Burning Man doesn't rely on the 911 system for any of its EMS issues. There are two large aid stations that are staffed by professional doctors, nurses, paramedics, etc. (people who are certified to be able to provide Basic Life Support services at a minimum), which are open 24/7 while the event is taking place, and before and after for all of the people who volunteer their time to construct and deconstruct the city.
On top of that, there is a fully functional Advanced Life Support facility (called Rampart) that is established in the center of the city and is meant to handle the very serious cases, of which there are of course a few every year. They have the ability to radio for air transport to Reno (the nearest large city with a real hospital) at a moment's notice. Rampart is airlock-sealed to keep the pervasive dust out and provide an environment that is as sterile as can be expected.
Emergency services are taken very, very seriously at Burning Man, and they have a history that goes back a long, long way.
I had a go at Google Glass a few days ago (courtesy of a friend with connections), and I had a rather unexpected problem with them. The display is set on the right side of the frame and can't be moved. I'm extremely left-eye dominant, to the the point where reading with my right eye alone is next to impossible. I can make out the scenery, but the center of my vision in that eye has the acuity of peripheral vision, and I can't parse complex shapes (ie text) with that eye alone. I hate to claim "I have a medical condition", but I do, and it's called amblyopia. Until Google makes the display switchable to the left side, this is a show-stopper for me.
I can certainly see that as the kind of thing that will show up in version 2 or 3, but they would be a waste of money for me at this point.
My company gave us the option of switching to 9/80 about a year ago, and while I hemmed and hawed about it for a while, I absolutely have no regrets about taking it. The Friday off is excellent because it frees you up for longer trips away without using vacation time.
It can also make some really nice situations when coupled with holidays. For example, since this most recent Christmas was on a Thursday, and my company gave us the following Friday off, I got to apply my 9/80 day off to the day before Christmas. That meant that I had Wednesday through Friday off just naturally, so I only had to take Monday and Tuesday off as vacation days to score the entire week off.
The days off are generally respected at my company, usually not more than a brief phone call in the event that something comes up that only I can take care of.
I should caveat all of this by saying that I like my job, I'm good friends with most of my co-workers and really wouldn't mind getting a phone call from them on a day off anyway. I imagine that a lot of other people who aren't in that situation would be more uptight about their time being respected, but I personally don't mind giving a little extra time here and there.
It also tends to make my evening commute a little easier since I'm leaving work at 6, and most of the people battling their way home at 5 have cleared off the road by then.
Something which has bothered me about games, particularly those in the realistic war genre (aka every WWII game made in the last 10 years... thanks Saving Private Ryan), is that the enemy always fights absolutely to the death. Even in games where enemies slow down after a few hits, they'll still hold onto their weapon and try to kill you as they crawl along the floor. If they're going for realism, then these guys should drop their weapon after a hit to leg, put their hands up, and you then lose points for killing them.
I'm a wildlife biologist, and I do a lot of work in the Bay Area near where all of this happened. Trespassing is practically part of my job description, because even though we always notify landowners before we arrive on site, they aren't always happy to see you regardless. Honestly, I have enough problems with angry ranchers when I'm actually allowed and supposed to be on their land. Just two weeks ago, my boss got accosted by a notoriously angry rancher who claimed that she had parked on his land (she had not) and that we had almost killed his horse a few years ago (no one had any idea what this lunatic was talking about). This happened within 5 miles of where the geohashers were.
Incidentally, it's not at all unusual for those guys to have firearms with them in their trucks. It's a very hilly area along Bollinger Canyon Road, and there's an enormous coyote population with plenty of hiding places. It's entirely possible that the weapons the rancher had weren't specifically meant for the XKCDers, but it doesn't change how scary it is to have an irate person with a firearm coming after you.
Also, there are meth labs all over the place around there. Get too near one of those things and you're screwed.
What's really sad is that this family is probably now on a terror watch list, even though it's obvious that it was all a mix-up. Homeland Security is so bored because there's no actual terrorism to deal with that they'll just be devoting their resources to harassing innocent people and refusing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
I'm dead serious, these people are probably all having their phones warrantlessly wiretapped and their emails read by some orderly in an FBI data center.
Can we just get over this terrorism nonsense, disband the department of homeland security, and get on with our lives?
