ahem, as an atheist, i take issue with your implication.
1. the golden rule is intrinsically human. It's sprung up time and again, regardless of religious influence. It springs from our empathy i imagine. 2. if god can be the source of morality, why can't we collectively as a species be the source of morality too? it's in our genes, our history. as people have argued, we know at least that morality is a human collaboration if nothing else; just see how much it's changed over our history. human rights and the rights of kings, slavery, minority rights, gender equality etc. etc. and if you're going to argue that we were always wrong, we're only getting to the truth of an unknowable ideal... how is that practically different than making it up as we go along in the first place. Also which morality are you talking about? yours or islams? or buddhists? with its confucian inflection?
i think it boils down to; you do your thing, i'll do mine, and if you mess with his thing, i think i've got an obligation to help stop you, just to keep an ordered and civil society.
why is it right? because we've all agreed it is. and it probably wasn't 100 years ago.
3. that's a personal question, i think israel should get enough territory that it feels safe, and it should silence the expansionists within its population, and the west bank should be annexed by jordan. gaza can go back to Egypt. israel should probably get on top of its endemic racism toward its arab citizens... but that might take a while after everybody stops shooting and stabbing each other. 4. i'm not touching this one:).
i'm made so that i cannot believe.:) occasionally it would be nice though.
quick googling, a nail weighs about 1 g. a full stick of dynamite is 190 grams. lets say you take 1/6 a stick of dynamite, and wrap 20 nails around it, you'd get something around 50 grams.
that's assuming you can't chop anything off that drone to lighten it.
taking a look at that thing, most of the casing appears to be superfluous, and those landing struts too.
you've got something like 4 3-4 inch landing struts made of plastic, which isn't probably that much lighter than water densitywise. i'd say they're something like 5-6 grams each, right there you've got another 20 grams to play around with.
the casing probably adds another 5-10 grams.
now you've got a quarter stick of dynamite and 20 nails.
the point being, yes a big firecracker, but a big firecracker can permanently disfigure someone, i wouldn't want to be in the vicinity of a weaponized toy.
also, that's assuming they don't have someone with the knowhow to... overclock?... that thing.
it's sometimes not about what they are, but about what they could be. could you swap out the battery? could you i don't know, chop off any extraneous bits.
can it carry 50 grams of TNT? 50 g was the fill capacity of a ww2 era handgrenade... and TNT is what they use in their qassam rockets.
how hard would it be to chop these for parts and make a "frankendrone?"
at the very least, these things could be a source of electronics. how hard would it be to repurpose their radio receiver/wireless receiver into a component in an IED?
inspiration strikes hard and fast when you have the hankering to gank some mooks.
baseball record is about 136 meters. the ball left his hand going 120mph, he had a running start.
for comparison, in 2008 the average pitch speed on a fastball was 91mph in the major leagues. now apparently there are people breaking 100 consistently.... but yes, i don't think throwing anything 100 meters... is going to be more accurate or reliable than droning it there.
that's what you get for trying to talk about the intrinsic value of a highly subjective medium. can you dance to american pie? does it matter if you can't? is complexity the key? then nothing really holds a candle to classical music.
the problem with being elitist in that fashion is that there's always going to be a litmus test you yourself fail.
fuck swift and gaga, gimme some good old tatum any day:).
... like via any objective measure the answer is probably, moreso than whoever you listen to.
More confirmed sales than springsteen. there are't that many artists bigger than kanye. unless you're listening to ms swift, rihana or mariah, contemporary-wise they're not bigger than kanye.
yeah, it's a scary world we live in. and yes, that's also one of my concerns. Long after you're dust, the stupid shit you say and do will persist.
I find myself despairing that we'll ever figure out the boundary between my rights and my neighbor's. If i say something racially insensitive and he reacts, where exactly does his rights of response end and mine of a private citizen begin. can he organize his friends to boycott my store? yes. can he organize the town? yes. If he's persuasive enough, can he organize an entire nation to ostracize a single individual? yes, should this be legal? i don't know. Each person is exercising his right of association. Can he bribe everyone to not associate with me if he has enough money? enough influence?
donald sterling and brendan eich, i keep coming back to them again and again when considering this issue. One man loses half a billion dollars ostensibly because of an illegal recording. each and every person was exercising his constitutionally gauranteed rights. The other man loses his job because of a political contribution. again, everyone protesting was perfectly legal in doing so... I don't know how to feel. It feels like persecution.
same with the privacy rights in europe. the right to be forgotten, i am similarly torn between two positions there.
it's just one of those gray areas that someone eminently more qualified than me, and paid to think about it, will figure out.
how legal is it to organize a campaign to get someone fired? how legal is it to target a single individual from a donation roll. how legal, how legal, how legal.
doesn't speak to ethical at all, or societally beneficial, but i'm sure those will factor in too.
and remember, the same laws must hold for your enemies as well as your friends.
as hitchens said, 'it's always worth examining first principles' confronting incorrect assumptions and arguments leads people to a better understanding of their own stances and closely held beliefs.
