no, I will not mock earthquake planning, but a disease passing from birds to humans I will mock any day, and the same for fearmongering
Then you are grossly ignorant of zoonosis and where "new" diseases come from. Most human pandemics come from animal hosts. Humans are very rarely the host in which initial mutations develop, and pandemic deaths are generally a sign of a disease with poor evolutionary fitness in its new human environment (because it destroys its primary ecosystem too fast to effectively spread in perpetuity).
Influenza A is a pathogen regularly crosses between species. Birds & swine are the most common crossover species, but flu can also infect dogs, horses, and bats, among many other species.
It's by far not the only one. West Nile virus has birds as a primary reservoir and is a major issue for horse owners. Mice are the origin for hantaviruses like the Sin Nombre virus (aka "Four Corners disease") as well as the most common carriers of Lyme disease (not deer). The black plague persists to this day in rodent populations including rats, squirrels, and chipmunks. Shellfish can act as reservoirs for cholera. SARS came from bats, and they're our best lead for where Ebola came from. Snails are the carriers between human hosts for schistosomiasis. Salmonella comes from bird and reptile hosts (especially turtles).
Birds, as warm-blooded creatures, are an excellent host for many human pathogens. They are also nigh ubiquitous, have a relatively fast breeding and replacement cycle, and migratory species can pick up and spread diseases over an amazingly wide area. Scoff all you want, but the only thing that's more of a threat to humans as a source of infectious disease than birds are bats, because bats are the second most diverse order of mammals after rodents and have many of the same flying habits of birds.
And the polonium-beryllium modulated neutron initiator. Oh and a tube and backplate for the 85 lb uranium "bullet" that's strong enough to withstand the "shot" towards the uranium ring. Titanium carbide isn't a material easily replaced by ABS plastic, after all. You also need the anvil to absorb the impact so the whole assembly doesn't go shooting out the front.
Really, when you look over the design, the only part that can safely be replaced with plastic is the outer, aerodynamic shell of the bomb.
Throughout history, artists have been described as "provocative". Many of these provocative works are now considered classics. One purpose of art is indeed to be provocative. Are you trolling, or just massively ignorant? I don't see a third option here
One could be a member of the large number of people outside of the "high art" community that believes that mere provocation is insufficient to be art.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living? Not art. Marcel Duchamp's "readymades?" Not art. Work No. 227: the lights going on and off? Not art.
To us, art requires some kind of talent, skill, or effort that is beyond what the common man can achieve. Sneer as you like at those of us who don't see the above as art for being "ignorant," but we just look at people like you as the emperor with no clothes -- suckers who have built an entire sense of "culture" around all nodding and pretending to believe a con perpetrated upon you until you actually do.
There's a difference between preparing for something that hasn't happened yet and something that isn't likely to ever happen. A pandemic will happen again, though it might not happen in our lifetimes. You might as well mock earthquake planning.
Patents are a part of it, but they're minuscule compared to the capital requirements. Semiconductor manufacture isn't a basement hobbyist game; it's the absolute cutting edge of technology, and the people who make the machines that make the chips are creating custom, precision hardware for a very small customer base. Commercial-scale semiconductor plants run about $1 billion minimum, for a 10k-30k wafers per month "minifab" and can run up to $8-10 billion for a "gigafab" churning out 80k-100k wafers per month.
it's exactly that point, that these things are unknowable, that makes it so absurd for someone to make up a story that's completely contrary to the known observable universe, and claim that it's true.
If it's contrary, yes. If it's not contrary, because science is silent or merely speculative on an issue, then no.
unless of course they're talking about the flying spaghetti monster. you have to respect an idea as awesome as pasta.
Not really, since the entire purpose of the FSM is the mockery and disrespect of other people's beliefs. It may be an amusing mockery, but it is a mockery nonetheless -- and not the kind that's just a harmless joke between friends. It's the judgmental kind that says, "I'm smarter and thus better than you."
I'm still pissed I was labeled a troll when I mentioned that there was no privacy in the US.
No, I'd bet cash money that's not what you were modded Troll for.
So give up on the privacy whining. You don't have and will never get it back. And the biggest point, WTF do you care for? You think anyone cares you are butt fucking your same sex roommate? Society doesn't care anymore. The poeple who will use that info against you will find out some other way. The only dumbasses who care about privacy are the ones doing something they know to be illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous. I bet Castro was a privacy advocate.
