When did being utterly devoid of courage and constantly afraid of every single thing under the sun became a virtue?
If it's my company, my money, my neck is on the line...
If I'm working for someone else--who would just as soon lay me off if it became cheap enough to do so--then I do what I'm paid to do. Carrying 5G buckets of diesel up 17 dark flights of steps while the lobby has 4' of water in it is NOT what I'm being paid for.
It has nothing to do with a lack of courage or fear. It has to do with understanding that it's not worth potentially DYING or becoming disabled in a situation where the company will almost certainly turn around distance itself by saying I was operating outside the scope of what they told me to do, possibly ending up in any insurance claims being denied, or even in my being personally litigated against...
Agreed, I think it's pretty lousy to have these types of animals as pets--there is a reason birds go crazy when left alone in cages, they are too intelligent and not psychologically suited for domesticated life. Just because it's small enough to not seriously injure humans does not mean it's acceptable or suited to become a pet.
Cats & Dogs have been domesticated over hundreds/thousands of generations... even today there are breeds of dogs that are clearly not suited for living mostly indoors--so would paralyzing that breed of dog (even if in a painless and temporary manner) not be considered cruel? These birds belong in their natural habitats, not in people's suburban homes...
Now if this bird had a wing injury this would be a totally different story, he's giving it a life it could not have... but that is not really the case here, this bird was forced to live a life in a cage when it could otherwise be out in nature.
Conservatives over here have done things like pass laws forbidding global warming
They've made being the Earth a crime
in America, there is a state now where, by law, every woman is pregnant
Seriously... wtf are you talking about? You either need to put down the crack pipe, or provide legitimate citations for these (and then pass the crack pipe over here)
This is certainly news for nerds. A man is being arrested for posting something on facebook. To be arrested for posting ANYTHING on facebook seems *insane* to me.
The US, for it's faults, certainly does have some good points. I was watching an old (2 years) youtube video about Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee) who was under investigation by the Australian Crimes Commission. He went on TV talking about the investigation, the video I was watching was a follow up by some sort of a talk show host who was saying that it's illegal to talk about the investigation or even admit you are being investigated--that seems absolutely insane to me as well. So not only are we going to accuse of crimes, but it will BE A CRIME if you tell anyone we are investigating you......... that is nuts.
No, it's more like saying he know how to evaluate (and trust) his sexual partners before engaging in sex, and those that he doesn't trust or can't be sure of, he brings to the clinic to get tested first...
I think the point is to continue to allow the person to remain ambulatory as long as possible for many different reasons both practical and not. Perhaps also to detect a temporary condition caused by tiredness, TIA or some other event.
Whenever I hear about these things all I can think of is the inevitable spectacular failures that will occur when something snaps that ribbon and 50-100 miles of ribbon start pouring out of the sky...
On the moon I guess you'd wind up with a massive pile (like that scene near the end of Twins when Schwarzenegger and Devito drop the chain on the bad guy)...
On earth, with wind, rotation, etc... you might have a massive ribbon falling over span of 10's of miles, landing on homes, schools, highways, people...
Typical meal for me is 4 chicken thighs, 5 eggs fried in butter, then half a tub of cream cheese. Seriously.
I know all your stats are in line, losing weight, etc, etc... but it just sounds like such a horrible diet. How can that possibly be good for you? I grew up on the cheese-wheel man singing me the "you are what you eat from your head to your feet" song... and eating dark meat chicken, nearly half a dozen eggs in butter and half a pound of cream cheese (I assume that's half a tub) just seems awful.
Lovely fail there since a lot of sites use SMS for some sort of authentication, Google, and Blizzard among them.
So? This doesn't affect them I don't think--the SMS based authentication I've seen with my bank and Google all involve them sending me a code which I enter on their site. This issue wouldn't cause any problems with that.
The purpose of war is to have as little skin in the game as possible.
The purpose of traditional "duelling" is ritual combat.
One thing is not like the other.
I thought the purpose of war, at the highest level, was to either defend or conquer (which would include destroy)... Maybe one of the ideal ways to wage a war is keep as little skin in there as possible, but I don't think most people would say that it's the purpose...
Since the OP never mentioned dueling, I'm a bit lost as to what your point is?
A lesson can take many forms. An example of a "lesson" not based on history, but on fiction, could be Aesop's Fables, they're widely considered to be "lessons" for children, if disagree with the term lesson being applied that's fine, but frankly most people know what I meant, and since that's the point of written and spoken language, I'm cool with it.
Anyway, it's a matter of semantics--my point, which of course is half-joking, is that a movie, which was fictional, which came out in 1984 which contained depictions of remote controlled, and self-directed, armed robots which were created to replace human military personnel in dangerous situations. I know it's fiction, but at a high level it's awfully parallel to what we are apparently working toward today. So the lesson/speculation/advice/whatever that I believe should be taken away from this work of fiction is that it would be a good idea to avoid turning all control over the killer robots to a single mind (whether it's a single human, small group of humans ("hive mind"), or artificial intelligence).
