I'd rather have an uppity American woman in my bed than some sexually repressed semi-slave from one of these psychotically misogynistic cultures. I want a companion, not a slave.
"Girls with guns! Crucial realm!" --The Dirty Pair
What historian called this "the banality of evil"? Just because tribalism is in our genes doesn't mean we have to submit to it.
Humans were in hunter-gatherer clans for at least 100,000 years. We've been civilized for less than 8000 years. Behaviors that helped us then can hurt us now.
Need better police recruiting. There are many ppl who'd make fine policemen but can't stand the insular culture or the lousy pay. Maybe widen the base with more part-time or reserve cops, basing cops in the community rather from insular patrol stations, and rotating cops from 911 response into community policing and back out again. Maybe also rotating cops around different neighborhoods, too. Another solution that's been tried: keeping good cops on the street for more hours by handing off paperwork and traffic patrol to reserve cops or cadets. There are solutions to bad behavior, because bad behavior is sometimes the result of insular subculture, bad examples, or bad organization.
You see this in online gaming. Playing ctf in Star Wars Republic Commando, or coop in Synergy, I can't count how many times I've seen guys bellowing complaints on voice or on the chat line. "I've got a terrible team!" Oh, they're really gonna get better now. A few of my friends and I don't do that. When a person on our team gets the flag or clears the opfor off the flag carrier's tail, or scores, it's "GJ!" "Way to go!" Everyone enjoys the game a little more when ppl behave that way. Plus, we win more games. Guys even switch teams. Things are a little simpler in Synergy. We votekick the complainers off the server.
once you heard about FDR's court-packing scheme. Not one politician will agree with anyone 100% of the time.
We're at the start of a long journey to make the US government work again for the people. Do you think that process stops with Obama? Obama is the starting place. A big Democratic win in November means that a whole bunch of people will come into office, people we can push toward protecting civil liberties. Our position as their supporters, even their donors, will give us much more power over them. Maybe we can get a few things done.
Vote Republican, and you vote for more of the same, you vote to disenfranchise yourself. You think McCain and his crowd will ever listen to your concerns about the rights of citizens in a free society?
...of the blernball argument between Leela and Bender, something about the star pitcher in the old robot league being a converted howitzer? Of course a machine would win at air hockey, I'm surprised the 8-bit version lost.
I'm shocked, shocked to learn I'm wrong. I'm wrong so often, I suppose I should be shocked when I'm right about something. I'll mail your dollar bills to you, one dollar bill at a time. There are currently only eleven of them in my wallet.:)
I don't know, because I haven't seen the software they use, but I'll bet the big stack of $1 bills in my wallet that it's all T/F and multiple choice.
And that's crap.
Such testing only tests the ability of a student to pass T/F or multiple choice tests. When you can solve a math problem when it's only you and the problem on the page, OK, then you understand what you've been taught.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read an old Princeton Review SAT or GRE book, they talk about it at some length.
We're training these kids not for reality, but to take tests, with the answers fed to them.
It's the intellectual equivalent of trying to teach mechanical skills with a erector-set simulator on a PC. There is a subtle disconnect between what we can learn virtually and what we can learn through real experience.
Just because you've played CSS, that doesn't mean you can be trusted with a rifle.
I doubt very much they'll put him in Max. If he gets prison time, and I bet he will get from one to three years, he'll be sent to Minimum or a nice prison farm, to hang out with the savings-and-loan crowd and the check kiters.
This just occurred to me - what if there is no answer? What if there is no such thing as "good software design," only good and bad software? What if the demands of individual projects determine the software design environment?
If you think these questions are silly, you have never been the focus of a thesis or dissertation defense. Those guys on your committee? They gang up on you at the end of the process and grill your ass off.
I don't want to come off harsh, but this guy is from a good university, in a graduate program, and he needs help in basic research on his dissertation? Look at the question, this isn't a survey: "...I am looking for links/references on this topic."
