All the post shows is that the tracking still happens, it just isn't very accurate.
The data seems good enough to tell where you've been, just maybe not good enough to track your exact whereabouts by the minute. So maybe it takes note of the position at the times the GPS chip already happens to be active, and not constantly at regular intervals like a proper tracker would.
Still that seems to do nothing to disprove that the phone's location is being logged often enough to figure out where you've been, and to me it still amounts to a huge violation of privacy.
He mentions Android doing the same. That's no excuse, if Android does that it also should stop doing it.
1. You can't emit high amperage current. You can restrict current with a resistor, you can make a circuit that allows too much current to be drawn, and you can make a circuit that allows for a lot of current to flow safely. But you can't forcefully push current into something.
2. USB operates at a fixed 5 volts, so a phone is very unlikely to have any suitable voltage regulation circuitry connected to the USB connector. Good luck getting your own in there, it's all tiny surface mount components pretty much impossible to solder by hand, and without any spare room inside.
3. Most phones can't operate in host mode, so they can't power the USB port and only receive power from it.
Technically the idea is possible, but it's very impractical to do in a phone.
Flash(yes even the supposedly hardware accelerated version) takes my mac book from 6 hours of surfing off the battery to 2 hours
So does constantly compiling stuff using both cores on my laptop. Yet Ubuntu doesn't seem to be about to stop shipping GCC, just because it can suck battery life.
I want to be able to compile, or run flash when I need to, battery life be damned.
Science is simply the formalization of the things we do on an everyday basis, and which are entirely essential to our functioning. To ask what would you do if they stopped working is about as meaningful as asking what would you do if you suddenly became an octopus, physically and mentally.
But, all that stuff you're saying isn't really meaningful in your own religion, as your own bible contains ample mentions of people thinking for themselves, being devious (Jacob, for instance) and the world working in an very predictable way unless altered by a miracle.
To postulate something entirely different ought to qualify as some sort of heresy, I think.
but now perhaps you understand why many christians are quite unhappy about the prospect of their worldview evaporating. To them it's a permanent and eternal suicide.
Problem is their worldview doesn't stand up to the evidence.
All over the world people came up with their own weird religions. Even christianity has many, many subdivisions. That's good evidence that what religions profess have very little relationship with reality, because if it there was any, there'd be maybe 3 christian denominations, not 38000.
Now science, it is the same everywhere. e = mc^2 here, in the US, in China, in Pakistan, on the north pole and on the moon.
It's not really a new concept it looks like this. It's just not very practical.
From what I heard the problem with this kind of thing is that it takes two trucks worth of equipment to setup, lots of power, cooling and chemicals (since it's a dye laser). Now on a ship that's a lot less of a problem.
From what I understand, the kind of mirror used in a laser is extremely efficient, tuned to the laser's frequency, sealed in a chamber that doesn't have a spec of dust in it, and has an active cooling system. This can be done in a special environment like inside an enclosed mechanism, but a missile isn't going to be able to have this kind of thing on its surface.
I'm pretty sure it's the first. It's really ideal for such a role. Also:
There doesn't have to be a capacitor that needs charging if the ship can provide enough power. There's probably a capacitor in there somewhere, but it most likely doesn't work like a camera flash. It's probably more limited by heating.
There's no reason for it to miss, given that it's a laser and unlike in Star Wars, in reality those move at the speed of light. All it needs is a positioning system capable of keeping up.
It's also most likely can probably keep going for at least a few seconds. The aim can be adjusted while it keeps lasing, so an initial miss isn't necessarily a problem.
Scientific investigation isn't just particle physics. It goes much lower down.
Saying that the scientific method no longer works is saying that you no longer can figure out building something by stacking bricks.
The scientific method basically is:
1. Define the question 2. Gather information and resources (observe) 3. Form hypothesis 4. Perform experiment and collect data 5. Analyze data 6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis 7. Publish results 8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
So what does it mean that this no longer works, in general?
