Look at the number of hairdryer in the shower deaths we have prevented.
I know you are being sarcastic but the update to the building code to require GFCI plugs in the bathroom has saved thousands of lives. Deaths by electric shock in the US have dropped from about 500 a year in 1960s to around 150 now days despite a population increase.
You can readily find the stats online or just google "gfci saved my life" for some anecdotes.
It's popular to spout the meme that government regulation is unnecessary and unhelpful but there are countless examples of problems solved by government action. Nobody has to worry about their young children dying from small pox anymore, or polio or consumption. If you house catches fire the fire department will show up. And if you buy a new house you don't have to worry about your four year old electrocuting themselves while playing dress up in the bathroom with the hairdryer, even if you have no clue what a GFCI is or how it works. A GFCI costs significantly more than a standard plug and without the government regulation developers would not install them. You also don't have to worry about your house coming down in a earthquake, like houses in Haiti (government solved that problem too).
What do you mean walked all over? This isn't lord of the flies. If someone is jerk I don't include them in my social circle and they certainly wouldn't be employed where I work. If they act violent I call the police. If they try and harm me in some other way I call a lawyer.
Can you give me an example of how someone with balls can "walk all over" a soft person in modern western society? (Without ending up in jail or the defendant in a lawsuit)
Exactly. But your problem is largely due to inconsistent tax regimes in neighbouring states. Nobody is manufacturing cigarettes - that would be much more difficult. In Canada we have much higher taxes on alcohol and cigarettes than the US does, however, smuggling for resale is almost nonexistent.
7. The price of the drugs will be 5-10x lower, making the theft crime needed for unemployed addicts to support their habits will be proportionally lower.
I agree with everything except point 7. Introduce it at a low enough cost to put all of the illegal avenues out of business. Then slowly increase the price and make it more expensive that it used to be. Just like alcohol and tobacco. Overall usage will decrease dramatically and the government will make money in the form of taxes that can be used to fund rehab, abstinence campaigns and hospitals.
Your argument seemed to be that he was emitting radiation and therefore he has no right of privacy. I said- what if we are all giving of some information that can be used to determine what we are doing (in the form of gravity waves) then should we all be exposed? (See how that works? I made the information given off by EM radiation equivalent to the information given off by gravity waves and then used that parallel to pose a new question!) .
Since you can seem to connect the dots you must be a dumble fucker
Captcha's on Slashdot should be replaced with a simple IQ test; it would keep people like you from posting much to the benefit of everyone else.
Also, look up straw-man dumb fuck. Responding to opinion with a hypothetical question doesn't make a straw man fallacy, bumble bee fucker.
Whether the EM waves you are emitting are visible or not makes no difference.
Yes it does. What if a device is invented that can detect the minute changes in gravity that occur when an object moves about. Lets assume that by using this device the police could reconstruct a 3d rendering of an entire city include all the people in it and what they are doing. Does that sound like a good idea?
Whether your cellphone signal can be tracked without a warrant is not a technical issue. It's a philosophical, moral, societal, political and legal question.
Offering someone asylum doesn't magically transport them out of jail and into Ecuador. Once the Swedish authorities have their hands on him I would imagine that it would be difficult to give him asylum. Even if he is found not guilty of the charges in Sweden they may very well hand him straight to the US without releasing him.
The only problem I have with two factor authentication for Gmail is if I lose my phone how to I access my email? I don't want to be locked out of my email, ever.
Here you go, a list of fatwa's calling for the death of ordinary individuals who speakout or say something negative about islam. It is one of the negative things about fundamentalist islam.
Salman Rushdie Main article: The Satanic Verses controversy One of the first well-known fatwas was proclaimed in 1989 by the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, against Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses. The reason was an allegedly blasphemous statement taken from an early biography of the Prophet Muhammad, regarding the incorporation of pagan goddesses into Islam’s strongly monotheistic structure. Khomeini died shortly after issuing the fatwa. In 1998 Iran stated it is no longer pursuing Rushdie’s death; however, that decree was again reversed in early 2005 by the present theocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In 1991, Rushdie's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in Tokyo, and his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed in Milan. In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and severely injured in an attack outside his house in Oslo. Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was torched by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator.
