You are confusing two issues. Yes, you can take guns on your plane. BUT, you can not carry your guns through a public checkpoint, then walk through a public area to get to your plane.
I feel dumb having to explain this, so think about it for a second. Once past the checkpoint, you could give away your guns (or have them stolen, or have them forcibly taken away) Then someone else would be free to take those weapons on a different plane. The officials were 100% correct in what they did.
I still have my job, and have never bothered to install back doors. But I am think about moving to a different position/geographical location, and am trying to get rid of all my hacks and cludges so that my replacement can have an easier time. Let me tell, with both of us working on this 2-3 hours each week, we are nowhere close to getting rid of all the crap.
Just a simple example, of which we got rid last week. In 1997 when I had been just hired, my company was in the process of changing its ERP software. The problem was that they had a front end to it that had been written by an outside contractor whom they had fired. He did not put backdoors or anything, but no one had realized that the front end would not work with the new SQL based solution.
Because the problem was dropped in my lap, I ended up hacking together a really ugly, brute force solution - watching the front end server process for disk access requests, putting it to sleep, and creating the old style file on the fly. Thirteen years later, the company owner and two of his close friends who head two of our 50 warehouses refuse to use any other front end. So until last week, I had a compiled program with full access to the main ERP database, to the payroll's server physical disk and to a modem. Good luck finding that.
And yes, I realize that it was a terrible thing to leave active for more than a decade. But seriously, who remembers to go back and work on something like this unless it breaks? The only reason it's gone is that I am trying to tidy things up before I move... and if I was not moving within the company, I doubt I would be so nice.
I think that we can all agree that the 'magic' cables are going to pass the same 0s and 1s as any working cable. Still, it is not impossible that the 'magic' cables result in better sound. Allow me to play devil's advocate.
For example, non-magic cables might produce EM fields that may interfere with the audio equipment generating the sound that the blogged was listening to. The magic cables, with better shielding, might not, and thus, despite transporting the same 0s and 1s, result in better quality.
Of course, given the low voltage and current involved, I do not believe this for a second.
The tallest horse skeleton from that period barely passes the horse/pony barrier (by 3cm) The average horse of the period was 1.3m tall and the bones suggest that it weighted about 30% less than the light riding horses of today. It probably would not have be able to go very fast or very far with a rider. Yes, people rode them sometimes, but mostly they were used in chariots.
In a race between a rider and Tut's chariot, I'd definitely bet on the chariot, even with a driver in addition to the Pharaoh.
How do you decide which rights God supports and how do you explain rights to someone who laughs at your specific idea of a Supreme Being? And do you believe that the "Declaration of Independence" is divinely inspired, as opposed to Sharia law, for example? Now, I happen to abhor one, and respect the other, and am very, very scared that someone would think that the best way to decide which one should be enforced is to decide which one is ACTUALLY inspired by God.
For example, I know people who believe that one has the right not to be offended. Others believe that one has the right to speak one's mind. I'm trying to use neutral language and failing, so maybe I should frame it as 'Grow a thicker skin, you wimp!' VS 'Stop harassing me, you bigot!'
Given that God has never spoken to me, I do not know which of the above two 'rights' is natural. I am sure that you, just like me, have an opinion on which right is a right and which one is not. I assure you that I can come up with 'rights' on which a Muslim and a Christian will disagree, and 'rights' on which a Chinese and a Frenchman will find each other's position risible.
So, how do we decide what's a right, and how do we protect those rights? I trust debate and voting a lot more than people who know what God intends, or autocrats who 'know' the right way, and the power to enforce it.
Sure, but you "have all rights, except what is limited" only if a particular society, the United States of America in this case, is willing and able to enforce the Bill of Rights. There is nothing natural about this. Furthermore, even this very specific society has added some rights and removed others.
My point is not that rights are bad, or that we have less/more rights. My point is that rights are not natural, and two humans from different backgrounds will probably not agree on which rights should be protected.