1. You're unable to define a question. Definitely too stupid for religion. 2. You're unable to gather information. You can't listen to prophets or preachers or read a bible either, then. 3. You're unable to think, having the intelligence of an insect. At the very least you can't figure out any implications from what your religion says.
Really this no longer working makes you braindead. Without this you can't do something as simple as noticing there's no food in the fridge, and figuring out that means you should buy some.
4. and 8. If these don't work it means that the world is unpredictable. Meaning that if you stack two bricks, sometimes one explodes, or turns into gold, or vanishes, or makes you turn blue, and it's entirely random every time. The universe is completely unpredictable and no rules can be deduced from anything. You can't build a church of make a bible in such an universe, because they rely on processes that are predictable (like that stacking bricks in a certain way results in a building able to stand).
5. and 6. Lack of this as well indicates extreme stupidity that would make you unable to deal with the fridge, as well as with that you're supposed to put your pants on before going to church.
7. Lack of this means people are unable to communicate, and so no longer human. You certainly lack ability to preach in this case.
That's not necessarily true: an all-powerful being could arbitrarily change the universe on a whim and leave religious experience as the only reliable way to survive. Such a being could actively thwart scientific investigation and only reward blind obedience. What would Dawkins' do then?
Commit suicide if he still could figure out how, I guess? I'd gladly join him, because that's the heck of an unpleasant situation to live in.
I don't think you're thinking about the full consequences of something like this:
in this imagined universe you're unable to put your pants on without divine intervention, and lack any free will. The entire population will have to be controlled by divine puppet strings, because you've removed everything that makes humans intelligent. These people won't be able to read a bible.
In general, the correct way is whatever the project you're working on currently uses.
The argument is mostly about "I prefer having braces lined up" vs "I prefer seeing more lines of code". That's not about strict correctness, just tradeoffs.
If the scientific method no longer worked, religion wouldn't either.
The scientific method is based on that the world is consistent. You dare to take a step forward because you're very sure the floor isn't about to suddenly disappear underneath, or a wall isn't going to materialize right in front, or that the space in front of you isn't going to turn out to be devoid of oxygen.
Now given this predictability, we can formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and formulate theories that explain how stuff works.
Religion is based on handed down rules, not on discovery and experimentation, but it still depends on the world being predictable. You couldn't have a bible if the world kept on changing at random.
For that matter, life wouldn't exist in such a world, because life is all about observing the environment, making predictions, and adjusting what you're doing to try to perpetuate your own existence.
If it's a good implementation, I don't have a problem.
I once tried Quake 3 in anaglyph mode and that was painful. But anaglyph always was a bad way of doing it. Now well done 3D with good hardware? No problem at all. I've watched about 5 hours worth of 3D movies without a problem, and played fast paced games for about that long in 3D on a Zalman monitor.
I do not believe that the physical death of the body is the worst thing that can happen to a person.
Neither I. Some forms of living can be really horrible.
God knows all things, but we don't. If God keeps us from the extremes, we will never have a hope of knowing all things.
Why wouldn't we want to know all things?
I suppose you're going to ask how I can argue against killing people if I assert that it's okay for God to let people do dangerous things? There are lots of things God can do without being evil that we would be evil to do. Partly, it's because He can and does take care of the mess.
I hold that the morality of an action is evaluated at the time it takes place. Repairing the damage doesn't change the morality of the original action. It might invite leniency or forgiveness, but a wrong was still committed anyway.
Take for instance the story I heard about the Skull and Bones society at Yale. Apparently it's something of a club for crazy rich kids. The story goes that one of the ways they had to amuse themselves was to completely trash a restaurant, then at the end throw a heap of cash at the owner for covering the repairs.
So your claim here is that if they can (and perhaps guarantee) "take care of the mess", by for instance giving the owner enough cash for full repairs and compensating for the lost business, there's no moral issue with such a thing?
BTW, you're preaching to the choir when you talk to me about how making the world too easy denatures art.