Shahin Najafi An Iranian rapper who raps in Persian language has been forced into hiding after hardline clerics offered a $100,000 reward for his murder, incensed by his song (Naghi) which is satirising the Tehran regime and making allegedly irreverent remarks about the tenth Islamic imam (Naghi).
Geert Wilders Possibly the most internationally well-known politician, Geert Wilders, is one of many Dutch politicians who have had a fatwa issued against them. In 2008 Wilders received 285 death threats, with a further 264 aimed at all Dutch politicians. There were a total of 145 protection orders for Wilders in 2006; in 2005 there were 110. An Australian imam named Feiz Muhammad has issued a fatwa calling for the Dutch politician’s beheading, as of 2010.
Jerry Falwell In an interview given on September 30, 2002, for the October 6 edition of 60 Minutes, American Christian minister Jerry Falwell said: "I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to decide] that he was a violent man, a man of war." The following Friday, Mohsen Mojtahed Shabestari, the spokesman of Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa calling for Falwell's death, saying Falwell was a "mercenary and must be killed." He added, "The death of that man is a religious duty, but his case should not be tied to the Christian community."
Taslima Nasreen Fundamentalists in Bangladesh proclaimed a similar fatwa against Taslima Nasreen in 1993, against a series of newspaper columns in which she was critical of the treatment of women under Islam. The next year she wrote Lajja (Shame) which described the abuse of women and minorities. Again there were calls for her death, and her passport was confiscated. Within the legal system, she felt that she might have faced a jail term of up to two years, where she was likely to be murdered. She managed to escape the country via Calcutta, was granted asylum in Sweden, and then lived in Paris, and finally came to India. Even in India, she had to flee the city of Calcutta and move to Delhi under Indian government's strict orders following riots in Calcutta.
The often cited buggy whip people went out of business as a result of innovation in products. Wal-mart hasn't produced any new products. That's my point. Wal-mart's success stems from innovations in labour management, negotiating with suppliers and contractors, leveraging off shore manufacturing and artificially depressed currencies.
Yes, it is innovative to find a way to lower your distribution center hourly wage from $8/hour to $5/hour but not something I would compare to the invention of the Model T.
And the merchant class, who used to get by owning small shops, will cease to exists. All those people will work at Wal-mart for $8/hour.
Wal-mart's low prices exist not because they have a vastly more efficient distribution system as commonly thought but rather because they have vastly more efficient systems for negotiating deals, driving down labour costs, leveraging the artificially low Chinese yuan and squeezing the profit from the supply chain.
Why would it have to be underground all the way? I would think that for most of the distance you could build an above ground structure for far cheaper. Or at the very least build a cut and cover tunnel much cheaper than boring a hole. That would only need to be done in the cities.
How does the so-called "carbon footprint" of this 24x7x365 sucker compare with once or twice a week garbage trucks?
I would imagine that large buildings in NYC would require daily pickup and each building would produce enough trash to fill an entire truck each day. A large office building in NYC has 50,000 or so people in it per day. Now if only the could upgrade the system to transfer recyclables to the recycling station.
"What is the status of flight 647 on United Airways?"
The search box at the top reads:
"What is the status of flight 647 on United Airways?"
I can then change that to "544" by changing three characters or make any other modifications to my query. Google doesn't need to remember to the context on the server side because it provides it in the search box. I don't have to repeat myself like I would with voice.
Agreed. After probably spending $50k on apple products over the years this makes me not want to another thing from them.
They have become too big and profitable for their own good and as a result don't seem to care about the customers who made them that way. Classic biting the hand that feeds them.
Exactly. Close 100% of North Korean GDP is going towards military uses whether the US has missile defense or not. Forcing North Korea to use up a large part of that budget building a larger, yet less effective, arsenal is a win.