I'd bet it was this sort of nonsense you got modded Troll for. In a single paragraph, you are hostile & insulting, highly opinionated, dismissive of people with differing opinions or lifestyles, and just flat out wrong on details. You call an opinion other than your own "whining" and tell people to just give up and accept things the way you see them. The Castro thing is just random. Like you wanted to toss in a "you're all as bad as Hitler" comment but were afraid of being called out for Godwin's Law. The sig in which you pat yourself on the back for how "compelling" your own arguments are is also a point against you.
I blame the mentality that profiling is some horrible crime, therefore everyone must be overly searched.
Spoken like someone who has never been subjected to it. "Profiling" is just a fancier term for discrimination based on stereotypes.
I am lucky to be a member of several privileged groups in society, but even I've been on the short end of that stick as a grumpy, trenchcoat-wearing teen right when the Columbine massacre occurred. (Thank goodness I was out of high school by then.)
It sucks to be preemptively treated as a criminal. It gets you angry and it makes you feel like less of a person. I only had to weather that for a few months; I can't imagine what an entire lifetime of that does to you and your sense of belonging in a community. Profiling is an evil, because it judges people not based on the content of their character but on superficial traits, and it subjects them to discrimination.
I would argue that solid direct proof isn't necessary to make an informed judgment about some probability if related / circumstantial evidence is there in abundance.
The problem is that the circumstantial evidence is of the "absence of evidence" form. I have yet to see anything persuasive that argues for a purely materialistic universe over a mostly hands-off "watchmaker" universe or a subtle, "works in mysterious way" interpretation.
[Religions are] always built not on logic or observation, but instead on emotional needs and fantasy. [...] What's wrong with just saying we don't know yet? Must people automatically assign religion/ghosts/superstition as our default answer to things we can't yet explain?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "I don't know." In my opinion, it's the most logical answer. It's not my answer, but it's at least one I hold a strong intellectual respect for. However, I assert that it's not unreasonable in the absence of an objective answer to rely upon a subjective one.
Many people I know feel a strong, personal connection with God. There's no way to objectively prove from the outside whether this is a real thing or just some weird misfiring of the brain, and to those who experience it, it seems very real. So, if there is no way to prove of disprove a subjective experience, is it more logical to assume it's not real or to treat it as real? (I don't know that there is a "right" answer to that, but I'm sure many philosophers have spilled a lot of ink on both sides of that debate.)
Religion as you say, does fulfill an emotional need, and that should not be dismissed lightly as a sense of purpose and a foundation for deciding right and wrong are important to human psychological health and happiness. Some people can find those answers without religion, but not all or most even. And those that do don't always do so for rational reasons nor behave rationally as a result.
See, it's not religion itself that's really the cause of the social ills it gets blame for. Wars of dogma, intolerance and smug, judgmental treatment of others, purges of the unbelievers, and the abandonment of critical thinking all happen in anti-religious societies too. Witness the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. The terrible cult of personality surrounding Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot led to untold suffering at the hands of zealots out to destroy the old, religious ways as competitors to their belief system.
The problem is that humans are pack animals, rigged by evolution to support people close to them (e.g. tribes, clans, families, etc.) and to treat everyone else as competitors to be destroyed. We seek means of identifying who is "one of us" and who is "one of them," and religious intolerance is just a symptom, not the true causa causans.
Amusingly, you know what makes partisanship disappear? Money. If you give a financial incentive for correct answers or for admitting ignorance, people of different political strips start giving much more similar answers rather than just spouting off whatever sound bite they've heard from their own party members.
Honestly, by all accounts, he was kind of a stubborn asshole, though his final spiteful triumph has led to him being lionized. It's worth remembering though that he was fined for beating one of his indentured servants to death over a petty theft and is said to have tangled with the law several times afterwards. He was described as "a powerful brute of a man and feared by many in the village." He also attempted to throw his wife under the bus first.
His irascible personality and conflict with the Putnams is probably the main reason he was fingered as a witch in the first place. Probably any excuse to get rid of the miserable old coot.
You know, the punchline from the commercial just doesn't work if you don't give some indication that the supposed French model isn't saying "bon jour" correctly (and isn't attractive).
It seems to fit well with Wikipedia's definition, "a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary."
Merely being "wrong" isn't sufficient to be a delusion. The sticking detail is "superior evidence to the contrary."