No, you're missing the point completely. What I mean is, for some people being crazy is the defining part of their personality. A sane Van Gogh or Dali might have become a store clerk, or just paint good but unremarkable portraits and landscapes, and be forgotten by history.
So, if Van Gogh goes to heaven, who arrives? The crazy guy? But then he's still crazy and suffering from it, and that makes heaven not very appealing. Van Gogh minus the crazy? But then that's not Van Gogh.
Somehow it seems to me that you are misreading my arguments. I am telling you that heaven is specifically not the brainless happy state that you seem to have become convinced that Christianiity teaches it is, and you keep trying to tell me that I'm wrong to believe in a heaven that is brainless bliss.
It practically has to be that, or it wouldn't be very heavenly. Eternity is a long time and provides plenty chances to get horribly bored. If there are other people there, you'll eventually bump into somebody whose guts you'll really hate, if they're anything like normal people.
But for that matter, where do you get your idea of what's it like? How are you sure you won't end up in say, Valhalla?
And I think you would not disagree that collective ritual for the sake of community building is necessarily bad, if not overdone or repeated invoked without (heh) thought?
It can be bad when done at the expense of something more useful. Having a convenient and satisfying ritual at hand easily frees you from the need to do something. Doing something, no matter how pointless, can easily trick yourself into believing you've done your part, and settled the matter.
That's rather low on the scale of badness of course, but I wouldn't want to encourage it.
The example about the red light, I am a parent. I have been in situations where I watched my children walk into danger from their own choices. I tried to talk them out of those choices, but they insisted. In some cases the danger has been physical and I have actually resorted, initally, to physical means to prevent them, but when they refuse to listen, well, preventing them from learning from their mistakes is also a form of abuse.
Within limits of course. Hopefully you don't intentionally let them get hit by a car or blow up the building just to teach a lesson.
I personally don't consider idealism, cynicism, depression, being just plain tired, losing brain function, etc. as changes to personality, per se. These things are functional issues, and if the resurrection restores the body, surely it will restore the brain.
Why not? You mean you don't know anybody whose excessive optimism, paranoia or depression is a defining characteristic of who they are?
For some people those things have far reaching implications. I suspect quite a few writers and painters would never have produced most of their work if they had an easy life.
But my experience is that, for example, if one doesn't want to learn how to program in Java, one can read all the books on Java that there are and even go through the motions of typing in the examples and still not be able to program in Java. Wanting something is not a bad thing.
You're not following the right motions then.
Programming isn't about copying examples from a book. Trying to learn programming by ritual is probably the worst way there is. Programming is about thinking and understanding, and rigid following of orders is the computer's job.
You definitely can learn against your will, if done in the right way. If forced to lift weights you'll get stronger, no matter how much you hate it. School has a lot of that kind of thing. Not saying that it's the best way to do it, but it does work.
Moments of silence not used to to figure out what one can do are wasted. Pondering that doesn't include assessment and conclusion is not much use, either. Likewise, prayer. Prayer only for form is weak medicine. This is what I mean when I suggest that there is more to religion than you have considered. We put into it what we choose to put into it, and we get out of it what we put into it.
If moments of silence were for thinking, they wouldn't exist in the first place. Instead we'd have "moments of thinking" where everybody would go for an hour or two and think in the way that works for them. Maybe sitting on a bench in a park, or in the kitchen with a cup of tea. Alternately, we'd do a brainstorming session.
People can't do deep thinking on a 5 minutes schedule. Moments of silence aren't about thinking, they're about doing a collective ritual for the sake of community building.
The difference is that the people there are actually having a revolution there.
It may be surprising, but people can manage to live pretty well under a dictator. For many people a dictator doesn't mean that much in practice. They still go on with living their lives, and it generally works OK even without freedom of speech or justice. If you remove a dictator in a place like that a lot of people won't be sure where to go next. So chaos is near guaranteed.