I believe that's part of the strength of diversity. The truth will out, and will be stronger for having been tested.
we cede any expectation of control in a public spaces. Enforcing a safe space in a space you have no legal right to exclude people from is the very definition of entitlement. You don't own the park, we all do, the people you're trying to exclude included. your rights do not preempt theirs.
i'm more troubled that they don't know how fundamentally un-american a speech-ban would actually be.
There is speech, there's response, and there's prior-restraint. As a society it feels like we're moving toward a place where people are going to censor themselves for fear of overwhelmingly vitriolic harassment from the left.
you say something wrong, you slip up once in a public way, or slip up in a way that someone with a grudge can make public. and looks like you're going to have to move, and change jobs, and go into exile for half a decade
... just a question, you know... out of curiosity... are you saying self-driving cars are going to be so convenient? or are you suggesting no normal drivers left because we all get skynetted?
a month or two will seriously fuck up your aim and your timing, and that combined with other players improving quickly can be pretty thumping. I think two months off from one of my old favorites, and it took me a couple weeks to almost get back to where i was.
you're talking about half-life two, so i'm assuming you've got something like 1000 hours into it at least. you're still playing it, so i'm going to assume you play it at a decently high level. When you play at a certain level, it's more about the ingrained shit. Keeping your reactions tight and on point means more than it did at 100 hours. Everybody know the maps, everbody knows the jumps, landing rockets ain't a thang at that level... we're talking about air rockets and twitch rail-shots now baby. and taking a couple months off, rewiring your fingers for an RPG... that's going to fuck your twitching.
... because drones are like... an innovative concept that only america could have thought up.
and our current crop of enemies haven't been trying to escalate at every turn with all their might.
some things are inevitable, and someone has to be first.
also, i don't think we'll see drones from the current crop of people who hate america.
why build a military grade drone? it would be cheaper to just put a moron in a plane... don't even need to teach them how to land. why build a robot? people are easier to camouflage... might be cheaper to produce too.
a billion followers of islam even if a vanishingly small percentage are batshit crazy, are more than i'm comfortable with... especially when batshit crazy is in power every so often.
hamas, the muslim brotherhood, and iran spring to mind. it's difficult to play chicken with someone that thinks that both people losing is a win.
... you're not being paranoid if everyone really is out to get you.
if anybody is perfectly justified at jumping at shadows, i'd say it's the jews.
they've been holocausted once, repelled 2-3 unprovoked acts of aggression by EVERYONE within the first 30 years of founding a nation... and probably have a pretty healthy and pretty warranted genetic fear of religious persecution due to something like a couple millenia of jew-baiting.
i'm not. ads are a pain, and clicking through is auto-reflex now... but in the same measure, who's going to generate revenue for the companies behind these websites? say we reach the state you're looking for, everybody has blocked 100 percent of ads, or a large percentage. who's going to pay to put an ad on a site that nobody sees? how do you propose reddit generate revenue? all those aggregator sites?
do we go to a subscriber model? that's even more of a pain in the ass. we've already heard the death knell of traditional journalism, if the NYT can no longer generate revenue even in an online model... how exactly is journalism supposed to cope? do we rely on bloggers for our information? is there passion enough to compensate for someone else's profession? if they do it full-time, how do they support themselves without ad revenue?
in effect, we are exchanging our attention for content we want, would it be better to exchange actual money for it?
Slashdot Mirror
ahem, as an atheist, i take issue with your implication.
1. the golden rule is intrinsically human. It's sprung up time and again, regardless of religious influence. It springs from our empathy i imagine.
2. if god can be the source of morality, why can't we collectively as a species be the source of morality too? it's in our genes, our history. as people have argued, we know at least that morality is a human collaboration if nothing else; just see how much it's changed over our history. human rights and the rights of kings, slavery, minority rights, gender equality etc. etc. and if you're going to argue that we were always wrong, we're only getting to the truth of an unknowable ideal... how is that practically different than making it up as we go along in the first place. Also which morality are you talking about? yours or islams? or buddhists? with its confucian inflection?
i think it boils down to; you do your thing, i'll do mine, and if you mess with his thing, i think i've got an obligation to help stop you, just to keep an ordered and civil society.
why is it right? because we've all agreed it is. and it probably wasn't 100 years ago.