...and of course we don't want to ever forget the lessons learned from the Terminator franchise or to a lesser degree RoboCop... which is that total automation of these devices can just as easy be turned back on you or your populations.
Sounds like they're simply missiles/bombs with non-traditional methods of locomotion.
In the scheme of things it's an easy sell, because they'll say "hey, we either send in the smart bomb and use lower yields and more accurate target detection, or we level the place".
Like any weapon the trick will be using them to only injure those that you specifically want to injure. Getting lazy, sloppy or inhuman with these things will be the same as with any other type of weapon.
My biggest fear with these UAV's is that we take the human factor out. I'm not talking about a human's ability to not kill innocent people--we know that is subjective--I'm talking about the military's decisions to carry out certain types of strikes when we literally have no "skin" in the game. It's already an issue with super accurate missiles and current generation of UAV's, these roomba-bombs may only make it worse.
I dislike e-readers because of the lack of permanence and requirement for licensing to make the data available. Governments change, corporations change, with every copy of the device still tied to the "mothership" they retain the ability to pull a few strings and metaphorically reel all the copies back out of your pockets and homes.
I'm very happy with Amazon selling MP3s vs. Apple's copy protected stuff. I can move their MP3s around to difference devices and they still play, I don't have to worry about future license issues, etc. As long as I am a good steward of my files, making backups, etc, they will live on indefinitely and relatively easily. The MP3 format is going to remain persistent for the rest of my lifetime, just like today I can play a MOD file straight of a 5.25" floppy from 1992. Right now I don't think the same can be said for their e-books, and that scares me.
I disagree about availability of titles though--Ceteris paribus, I believe that once something becomes electronically available it will be far easier to keep it available for sale in digital libraries. After all, what benefit does a company like Amazon have to "taking an e-book off the shelf"? It costs them virtually nothing to store the title, allow it to be searched, etc... so if every few years they generate a few sales, why not keep it? The same is not true for physical media, it costs money to buy it, to store it. Once it's not selling they want to make space. And of course once it's out of print, it's out of print, so if it does sell out, there are no more copies. So I'd be more inclined to believe that in 50 years an obscure author, who has an e-book and printed book today, would be easier to locate as an e-book vs. a physical book (which presumably would be long out of print and now exists only in people's personal collections, a handful of public libraries, and the inventories of used book sellers).
Assuming we do not gain DRM/license free e-books... What I would like to see is paper books sold around the same price as they are today with an option to either get the e-book for free (as with some DVDs) or at least a very low cost adder, say +10-20%.
Trading has never been about balance sheets... Dumps in stable companies like Apple rarely last long, look how fast it recovered from the panic around it's earnings.... It has nothing to do with profit or loss, just trying to figure out what other people will do. It's all about human behavior. And always has been.
First you say it has nothing to do with actual values. Then you point out that the panic was based on earnings (which of course relate to values). Then you go back to saying it has nothing to do with profit or loss, but instead is about human behavior--but you had just described a human behavior, panic, which was related to earnings.
Stock prices are based on values and earnings. No stock would trade for long for a company that does not make money. I've heard a lot of people say that no one trades on value, etc... maybe I don't get the terminologies, but it seems to me that the vast number of people introducing money into the markets do trade on value, or least are expecting that the decisions for their money are made on value. Let's not forget just how much of America's retirement is based on stocks, it's freakishly large amount for many people. I can't NOT be in the market with this money because it will simply stagnate with alternatives like savings rates, so there is really no choice but to invest in stocks and bonds (and I'm sure this is by design to some degree).
Our currency is no longer based on a tangible commodity. Our stock prices used to be based on actual and anticipated performance as well as assets of a company--sure it's always been about guessing, but those guessers used to be done at human speed--now what we've got is the equivalent of pong running at 4GHz and every time one side misses the "ball" with it's paddle we have either a flash crash or hyper inflation.
Plus, I don't think anybody wants to be the one predicting that the human race will be ravaged by something as simple as laziness and stupidity, instead of thermonuclear war or worldwide hunger.
Mike Judge has already made these predictions... see Idiocracy.
Visions of "professional" gamers make me think of that episode from IT Crowd where Moss starts playing "street countdown", it's a bunch of people taking a game WAY too seriously, yet somehow it actually is legitimate...
Prime: "First rule of Street Countdown. Is that you really must try and tell as many people as possible about it. It's a rather fun game and the more people you tell about it the better."
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah no kidding... we're not talking about hospital generators... it's freaking web servers.
When did being utterly devoid of courage and constantly afraid of every single thing under the sun became a virtue?
If it's my company, my money, my neck is on the line...