Now where there is an outright civil war it's different. It's clear the people want somebody else in the ruling position and that they will fight to get there. And that they have some sort of plan for when they do that. Of course it's not a guarantee, but the chances of something good coming out of that is much higher.
From what I gather the components being removed are most likely resistors and capacitors. And sure, some can be probably removed, if you don't mind ending up with a noisy power supply and too much current going to various parts.
So you're left with a device that kind of works, but that may mysteriously stop working in a few months.
I'll dissent a bit and say that IMO this is a fairly good ruling.
That's not to say it should be legal, but it should fall under a different law, something like "theft of services". Like whatever law applies to hooking up to somebody else's electricity or water supply.
I don't think breaking into somebody else's computer, and using their internet connection without permission are equivalent. They're done for different reasons, though they may be connected, and the seriousness isn't the same.
Actually I agree on drugs, prostitution and gambling.
But think of what legalized bribing means. First, if you can legally ask for one, and everybody else asks for one, why wouldn't you? So it's effectively a tax on every service. Want to send mail? The post office employee wants a bribe. Want mail delivered? The postman wants one too. Need a tire changed? Well, maybe next week unless you can "tip" the mechanic. You don't pay, work doesn't get done. That's very inefficient.
Then the other consequences: no security anywhere. You can be legally killed. A coworker can bribe your boss if he doesn't like you. Want a harem of 10 year old girls? No problem if you can pay the price. People don't like it? You can bribe the police to make sure they stop bothering you. It effectively eliminates law and makes it be whatever somebody is paying for today. And it probably changes depending on where you are.
Even supposing you think you could manage living in that kind of madness, it wouldn't work all that well for you. After all, most wealth belongs to a very small amount of people, and you're most likely not in that list. It would take possibly millions of people to out-bribe somebody of the caliber of Murdoch, and you're out of luck if what he wants is a return of the Prohibition. Now he can legally get any law he wants passed, and make sure it's enforced by paying whoever needs to be paid.
I approve of Wikileaks especially when it leaks stuff about my country (not the US). I don't subscribe to bullshit like patriotism. The more data, the better, and the more likely something can be done to fix the problems.
I really hope you're trolling because it's that much of an insane statement.
But supposing are you serious: Let's say bribes are legal. How would that work exactly? Should laws come with a price attached? Pay $1M, and we forget that murder?
Because it's entirely legitimate to test an applicant's knowledge, and reject them if they don't know what they're supposed to.
This law is equivalent to making it illegal to discriminate against programmers who are convinced there's nothing wrong with dereferencing an uninitialized pointer.
Think about what this law means in its ultimate extent: The student may answer the question "Where did homo sapiens come from" with "From my ass", and it'd have to be scored as correct.
Your example about the red light? Do you have children? Do you know how hard it is to get them to listen to common sense some times?
No, but I remember being one. Sure, parents aren't all powerful. That's why people should only be held responsible only as far as they are capable of doing something.
I expect you will again assert that God should be able to save such a child even if the parent was simple unable to react fast enough. But you skip a whole lot of other possibilities.
Yep
For example, which is going to be more emotionally damaging? Getting hit by a car and then finding himself alive (as a spirit) in a different world, a world connected to this but different, perhaps being met by the people who were his grandparents in this world, or being hauled around in a harness from age two because the parents ar unwilling to let the poor child make any "wrong" decisions?
You seem to only think of extremes. As if I was advocating having every kid on a leash, or something. No, I'm just saying that for the sake of example: That if while you're watching and have plenty time and ability to react you just stand there and watch your kid run into a busy street, that it doesn't constitute good parenting.
Which version of heaven? God owns this universe. He has all versions of heaven that are necessary. People go to the heaven they are willing to prepare in this life to receive. It's a little more involved than that, because many people don't get all the chances they should in this life and God can and does make allowances for that, but forces no one to a heaven they don't want.
No, which version of you I mean.