The problem with religion is that there isn't a lot of evidence one way or the other about the core questions of religion -- the origin of the universe and of life, what purpose we have in life, and what awaits us after death. Specific details of creation stories or certain mythical events in the past have been knocked out in many cases, but religion will not go away so long as those questions are essentially unanswerable with any degree of solid proof.
I agree that this is pretty loaded language, and I am somewhat concerned that the author's implied solution is to add more prey to bring the system back into "balance." So then, who are the prey, if all the HFT bots are predators?
I've never even known anyone that lost anything by refusing to use facebook (or other social networks).
Well, you wouldn't, would you? That's the peril of abstaining from a communications technology.
I miss out on stuff all the time because I refuse to use social media; sometimes my friends remember to tell me individually, and sometimes they forget. I don't really have any right to demand that they make extra special care to communicate to me when their preferred means of communication gets the rest of us; it's me that's the odd one sticking out. It's nice when they think of me and let me know, but it's not some great social snub that they don't walk across the room to speak to the guy standing alone in the corner. I'm the one who opted into that.
"B...but Diaspora!" Diaspora is slow and to really take advantage of it, you have to run your own server, which means that 99 percent of users can't even wrap their heads around the concept.
Forget the concept. 99% of users can't even do it because it would be a violation of their terms of service.
It kinda figures... but why pick Israel of all allies? Israel should have plenty of work to do themselves before bothering with NSA lists, and if the story breaks out like it just did, those theorizing that the USA is Israel's pet would have a field day. I'd have asked some Commonwealth country instead.
We're already working with all the other major English-speaking countries in the Five Eyes program. Also Germany.
Seriously, Americans? What do you care? What do you have to hide!?
I don't know yet. Personally, I don't want to find out after the fact that there was something I would have wanted hidden. Maybe I'm doing nothing wrong by today's standards, but who knows how we'll think about ourselves 10, 20, or 40 years from now?
Think of how many older people you know/knew who lived through the days when racism was still openly practiced and encouraged. Think of people who have mellowed their views about homosexuality only in the past decade. Think of how people used to smoke in their homes around their children. Or how they used to spank children that misbehaved. Or let them ride in the back of a truck with no seat belt. Or let them run around naked and even take pictures of it.
If you grew up in a rural area, you probably remember someone having hunting rifles on a gun rack in the back of their truck at school or maybe you even carried a pocketknife to school. Maybe you used to be the kind of geek that wore a trenchcoat before Columbine killed that fashion off.
So who knows what innocent thing I'm doing today that will be disapproved of later? Maybe it'll just be embarrassing. Maybe it'll be blackmail worthy. Maybe it'll even be grounds for suspecting me as some kind of future or current criminal. I mean, how many Muslims in America thought their social networks would be under heavy scrutiny before 9/11?
We shouldn't have to live in perpetual fear of the future or of the judgment of our peers. We need a personal space in which to unwind and to develop our thoughts before they're ready to take before public scrutiny. We need privacy to become ourselves and not just an empty reflection of what others expect from us.
Your quote is from the Slashdot summary of a lame attempt at internet comedy that drastically exaggerated or essential made up other people stupidity for a cheap laugh. For example, the article also claims that people were fooled into thinking it was live television based on a couple of people commenting about it like an actual documentary (which isn't what you typically call live television). Since the show was a docu-drama that mixed fiction with actual footage shot mostly during the London riots, this wasn't exactly as unreasonable as the author's mockery would suggest.
So take anything else snarky said about the show from the same guy with a grain of salt. Most other reviews of the show don't even mention the candle fire, except for an off-handed mention in The Independent.
Making a TV special about how dangerous stuff like this is just gets the public to do even stupider things and wastes time and money.
Again, it's not like that what the show was "about." It was just a minor plot point. Are you seriously suggesting that TV should only be allowed to use more common tragedies for fear that people might overreact to minor ones?
Slashdot Mirror
no, I will not mock earthquake planning, but a disease passing from birds to humans I will mock any day, and the same for fearmongering
Then you are grossly ignorant of zoonosis and where "new" diseases come from. Most human pandemics come from animal hosts. Humans are very rarely the host in which initial mutations develop, and pandemic deaths are generally a sign of a disease with poor evolutionary fitness in its new human environment (because it destroys its primary ecosystem too fast to effectively spread in perpetuity).