Rights come from the ability of some entity to enforce them. Unless you believe in a Supreme Being of some flavour, that means a society. It may be as informal as public disapproval, or as brutal as men-with-guns, but given human nature, no rights exist without the ability to protect them. Well, maybe the right to privacy in your thoughts, but that's only because there no technology to protect it against... yet.
There are NO natural rights. There are only rights that we have granted ourselves by organizing into societies that defend them. And yes, that is one of the main reasons for having societies.
So tell me, do you believe that the right of own property is given to us by God Himself, and He will descend from Heaven to defend it? Or are you a supersoldier that can secure his property against any warlord and his well armed thugs?
Because if neither is the case, then your property is yours ONLY because there is a society that defends it, and that same society requires you to get permission before you start projects that MAY affect society. You could damage utilities lines/pipes, you could create a mosquito breeding ground, and yes, you could spoil the view of your next door neighbor.
You cannot take only some of what society bring, and shun the rest. You can and should work toward changing what you do not like within the rules. I personally do not like many, many of my home association rules, but I dislike the communities that lack any rules.
In Europe, or at least every country I've lived in, people measure fuel consumption in Liters-Needed-For-100-kilometers. I think that it works better than the way we are doing it here in the US.
You are exactly right. It is actually illegal in some jurisdiction (Nevada, at least) to make a gambling machine where the user's skill can influence the outcome. Even the ones that look like a video game where you control an avatar (a dude, a car or a spaceship) are absolutely not rewarding skill or penalizing inability.
Actually, rats will push a button that sends an impulse to their pleasure center, and ignore food, sex, etc... Monkeys will easily get addicted to alcohol, some drugs, etc...
I think that the average human is still less likely that the average rat to die of hunger and bed sores because of an addiction. But now my girlfriend has gone to bed, and I better go play Mount & Blade while she cannot object.
Well, I'm no Apple fanboy - I have not owned anything from Apple since the Apple IIe, but I recently recommended ordering a number of pads for our company's salesmen. They look nice, they are simple as shit, and they are just fine for showing the product to the customers, and accessing the company's webpages. I am even reworking some of the existing front ends to our ERP software to fit the iPad's limited abilities.
So, yeah, it can be a productivity tool. We tried doing the same with Acer notebooks, and of the four people who tested the idea, one broke his notebook physically, two got totally swamped with viruses (salesmen are dumb as shit and like their porn) and the fourth uses it to this day... but the project got killed. We now have two testing using the iPad, and three weeks into it, they are both happy. The notebook guy is also an ardent proponent to getting iPads... So we have 42 on order.
Hey, if we are going to go for anecdotal difference, here's mine.
My best friend is a fan, he has been making us watch it every time he has a chance, and on Saturday he said 'Everyone to whom I've shown it loves it'... despite the fact that there are groans every time he pulls out the DVD case.
I don't like cowboys, I hate the casual disregard for realism, and the commanding officer is a reckless, incompetent egotist who would get a bullet in the back of the head the second time he pulls the crew endangering crap he's so fond of. It's especially jarring because there are at least two crew members who have the motive, means and oportunity to do something like that.
My guess in general ? No. In the company I work in? Hell, no.
1. The manager is the owner. My disagreement from 2001, the reasons for it, and the suggested alternative are in his inbox. 2. It's been serving us faithfully for nearly nine years. No one gets fired for having engineered something like that. 3. It's trivial to run an emulator with the sole purpose to access our point of sale front end to ANOTHER obsolete app. 4. Rewriting the four sites that will not work with newer versions is not impossible, or that costly. Just unnecessary. 5. In the world of private ownership, department heads don't fire get fired for mistakes in the past, but for failure to handle the present. 7. No one got fired for buying IBM^H^H^H Microsoft.
You'd have a better chance in court if you shot them while they were on your property than if you electrocuted them with a contraption that was clearly non-accidental.