Your personality can dramatically change through the time. One can be idealistic and liberal as a teenager, depressed and conservative as an adult, and then get Alzheimer and forget about pretty much everything. Some illnesses can even cause your personality to switch back and forth. So which of those would be the true you?
Now you could conceivably say that at the very least the version of you without Alzheimer. What about things like Down Syndrome? Some things are permanent and are there from birth. Then the healthy version of that person never existed in the first place.
Then there's that many things like that aren't just "on" or "off", they're on a spectrum where too much of it may lead to a miserable life, but the right amount works wonders.
Hell is mostly for people who aren't willing to go to heaven at all. No, don't tell me you don't think people would willingly reject heaven. There are plenty of people who don't like having to make choices, and heaven is full of choices.
Nah, I don't doubt it at all. All the religious ideas of heaven sound rather horrible to me. If christian hell is something of a torture pit, then the christian heaven is some sort of Ned Flanders' "Re-Neducation" style world, with lobotomy and all.
None of the things that you think motivate me in heaven? I think otherwise. But, then, the heaven I would choose is not the heaven you thought you were describing, by any means.
How are you so sure you'll get to choose? I don't remember anything in the bible about that
Personality being linked to the brain? FWIW, the body will not be resurrected without the brain.
But I think you're jumping to conclusions. We can demonstrate, for instance, that certain stimulations to the brain can cut temper short, but, then, so can sleep deprivation. Those, and all other experiments I've seen mostly demonstrate that we are human, and subject to a variety of influences, rather than demonstrating that we would have no personality without a brain.
Nope, it's pretty well tested. Thanks to things like research, experiments and studies of brain damage we already know pretty w
Slashdot Mirror
All the post shows is that the tracking still happens, it just isn't very accurate.
The data seems good enough to tell where you've been, just maybe not good enough to track your exact whereabouts by the minute. So maybe it takes note of the position at the times the GPS chip already happens to be active, and not constantly at regular intervals like a proper tracker would.
Still that seems to do nothing to disprove that the phone's location is being logged often enough to figure out where you've been, and to me it still amounts to a huge violation of privacy.
He mentions Android doing the same. That's no excuse, if Android does that it also should stop doing it.
Would be the heck of a modification.
1. You can't emit high amperage current. You can restrict current with a resistor, you can make a circuit that allows too much current to be drawn, and you can make a circuit that allows for a lot of current to flow safely. But you can't forcefully push current into something.
2. USB operates at a fixed 5 volts, so a phone is very unlikely to have any suitable voltage regulation circuitry connected to the USB connector. Good luck getting your own in there, it's all tiny surface mount components pretty much impossible to solder by hand, and without any spare room inside.
3. Most phones can't operate in host mode, so they can't power the USB port and only receive power from it.
Technically the idea is possible, but it's very impractical to do in a phone.
Otherwise I imagine the hacker will try to put up a demonstration.
i wonder what can be done with access to that system.
So does constantly compiling stuff using both cores on my laptop. Yet Ubuntu doesn't seem to be about to stop shipping GCC, just because it can suck battery life.
I want to be able to compile, or run flash when I need to, battery life be damned.
All that is a bunch of nonsense.
Science is simply the formalization of the things we do on an everyday basis, and which are entirely essential to our functioning. To ask what would you do if they stopped working is about as meaningful as asking what would you do if you suddenly became an octopus, physically and mentally.
But, all that stuff you're saying isn't really meaningful in your own religion, as your own bible contains ample mentions of people thinking for themselves, being devious (Jacob, for instance) and the world working in an very predictable way unless altered by a miracle.
To postulate something entirely different ought to qualify as some sort of heresy, I think.
Problem is their worldview doesn't stand up to the evidence.
All over the world people came up with their own weird religions. Even christianity has many, many subdivisions. That's good evidence that what religions profess have very little relationship with reality, because if it there was any, there'd be maybe 3 christian denominations, not 38000.
Now science, it is the same everywhere. e = mc^2 here, in the US, in China, in Pakistan, on the north pole and on the moon.