I don't think I am evil when I say I will not keep me up at night if millions starve in China, they bought it upon themselves. If you outpace your ability to sustain a civilization then you fucked up, its not the fault of someone in another country who wanted cheaper goods and 3 lattes, they didn't make the rules. China is trying to become a successful global economy via short-cuts and cheating. Nations like Germany, Japan and the USA spent a century or two and a few major wars getting where they are. If China's economy turns out to be a house of cards and it collapses then too bad, they tried to cheat the system and lost.
Are you kidding me?
The western worlds route to a successful economy: About 400 years ago your ancestors (I'm assuming) migrated to a new fertile continent with lots of resources and killed almost all of the many millions of people living there- they then went to another continent and took slaves from there and built their economy. Next, with their new found wealth they went around the world "colonizing" countries and taking their GDP back to Europe.
Should China employ the same route to a successful economy?
It is quite probable that the only reason that the Americas were not colonized by either China or India before the Europeans was due to the Confucian bureaucracy who in around 1500 made it a capital offense to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts (a similar rule was imposed by the Brahmins in India). At the time China had more advanced ships and ocean going skill than the Europeans and the standard of living in India and China was higher than in pre-columbian Europe.
So really, you are just a lucky little result of history. With some very small changes in the past you could just be some peasant boy living in a dirty overcrowded Europe hoping for a Job at Foxconn London. Hope that thought doesn't keep you up at night either.
This is great.. I have been running a web application company for the past 14 years. Now days we are drowned out of the search results for certain terms by jackass SEO optimized competitors. The competitors at the top of search results are simply there because that have done things like exchange links with a completely unrelated site. They have a list of 12 or so links in their footer and each of the 12 other sites do the same. None of the sites have anything to with each other. It is surprising that with the amount Google spends on optimization that this would work but it has so far.
With google being pretty much the single dominant search engine this has impacted our business. I was recently considering that we would have to play catch up in this game but now I am just going to wait and see what happens.
Yes they are... I have a breathalyzer for this very reason. We recent passed a law in British Columbia that limits the blood alcohol level to 0.05%. I have no idea what that is for my metabolism. Is it 1 beer an hour? 2 beers over three hours? Who knows- so I bought a breathalyzer for $150 and keep in the glove compartment. I've probably tested a dozen friends with it as well. I have friends that now know that they can drink 3 beers and still be under 0.05% and other friends that can only drink one.
A lot people want to have a couple of drinks with dinner and simply assume that because they weigh a certain amount they can drink X drinks an hour in accordance with some rule they heard somewhere. They *want* to be responsible and think they are being responsible but still end up going over the legal limit. (Or worse yet not having a drink when they could have).
Historically Apache hasn't been great when it comes to performance. I run a number of busy web applications and having migrated from Apache to Lighttpd and then to a combination of Lighttpd and NginX I can tell you that everyone espousing Apache simply hasn't had to scale. Apache is fine you are running one or two servers with minimal load, beyond that is when you start to see problems.
You can easily do tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of light requests per month with minimal scripting and a bit of MySQL of a single core i7 box. If that is your scenario you simply won't understand what people are talking about when they say the performance sucks.
When I switched I had over a dozen web servers serving billions of high workload requests per month. During peak usage times load would peak, back logs would increase, and response was starting to slow. We had our own custom Apache source tree and were constantly conducting experiments to tune and tweak the configuration. We used Lingerd and all sorts of complicated tricks and tweaks to squeeze every last drop of performance. Then, as a test, we switched to Lighttpd, default configuration, and guess what? Load absolutely plummeted. We dropped Apache like a bad habit. That was years ago and we have probably saved $100k in hardware and time since... Now we actually spend our time optimizing our Applications and never worry about what the web server is doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the number of hairdryer in the shower deaths we have prevented.
I know you are being sarcastic but the update to the building code to require GFCI plugs in the bathroom has saved thousands of lives. Deaths by electric shock in the US have dropped from about 500 a year in 1960s to around 150 now days despite a population increase.
You can readily find the stats online or just google "gfci saved my life" for some anecdotes.