3. that's a personal question, i think israel should get enough territory that it feels safe, and it should silence the expansionists within its population, and the west bank should be annexed by jordan. gaza can go back to Egypt. israel should probably get on top of its endemic racism toward its arab citizens... but that might take a while after everybody stops shooting and stabbing each other. :).
4. i'm not touching this one
i'm made so that i cannot believe. :) occasionally it would be nice though.
that's exactly what i think of when i think of tnt.
you got me, super innocuous.
quick googling, a nail weighs about 1 g. a full stick of dynamite is 190 grams. lets say you take 1/6 a stick of dynamite, and wrap 20 nails around it, you'd get something around 50 grams.
that's assuming you can't chop anything off that drone to lighten it.
taking a look at that thing, most of the casing appears to be superfluous, and those landing struts too.
you've got something like 4 3-4 inch landing struts made of plastic, which isn't probably that much lighter than water densitywise. i'd say they're something like 5-6 grams each, right there you've got another 20 grams to play around with.
the casing probably adds another 5-10 grams.
now you've got a quarter stick of dynamite and 20 nails.
the point being, yes a big firecracker, but a big firecracker can permanently disfigure someone, i wouldn't want to be in the vicinity of a weaponized toy.
also, that's assuming they don't have someone with the knowhow to ... overclock?... that thing.
it's sometimes not about what they are, but about what they could be. could you swap out the battery? could you i don't know, chop off any extraneous bits.
can it carry 50 grams of TNT? 50 g was the fill capacity of a ww2 era handgrenade... and TNT is what they use in their qassam rockets.
how hard would it be to chop these for parts and make a "frankendrone?"
at the very least, these things could be a source of electronics. how hard would it be to repurpose their radio receiver/wireless receiver into a component in an IED?
inspiration strikes hard and fast when you have the hankering to gank some mooks.
baseball record is about 136 meters. the ball left his hand going 120mph, he had a running start.
for comparison, in 2008 the average pitch speed on a fastball was 91mph in the major leagues. now apparently there are people breaking 100 consistently. ... but yes, i don't think throwing anything 100 meters... is going to be more accurate or reliable than droning it there.
well you know, they can lift at least 50 g
which just so happens to be about the fill capacity of one of them old WW2 hand grenades, the MK 2
with TNT, which coincidentally is exactly what they fill those qassam rockets with that hamas fires into israel.
but you know, no biggie, they'd almost certainly be targeting civilians.
disposable* :) kanye has more sales than gaga.
that's what you get for trying to talk about the intrinsic value of a highly subjective medium. can you dance to american pie? does it matter if you can't? is complexity the key? then nothing really holds a candle to classical music.
the problem with being elitist in that fashion is that there's always going to be a litmus test you yourself fail.
fuck swift and gaga, gimme some good old tatum any day :).
but not really. too complex for my ear.
... like via any objective measure the answer is probably, moreso than whoever you listen to.
More confirmed sales than springsteen. there are't that many artists bigger than kanye.
unless you're listening to ms swift, rihana or mariah, contemporary-wise they're not bigger than kanye.
surprisingly he beats out gaga.
yeah, it's a scary world we live in. and yes, that's also one of my concerns. Long after you're dust, the stupid shit you say and do will persist.
I find myself despairing that we'll ever figure out the boundary between my rights and my neighbor's. If i say something racially insensitive and he reacts, where exactly does his rights of response end and mine of a private citizen begin. can he organize his friends to boycott my store? yes. can he organize the town? yes. If he's persuasive enough, can he organize an entire nation to ostracize a single individual? yes, should this be legal? i don't know. Each person is exercising his right of association. Can he bribe everyone to not associate with me if he has enough money? enough influence?
donald sterling and brendan eich, i keep coming back to them again and again when considering this issue. One man loses half a billion dollars ostensibly because of an illegal recording. each and every person was exercising his constitutionally gauranteed rights. The other man loses his job because of a political contribution. again, everyone protesting was perfectly legal in doing so... I don't know how to feel. It feels like persecution.
same with the privacy rights in europe. the right to be forgotten, i am similarly torn between two positions there.
it's just one of those gray areas that someone eminently more qualified than me, and paid to think about it, will figure out.
how legal is it to organize a campaign to get someone fired? how legal is it to target a single individual from a donation roll. how legal, how legal, how legal.
doesn't speak to ethical at all, or societally beneficial, but i'm sure those will factor in too.
and remember, the same laws must hold for your enemies as well as your friends.