Having gone through a similar process several years ago, I can tell you that this guy is trying to get started on his dissertation, and he's already lost.
Even a half-assed google on software design strategy can turn up stuff on the utilization of quality control techniques from aerospace programming in medical devices, the application of evolutionary theory to software design, even a nifty little blog called Coding Horrors. And he can't find this himself?
He also needs to ask himself certain basic questions. What is a good program? What is a bad program? Do their failures and successes arise from the design environment? Or do they arise from the choices about the actual program that programmers made while constructing it, regardless of the "design environment"? What strategies do good programmers use? The article he cited can be challenged conceptually is about five different ways.
Doesn't this guy have a faculty adviser? I had an entire freaking committee, and I had to scoot around to five different guys and get their feedback on every aspect of my work.
Here's an idea. Arrive at a list of good software products, then seek out the design teams and interview them. Find out what effective people do and why they do it. If a real answer is desired, the work will be immense, and the project will take a couple years.
My advice? Read, research, read, refocus your research, talk to anyone who'll sit still for five seconds, read somemore, and keep your committee clued in to what you are doing. If you don't do these things, you're boned.
and it's a very very nice keyboard for sustained typing. Plus, it has a lifetime guarantee, so if it breaks, you can get a replacement. I'm not just saying this, I use one, I'm typing on one right now!
Much better than the M IMHO, though I haven't typed on an M for longer than a lifetime of a healthy rat.
So think before you act, and find something that suits your hands. Comfort over fashion!
No kidding. Several of my smarter, nerdier friends are martial artists. They began their studies in karate, tae kwon do, judo, kung fu, jujitsu, and boxing when they were kids, as a response to bullying. The physical bullying stopped for me when I was a freshman in high school. I picked up one of my tormentors and threw him head first into a locker. They continued their taunts and mockery after that, but nothing physical. They knew better.
....like abebooks.com and alibris.com. But be careful when ordering, cuz you'll pay at least $4.00 per book for shipping.
Also good, online discount book outlets like daedalusbooks.com and edwardrhamilton.com.
How to know what to read? Well, slashdot readers are good at picking books, run a search for slashdot SF book reviews. I also use sfrevu.com occasionally. Then there's the grandaddy of them all, locusmag.com. That ought to get you started. Have fun!
This is the second untrue "truth" from the FBI that has been exposed. Profound questions about the viability of criminal profiling have been made in the New Yorker. Profiling may all be hokum, pure junk science based on only a handful of interviews with serial murderers. So this begs the question: what is it about the FBI that they prefer junk science to real science?
They demonstrate an anti-satellite weapon. They show off a quiet sub. The second isn't as impressive as it sounds. As any hardcore Discovery Channel watcher will tell you, several of our European allies already have super-quiet subs. But the Chinese show off these new technologies in public. What are they trying to do?
When they look as us, what do they see? Remember, these guys aren't stupid, they listen when Bush speaks, they watch when he acts. They see a president completely disdainful of alliances and diplomacy, dependent upon military force and dedicated to unilateral, unprovoked military actions. They see an American administration encouraging rash behavior in its allies. Remember the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon? The Bush administration, according to some news reports, encouraged the Israeli government in its invasion plans. What might Bush do next? The Chinese wish to show our president that not every problem has an "easy" military solution. Bush doesn't listen to words, maybe he'll pay attention to deeds.
As Cap'n Jack Sparrow would say: "They put a shot across our bow, matey!"
Please keep in mind that the space shuttle is something else we can blame on politicians. It was they who balked at paying for a safe, reliable shuttle design, and forced this compromise insanity on NASA.
I credit Robert E. Howard for keeping me sane through high school, and more violent imagery you could not find. Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, their blood-soaked adventures helped me cope. I can't explain way. I am not the only one. I've met two other guys who had the same experience. Hell, I made my own martial arts weapons (shirikin, 'chucks, chain weapons, etc.). Did I ever hurt anyone? No. My mom and dad kept a good eye on me, too, and stepped in on a couple occasions when they thought I was getting to be a little too much of a loner. So maybe those are the two keys to preventing this, maybe every teenager should have some form of mental refuge and others who care about him.