It's popular to spout the meme that government regulation is unnecessary and unhelpful but there are countless examples of problems solved by government action. Nobody has to worry about their young children dying from small pox anymore, or polio or consumption. If you house catches fire the fire department will show up. And if you buy a new house you don't have to worry about your four year old electrocuting themselves while playing dress up in the bathroom with the hairdryer, even if you have no clue what a GFCI is or how it works. A GFCI costs significantly more than a standard plug and without the government regulation developers would not install them. You also don't have to worry about your house coming down in a earthquake, like houses in Haiti (government solved that problem too).
What do you mean walked all over? This isn't lord of the flies. If someone is jerk I don't include them in my social circle and they certainly wouldn't be employed where I work. If they act violent I call the police. If they try and harm me in some other way I call a lawyer.
Can you give me an example of how someone with balls can "walk all over" a soft person in modern western society? (Without ending up in jail or the defendant in a lawsuit)
Exactly. But your problem is largely due to inconsistent tax regimes in neighbouring states. Nobody is manufacturing cigarettes - that would be much more difficult. In Canada we have much higher taxes on alcohol and cigarettes than the US does, however, smuggling for resale is almost nonexistent.
7. The price of the drugs will be 5-10x lower, making the theft crime needed for unemployed addicts to support their habits will be proportionally lower.
I agree with everything except point 7. Introduce it at a low enough cost to put all of the illegal avenues out of business. Then slowly increase the price and make it more expensive that it used to be. Just like alcohol and tobacco. Overall usage will decrease dramatically and the government will make money in the form of taxes that can be used to fund rehab, abstinence campaigns and hospitals.
For clarification GP means this type of AA Battery:
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/02057T736e8oT/610x.jpg
Not this type:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/Energizer_reghargeble_batteryIMG_0006.JPG/220px-Energizer_reghargeble_batteryIMG_0006.JPG
Still not funny though.
Your argument seemed to be that he was emitting radiation and therefore he has no right of privacy. I said- what if we are all giving of some information that can be used to determine what we are doing (in the form of gravity waves) then should we all be exposed? (See how that works? I made the information given off by EM radiation equivalent to the information given off by gravity waves and then used that parallel to pose a new question!) .
Since you can seem to connect the dots you must be a dumble fucker
Captcha's on Slashdot should be replaced with a simple IQ test; it would keep people like you from posting much to the benefit of everyone else.
Also, look up straw-man dumb fuck. Responding to opinion with a hypothetical question doesn't make a straw man fallacy, bumble bee fucker.
Whether the EM waves you are emitting are visible or not makes no difference.
Yes it does. What if a device is invented that can detect the minute changes in gravity that occur when an object moves about. Lets assume that by using this device the police could reconstruct a 3d rendering of an entire city include all the people in it and what they are doing. Does that sound like a good idea?
Whether your cellphone signal can be tracked without a warrant is not a technical issue. It's a philosophical, moral, societal, political and legal question.
Yes, the GP was saying let him go to Sweden first then give him asylum. I am saying that won't really work.
Offering someone asylum doesn't magically transport them out of jail and into Ecuador. Once the Swedish authorities have their hands on him I would imagine that it would be difficult to give him asylum. Even if he is found not guilty of the charges in Sweden they may very well hand him straight to the US without releasing him.
The only problem I have with two factor authentication for Gmail is if I lose my phone how to I access my email? I don't want to be locked out of my email, ever.
Here you go, a list of fatwa's calling for the death of ordinary individuals who speakout or say something negative about islam. It is one of the negative things about fundamentalist islam.
Salman Rushdie
Main article: The Satanic Verses controversy
One of the first well-known fatwas was proclaimed in 1989 by the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, against Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses. The reason was an allegedly blasphemous statement taken from an early biography of the Prophet Muhammad, regarding the incorporation of pagan goddesses into Islam’s strongly monotheistic structure. Khomeini died shortly after issuing the fatwa. In 1998 Iran stated it is no longer pursuing Rushdie’s death; however, that decree was again reversed in early 2005 by the present theocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In 1991, Rushdie's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in Tokyo, and his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed in Milan. In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and severely injured in an attack outside his house in Oslo. Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was torched by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator.