Hell yeah:-) My desk sports a LasetJet5 made in May 1996, a modem M made in April 1997, and a Hitachi 24" CRT made in March 1995. The monitor takes a few minutes to warm up, but the rest is rock solid.
You know, it is far from easy to implement a "secondary, encrypted, trusted "update partition" that only the Windows root can edit, and only during shutdown" on a PC that has been rooted, unless you support this in hardware. And I can already hear the screaming and gnashing of teeth if some people, present company very much included, learned that PCs come with something like that.
I would certainly not be happy running hardware that I knew had something that I and no one I know could get into. And I can get into it, it's not that "trusted", is it?
Actually, no. Not unless the gun has a bullet in chamber, is off safety, and pointed at me. But if all the above are true, then a handgun at one foot is just as good. I fence. 10 meters is not much distance at all.
In my experience, most shooting instructors have 21 feet as the range at which a knife wielding amateur has the drop, if he start acting first, on a trained shooter with a gun in a quick draw holster. Our brains need time to see, process, decide, send the signal to the limbs... Of course, the instructors drill this in the trainee so that they understand that at this point, they need to shoot, as opposed to wait to see what the knife guy will do.
And a fencer with a sword will touch at 10 meters in the time an average person with a knife will cover 7 meters. My personal time under 1.3 seconds for 9 yards. From guard. (No, I am not an Olympic class sprinter. The lunge at the end is what makes a huge difference.)
It was no accident that I gave Feta cheese as an example. Feta is not a region in Greece. It is accepted that Feta derives from an Italian word meaning slice. I also think that it is quite a stretch to claim that cheeses are 'just' processed milk. After all, the EU forbid members to produce 'Feta' cheese because their recipes sometimes used other than goat milk. And yes, 'Feta cheese' is definitely an AOC in Europe.
In English, as far as I know, 'Feta cheese' is used to describe all kinds of 'Greek-style', 'Brine', or 'White cheese'. So yes, it would be illegal in Europe, for someone to make his own white cheese, even if he is using goat milk (i.e. the proper procedure), and call it Feta. And if you happen to only speak English, you have to think up another name.
So please, before you 'grrrr' at me, check your facts.
In the same way that Bulgaria, Serbia, and Belgium produce 'cheap knockoffs' of Feta cheese, but have to call it something else, because Greece has been awarded the 'copyright' by the EU?
"Appellation d'origine contrôlée" has existed for centuries, and there are plenty of sensible arguments for and against it. I would not mind seeing where Slashdot stands on that issue, but presenting what Malaysia is doing as a brand new concept is ridiculous.
In your example, the answer is quite clear. But lets imagine that you did not break all your bones, and just dislocated your elbow, and there is a guy who suggests to re-set it (a lot of pain, and a damn good chance of full and quick recovery) and one guy who insist on slapping a plaster cast over the dislocated joint, and who will milk you over the injury for months.
And now for the completely non-hypothetical. In the army I broke my wrist. The sergeant thought it was just dislocated, because "I did not whine enough for a fracture" (I've passed kidney stones, and most pain does not begin to compare) He tried to quickly fix it, by jerking on my hand, and may have made it worse. So it can go both ways, and yes, it would be nice if we were better at diagnosis.
The original poster does have a point - practitioners may have an economic incentive to "up-diagnose". I also know that the worst quack can actually end up having a amazingly positive effect on a patient, whether the latter is actually suffering from a real problem, or only thinks he is.
And the problem, I, personally, have with "mental health therapists" is that they cannot convince ME, that what they are doing is actual science (the problem may be MINE, I won't argue that) So, I, personally, have never used their services, and never will. At the same time, I am sure that they can be good for some people, and would not dream of trying to convince someone else that they are engaged in "hand waving".
Slashdot Mirror
You are confusing two issues. Yes, you can take guns on your plane. BUT, you can not carry your guns through a public checkpoint, then walk through a public area to get to your plane.