It's not really a new concept it looks like this. It's just not very practical.
From what I heard the problem with this kind of thing is that it takes two trucks worth of equipment to setup, lots of power, cooling and chemicals (since it's a dye laser). Now on a ship that's a lot less of a problem.
From what I understand, the kind of mirror used in a laser is extremely efficient, tuned to the laser's frequency, sealed in a chamber that doesn't have a spec of dust in it, and has an active cooling system. This can be done in a special environment like inside an enclosed mechanism, but a missile isn't going to be able to have this kind of thing on its surface.
I'm pretty sure it's the first. It's really ideal for such a role. Also:
There doesn't have to be a capacitor that needs charging if the ship can provide enough power. There's probably a capacitor in there somewhere, but it most likely doesn't work like a camera flash. It's probably more limited by heating.
There's no reason for it to miss, given that it's a laser and unlike in Star Wars, in reality those move at the speed of light. All it needs is a positioning system capable of keeping up.
It's also most likely can probably keep going for at least a few seconds. The aim can be adjusted while it keeps lasing, so an initial miss isn't necessarily a problem.
Scientific investigation isn't just particle physics. It goes much lower down.
Saying that the scientific method no longer works is saying that you no longer can figure out building something by stacking bricks.
The scientific method basically is:
1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources (observe)
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
So what does it mean that this no longer works, in general?
1. You're unable to define a question. Definitely too stupid for religion.
2. You're unable to gather information. You can't listen to prophets or preachers or read a bible either, then.
3. You're unable to think, having the intelligence of an insect. At the very least you can't figure out any implications from what your religion says.
Really this no longer working makes you braindead. Without this you can't do something as simple as noticing there's no food in the fridge, and figuring out that means you should buy some.
4. and 8. If these don't work it means that the world is unpredictable. Meaning that if you stack two bricks, sometimes one explodes, or turns into gold, or vanishes, or makes you turn blue, and it's entirely random every time. The universe is completely unpredictable and no rules can be deduced from anything. You can't build a church of make a bible in such an universe, because they rely on processes that are predictable (like that stacking bricks in a certain way results in a building able to stand).
5. and 6. Lack of this as well indicates extreme stupidity that would make you unable to deal with the fridge, as well as with that you're supposed to put your pants on before going to church.
7. Lack of this means people are unable to communicate, and so no longer human. You certainly lack ability to preach in this case.
Commit suicide if he still could figure out how, I guess? I'd gladly join him, because that's the heck of an unpleasant situation to live in.
I don't think you're thinking about the full consequences of something like this:
in this imagined universe you're unable to put your pants on without divine intervention, and lack any free will. The entire population will have to be controlled by divine puppet strings, because you've removed everything that makes humans intelligent. These people won't be able to read a bible.
In the absolute sense, there's no correct way.
In general, the correct way is whatever the project you're working on currently uses.
The argument is mostly about "I prefer having braces lined up" vs "I prefer seeing more lines of code". That's not about strict correctness, just tradeoffs.
If the scientific method no longer worked, religion wouldn't either.
The scientific method is based on that the world is consistent. You dare to take a step forward because you're very sure the floor isn't about to suddenly disappear underneath, or a wall isn't going to materialize right in front, or that the space in front of you isn't going to turn out to be devoid of oxygen.
Now given this predictability, we can formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and formulate theories that explain how stuff works.
Religion is based on handed down rules, not on discovery and experimentation, but it still depends on the world being predictable. You couldn't have a bible if the world kept on changing at random.
For that matter, life wouldn't exist in such a world, because life is all about observing the environment, making predictions, and adjusting what you're doing to try to perpetuate your own existence.
If it's a good implementation, I don't have a problem.
I once tried Quake 3 in anaglyph mode and that was painful. But anaglyph always was a bad way of doing it. Now well done 3D with good hardware? No problem at all. I've watched about 5 hours worth of 3D movies without a problem, and played fast paced games for about that long in 3D on a Zalman monitor.