Shahin Najafi
An Iranian rapper who raps in Persian language has been forced into hiding after hardline clerics offered a $100,000 reward for his murder, incensed by his song (Naghi) which is satirising the Tehran regime and making allegedly irreverent remarks about the tenth Islamic imam (Naghi).
Geert Wilders
Possibly the most internationally well-known politician, Geert Wilders, is one of many Dutch politicians who have had a fatwa issued against them. In 2008 Wilders received 285 death threats, with a further 264 aimed at all Dutch politicians. There were a total of 145 protection orders for Wilders in 2006; in 2005 there were 110. An Australian imam named Feiz Muhammad has issued a fatwa calling for the Dutch politician’s beheading, as of 2010.
Jerry Falwell
In an interview given on September 30, 2002, for the October 6 edition of 60 Minutes, American Christian minister Jerry Falwell said: "I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to decide] that he was a violent man, a man of war."
The following Friday, Mohsen Mojtahed Shabestari, the spokesman of Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa calling for Falwell's death, saying Falwell was a "mercenary and must be killed." He added, "The death of that man is a religious duty, but his case should not be tied to the Christian community."
Taslima Nasreen
Fundamentalists in Bangladesh proclaimed a similar fatwa against Taslima Nasreen in 1993, against a series of newspaper columns in which she was critical of the treatment of women under Islam. The next year she wrote Lajja (Shame) which described the abuse of women and minorities. Again there were calls for her death, and her passport was confiscated. Within the legal system, she felt that she might have faced a jail term of up to two years, where she was likely to be murdered. She managed to escape the country via Calcutta, was granted asylum in Sweden, and then lived in Paris, and finally came to India. Even in India, she had to flee the city of Calcutta and move to Delhi under Indian government's strict orders following riots in Calcutta.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatwas#Fatwas_promoting_violence_against_a_particular_individual
FYI- Bear spray can cause serious injury or death to humans. It is far more potent that pepper spray designed for us on humans.
The often cited buggy whip people went out of business as a result of innovation in products. Wal-mart hasn't produced any new products. That's my point. Wal-mart's success stems from innovations in labour management, negotiating with suppliers and contractors, leveraging off shore manufacturing and artificially depressed currencies.
They create innovations like this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/walmart-outsourcing-depresses-wages_n_1573885.html
Yes, it is innovative to find a way to lower your distribution center hourly wage from $8/hour to $5/hour but not something I would compare to the invention of the Model T.
And the merchant class, who used to get by owning small shops, will cease to exists. All those people will work at Wal-mart for $8/hour.
Wal-mart's low prices exist not because they have a vastly more efficient distribution system as commonly thought but rather because they have vastly more efficient systems for negotiating deals, driving down labour costs, leveraging the artificially low Chinese yuan and squeezing the profit from the supply chain.
Why would it have to be underground all the way? I would think that for most of the distance you could build an above ground structure for far cheaper. Or at the very least build a cut and cover tunnel much cheaper than boring a hole. That would only need to be done in the cities.
How does the so-called "carbon footprint" of this 24x7x365 sucker compare with once or twice a week garbage trucks?
I would imagine that large buildings in NYC would require daily pickup and each building would produce enough trash to fill an entire truck each day. A large office building in NYC has 50,000 or so people in it per day. Now if only the could upgrade the system to transfer recyclables to the recycling station.
Google does have context. If I type
"What is the status of flight 647 on United Airways?"
The search box at the top reads:
"What is the status of flight 647 on United Airways?"
I can then change that to "544" by changing three characters or make any other modifications to my query. Google doesn't need to remember to the context on the server side because it provides it in the search box. I don't have to repeat myself like I would with voice.
Agreed. After probably spending $50k on apple products over the years this makes me not want to another thing from them.
They have become too big and profitable for their own good and as a result don't seem to care about the customers who made them that way. Classic biting the hand that feeds them.
Exactly. Close 100% of North Korean GDP is going towards military uses whether the US has missile defense or not. Forcing North Korea to use up a large part of that budget building a larger, yet less effective, arsenal is a win.
