I've been a programmer since college in the 1980s. I don't use DEC BASIC or Turbo Pascal anymore, but C/C++ is alive and well, and I've picked up Perl and Python along the way. I keep staring at that Java textbook, too.
I got my first genuine Silicon Valley job in 2007; it was quite interesting. (God, I love the Bay area!) My manager and I were the same generation and general level of experience; we had a lot to talk about. All the other programmers were a bunch of kids, frankly. 20-somethings and 30-low-somethings. Good kids, relatively sharp, but I learned that being young and sharp isn't the same as being experienced and still sharp. If you're willing to keep learning new stuff as it comes along, and new techniques, that huge fund of experience with problem solving and bug-hunting gives you a major advantage. Besides, you can tell the new kid from India war stories about working on the engine controllers for the Marine Corp's coolest toy.
(I've also noticed that after you've unsnarled someone else's undocumented, buggy code for the Nth time in 20 years, you develop a strange fondness for well-written documentation, even if you have to write it yourself, and modular, well-structured code, even if you have to re-write it yourself, and coding standards, even if you have to invent them yourself. All that stuff I disdained when my professors back in college demanded it has come back to haunt me; damn, they were right--this stuff is a good idea! On the other hand, there are times when 'goto' is actually useful.)
I personally have little aptitude for management and avoid it like the plague, but that's me. YMMV; just pointing out you can still program well beyond your age. You can, in fact, become the respected senior guru.
Correct. There are more serious things that you don't hear about because they are classified, which creates a problem: because you (the general public) don't hear about them, you don't believe they exist. Unfortunately, these days many people don't trust the government well enough to accept "trust us, we know what we're talking about even if we can't show you the evidence" because of past abuses of the public trust.
So what, hypothetically, do you do know if you're in the government setting policy on this issue? You can't reveal all that's really going on for good security reasons (sure, let's tell the enemy exactly what has been successful against us and what hasn't!), but without evidence, the public thinks you are crying wolf. If you release limited information that isn't a big security compromise just to know about, the public says "Eh, that's not a big deal, you're just trying to get attention!"
How long do you think the people ordering such actions would live? Governments aren't faceless monoliths; they're made of people. People die. Cutting off food, water, santitation, communication and entertainment would turn all the neutral citizens and many of your former supporters into rebels, not to mention cripple the government forces as well. Your scenario is stupid.
Utilities and distribution are local and mostly privatized. Why should they cooperate with a bunch of obvious complete loons in Washington D.C? They're much more likely to pay attention to local authorities, especially if the local authorities are supported by an angry, armed citizenry. Your scenario is not just stupid, it's impossible.
DAOC originally had two modes of travel in the PVE zones: 1) you walk, 2) you buy a horse ticket and ride a pre-mapped horse route (out of the question for level 1 chars with no money). They had one mode of travel in RvR zones: you walk. Speed classes could make the "walk" option go faster.
Currently in DAOC, for PVE zones, you have portal stones that allow you to teleport *back* to your personal house, your guild house, or your current bind point. If you don't have a guild or aren't the character who owns the house on your account, those options aren't available. You have the old horse routes, flight routes, shark routes & boat routes, which are now free so lowbies can use them. You have teleports to "hub" locations for most regions. You have a few extra teleport options that require either (a) going there on foot at least once (Catacombs cities), or (b) grinding faction (the dragon zone village). You have fast personal mounts. Speed classes still make the "walk" and "ride personal mount" options faster.
For RvR zones, you can teleport from the zone entrance keep to keeps solidly controlled by your realm in your own lands (if an enemy realm takes any outposts of a keep, it "breaks" the teleport), or ride fast boats up the rivers and across the oceans to enemy realms on pre-determined routes with known endpoints (i.e., ambush zones. Always jump from a boat before it gets to the drop point if you want to live). You can walk, or ride personal mounts. Speed classes still do their thing. Portal stones do NOT work in RvR zones(no, you can't bug out of a battle by using a portstone). RvR dungeons are even more restrictive: you walk, period.
You can get reasonably close to anywhere fairly quickly by a combination of porting to the nearest portal, riding a rental horse/boat/flying critter/shark, and then running to the start point of your quest/raid/guild hunt on your personal mount (as long as you don't have to fight your way in...). Once you've finished the dungeon/killed the dragon/whatever and are way out in the back end of nowhere, you can use your portal stone to go home without having to fight your way back out again.