... what just happened to the english language there i think triggered me.
triggered means i want to rage-fuck it now right? if it doesn't i don't understand why people are triggering people all the time.
as hitchens said, 'it's always worth examining first principles' confronting incorrect assumptions and arguments leads people to a better understanding of their own stances and closely held beliefs.
I believe that's part of the strength of diversity. The truth will out, and will be stronger for having been tested.
we cede any expectation of control in a public spaces. Enforcing a safe space in a space you have no legal right to exclude people from is the very definition of entitlement. You don't own the park, we all do, the people you're trying to exclude included. your rights do not preempt theirs.
i'm more troubled that they don't know how fundamentally un-american a speech-ban would actually be.
There is speech, there's response, and there's prior-restraint. As a society it feels like we're moving toward a place where people are going to censor themselves for fear of overwhelmingly vitriolic harassment from the left.
you say something wrong, you slip up once in a public way, or slip up in a way that someone with a grudge can make public. and looks like you're going to have to move, and change jobs, and go into exile for half a decade
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02...
bleh, where's the variety in life when we can't afford to be wrong ever?
in the immortal words of toby ziegler, "we've had arafat here [at the white house]..."
i think criminal organization gets trumped by mass murderer most days of the week, and in a grander venue than a college campus.
our limits only constrain as much as expediency allows them to.
... just a question, you know... out of curiosity... are you saying self-driving cars are going to be so convenient? or are you suggesting no normal drivers left because we all get skynetted?
helvetica is the nilla wafer of fonts it seems.
have you taken a break that long before?
a month or two will seriously fuck up your aim and your timing, and that combined with other players improving quickly can be pretty thumping. I think two months off from one of my old favorites, and it took me a couple weeks to almost get back to where i was.
you're talking about half-life two, so i'm assuming you've got something like 1000 hours into it at least. you're still playing it, so i'm going to assume you play it at a decently high level. When you play at a certain level, it's more about the ingrained shit. Keeping your reactions tight and on point means more than it did at 100 hours. Everybody know the maps, everbody knows the jumps, landing rockets ain't a thang at that level... we're talking about air rockets and twitch rail-shots now baby. and taking a couple months off, rewiring your fingers for an RPG... that's going to fuck your twitching.
randall munroe you heathen.
... because drones are like... an innovative concept that only america could have thought up.
and our current crop of enemies haven't been trying to escalate at every turn with all their might.
some things are inevitable, and someone has to be first.
also, i don't think we'll see drones from the current crop of people who hate america.
why build a military grade drone? it would be cheaper to just put a moron in a plane... don't even need to teach them how to land.
why build a robot? people are easier to camouflage... might be cheaper to produce too.
a billion followers of islam even if a vanishingly small percentage are batshit crazy, are more than i'm comfortable with... especially when batshit crazy is in power every so often.
hamas, the muslim brotherhood, and iran spring to mind. it's difficult to play chicken with someone that thinks that both people losing is a win.
... you're not being paranoid if everyone really is out to get you.
if anybody is perfectly justified at jumping at shadows, i'd say it's the jews.
they've been holocausted once, repelled 2-3 unprovoked acts of aggression by EVERYONE within the first 30 years of founding a nation... and probably have a pretty healthy and pretty warranted genetic fear of religious persecution due to something like a couple millenia of jew-baiting.
what tires are on your vehicle?
what cereal do you eat?
what's the first company that comes to mind when i say car insurance?
is it state farm? geico? if you list out the car insurance companies you know off-hand will they be among them?
if you were to start shopping around, would they make the list of insurance companies you would look at, for the simple fact that you know their name?
given the choice between two brands of dish soap of approximately equal price, would you buy the one you've heard of before or the one you haven't?
i'm not. ads are a pain, and clicking through is auto-reflex now... but in the same measure, who's going to generate revenue for the companies behind these websites? say we reach the state you're looking for, everybody has blocked 100 percent of ads, or a large percentage. who's going to pay to put an ad on a site that nobody sees? how do you propose reddit generate revenue? all those aggregator sites?
do we go to a subscriber model? that's even more of a pain in the ass. we've already heard the death knell of traditional journalism, if the NYT can no longer generate revenue even in an online model... how exactly is journalism supposed to cope? do we rely on bloggers for our information? is there passion enough to compensate for someone else's profession? if they do it full-time, how do they support themselves without ad revenue?
in effect, we are exchanging our attention for content we want, would it be better to exchange actual money for it?
shit, i'd vote bloomberg in a heartbeat.
and i'm middle of the road as they come.
sanders is a crackpot on the left, trump is all sound and fury... clinton is a political animal first and makes me wary...