He's _ un lucky_ it fired
FTFY
I think he would be much better off if the gun didn't fire.
I don't think I am evil when I say I will not keep me up at night if millions starve in China, they bought it upon themselves. If you outpace your ability to sustain a civilization then you fucked up, its not the fault of someone in another country who wanted cheaper goods and 3 lattes, they didn't make the rules. China is trying to become a successful global economy via short-cuts and cheating. Nations like Germany, Japan and the USA spent a century or two and a few major wars getting where they are. If China's economy turns out to be a house of cards and it collapses then too bad, they tried to cheat the system and lost.
Are you kidding me?
The western worlds route to a successful economy: About 400 years ago your ancestors (I'm assuming) migrated to a new fertile continent with lots of resources and killed almost all of the many millions of people living there- they then went to another continent and took slaves from there and built their economy. Next, with their new found wealth they went around the world "colonizing" countries and taking their GDP back to Europe.
Should China employ the same route to a successful economy?
It is quite probable that the only reason that the Americas were not colonized by either China or India before the Europeans was due to the Confucian bureaucracy who in around 1500 made it a capital offense to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts (a similar rule was imposed by the Brahmins in India). At the time China had more advanced ships and ocean going skill than the Europeans and the standard of living in India and China was higher than in pre-columbian Europe.
So really, you are just a lucky little result of history. With some very small changes in the past you could just be some peasant boy living in a dirty overcrowded Europe hoping for a Job at Foxconn London. Hope that thought doesn't keep you up at night either.
This is great.. I have been running a web application company for the past 14 years. Now days we are drowned out of the search results for certain terms by jackass SEO optimized competitors. The competitors at the top of search results are simply there because that have done things like exchange links with a completely unrelated site. They have a list of 12 or so links in their footer and each of the 12 other sites do the same. None of the sites have anything to with each other. It is surprising that with the amount Google spends on optimization that this would work but it has so far.
With google being pretty much the single dominant search engine this has impacted our business. I was recently considering that we would have to play catch up in this game but now I am just going to wait and see what happens.
Yes they are... I have a breathalyzer for this very reason. We recent passed a law in British Columbia that limits the blood alcohol level to 0.05%. I have no idea what that is for my metabolism. Is it 1 beer an hour? 2 beers over three hours? Who knows- so I bought a breathalyzer for $150 and keep in the glove compartment. I've probably tested a dozen friends with it as well. I have friends that now know that they can drink 3 beers and still be under 0.05% and other friends that can only drink one.
A lot people want to have a couple of drinks with dinner and simply assume that because they weigh a certain amount they can drink X drinks an hour in accordance with some rule they heard somewhere. They *want* to be responsible and think they are being responsible but still end up going over the legal limit. (Or worse yet not having a drink when they could have).
Big Iron? Now days a Super Micro box with 24GB of ram can be had for a $1000... Ram has gotten really cheap. $2500 or so for a box with 64GB.
Historically Apache hasn't been great when it comes to performance. I run a number of busy web applications and having migrated from Apache to Lighttpd and then to a combination of Lighttpd and NginX I can tell you that everyone espousing Apache simply hasn't had to scale. Apache is fine you are running one or two servers with minimal load, beyond that is when you start to see problems.
You can easily do tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of light requests per month with minimal scripting and a bit of MySQL of a single core i7 box. If that is your scenario you simply won't understand what people are talking about when they say the performance sucks.
When I switched I had over a dozen web servers serving billions of high workload requests per month. During peak usage times load would peak, back logs would increase, and response was starting to slow. We had our own custom Apache source tree and were constantly conducting experiments to tune and tweak the configuration. We used Lingerd and all sorts of complicated tricks and tweaks to squeeze every last drop of performance. Then, as a test, we switched to Lighttpd, default configuration, and guess what? Load absolutely plummeted. We dropped Apache like a bad habit. That was years ago and we have probably saved $100k in hardware and time since... Now we actually spend our time optimizing our Applications and never worry about what the web server is doing.