I like the mix. It allows me to bypass really boring lowbie country that I've seen every other day for the last 7 years, but still requires you to go slow through the territory you are interested in--or where the inhabitants are interested in you.
I agree with you, but you're insisting on "common sense", from school officials. The same ones that came up with zero-tolerance policies in the first place that lead to ridiculous results like trying to ban the Star of David as a gang symbol. The same ones here that are strip-searching a kid for being accused of possessing Motrin.
Sweet mother of God, I wish prescription ibuprofen had been available when I was in high school! I missed at least one day a month of school due to cramping and pain. (I know, TMI). Point is, there are VERY valid reasons for a teenage girl to have ibuprofen. It's way the hell easier to concentrate on actually learning when you aren't curled up in a corner whimpering from sheer pain!
School policy regarding ibuprofen was stupid, and the strip-search was beyond stupid. Someone should have been busted for sexual harassment of a minor.
Actually, "mid-book blues" are a very common writer's problem. You get past the fun start of setting up the story, and you aren't to the emotional pay-off of the climax, and the middle part starts to look like a slog. It's also when you start to think that your writing sucks, the book sucks, you suck, and why am I doing this anyway?
It's why there are a lot of unfinished novels bit-rotting on hard-drives. Successful writers just push through the slog; there's a point at which it gets better, usually. If it sucks, you go back and clean it up in the edit, but a lot of the stuff that might not be fun to write can't be just skipped. Between the start and the climax, you have little things like character development, plot development, pacing, etc.
Now, one technique for dealing with the slog is to write out the exciting scenes that are nagging you to get to them, so (a) you don't forget them by the time you get to that point in the story, and (b) so you aren't so desperate to get to the "fun" scenes to write that the intervening chapters seem tedious to write. Then, when you get to that point in the story, you realize that the exciting climactic scene no longer fits and you have to re-write it anyway.;-)
LJ was hammered last night; the celebrity gossip community ONTD (Oh No They Didn't) apparently got something like 800 comments in 30 seconds on the Michael Jackson thread, then the LJ servers went down (much to the annoyance of those of us using other communities who could care less about wailing online about Michael). They finally came back up after locking the ONTD community's Jackson discussion.
Okay, so having art, music & culture is a "waste of limited resources"? Sorry, I prefer to be a human being rather than an organic thinking machine. Art & Music & culture in general are part of what makes us human.
Other news that came out yesterday in addition to MJ dropping dead was the discovery that humans were making musical instruments 35,000 years ago. (Not to mention carving pornographic fertility fetishes. Porn: the oldest form of Art). Apparently Ice-Age Cro-Magnon hunters considered making music just as worthy of effort as finding clever new ways of chipping better spearpoints....possibly because music is one of those things that is integral to the human mind, like language. There is a tie between music and mathematics in the human brain, and music is comprehended by and stimulates entirely different sections of the brain than spoken language. It's quite important to human mental development.
Love of music is not a "problem with society". It may be the savior of society.
p.s. IMHO, Michael Jackson's music was eh, okay. His dancing, on the other hand, was utterly awesome.
I think people in Basel, Switzerland are a bit on the jumpy side.
This one happened when I was working in California in Silicon Valley. At 5.6, that got people's notice. I, on the other hand, who was new to California and just knew that California had "lots of earthquakes", didn't realize it was out of the ordinary and actually caused some local excitement until I turned on the news. It was much weaker than the 7.6 that smacked Diego Garcia while I was stationed there in 1983; about the same as the aftershocks we had for months.
Nov 30 17 46 00.6 6.85 S 72.11 E 10 G 6.6 7.6 1.2 402 CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO REGION. Ms 7.7 (BRK).
Mo=1.1*10**20 Nm (GS). Mo=4.1*10**20 Nm (HRV).
Some damage (VI) to buildings and piers on Diego Garcia. About a 1.5 meter rise in wave height in the lagoon
and significant wave damage near the southeastern tip of the island. Forty-centimeter tsunami at Victoria,
Seychelles. Large zone of discolored sea water observed 60 to 70 kilometers north-northwest of Diego Garcia.
That's like saying gangsters can command more guns than any legal response--in a war zone. Against the military.
This is government and national security that's being discussed, in a war situation. I don't think they actually care what the legal options for civilians vs. criminals are. Military law and treaties are what's relevant here.
Is there anything in the Geneva Convention or military law that stops the government from using every possible computer to take down an enemy attacker's infrastructure and attack capability? I don't think so.