I feel dumb having to explain this, so think about it for a second. Once past the checkpoint, you could give away your guns (or have them stolen, or have them forcibly taken away) Then someone else would be free to take those weapons on a different plane. The officials were 100% correct in what they did.
Amen to this.
I still have my job, and have never bothered to install back doors. But I am think about moving to a different position/geographical location, and am trying to get rid of all my hacks and cludges so that my replacement can have an easier time. Let me tell, with both of us working on this 2-3 hours each week, we are nowhere close to getting rid of all the crap.
Just a simple example, of which we got rid last week. In 1997 when I had been just hired, my company was in the process of changing its ERP software. The problem was that they had a front end to it that had been written by an outside contractor whom they had fired. He did not put backdoors or anything, but no one had realized that the front end would not work with the new SQL based solution.
Because the problem was dropped in my lap, I ended up hacking together a really ugly, brute force solution - watching the front end server process for disk access requests, putting it to sleep, and creating the old style file on the fly. Thirteen years later, the company owner and two of his close friends who head two of our 50 warehouses refuse to use any other front end. So until last week, I had a compiled program with full access to the main ERP database, to the payroll's server physical disk and to a modem. Good luck finding that.
And yes, I realize that it was a terrible thing to leave active for more than a decade. But seriously, who remembers to go back and work on something like this unless it breaks? The only reason it's gone is that I am trying to tidy things up before I move... and if I was not moving within the company, I doubt I would be so nice.
I think that we can all agree that the 'magic' cables are going to pass the same 0s and 1s as any working cable. Still, it is not impossible that the 'magic' cables result in better sound. Allow me to play devil's advocate.
For example, non-magic cables might produce EM fields that may interfere with the audio equipment generating the sound that the blogged was listening to. The magic cables, with better shielding, might not, and thus, despite transporting the same 0s and 1s, result in better quality.
Of course, given the low voltage and current involved, I do not believe this for a second.
The tallest horse skeleton from that period barely passes the horse/pony barrier (by 3cm) The average horse of the period was 1.3m tall and the bones suggest that it weighted about 30% less than the light riding horses of today. It probably would not have be able to go very fast or very far with a rider. Yes, people rode them sometimes, but mostly they were used in chariots.
In a race between a rider and Tut's chariot, I'd definitely bet on the chariot, even with a driver in addition to the Pharaoh.
How do you decide which rights God supports and how do you explain rights to someone who laughs at your specific idea of a Supreme Being? And do you believe that the "Declaration of Independence" is divinely inspired, as opposed to Sharia law, for example? Now, I happen to abhor one, and respect the other, and am very, very scared that someone would think that the best way to decide which one should be enforced is to decide which one is ACTUALLY inspired by God.
For example, I know people who believe that one has the right not to be offended. Others believe that one has the right to speak one's mind. I'm trying to use neutral language and failing, so maybe I should frame it as 'Grow a thicker skin, you wimp!' VS 'Stop harassing me, you bigot!'
Given that God has never spoken to me, I do not know which of the above two 'rights' is natural. I am sure that you, just like me, have an opinion on which right is a right and which one is not. I assure you that I can come up with 'rights' on which a Muslim and a Christian will disagree, and 'rights' on which a Chinese and a Frenchman will find each other's position risible.
So, how do we decide what's a right, and how do we protect those rights? I trust debate and voting a lot more than people who know what God intends, or autocrats who 'know' the right way, and the power to enforce it.
Sure, but you "have all rights, except what is limited" only if a particular society, the United States of America in this case, is willing and able to enforce the Bill of Rights. There is nothing natural about this. Furthermore, even this very specific society has added some rights and removed others.
My point is not that rights are bad, or that we have less/more rights. My point is that rights are not natural, and two humans from different backgrounds will probably not agree on which rights should be protected.
Rights come from the ability of some entity to enforce them. Unless you believe in a Supreme Being of some flavour, that means a society. It may be as informal as public disapproval, or as brutal as men-with-guns, but given human nature, no rights exist without the ability to protect them. Well, maybe the right to privacy in your thoughts, but that's only because there no technology to protect it against... yet.