Influenza A is a pathogen regularly crosses between species. Birds & swine are the most common crossover species, but flu can also infect dogs, horses, and bats, among many other species.
It's by far not the only one. West Nile virus has birds as a primary reservoir and is a major issue for horse owners. Mice are the origin for hantaviruses like the Sin Nombre virus (aka "Four Corners disease") as well as the most common carriers of Lyme disease (not deer). The black plague persists to this day in rodent populations including rats, squirrels, and chipmunks. Shellfish can act as reservoirs for cholera. SARS came from bats, and they're our best lead for where Ebola came from. Snails are the carriers between human hosts for schistosomiasis. Salmonella comes from bird and reptile hosts (especially turtles).
Birds, as warm-blooded creatures, are an excellent host for many human pathogens. They are also nigh ubiquitous, have a relatively fast breeding and replacement cycle, and migratory species can pick up and spread diseases over an amazingly wide area. Scoff all you want, but the only thing that's more of a threat to humans as a source of infectious disease than birds are bats, because bats are the second most diverse order of mammals after rodents and have many of the same flying habits of birds.
Then you only need the Uranium-235....
And the polonium-beryllium modulated neutron initiator. Oh and a tube and backplate for the 85 lb uranium "bullet" that's strong enough to withstand the "shot" towards the uranium ring. Titanium carbide isn't a material easily replaced by ABS plastic, after all. You also need the anvil to absorb the impact so the whole assembly doesn't go shooting out the front.
Really, when you look over the design, the only part that can safely be replaced with plastic is the outer, aerodynamic shell of the bomb.
Throughout history, artists have been described as "provocative". Many of these provocative works are now considered classics. One purpose of art is indeed to be provocative. Are you trolling, or just massively ignorant? I don't see a third option here
One could be a member of the large number of people outside of the "high art" community that believes that mere provocation is insufficient to be art.
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living? Not art.
Marcel Duchamp's "readymades?" Not art.
Work No. 227: the lights going on and off? Not art.
To us, art requires some kind of talent, skill, or effort that is beyond what the common man can achieve. Sneer as you like at those of us who don't see the above as art for being "ignorant," but we just look at people like you as the emperor with no clothes -- suckers who have built an entire sense of "culture" around all nodding and pretending to believe a con perpetrated upon you until you actually do.
I agree. A zip gun clearly takes skill, talent, and effort to create.
That makes this mere pop art, unworthy of being honored with our greatest works.
There's a difference between preparing for something that hasn't happened yet and something that isn't likely to ever happen. A pandemic will happen again, though it might not happen in our lifetimes. You might as well mock earthquake planning.
Patents are a part of it, but they're minuscule compared to the capital requirements. Semiconductor manufacture isn't a basement hobbyist game; it's the absolute cutting edge of technology, and the people who make the machines that make the chips are creating custom, precision hardware for a very small customer base. Commercial-scale semiconductor plants run about $1 billion minimum, for a 10k-30k wafers per month "minifab" and can run up to $8-10 billion for a "gigafab" churning out 80k-100k wafers per month.
Read more at SemiWiki.
it's exactly that point, that these things are unknowable, that makes it so absurd for someone to make up a story that's completely contrary to the known observable universe, and claim that it's true.
If it's contrary, yes. If it's not contrary, because science is silent or merely speculative on an issue, then no.
unless of course they're talking about the flying spaghetti monster. you have to respect an idea as awesome as pasta.
Not really, since the entire purpose of the FSM is the mockery and disrespect of other people's beliefs. It may be an amusing mockery, but it is a mockery nonetheless -- and not the kind that's just a harmless joke between friends. It's the judgmental kind that says, "I'm smarter and thus better than you."
I'm still pissed I was labeled a troll when I mentioned that there was no privacy in the US.
No, I'd bet cash money that's not what you were modded Troll for.
So give up on the privacy whining. You don't have and will never get it back. And the biggest point, WTF do you care for? You think anyone cares you are butt fucking your same sex roommate? Society doesn't care anymore. The poeple who will use that info against you will find out some other way. The only dumbasses who care about privacy are the ones doing something they know to be illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous. I bet Castro was a privacy advocate.