You've never worked in retail, have you? Or owned a retail business?
Trust me on this, customers notice when they get poor service, and remember it, sometimes for decades. (e.g., I refused to shop in any K-Mart for 20 years because one K-Mart wouldn't let me pay with a Traveller's Cheque). Poor customer service is not far behind general mismanagement as a top cause of small business failures.
Most businesses that actually stay in business are aware that the real money is in repeat customers. You don't have repeat customers if you piss them off the first time. Ever store I worked at, the management made serious efforts to mollify unhappy customers and make them happy--for one thing, people remember positively that the customer service or the manager took their complaint seriously and did his or her best to fix the problem. (That's why blowing off or covering up problems is much worse than admitting it and fixing it, btw.) Customers who feel that if there is a problem, it will be addressed promptly are more comfortable about spending money at your business repeatedly.
On the other hand, if you are a dick who is just trying to get freebies with spurious complaints, experienced managers pick up on that pretty quick, and really don't want your business. (Yes, there are people who will do that. There are people who will do refund scams, too. There are people who will throw temper tantrums in the cash register line because the large "$XX AFTER rebate" price signs clearly mean "I pay that price at the cash register, you're ringing it up wrong!")
Where are you getting your historical and religious info, Chick Tracts?
You seem to be confusing the words "massacre" and "conquest". Mohammed's Arabs conquered their neighbors and converted them to Islam; they didn't exterminate them. Arabs have been raiding their neighbors since the dawn of history, and moving in and taking over when their civilized neighbors were weak--study the history of ancient Iraq/Mesopotamia some time. They tended to get assimilated by the vastly larger civilized populations they ruled, not massacred.
The Mongols and the Turks coming off the steppes were the ones that exterminated whole populations, and that was centuries after the original Arab conquest. The steppe nomads weren't having any of that assimilation stuff, so they wiped out everyone who wasn't an ignorant peasant. The Ottoman conquest of the Middle East set civilization in Mesopotamia back by centuries; it still hasn't recovered.
By the way, most places the moslems are natives; they converted to Islam via conquest or trade. Persians are not Arabs, and calling them Arabs is a good way to insult them.
I remember being a 17-year-old (many decades ago) with a class tour group in London, England. I managed to get away from the tour group during our unsupervised shopping day and rode the Underground in circles all over London, toured the British Museum and the British Museum of Natural History, found a nice little cafe with really great beef-stew called "Oodles" up around Oxford St. somewhere...
Totally freaked my parents out when they heard I'd done that.
The reason is that before long, the world's nuclear reactors (especially the older designs) would start running out of coolant and going Chernoble themselves.
Um, no. Nuclear reactors Do Not Work That Way. If it loses external power, the damper rods will trip and shut it down. The turbines for generating power from the reactor's heat have lots of moving parts and will die from lack of maintenance long before the coolant leaks away. Also, since in water-cooled reactors, the water is the moderator as well, the reactor will slowly fizzle if the water goes away--assuming the fail-safes haven't already dropped the damper rods because of overheating. It takes slow neutrons to induce fission.
Chernoble didn't happen by random accident--it was a deliberate "slam the throttle to the firewall" stress test with ALL THE SAFETY INTERLOCKS DISENGAGED. They found out the hard way why you have safety interlocks; Chernoble was one of the most extreme episodes of collective stupidity in the history of power generation, ever. There was a National Geographic article many years ago that explained it in excrutiating detail.
It's what they should have done, but ole C. Ray didn't have the balls to say "these areas are untenable in the long run, we're not restoring city services here, just bulldoze it", and people have come back and rebuilt those homes scattershot.
2/3 of New Orleans East may be pure rotting blight, but the other 1/3 spent sweat and money rebuilding. It's too late to just bulldoze them, because New Orleans is too damn broke thanks to our upstanding government officials to buy them out with any kind of fair compensation.
Guh! I remember that. I went through quite a few tire patches--there were always nails and bolts on the road. Plus there were the times I had to active dodge debris falling off of trucks. Nothing like someone's furniture sitting in the middle of a busy interstate to make sure you are PAYING ATTENTION THERE! Or an overloaded pickup shedding part of its load of lumber not 20 feet ahead of you.
There were days post-Katrina that driving around N'Awlins was like being in some surreal driving game.
Dude, you are giving run-of-the-mill politicians WAY too much credit for Machiavellian intelligence.