There are NO natural rights. There are only rights that we have granted ourselves by organizing into societies that defend them. And yes, that is one of the main reasons for having societies.
So tell me, do you believe that the right of own property is given to us by God Himself, and He will descend from Heaven to defend it? Or are you a supersoldier that can secure his property against any warlord and his well armed thugs?
Because if neither is the case, then your property is yours ONLY because there is a society that defends it, and that same society requires you to get permission before you start projects that MAY affect society. You could damage utilities lines/pipes, you could create a mosquito breeding ground, and yes, you could spoil the view of your next door neighbor.
You cannot take only some of what society bring, and shun the rest. You can and should work toward changing what you do not like within the rules. I personally do not like many, many of my home association rules, but I dislike the communities that lack any rules.
In Europe, or at least every country I've lived in, people measure fuel consumption in Liters-Needed-For-100-kilometers. I think that it works better than the way we are doing it here in the US.
You are exactly right. It is actually illegal in some jurisdiction (Nevada, at least) to make a gambling machine where the user's skill can influence the outcome. Even the ones that look like a video game where you control an avatar (a dude, a car or a spaceship) are absolutely not rewarding skill or penalizing inability.
Actually, rats will push a button that sends an impulse to their pleasure center, and ignore food, sex, etc... Monkeys will easily get addicted to alcohol, some drugs, etc...
I think that the average human is still less likely that the average rat to die of hunger and bed sores because of an addiction. But now my girlfriend has gone to bed, and I better go play Mount & Blade while she cannot object.
Well, I'm no Apple fanboy - I have not owned anything from Apple since the Apple IIe, but I recently recommended ordering a number of pads for our company's salesmen. They look nice, they are simple as shit, and they are just fine for showing the product to the customers, and accessing the company's webpages. I am even reworking some of the existing front ends to our ERP software to fit the iPad's limited abilities.
So, yeah, it can be a productivity tool. We tried doing the same with Acer notebooks, and of the four people who tested the idea, one broke his notebook physically, two got totally swamped with viruses (salesmen are dumb as shit and like their porn) and the fourth uses it to this day... but the project got killed. We now have two testing using the iPad, and three weeks into it, they are both happy. The notebook guy is also an ardent proponent to getting iPads... So we have 42 on order.
Hey, if we are going to go for anecdotal difference, here's mine.
My best friend is a fan, he has been making us watch it every time he has a chance, and on Saturday he said 'Everyone to whom I've shown it loves it'... despite the fact that there are groans every time he pulls out the DVD case.
I don't like cowboys, I hate the casual disregard for realism, and the commanding officer is a reckless, incompetent egotist who would get a bullet in the back of the head the second time he pulls the crew endangering crap he's so fond of. It's especially jarring because there are at least two crew members who have the motive, means and oportunity to do something like that.
Dr.Horrible, on the other hand, I enjoyed. A lot.
Or c) that communications are disrupted (as the newspaper article claimed).
Correct on both counts.
My guess in general ? No. In the company I work in? Hell, no.
1. The manager is the owner. My disagreement from 2001, the reasons for it, and the suggested alternative are in his inbox.
2. It's been serving us faithfully for nearly nine years. No one gets fired for having engineered something like that.
3. It's trivial to run an emulator with the sole purpose to access our point of sale front end to ANOTHER obsolete app.
4. Rewriting the four sites that will not work with newer versions is not impossible, or that costly. Just unnecessary.
5. In the world of private ownership, department heads don't fire get fired for mistakes in the past, but for failure to handle the present.
7. No one got fired for buying IBM^H^H^H Microsoft.
You'd have a better chance in court if you shot them while they were on your property
than if you electrocuted them with a contraption that was clearly non-accidental.
Hell yeah :-) My desk sports a LasetJet5 made in May 1996, a modem M made in April 1997, and a Hitachi 24" CRT made in March 1995.