....but back in the 1980s (or was it the 1970s?), Israeli airport security found a well-made bomb inside a working radio. They managed to squeeze the explosives into the radio case and modify the radio so it would still work. Considering how fragile airliners are, even the amount of Semtex you could squeeze into a large pocket calculator would open up the side of a plane. Everyone's so bent out of shape about Arab terrorists, but what about people who've actually killed people with bombs? Those include Sikh separatists (took down an Indian airliner), the Tamil Tigers (fond of using suicide bombers, and they aren't religious extremists, just ordinary secular extremists), Christian fundamentalist bombers who like to take down abortion clinics, narcotraffickers in Mexico and South America, leftist guerrillas in Peru, disgruntled workers in the USA, and rightist guerrillas in Central America. Not to freak you out or anything....
I'd have to agree, this was silly and dangerous of her, and not an over-reaction by the police. The charges she's facing may be over the top, but the initial reaction was appropriate. Let us not forget the collar bomb on the pizza driver, the retarded kid strapped with a bomb, the involuntary bombers of the recent mess in Northern Ireland, the cell phone bombs of the Middle East and Iraq, and a host of other incidents where someone obviously wearing a bomb approached police. The target in these instances was not the civilian population but the cops themselves. Lumping this incident in with the "I'm speaking Arabic so obviously I'm a threat" incident, or the "I'm wearing a costume so I must be a threat" fiasco is a mistake. Unlike us, most people haven't looked inside their computer cases. Also, it is unusual for someone to be carrying around a naked motherboard (Eeek!) or have one pinned to her shirt. We live in the age of the bomber, so FedEx that circuitry, don't try to carry it on a plane. And for God's sake, don't walk up to a cop with it in your hand. She is lucky to be alive.
Way to miss the point. There are a variety of means of subduing someone or diffusing the situation before going to a "less than lethal" weapon. "Less than lethal" can kill (this includes bean bag guns, rubber bullets, every variety of taser and stun gun, and pepper spray - since you're such experts, you go find the citations - who knew the term paper police were active on slashdot?), other techniques should be used first. I have seen the video of this confrontation, and this guy was resisting, but they had him under control. How about a little common sense? Why the cops didn't put cuffs on him and march him out to the patrol car I don't know. There would have been no controversy, they would have put him in a holding cell for an hour until he cooled down, and then they'd just let him go. Now, it's law suits, people losing their jobs, the college looking bad, etc., etc. As to my slashdot critics, well, in my experience, when someone focuses on the technical minutiae of an article while ignoring the main point, it means they've run out of arguments. The cops were wrong to taser the guy. Just being a jerk is not a qualification for being tasered.
Let's make two big piles of articles, one for and another against, and the highest pile wins. Never mind common sense or science, highest pile wins.
"It is possible that tasers or any other high voltage device could cause cardiac arrhythmia in a susceptible minority of people, possibly leading to heart attack or death in minutes by ventricular fibrillation (which leads to cardiac arrest and if not treated immediately to sudden death).....People susceptible to this outcome are sometimes healthy and unaware of their susceptibility.... Between June 2001 and June 2007, there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers...."
Any method used to subdue can kill. Does rude or obnoxious behavior deserve this kind of response? Whatever happened to picking a guy up and carrying him out? Or putting a wrist lock on him and walking him out? Or just talking the guy out? A couple years ago, a crazed individual, thinking I had insulted him in the parking lot (to this day I don't who he was or why he was so angry), followed me into a bookstore and began to threaten me and scream obscenities. I'm just an ordinary guy, but I talked him out of the store and into the street. Frustrated at his inability to provoke me, he wandered off. Taser first is not the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather have an uppity American woman in my bed than some sexually repressed semi-slave from one of these psychotically misogynistic cultures. I want a companion, not a slave.