Politicians are not 99th-percentile geniuses, as a rule. They are average, with some skills at getting elected and not getting caught badly enough to get kicked out of office. A lot of them are downright stupid; just listen to them in a nominally closed meeting sometime (i.e., when they are working with each other, like a city council meeting, and not mouthing sound-bites for the camera).
Greed and stupidity account for far more observed behavior than malice and genius.
Let me get this straight: if I *know* someone is lying and/or defrauding me, I should accomodate the liar?
Could you elaborate on that? I'm having trouble making sense out of your argument.
Also, when did you look at the terms & conditions of my hypothetical ISP contract to know just what I bought? My hypothetical example specified following the terms & conditions of an agreed-to contract. How is this unethical?
Your analogy is silly. A better analogy is the U.S. Tax Code, which says I can get tax credits if I meet certain conditions. If I meet those conditions, and apply the tax credits to my tax return, should you complain that I'm "avoiding paying my fair share" and doing something immoral/unethical/fattening?
Newsflash: society has always had ways of punishing people who publically behave in ways very strongly disapproved of by the norm. This is not new. What is new is having millions of people able to shine a light on your public behavior.
Newsflash #2: China has always been a society that keeps itself in line through social pressure. This is just the extension to the internet of what once was the function of the local village--point out those behaving badly and shame or ostracize them into regretting it.
Remember: The Internet is a venue where you can make an ass of yourself in front of hundreds of millions of people. If you don't want to be publically held up as an ass, don't post videos of yourself being one on YouTube.
I'm paying for the bandwidth, therefore it is ethical for me to use it. Now if I were to go to the neighborhood cable patch box and re-arrange a few jumpers so I get *more* bandwidth than I'm subscribed for, that would be unethical. If I were to deliberately spam my neighbor's router with tailored packets so that it fell off the Internet, that would also be unethical.
Using a communications service that I have contracted to buy at specific rates and terms is ethical for me. It may not have been ethical for the communications seller to oversell it, but that is on his head, not mine. If he does not deliver what he has agreed to in exchange for my payment (i.e., punitive rates and disconnnections for using the service according to the original contract), he would also be unethical in that case.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a programmer since college in the 1980s. I don't use DEC BASIC or Turbo Pascal anymore, but C/C++ is alive and well, and I've picked up Perl and Python along the way. I keep staring at that Java textbook, too.
I got my first genuine Silicon Valley job in 2007; it was quite interesting. (God, I love the Bay area!) My manager and I were the same generation and general level of experience; we had a lot to talk about. All the other programmers were a bunch of kids, frankly. 20-somethings and 30-low-somethings. Good kids, relatively sharp, but I learned that being young and sharp isn't the same as being experienced and still sharp. If you're willing to keep learning new stuff as it comes along, and new techniques, that huge fund of experience with problem solving and bug-hunting gives you a major advantage. Besides, you can tell the new kid from India war stories about working on the engine controllers for the Marine Corp's coolest toy.
(I've also noticed that after you've unsnarled someone else's undocumented, buggy code for the Nth time in 20 years, you develop a strange fondness for well-written documentation, even if you have to write it yourself, and modular, well-structured code, even if you have to re-write it yourself, and coding standards, even if you have to invent them yourself. All that stuff I disdained when my professors back in college demanded it has come back to haunt me; damn, they were right--this stuff is a good idea! On the other hand, there are times when 'goto' is actually useful.)
I personally have little aptitude for management and avoid it like the plague, but that's me. YMMV; just pointing out you can still program well beyond your age. You can, in fact, become the respected senior guru.
Correct. There are more serious things that you don't hear about because they are classified, which creates a problem: because you (the general public) don't hear about them, you don't believe they exist. Unfortunately, these days many people don't trust the government well enough to accept "trust us, we know what we're talking about even if we can't show you the evidence" because of past abuses of the public trust.
So what, hypothetically, do you do know if you're in the government setting policy on this issue? You can't reveal all that's really going on for good security reasons (sure, let's tell the enemy exactly what has been successful against us and what hasn't!), but without evidence, the public thinks you are crying wolf. If you release limited information that isn't a big security compromise just to know about, the public says "Eh, that's not a big deal, you're just trying to get attention!"
What do you do?
Not to mention Jewish partisans
How long do you think the people ordering such actions would live? Governments aren't faceless monoliths; they're made of people. People die. Cutting off food, water, santitation, communication and entertainment would turn all the neutral citizens and many of your former supporters into rebels, not to mention cripple the government forces as well. Your scenario is stupid.