The monitor takes a few minutes to warm up, but the rest is rock solid.
You know, it is far from easy to implement a "secondary, encrypted, trusted "update partition" that only the Windows root can edit, and only during shutdown" on a PC that has been rooted, unless you support this in hardware. And I can already hear the screaming and gnashing of teeth if some people, present company very much included, learned that PCs come with something like that.
I would certainly not be happy running hardware that I knew had something that I and no one I know could get into. And I can get into it, it's not that "trusted", is it?
Actually, no. Not unless the gun has a bullet in chamber, is off safety, and pointed at me. But if all the above are true, then a handgun at one foot is just as good. I fence. 10 meters is not much distance at all.
In my experience, most shooting instructors have 21 feet as the range at which a knife wielding amateur has the drop, if he start acting first, on a trained shooter with a gun in a quick draw holster. Our brains need time to see, process, decide, send the signal to the limbs... Of course, the instructors drill this in the trainee so that they understand that at this point, they need to shoot, as opposed to wait to see what the knife guy will do.
And a fencer with a sword will touch at 10 meters in the time an average person with a knife will cover 7 meters. My personal time under 1.3 seconds for 9 yards. From guard. (No, I am not an Olympic class sprinter. The lunge at the end is what makes a huge difference.)
Thirty meters is a different story.
By the way, look up Tueller's Drill: http://www.google.com/search?q=Tueller+Drill
It was no accident that I gave Feta cheese as an example. Feta is not a region in Greece. It is accepted that Feta derives from an Italian word meaning slice. I also think that it is quite a stretch to claim that cheeses are 'just' processed milk. After all, the EU forbid members to produce 'Feta' cheese because their recipes sometimes used other than goat milk. And yes, 'Feta cheese' is definitely an AOC in Europe.
In English, as far as I know, 'Feta cheese' is used to describe all kinds of 'Greek-style', 'Brine', or 'White cheese'. So yes, it would be illegal in Europe, for someone to make his own white cheese, even if he is using goat milk (i.e. the proper procedure), and call it Feta. And if you happen to only speak English, you have to think up another name.
So please, before you 'grrrr' at me, check your facts.
In the same way that Bulgaria, Serbia, and Belgium produce 'cheap knockoffs' of Feta cheese, but have to call it something else, because Greece has been awarded the 'copyright' by the EU?
"Appellation d'origine contrôlée" has existed for centuries, and there are plenty of sensible arguments for and against it. I would not mind seeing where Slashdot stands on that issue, but presenting what Malaysia is doing as a brand new concept is ridiculous.
No, he is saying that 50% of the 66% (overweight ones) are obese.
Yeah, it's the same in Bulgarian. By the way, in English, it can also refer to
the contest itself and the nitpickers above are simply wrong.
In your example, the answer is quite clear. But lets imagine that you did not break all your bones, and just dislocated your elbow, and there is a guy who suggests to re-set it (a lot of pain, and a damn good chance of full and quick recovery) and one guy who insist on slapping a plaster cast over the dislocated joint, and who will milk you over the injury for months.
And now for the completely non-hypothetical. In the army I broke my wrist. The sergeant thought it was just dislocated, because "I did not whine enough for a fracture" (I've passed kidney stones, and most pain does not begin to compare) He tried to quickly fix it, by jerking on my hand, and may have made it worse. So it can go both ways, and yes, it would be nice if we were better at diagnosis.
The original poster does have a point - practitioners may have an economic incentive to "up-diagnose". I also know that the worst quack can actually end up having a amazingly positive effect on a patient, whether the latter is actually suffering from a real problem, or only thinks he is.
And the problem, I, personally, have with "mental health therapists" is that they cannot convince ME, that what they are doing is actual science (the problem may be MINE, I won't argue that) So, I, personally, have never used their services, and never will. At the same time, I am sure that they can be good for some people, and would not dream of trying to convince someone else that they are engaged in "hand waving".