"Girls with guns! Crucial realm!" --The Dirty Pair
What historian called this "the banality of evil"? Just because tribalism is in our genes doesn't mean we have to submit to it.
Humans were in hunter-gatherer clans for at least 100,000 years. We've been civilized for less than 8000 years. Behaviors that helped us then can hurt us now.
Need better police recruiting. There are many ppl who'd make fine policemen but can't stand the insular culture or the lousy pay. Maybe widen the base with more part-time or reserve cops, basing cops in the community rather from insular patrol stations, and rotating cops from 911 response into community policing and back out again. Maybe also rotating cops around different neighborhoods, too. Another solution that's been tried: keeping good cops on the street for more hours by handing off paperwork and traffic patrol to reserve cops or cadets. There are solutions to bad behavior, because bad behavior is sometimes the result of insular subculture, bad examples, or bad organization.
IMHO
You see this in online gaming. Playing ctf in Star Wars Republic Commando, or coop in Synergy, I can't count how many times I've seen guys bellowing complaints on voice or on the chat line. "I've got a terrible team!" Oh, they're really gonna get better now. A few of my friends and I don't do that. When a person on our team gets the flag or clears the opfor off the flag carrier's tail, or scores, it's "GJ!" "Way to go!" Everyone enjoys the game a little more when ppl behave that way. Plus, we win more games. Guys even switch teams. Things are a little simpler in Synergy. We votekick the complainers off the server.
once you heard about FDR's court-packing scheme. Not one politician will agree with anyone 100% of the time.
We're at the start of a long journey to make the US government work again for the people. Do you think that process stops with Obama? Obama is the starting place. A big Democratic win in November means that a whole bunch of people will come into office, people we can push toward protecting civil liberties. Our position as their supporters, even their donors, will give us much more power over them. Maybe we can get a few things done.
Vote Republican, and you vote for more of the same, you vote to disenfranchise yourself. You think McCain and his crowd will ever listen to your concerns about the rights of citizens in a free society?
...of the blernball argument between Leela and Bender, something about the star pitcher in the old robot league being a converted howitzer? Of course a machine would win at air hockey, I'm surprised the 8-bit version lost.
I'm shocked, shocked to learn I'm wrong. I'm wrong so often, I suppose I should be shocked when I'm right about something. I'll mail your dollar bills to you, one dollar bill at a time. There are currently only eleven of them in my wallet. :)
I don't know, because I haven't seen the software they use, but I'll bet the big stack of $1 bills in my wallet that it's all T/F and multiple choice.
And that's crap.
Such testing only tests the ability of a student to pass T/F or multiple choice tests. When you can solve a math problem when it's only you and the problem on the page, OK, then you understand what you've been taught.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read an old Princeton Review SAT or GRE book, they talk about it at some length.
We're training these kids not for reality, but to take tests, with the answers fed to them.
It's the intellectual equivalent of trying to teach mechanical skills with a erector-set simulator on a PC. There is a subtle disconnect between what we can learn virtually and what we can learn through real experience.
Just because you've played CSS, that doesn't mean you can be trusted with a rifle.
"Old man shouts at cloud."
I doubt very much they'll put him in Max. If he gets prison time, and I bet he will get from one to three years, he'll be sent to Minimum or a nice prison farm, to hang out with the savings-and-loan crowd and the check kiters.
This just occurred to me - what if there is no answer? What if there is no such thing as "good software design," only good and bad software? What if the demands of individual projects determine the software design environment?
If you think these questions are silly, you have never been the focus of a thesis or dissertation defense. Those guys on your committee? They gang up on you at the end of the process and grill your ass off.
I don't want to come off harsh, but this guy is from a good university, in a graduate program, and he needs help in basic research on his dissertation? Look at the question, this isn't a survey: "...I am looking for links/references on this topic."
Having gone through a similar process several years ago, I can tell you that this guy is trying to get started on his dissertation, and he's already lost.