Utilities and distribution are local and mostly privatized. Why should they cooperate with a bunch of obvious complete loons in Washington D.C? They're much more likely to pay attention to local authorities, especially if the local authorities are supported by an angry, armed citizenry. Your scenario is not just stupid, it's impossible.
DAOC originally had two modes of travel in the PVE zones: 1) you walk, 2) you buy a horse ticket and ride a pre-mapped horse route (out of the question for level 1 chars with no money). They had one mode of travel in RvR zones: you walk. Speed classes could make the "walk" option go faster.
Currently in DAOC, for PVE zones, you have portal stones that allow you to teleport *back* to your personal house, your guild house, or your current bind point. If you don't have a guild or aren't the character who owns the house on your account, those options aren't available. You have the old horse routes, flight routes, shark routes & boat routes, which are now free so lowbies can use them. You have teleports to "hub" locations for most regions. You have a few extra teleport options that require either (a) going there on foot at least once (Catacombs cities), or (b) grinding faction (the dragon zone village). You have fast personal mounts. Speed classes still make the "walk" and "ride personal mount" options faster.
For RvR zones, you can teleport from the zone entrance keep to keeps solidly controlled by your realm in your own lands (if an enemy realm takes any outposts of a keep, it "breaks" the teleport), or ride fast boats up the rivers and across the oceans to enemy realms on pre-determined routes with known endpoints (i.e., ambush zones. Always jump from a boat before it gets to the drop point if you want to live). You can walk, or ride personal mounts. Speed classes still do their thing. Portal stones do NOT work in RvR zones(no, you can't bug out of a battle by using a portstone). RvR dungeons are even more restrictive: you walk, period.
You can get reasonably close to anywhere fairly quickly by a combination of porting to the nearest portal, riding a rental horse/boat/flying critter/shark, and then running to the start point of your quest/raid/guild hunt on your personal mount (as long as you don't have to fight your way in...). Once you've finished the dungeon/killed the dragon/whatever and are way out in the back end of nowhere, you can use your portal stone to go home without having to fight your way back out again.
I like the mix. It allows me to bypass really boring lowbie country that I've seen every other day for the last 7 years, but still requires you to go slow through the territory you are interested in--or where the inhabitants are interested in you.
Does the date September 11, 2001 ring a bell?
Slashdot was the ONLY internet news site that managed to stay up that day. And calling Slashdot a "news site" is reaching, but that day, it was.
I agree with you, but you're insisting on "common sense", from school officials. The same ones that came up with zero-tolerance policies in the first place that lead to ridiculous results like trying to ban the Star of David as a gang symbol. The same ones here that are strip-searching a kid for being accused of possessing Motrin.
Sweet mother of God, I wish prescription ibuprofen had been available when I was in high school! I missed at least one day a month of school due to cramping and pain. (I know, TMI). Point is, there are VERY valid reasons for a teenage girl to have ibuprofen. It's way the hell easier to concentrate on actually learning when you aren't curled up in a corner whimpering from sheer pain!
School policy regarding ibuprofen was stupid, and the strip-search was beyond stupid. Someone should have been busted for sexual harassment of a minor.
Actually, "mid-book blues" are a very common writer's problem. You get past the fun start of setting up the story, and you aren't to the emotional pay-off of the climax, and the middle part starts to look like a slog. It's also when you start to think that your writing sucks, the book sucks, you suck, and why am I doing this anyway?
It's why there are a lot of unfinished novels bit-rotting on hard-drives. Successful writers just push through the slog; there's a point at which it gets better, usually. If it sucks, you go back and clean it up in the edit, but a lot of the stuff that might not be fun to write can't be just skipped. Between the start and the climax, you have little things like character development, plot development, pacing, etc.
Now, one technique for dealing with the slog is to write out the exciting scenes that are nagging you to get to them, so (a) you don't forget them by the time you get to that point in the story, and (b) so you aren't so desperate to get to the "fun" scenes to write that the intervening chapters seem tedious to write. Then, when you get to that point in the story, you realize that the exciting climactic scene no longer fits and you have to re-write it anyway. ;-)
LJ was hammered last night; the celebrity gossip community ONTD (Oh No They Didn't) apparently got something like 800 comments in 30 seconds on the Michael Jackson thread, then the LJ servers went down (much to the annoyance of those of us using other communities who could care less about wailing online about Michael). They finally came back up after locking the ONTD community's Jackson discussion.