If I'm working for someone else--who would just as soon lay me off if it became cheap enough to do so--then I do what I'm paid to do. Carrying 5G buckets of diesel up 17 dark flights of steps while the lobby has 4' of water in it is NOT what I'm being paid for.
It has nothing to do with a lack of courage or fear. It has to do with understanding that it's not worth potentially DYING or becoming disabled in a situation where the company will almost certainly turn around distance itself by saying I was operating outside the scope of what they told me to do, possibly ending up in any insurance claims being denied, or even in my being personally litigated against...
mod up...
Agreed, I think it's pretty lousy to have these types of animals as pets--there is a reason birds go crazy when left alone in cages, they are too intelligent and not psychologically suited for domesticated life. Just because it's small enough to not seriously injure humans does not mean it's acceptable or suited to become a pet.
Cats & Dogs have been domesticated over hundreds/thousands of generations... even today there are breeds of dogs that are clearly not suited for living mostly indoors--so would paralyzing that breed of dog (even if in a painless and temporary manner) not be considered cruel? These birds belong in their natural habitats, not in people's suburban homes...
Now if this bird had a wing injury this would be a totally different story, he's giving it a life it could not have... but that is not really the case here, this bird was forced to live a life in a cage when it could otherwise be out in nature.
Let's keep this legitimate and put Kevin Sorbo in charge please.
Conservatives over here have done things like pass laws forbidding global warming
They've made being the Earth a crime
in America, there is a state now where, by law, every woman is pregnant
Seriously... wtf are you talking about? You either need to put down the crack pipe, or provide legitimate citations for these (and then pass the crack pipe over here)
This is certainly news for nerds. A man is being arrested for posting something on facebook. To be arrested for posting ANYTHING on facebook seems *insane* to me.
The US, for it's faults, certainly does have some good points. I was watching an old (2 years) youtube video about Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee) who was under investigation by the Australian Crimes Commission. He went on TV talking about the investigation, the video I was watching was a follow up by some sort of a talk show host who was saying that it's illegal to talk about the investigation or even admit you are being investigated--that seems absolutely insane to me as well. So not only are we going to accuse of crimes, but it will BE A CRIME if you tell anyone we are investigating you......... that is nuts.
No, it's more like saying he know how to evaluate (and trust) his sexual partners before engaging in sex, and those that he doesn't trust or can't be sure of, he brings to the clinic to get tested first...
We're gonna need at least a 20-sided room and lots of potted plants...
I think the point is to continue to allow the person to remain ambulatory as long as possible for many different reasons both practical and not. Perhaps also to detect a temporary condition caused by tiredness, TIA or some other event.
That's the ticket laddy.
You could always exercise, die skinny & fit, still having eaten your cheeseburgers ...just sayin' is all...
Whenever I hear about these things all I can think of is the inevitable spectacular failures that will occur when something snaps that ribbon and 50-100 miles of ribbon start pouring out of the sky...
On the moon I guess you'd wind up with a massive pile (like that scene near the end of Twins when Schwarzenegger and Devito drop the chain on the bad guy)...
On earth, with wind, rotation, etc... you might have a massive ribbon falling over span of 10's of miles, landing on homes, schools, highways, people...
Typical meal for me is 4 chicken thighs, 5 eggs fried in butter, then half a tub of cream cheese. Seriously.
I know all your stats are in line, losing weight, etc, etc... but it just sounds like such a horrible diet. How can that possibly be good for you? I grew up on the cheese-wheel man singing me the "you are what you eat from your head to your feet" song... and eating dark meat chicken, nearly half a dozen eggs in butter and half a pound of cream cheese (I assume that's half a tub) just seems awful.
Lovely fail there since a lot of sites use SMS for some sort of authentication, Google, and Blizzard among them.
So? This doesn't affect them I don't think--the SMS based authentication I've seen with my bank and Google all involve them sending me a code which I enter on their site. This issue wouldn't cause any problems with that.
Mod this one up... def. is not anything new.
The purpose of war is to have as little skin in the game as possible.
The purpose of traditional "duelling" is ritual combat.
One thing is not like the other.
I thought the purpose of war, at the highest level, was to either defend or conquer (which would include destroy)... Maybe one of the ideal ways to wage a war is keep as little skin in there as possible, but I don't think most people would say that it's the purpose...
Since the OP never mentioned dueling, I'm a bit lost as to what your point is?
A lesson can take many forms. An example of a "lesson" not based on history, but on fiction, could be Aesop's Fables, they're widely considered to be "lessons" for children, if disagree with the term lesson being applied that's fine, but frankly most people know what I meant, and since that's the point of written and spoken language, I'm cool with it.