Even a half-assed google on software design strategy can turn up stuff on the utilization of quality control techniques from aerospace programming in medical devices, the application of evolutionary theory to software design, even a nifty little blog called Coding Horrors. And he can't find this himself?
He also needs to ask himself certain basic questions. What is a good program? What is a bad program? Do their failures and successes arise from the design environment? Or do they arise from the choices about the actual program that programmers made while constructing it, regardless of the "design environment"? What strategies do good programmers use? The article he cited can be challenged conceptually is about five different ways.
Doesn't this guy have a faculty adviser? I had an entire freaking committee, and I had to scoot around to five different guys and get their feedback on every aspect of my work.
Here's an idea. Arrive at a list of good software products, then seek out the design teams and interview them. Find out what effective people do and why they do it. If a real answer is desired, the work will be immense, and the project will take a couple years.
My advice? Read, research, read, refocus your research, talk to anyone who'll sit still for five seconds, read somemore, and keep your committee clued in to what you are doing. If you don't do these things, you're boned.
..."Robotic Arm Controls Monkey Brain."
and it's a very very nice keyboard for sustained typing. Plus, it has a lifetime guarantee, so if it breaks, you can get a replacement. I'm not just saying this, I use one, I'm typing on one right now!
Much better than the M IMHO, though I haven't typed on an M for longer than a lifetime of a healthy rat.
So think before you act, and find something that suits your hands. Comfort over fashion!
No kidding. Several of my smarter, nerdier friends are martial artists. They began their studies in karate, tae kwon do, judo, kung fu, jujitsu, and boxing when they were kids, as a response to bullying. The physical bullying stopped for me when I was a freshman in high school. I picked up one of my tormentors and threw him head first into a locker. They continued their taunts and mockery after that, but nothing physical. They knew better.
But I'm a nice guy. Honest.
....like abebooks.com and alibris.com. But be careful when ordering, cuz you'll pay at least $4.00 per book for shipping.
Also good, online discount book outlets like daedalusbooks.com and edwardrhamilton.com.
How to know what to read? Well, slashdot readers are good at picking books, run a search for slashdot SF book reviews. I also use sfrevu.com occasionally. Then there's the grandaddy of them all, locusmag.com. That ought to get you started. Have fun!
This is the second untrue "truth" from the FBI that has been exposed. Profound questions about the viability of criminal profiling have been made in the New Yorker. Profiling may all be hokum, pure junk science based on only a handful of interviews with serial murderers. So this begs the question: what is it about the FBI that they prefer junk science to real science?
They demonstrate an anti-satellite weapon. They show off a quiet sub. The second isn't as impressive as it sounds. As any hardcore Discovery Channel watcher will tell you, several of our European allies already have super-quiet subs. But the Chinese show off these new technologies in public. What are they trying to do?
When they look as us, what do they see? Remember, these guys aren't stupid, they listen when Bush speaks, they watch when he acts. They see a president completely disdainful of alliances and diplomacy, dependent upon military force and dedicated to unilateral, unprovoked military actions. They see an American administration encouraging rash behavior in its allies. Remember the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon? The Bush administration, according to some news reports, encouraged the Israeli government in its invasion plans. What might Bush do next? The Chinese wish to show our president that not every problem has an "easy" military solution. Bush doesn't listen to words, maybe he'll pay attention to deeds.
As Cap'n Jack Sparrow would say: "They put a shot across our bow, matey!"
Please keep in mind that the space shuttle is something else we can blame on politicians. It was they who balked at paying for a safe, reliable shuttle design, and forced this compromise insanity on NASA.
I credit Robert E. Howard for keeping me sane through high school, and more violent imagery you could not find. Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, their blood-soaked adventures helped me cope. I can't explain way. I am not the only one. I've met two other guys who had the same experience. Hell, I made my own martial arts weapons (shirikin, 'chucks, chain weapons, etc.). Did I ever hurt anyone? No. My mom and dad kept a good eye on me, too, and stepped in on a couple occasions when they thought I was getting to be a little too much of a loner. So maybe those are the two keys to preventing this, maybe every teenager should have some form of mental refuge and others who care about him.