Okay, so having art, music & culture is a "waste of limited resources"? Sorry, I prefer to be a human being rather than an organic thinking machine. Art & Music & culture in general are part of what makes us human.
Other news that came out yesterday in addition to MJ dropping dead was the discovery that humans were making musical instruments 35,000 years ago. (Not to mention carving pornographic fertility fetishes. Porn: the oldest form of Art). Apparently Ice-Age Cro-Magnon hunters considered making music just as worthy of effort as finding clever new ways of chipping better spearpoints. ...possibly because music is one of those things that is integral to the human mind, like language. There is a tie between music and mathematics in the human brain, and music is comprehended by and stimulates entirely different sections of the brain than spoken language. It's quite important to human mental development.
Love of music is not a "problem with society". It may be the savior of society.
p.s. IMHO, Michael Jackson's music was eh, okay. His dancing, on the other hand, was utterly awesome.
Like another poster said, in California, a 3.4 is boring. Barely noticed the several thousand times a year one happens.
To put it in perspective, here's a list of Magnitude 3.0 or higher earthquakes in the US in the last 7 days.
Here's a week of California quakes.
I think people in Basel, Switzerland are a bit on the jumpy side.
This one happened when I was working in California in Silicon Valley. At 5.6, that got people's notice. I, on the other hand, who was new to California and just knew that California had "lots of earthquakes", didn't realize it was out of the ordinary and actually caused some local excitement until I turned on the news. It was much weaker than the 7.6 that smacked Diego Garcia while I was stationed there in 1983; about the same as the aftershocks we had for months.
It's a matter of what you are used to.
*laughs*
That's like saying gangsters can command more guns than any legal response--in a war zone. Against the military.
This is government and national security that's being discussed, in a war situation. I don't think they actually care what the legal options for civilians vs. criminals are. Military law and treaties are what's relevant here.
Is there anything in the Geneva Convention or military law that stops the government from using every possible computer to take down an enemy attacker's infrastructure and attack capability? I don't think so.
You've never worked in retail, have you? Or owned a retail business?
Trust me on this, customers notice when they get poor service, and remember it, sometimes for decades. (e.g., I refused to shop in any K-Mart for 20 years because one K-Mart wouldn't let me pay with a Traveller's Cheque). Poor customer service is not far behind general mismanagement as a top cause of small business failures.
Most businesses that actually stay in business are aware that the real money is in repeat customers. You don't have repeat customers if you piss them off the first time. Ever store I worked at, the management made serious efforts to mollify unhappy customers and make them happy--for one thing, people remember positively that the customer service or the manager took their complaint seriously and did his or her best to fix the problem. (That's why blowing off or covering up problems is much worse than admitting it and fixing it, btw.) Customers who feel that if there is a problem, it will be addressed promptly are more comfortable about spending money at your business repeatedly.
On the other hand, if you are a dick who is just trying to get freebies with spurious complaints, experienced managers pick up on that pretty quick, and really don't want your business. (Yes, there are people who will do that. There are people who will do refund scams, too. There are people who will throw temper tantrums in the cash register line because the large "$XX AFTER rebate" price signs clearly mean "I pay that price at the cash register, you're ringing it up wrong!")
Where are you getting your historical and religious info, Chick Tracts?
You seem to be confusing the words "massacre" and "conquest". Mohammed's Arabs conquered their neighbors and converted them to Islam; they didn't exterminate them. Arabs have been raiding their neighbors since the dawn of history, and moving in and taking over when their civilized neighbors were weak--study the history of ancient Iraq/Mesopotamia some time. They tended to get assimilated by the vastly larger civilized populations they ruled, not massacred.
The Mongols and the Turks coming off the steppes were the ones that exterminated whole populations, and that was centuries after the original Arab conquest. The steppe nomads weren't having any of that assimilation stuff, so they wiped out everyone who wasn't an ignorant peasant. The Ottoman conquest of the Middle East set civilization in Mesopotamia back by centuries; it still hasn't recovered.
By the way, most places the moslems are natives; they converted to Islam via conquest or trade. Persians are not Arabs, and calling them Arabs is a good way to insult them.
I remember being a 17-year-old (many decades ago) with a class tour group in London, England. I managed to get away from the tour group during our unsupervised shopping day and rode the Underground in circles all over London, toured the British Museum and the British Museum of Natural History, found a nice little cafe with really great beef-stew called "Oodles" up around Oxford St. somewhere...