I'd bet it was this sort of nonsense you got modded Troll for. In a single paragraph, you are hostile & insulting, highly opinionated, dismissive of people with differing opinions or lifestyles, and just flat out wrong on details. You call an opinion other than your own "whining" and tell people to just give up and accept things the way you see them. The Castro thing is just random. Like you wanted to toss in a "you're all as bad as Hitler" comment but were afraid of being called out for Godwin's Law. The sig in which you pat yourself on the back for how "compelling" your own arguments are is also a point against you.
I blame the mentality that profiling is some horrible crime, therefore everyone must be overly searched.
Spoken like someone who has never been subjected to it. "Profiling" is just a fancier term for discrimination based on stereotypes.
I am lucky to be a member of several privileged groups in society, but even I've been on the short end of that stick as a grumpy, trenchcoat-wearing teen right when the Columbine massacre occurred. (Thank goodness I was out of high school by then.)
It sucks to be preemptively treated as a criminal. It gets you angry and it makes you feel like less of a person. I only had to weather that for a few months; I can't imagine what an entire lifetime of that does to you and your sense of belonging in a community. Profiling is an evil, because it judges people not based on the content of their character but on superficial traits, and it subjects them to discrimination.
Thank you for pointing that out. I'd like to share another link for your own education in exchange.
I would argue that solid direct proof isn't necessary to make an informed judgment about some probability if related / circumstantial evidence is there in abundance.
The problem is that the circumstantial evidence is of the "absence of evidence" form. I have yet to see anything persuasive that argues for a purely materialistic universe over a mostly hands-off "watchmaker" universe or a subtle, "works in mysterious way" interpretation.
[Religions are] always built not on logic or observation, but instead on emotional needs and fantasy. [...] What's wrong with just saying we don't know yet? Must people automatically assign religion/ghosts/superstition as our default answer to things we can't yet explain?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "I don't know." In my opinion, it's the most logical answer. It's not my answer, but it's at least one I hold a strong intellectual respect for. However, I assert that it's not unreasonable in the absence of an objective answer to rely upon a subjective one.
Many people I know feel a strong, personal connection with God. There's no way to objectively prove from the outside whether this is a real thing or just some weird misfiring of the brain, and to those who experience it, it seems very real. So, if there is no way to prove of disprove a subjective experience, is it more logical to assume it's not real or to treat it as real? (I don't know that there is a "right" answer to that, but I'm sure many philosophers have spilled a lot of ink on both sides of that debate.)
Religion as you say, does fulfill an emotional need, and that should not be dismissed lightly as a sense of purpose and a foundation for deciding right and wrong are important to human psychological health and happiness. Some people can find those answers without religion, but not all or most even. And those that do don't always do so for rational reasons nor behave rationally as a result.
See, it's not religion itself that's really the cause of the social ills it gets blame for. Wars of dogma, intolerance and smug, judgmental treatment of others, purges of the unbelievers, and the abandonment of critical thinking all happen in anti-religious societies too. Witness the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. The terrible cult of personality surrounding Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot led to untold suffering at the hands of zealots out to destroy the old, religious ways as competitors to their belief system.
The problem is that humans are pack animals, rigged by evolution to support people close to them (e.g. tribes, clans, families, etc.) and to treat everyone else as competitors to be destroyed. We seek means of identifying who is "one of us" and who is "one of them," and religious intolerance is just a symptom, not the true causa causans.
Actually, presenting facts to people opposed to them only seems to harden their opinion further in that direction. People are so invested in being right that they dig in deeper when their beliefs are "under attack" by facts that don't agree with what they believe.
Amusingly, you know what makes partisanship disappear? Money. If you give a financial incentive for correct answers or for admitting ignorance, people of different political strips start giving much more similar answers rather than just spouting off whatever sound bite they've heard from their own party members.
That would be Giles Corey.
Honestly, by all accounts, he was kind of a stubborn asshole, though his final spiteful triumph has led to him being lionized. It's worth remembering though that he was fined for beating one of his indentured servants to death over a petty theft and is said to have tangled with the law several times afterwards. He was described as "a powerful brute of a man and feared by many in the village." He also attempted to throw his wife under the bus first.
His irascible personality and conflict with the Putnams is probably the main reason he was fingered as a witch in the first place. Probably any excuse to get rid of the miserable old coot.
You know, the punchline from the commercial just doesn't work if you don't give some indication that the supposed French model isn't saying "bon jour" correctly (and isn't attractive).
It seems to fit well with Wikipedia's definition, "a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary."
Merely being "wrong" isn't sufficient to be a delusion. The sticking detail is "superior evidence to the contrary."