Defensive much? I don't see a reason to mention Microsoft at all.
Well said
Neither I. Some forms of living can be really horrible.
Why wouldn't we want to know all things?
I hold that the morality of an action is evaluated at the time it takes place. Repairing the damage doesn't change the morality of the original action. It might invite leniency or forgiveness, but a wrong was still committed anyway.
Take for instance the story I heard about the Skull and Bones society at Yale. Apparently it's something of a club for crazy rich kids. The story goes that one of the ways they had to amuse themselves was to completely trash a restaurant, then at the end throw a heap of cash at the owner for covering the repairs.
So your claim here is that if they can (and perhaps guarantee) "take care of the mess", by for instance giving the owner enough cash for full repairs and compensating for the lost business, there's no moral issue with such a thing?
No, you're missing the point completely. What I mean is, for some people being crazy is the defining part of their personality. A sane Van Gogh or Dali might have become a store clerk, or just paint good but unremarkable portraits and landscapes, and be forgotten by history.
So, if Van Gogh goes to heaven, who arrives? The crazy guy? But then he's still crazy and suffering from it, and that makes heaven not very appealing. Van Gogh minus the crazy? But then that's not Van Gogh.
It practically has to be that, or it wouldn't be very heavenly. Eternity is a long time and provides plenty chances to get horribly bored. If there are other people there, you'll eventually bump into somebody whose guts you'll really hate, if they're anything like normal people.
But for that matter, where do you get your idea of what's it like? How are you sure you won't end up in say, Valhalla?
It can be bad when done at the expense of something more useful. Having a convenient and satisfying ritual at hand easily frees you from the need to do something. Doing something, no matter how pointless, can easily trick yourself into believing you've done your part, and settled the matter.
That's rather low on the scale of badness of course, but I wouldn't want to encourage it.
Within limits of course. Hopefully you don't intentionally let them get hit by a car or blow up the building just to teach a lesson.
Why not? You mean you don't know anybody whose excessive optimism, paranoia or depression is a defining characteristic of who they are?
For some people those things have far reaching implications. I suspect quite a few writers and painters would never have produced most of their work if they had an easy life.
You're not following the right motions then.
Programming isn't about copying examples from a book. Trying to learn programming by ritual is probably the worst way there is. Programming is about thinking and understanding, and rigid following of orders is the computer's job.
You definitely can learn against your will, if done in the right way. If forced to lift weights you'll get stronger, no matter how much you hate it. School has a lot of that kind of thing. Not saying that it's the best way to do it, but it does work.
If moments of silence were for thinking, they wouldn't exist in the first place. Instead we'd have "moments of thinking" where everybody would go for an hour or two and think in the way that works for them. Maybe sitting on a bench in a park, or in the kitchen with a cup of tea. Alternately, we'd do a brainstorming session.
People can't do deep thinking on a 5 minutes schedule. Moments of silence aren't about thinking, they're about doing a collective ritual for the sake of community building.
As far as I can tell, the citizens of the country
That's easy, because the citizens decided they want somebody else in charge. If they get what they want, it'll be better for them.
Probably would have gone much better, yeah. Also the idea of liberation would have made a lot more sense back then.
Look at Iraq now, just who is the US fighting at the moment? Saddam's army? It's long gone. So who are you liberating and from who now?
The difference is that the people there are actually having a revolution there.
It may be surprising, but people can manage to live pretty well under a dictator. For many people a dictator doesn't mean that much in practice. They still go on with living their lives, and it generally works OK even without freedom of speech or justice. If you remove a dictator in a place like that a lot of people won't be sure where to go next. So chaos is near guaranteed.
Now where there is an outright civil war it's different. It's clear the people want somebody else in the ruling position and that they will fight to get there. And that they have some sort of plan for when they do that. Of course it's not a guarantee, but the chances of something good coming out of that is much higher.
Yeah, I'm not that crazy about that idea.