Totally freaked my parents out when they heard I'd done that.
The reason is that before long, the world's nuclear reactors (especially the older designs) would start running out of coolant and going Chernoble themselves.
Um, no. Nuclear reactors Do Not Work That Way. If it loses external power, the damper rods will trip and shut it down. The turbines for generating power from the reactor's heat have lots of moving parts and will die from lack of maintenance long before the coolant leaks away. Also, since in water-cooled reactors, the water is the moderator as well, the reactor will slowly fizzle if the water goes away--assuming the fail-safes haven't already dropped the damper rods because of overheating. It takes slow neutrons to induce fission.
Chernoble didn't happen by random accident--it was a deliberate "slam the throttle to the firewall" stress test with ALL THE SAFETY INTERLOCKS DISENGAGED. They found out the hard way why you have safety interlocks; Chernoble was one of the most extreme episodes of collective stupidity in the history of power generation, ever. There was a National Geographic article many years ago that explained it in excrutiating detail.
It's what they should have done, but ole C. Ray didn't have the balls to say "these areas are untenable in the long run, we're not restoring city services here, just bulldoze it", and people have come back and rebuilt those homes scattershot.
2/3 of New Orleans East may be pure rotting blight, but the other 1/3 spent sweat and money rebuilding. It's too late to just bulldoze them, because New Orleans is too damn broke thanks to our upstanding government officials to buy them out with any kind of fair compensation.
Okaay...
Nice Soapbox you're standing on there.
Do you have any actual comments on TFA?
Guh! I remember that. I went through quite a few tire patches--there were always nails and bolts on the road. Plus there were the times I had to active dodge debris falling off of trucks. Nothing like someone's furniture sitting in the middle of a busy interstate to make sure you are PAYING ATTENTION THERE! Or an overloaded pickup shedding part of its load of lumber not 20 feet ahead of you.
There were days post-Katrina that driving around N'Awlins was like being in some surreal driving game.
No. Revolution and change start in the heart and mind. Without that, there will be no physical revolution.
And Europeans keep suggesting that U.S. laws are so backward because so-called "hate speech" is legally protected here....
Dude, you are giving run-of-the-mill politicians WAY too much credit for Machiavellian intelligence.
Politicians are not 99th-percentile geniuses, as a rule. They are average, with some skills at getting elected and not getting caught badly enough to get kicked out of office. A lot of them are downright stupid; just listen to them in a nominally closed meeting sometime (i.e., when they are working with each other, like a city council meeting, and not mouthing sound-bites for the camera).
Greed and stupidity account for far more observed behavior than malice and genius.
Let me get this straight: if I *know* someone is lying and/or defrauding me, I should accomodate the liar?
Could you elaborate on that? I'm having trouble making sense out of your argument.
Also, when did you look at the terms & conditions of my hypothetical ISP contract to know just what I bought? My hypothetical example specified following the terms & conditions of an agreed-to contract. How is this unethical?
Your analogy is silly. A better analogy is the U.S. Tax Code, which says I can get tax credits if I meet certain conditions. If I meet those conditions, and apply the tax credits to my tax return, should you complain that I'm "avoiding paying my fair share" and doing something immoral/unethical/fattening?
Newsflash: society has always had ways of punishing people who publically behave in ways very strongly disapproved of by the norm. This is not new. What is new is having millions of people able to shine a light on your public behavior.
Newsflash #2: China has always been a society that keeps itself in line through social pressure. This is just the extension to the internet of what once was the function of the local village--point out those behaving badly and shame or ostracize them into regretting it.
Remember: The Internet is a venue where you can make an ass of yourself in front of hundreds of millions of people. If you don't want to be publically held up as an ass, don't post videos of yourself being one on YouTube.
I'm paying for the bandwidth, therefore it is ethical for me to use it. Now if I were to go to the neighborhood cable patch box and re-arrange a few jumpers so I get *more* bandwidth than I'm subscribed for, that would be unethical. If I were to deliberately spam my neighbor's router with tailored packets so that it fell off the Internet, that would also be unethical.
Using a communications service that I have contracted to buy at specific rates and terms is ethical for me. It may not have been ethical for the communications seller to oversell it, but that is on his head, not mine. If he does not deliver what he has agreed to in exchange for my payment (i.e., punitive rates and disconnnections for using the service according to the original contract), he would also be unethical in that case.