Define "many." In my universe, 1 != "many".
Bang.
....but back in the 1980s (or was it the 1970s?), Israeli airport security found a well-made bomb inside a working radio. They managed to squeeze the explosives into the radio case and modify the radio so it would still work. Considering how fragile airliners are, even the amount of Semtex you could squeeze into a large pocket calculator would open up the side of a plane. Everyone's so bent out of shape about Arab terrorists, but what about people who've actually killed people with bombs? Those include Sikh separatists (took down an Indian airliner), the Tamil Tigers (fond of using suicide bombers, and they aren't religious extremists, just ordinary secular extremists), Christian fundamentalist bombers who like to take down abortion clinics, narcotraffickers in Mexico and South America, leftist guerrillas in Peru, disgruntled workers in the USA, and rightist guerrillas in Central America. Not to freak you out or anything....
I'd have to agree, this was silly and dangerous of her, and not an over-reaction by the police. The charges she's facing may be over the top, but the initial reaction was appropriate. Let us not forget the collar bomb on the pizza driver, the retarded kid strapped with a bomb, the involuntary bombers of the recent mess in Northern Ireland, the cell phone bombs of the Middle East and Iraq, and a host of other incidents where someone obviously wearing a bomb approached police. The target in these instances was not the civilian population but the cops themselves. Lumping this incident in with the "I'm speaking Arabic so obviously I'm a threat" incident, or the "I'm wearing a costume so I must be a threat" fiasco is a mistake. Unlike us, most people haven't looked inside their computer cases. Also, it is unusual for someone to be carrying around a naked motherboard (Eeek!) or have one pinned to her shirt. We live in the age of the bomber, so FedEx that circuitry, don't try to carry it on a plane. And for God's sake, don't walk up to a cop with it in your hand. She is lucky to be alive.
Way to miss the point. There are a variety of means of subduing someone or diffusing the situation before going to a "less than lethal" weapon. "Less than lethal" can kill (this includes bean bag guns, rubber bullets, every variety of taser and stun gun, and pepper spray - since you're such experts, you go find the citations - who knew the term paper police were active on slashdot?), other techniques should be used first. I have seen the video of this confrontation, and this guy was resisting, but they had him under control. How about a little common sense? Why the cops didn't put cuffs on him and march him out to the patrol car I don't know. There would have been no controversy, they would have put him in a holding cell for an hour until he cooled down, and then they'd just let him go. Now, it's law suits, people losing their jobs, the college looking bad, etc., etc. As to my slashdot critics, well, in my experience, when someone focuses on the technical minutiae of an article while ignoring the main point, it means they've run out of arguments. The cops were wrong to taser the guy. Just being a jerk is not a qualification for being tasered.
Let's make two big piles of articles, one for and another against, and the highest pile wins. Never mind common sense or science, highest pile wins.
People have died from taser shocks.
"It is possible that tasers or any other high voltage device could cause cardiac arrhythmia in a susceptible minority of people, possibly leading to heart attack or death in minutes by ventricular fibrillation (which leads to cardiac arrest and if not treated immediately to sudden death).....People susceptible to this outcome are sometimes healthy and unaware of their susceptibility....
Between June 2001 and June 2007, there were at least 245 cases of deaths of subjects soon after having been shocked using Tasers...."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroshock_weapon_controversy]
Any method used to subdue can kill. Does rude or obnoxious behavior deserve this kind of response? Whatever happened to picking a guy up and carrying him out? Or putting a wrist lock on him and walking him out? Or just talking the guy out? A couple years ago, a crazed individual, thinking I had insulted him in the parking lot (to this day I don't who he was or why he was so angry), followed me into a bookstore and began to threaten me and scream obscenities. I'm just an ordinary guy, but I talked him out of the store and into the street. Frustrated at his inability to provoke me, he wandered off. Taser first is not the way to go.