From what I gather the components being removed are most likely resistors and capacitors. And sure, some can be probably removed, if you don't mind ending up with a noisy power supply and too much current going to various parts.
So you're left with a device that kind of works, but that may mysteriously stop working in a few months.
I'll dissent a bit and say that IMO this is a fairly good ruling.
That's not to say it should be legal, but it should fall under a different law, something like "theft of services". Like whatever law applies to hooking up to somebody else's electricity or water supply.
I don't think breaking into somebody else's computer, and using their internet connection without permission are equivalent. They're done for different reasons, though they may be connected, and the seriousness isn't the same.
Actually I agree on drugs, prostitution and gambling.
But think of what legalized bribing means. First, if you can legally ask for one, and everybody else asks for one, why wouldn't you? So it's effectively a tax on every service. Want to send mail? The post office employee wants a bribe. Want mail delivered? The postman wants one too. Need a tire changed? Well, maybe next week unless you can "tip" the mechanic. You don't pay, work doesn't get done. That's very inefficient.
Then the other consequences: no security anywhere. You can be legally killed. A coworker can bribe your boss if he doesn't like you. Want a harem of 10 year old girls? No problem if you can pay the price. People don't like it? You can bribe the police to make sure they stop bothering you. It effectively eliminates law and makes it be whatever somebody is paying for today. And it probably changes depending on where you are.
Even supposing you think you could manage living in that kind of madness, it wouldn't work all that well for you. After all, most wealth belongs to a very small amount of people, and you're most likely not in that list. It would take possibly millions of people to out-bribe somebody of the caliber of Murdoch, and you're out of luck if what he wants is a return of the Prohibition. Now he can legally get any law he wants passed, and make sure it's enforced by paying whoever needs to be paid.
I approve of Wikileaks especially when it leaks stuff about my country (not the US). I don't subscribe to bullshit like patriotism. The more data, the better, and the more likely something can be done to fix the problems.
I also approve of leaks about the US, of course.
I really hope you're trolling because it's that much of an insane statement.
But supposing are you serious: Let's say bribes are legal. How would that work exactly? Should laws come with a price attached? Pay $1M, and we forget that murder?
Yeah, that'd make for an interesting world.
Because it's entirely legitimate to test an applicant's knowledge, and reject them if they don't know what they're supposed to.
This law is equivalent to making it illegal to discriminate against programmers who are convinced there's nothing wrong with dereferencing an uninitialized pointer.
Think about what this law means in its ultimate extent: The student may answer the question "Where did homo sapiens come from" with "From my ass", and it'd have to be scored as correct.
No, but I remember being one. Sure, parents aren't all powerful. That's why people should only be held responsible only as far as they are capable of doing something.
Yep
You seem to only think of extremes. As if I was advocating having every kid on a leash, or something. No, I'm just saying that for the sake of example: That if while you're watching and have plenty time and ability to react you just stand there and watch your kid run into a busy street, that it doesn't constitute good parenting.
No, which version of you I mean.
Your personality can dramatically change through the time. One can be idealistic and liberal as a teenager, depressed and conservative as an adult, and then get Alzheimer and forget about pretty much everything. Some illnesses can even cause your personality to switch back and forth. So which of those would be the true you?
Now you could conceivably say that at the very least the version of you without Alzheimer. What about things like Down Syndrome? Some things are permanent and are there from birth. Then the healthy version of that person never existed in the first place.
Then there's that many things like that aren't just "on" or "off", they're on a spectrum where too much of it may lead to a miserable life, but the right amount works wonders.
Nah, I don't doubt it at all. All the religious ideas of heaven sound rather horrible to me. If christian hell is something of a torture pit, then the christian heaven is some sort of Ned Flanders' "Re-Neducation" style world, with lobotomy and all.
How are you so sure you'll get to choose? I don't remember anything in the bible about that
Nope, it's pretty well tested. Thanks to things like research, experiments and studies of brain damage we already know pretty w