Anyway, it's a matter of semantics--my point, which of course is half-joking, is that a movie, which was fictional, which came out in 1984 which contained depictions of remote controlled, and self-directed, armed robots which were created to replace human military personnel in dangerous situations. I know it's fiction, but at a high level it's awfully parallel to what we are apparently working toward today. So the lesson/speculation/advice/whatever that I believe should be taken away from this work of fiction is that it would be a good idea to avoid turning all control over the killer robots to a single mind (whether it's a single human, small group of humans ("hive mind"), or artificial intelligence).
...and of course we don't want to ever forget the lessons learned from the Terminator franchise or to a lesser degree RoboCop... which is that total automation of these devices can just as easy be turned back on you or your populations.
Sounds like they're simply missiles/bombs with non-traditional methods of locomotion.
In the scheme of things it's an easy sell, because they'll say "hey, we either send in the smart bomb and use lower yields and more accurate target detection, or we level the place".
Like any weapon the trick will be using them to only injure those that you specifically want to injure. Getting lazy, sloppy or inhuman with these things will be the same as with any other type of weapon.
My biggest fear with these UAV's is that we take the human factor out. I'm not talking about a human's ability to not kill innocent people--we know that is subjective--I'm talking about the military's decisions to carry out certain types of strikes when we literally have no "skin" in the game. It's already an issue with super accurate missiles and current generation of UAV's, these roomba-bombs may only make it worse.
I dislike e-readers because of the lack of permanence and requirement for licensing to make the data available. Governments change, corporations change, with every copy of the device still tied to the "mothership" they retain the ability to pull a few strings and metaphorically reel all the copies back out of your pockets and homes.
I'm very happy with Amazon selling MP3s vs. Apple's copy protected stuff. I can move their MP3s around to difference devices and they still play, I don't have to worry about future license issues, etc. As long as I am a good steward of my files, making backups, etc, they will live on indefinitely and relatively easily. The MP3 format is going to remain persistent for the rest of my lifetime, just like today I can play a MOD file straight of a 5.25" floppy from 1992. Right now I don't think the same can be said for their e-books, and that scares me.
I disagree about availability of titles though--Ceteris paribus, I believe that once something becomes electronically available it will be far easier to keep it available for sale in digital libraries. After all, what benefit does a company like Amazon have to "taking an e-book off the shelf"? It costs them virtually nothing to store the title, allow it to be searched, etc... so if every few years they generate a few sales, why not keep it? The same is not true for physical media, it costs money to buy it, to store it. Once it's not selling they want to make space. And of course once it's out of print, it's out of print, so if it does sell out, there are no more copies. So I'd be more inclined to believe that in 50 years an obscure author, who has an e-book and printed book today, would be easier to locate as an e-book vs. a physical book (which presumably would be long out of print and now exists only in people's personal collections, a handful of public libraries, and the inventories of used book sellers).
Assuming we do not gain DRM/license free e-books... What I would like to see is paper books sold around the same price as they are today with an option to either get the e-book for free (as with some DVDs) or at least a very low cost adder, say +10-20%.
don't you mean clucked out in terror?
Trading has never been about balance sheets ... ...
Dumps in stable companies like Apple rarely last long, look how fast it recovered from the panic around it's earnings.
It has nothing to do with profit or loss, just trying to figure out what other people will do. It's all about human behavior. And always has been.
First you say it has nothing to do with actual values. Then you point out that the panic was based on earnings (which of course relate to values). Then you go back to saying it has nothing to do with profit or loss, but instead is about human behavior--but you had just described a human behavior, panic, which was related to earnings.
Stock prices are based on values and earnings. No stock would trade for long for a company that does not make money. I've heard a lot of people say that no one trades on value, etc... maybe I don't get the terminologies, but it seems to me that the vast number of people introducing money into the markets do trade on value, or least are expecting that the decisions for their money are made on value. Let's not forget just how much of America's retirement is based on stocks, it's freakishly large amount for many people. I can't NOT be in the market with this money because it will simply stagnate with alternatives like savings rates, so there is really no choice but to invest in stocks and bonds (and I'm sure this is by design to some degree).
Our currency is no longer based on a tangible commodity. Our stock prices used to be based on actual and anticipated performance as well as assets of a company--sure it's always been about guessing, but those guessers used to be done at human speed--now what we've got is the equivalent of pong running at 4GHz and every time one side misses the "ball" with it's paddle we have either a flash crash or hyper inflation.
Plus, I don't think anybody wants to be the one predicting that the human race will be ravaged by something as simple as laziness and stupidity, instead of thermonuclear war or worldwide hunger.
Mike Judge has already made these predictions... see Idiocracy.
Visions of "professional" gamers make me think of that episode from IT Crowd where Moss starts playing "street countdown", it's a bunch of people taking a game WAY too seriously, yet somehow it actually is legitimate...
Prime: "First rule of Street Countdown. Is that you really must try and tell as many people as possible about it. It's a rather fun game and the more people you tell about it the better."
Yep... funny scene.