The problem with religion is that there isn't a lot of evidence one way or the other about the core questions of religion -- the origin of the universe and of life, what purpose we have in life, and what awaits us after death. Specific details of creation stories or certain mythical events in the past have been knocked out in many cases, but religion will not go away so long as those questions are essentially unanswerable with any degree of solid proof.
I agree that this is pretty loaded language, and I am somewhat concerned that the author's implied solution is to add more prey to bring the system back into "balance." So then, who are the prey, if all the HFT bots are predators?
I suspect I won't like the answer.
I've never even known anyone that lost anything by refusing to use facebook (or other social networks).
Well, you wouldn't, would you? That's the peril of abstaining from a communications technology.
I miss out on stuff all the time because I refuse to use social media; sometimes my friends remember to tell me individually, and sometimes they forget. I don't really have any right to demand that they make extra special care to communicate to me when their preferred means of communication gets the rest of us; it's me that's the odd one sticking out. It's nice when they think of me and let me know, but it's not some great social snub that they don't walk across the room to speak to the guy standing alone in the corner. I'm the one who opted into that.
"B...but Diaspora!" Diaspora is slow and to really take advantage of it, you have to run your own server, which means that 99 percent of users can't even wrap their heads around the concept.
Forget the concept. 99% of users can't even do it because it would be a violation of their terms of service.
It kinda figures... but why pick Israel of all allies? Israel should have plenty of work to do themselves before bothering with NSA lists, and if the story breaks out like it just did, those theorizing that the USA is Israel's pet would have a field day. I'd have asked some Commonwealth country instead.
We're already working with all the other major English-speaking countries in the Five Eyes program. Also Germany.
Seriously, Americans? What do you care? What do you have to hide!?
I don't know yet. Personally, I don't want to find out after the fact that there was something I would have wanted hidden. Maybe I'm doing nothing wrong by today's standards, but who knows how we'll think about ourselves 10, 20, or 40 years from now?
Think of how many older people you know/knew who lived through the days when racism was still openly practiced and encouraged. Think of people who have mellowed their views about homosexuality only in the past decade. Think of how people used to smoke in their homes around their children. Or how they used to spank children that misbehaved. Or let them ride in the back of a truck with no seat belt. Or let them run around naked and even take pictures of it.
If you grew up in a rural area, you probably remember someone having hunting rifles on a gun rack in the back of their truck at school or maybe you even carried a pocketknife to school. Maybe you used to be the kind of geek that wore a trenchcoat before Columbine killed that fashion off.
So who knows what innocent thing I'm doing today that will be disapproved of later? Maybe it'll just be embarrassing. Maybe it'll be blackmail worthy. Maybe it'll even be grounds for suspecting me as some kind of future or current criminal. I mean, how many Muslims in America thought their social networks would be under heavy scrutiny before 9/11?
We shouldn't have to live in perpetual fear of the future or of the judgment of our peers. We need a personal space in which to unwind and to develop our thoughts before they're ready to take before public scrutiny. We need privacy to become ourselves and not just an empty reflection of what others expect from us.
PLEASE....vote out whoevers currently in office, and vote in anyone that will at least make lip service that this type of thing will end.
We did in 2008 over excesses of the financial sector and of the war on terror, and lip service is pretty much all we got on both counts.
...or essential made up other people stupidity for a cheap laugh.
Gah. I really need to learn to proofread before submitting.
Your quote is from the Slashdot summary of a lame attempt at internet comedy that drastically exaggerated or essential made up other people stupidity for a cheap laugh. For example, the article also claims that people were fooled into thinking it was live television based on a couple of people commenting about it like an actual documentary (which isn't what you typically call live television). Since the show was a docu-drama that mixed fiction with actual footage shot mostly during the London riots, this wasn't exactly as unreasonable as the author's mockery would suggest.
So take anything else snarky said about the show from the same guy with a grain of salt. Most other reviews of the show don't even mention the candle fire, except for an off-handed mention in The Independent.
Making a TV special about how dangerous stuff like this is just gets the public to do even stupider things and wastes time and money.
Again, it's not like that what the show was "about." It was just a minor plot point. Are you seriously suggesting that TV should only be allowed to use more common tragedies for fear that people might overreact to minor ones?
There was a joke? ... aren't jokes supposed to be funny?
Ah. Your uncertainty on that point probably explains your FTFY post, then.