With that, companies know that a person shopping for broadband has a 50-50 chance or 100% change of choosing them (with 2 or 1 providers respectfully). This means they have to do pretty much nothing to get your dollars. They can spar gently with the opposing company (if one exists) to get their churned users, but otherwise they have no incentive to give users great speeds at low prices. Now, if there were a dozen broadband companies serving each area, you'd see low prices and better service.
Unfortunately, the anti-vaccination brigade will read:
"The girl was awarded a settlement due to the vaccine aggrevating a previously existing condition which would have caused her to develop autism anyway."
as:
"The girl was awarded a settlement.... vaccine.... caused.... autism...."
Then, they'll move their goal posts from mercury or multiple vaccines at once or toxins or the number of vaccines (or wherever they are now) to "vaccines can trigger undetected conditions which cause autism so until we can detect these undetected conditions, all vaccines should be stopped."