A professor of mine once pointed out something very interesting about the Indian volcano theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Indian subcontinent was, 65 million years ago, more or less on the exact opposite side of the Earth from what would eventually become the Yucatan Peninsula. Remember that the Earth is really like a huge ball of liquid, molten rock (the mantle) with a thin crust of solidified material on the outside. What happens when you flick a water balloon really hard with your finger, but don't break it? The force of the blow causes waves to radiate throughout the water from the point of impact in all directions, and dissipates against the inside of the balloon. The point of strongest force for these waves will be on the direct opposite side of the balloon from the point of impact, which bubbles out briefly before returning to place.
On a global scale, a massive meteor impact would actually cause massive and very sudden volcanic eruptions on the opposite side of the Earth as it causes a wave of magma to concentrate on one very small spot.
Undying was a brilliant, brilliant game, and I would LOVE to see a sequel. It created an atmosphere of Lovecraft-style terror better than any game has ever done.
Plus, the ending of the game set it up specifically to have a sequel.
This attitude is carried over to IP in a lot of cases. More than once, a company has laid claim to an invention that an employee has developed on their own time, using no company resources, even in the absence of an "all your IP are belong to us" clause in their job description.
I was forced to sign an NDA which is worded so vaguely that it effectively gives my employer the power to claim as their own anything I do outside of work, on my own time, using ZERO company resources. And seeing as the owner of the company is extremely litigious, I'm put in the position that I have no choice but to lie through my teeth about what I do outside of work time in order to make any kind of career advancement.
Sometimes I hear the argument "Well you signed the contract and if you don't like it then you should quit and go somewhere else." This is the biggest cop-out argument ever, and all it does is allow policies which hurt employees to become the new norm. No, folks... It's MY time, MY resources, they're MY inventions. I don't care what I signed.
Even if the kids were doing exactly as the police claim they were, stripping every branch in a malicious manner, that is quite simply not a crime which warrants a DNA sample to be put on file. There's NO justification for that.
The parents really ought to sue the police department to have the DNA samples destroyed and removed from the database, then continue on and sue them for emotional damages. Magnify the pain: sue the department, sue the individual officers involved, sue their superiors, and drag it out as long as is physically possible. If they've got enough resources to spend time and effort jailing and DNA sampling 12 year olds, then they can certainly spare some for legal fees to defend their actions. I know this sounds like a sue-happy idiot talking, but the police went way out of line and are, as usual, totally unapologetic about it. The only way to get them to stop is to show them that there are brutal consequences for such actions. The entire department has to suffer in order to create a culture where they'll think twice about doing it again.
That reminds me of an incident depicted in a docu-drama that was on the History Channel a few years back called "My Father's Gun." The show was partly interviews with guys from a family whose members had been Chicago police officers for several generations, and partly dramitizations of some of their stories.
One story really stuck out to me. They were talking about how they would play "pick the perp", while on routine patrol. In this particular dramatization, two cops are hanging out in their patrol car, and they see a guy cross the street. They're sure that he's done something wrong, so they get out and confront him. They start interrogating him on the street as to where he's been, what he's been doing, and the whole time the guy protests that he's innocent. Just then, a call comes over the radio to keep an eye out for someone in their area who matches this guy's description, and lo and behold, it turns out that he'd just robbed a convenience store (or something like that), and our two cops are heros for having singled him out and hauled him in.
I couldn't help but wonder how many times they played "pick the perp" and wound up harassing and intimidating people who'd done nothing wrong.
I hate to parrot the ACCRC website so blatantly, but if you aren't paying someone to take it, it's probably being shipped to China, stripped of its precious metals, and then dumped in a river.
All this electronic equipment that we love so much is made up of some very, very unpleasant substances. Dumping it in a landfill or shipping it to a country that doesn't care about its environment doesn't count as proper disposal.
Working equipment is fine to be donated to charities who can use or redistribute it, but hardware that's broken, and I mean really broken (fried motherboards, scratched hard drives, etc.) needs to be taken care of the right way. The mindset that these things should be taken care of for free is very dangerous. Proper recycling costs money, and what you pay the ACCRC is the true price for keeping this stuff out of landfills.
As much as I want one of these machines, I'm still going to wait until they include PCI Express. ATI has said that they'll keep up with AGP models of their cards through next year, but what about after that? I don't want to have a machine that I can't upgrade the graphics card on after just one year. I've been able to keep my current G4 for so long because of its upgradability (upgraded from 500 mhz to 1 ghz, upgraded from a rage 128 to a radeon 8500), and it's still going strong 4 years later. Certainly it can't handle the newest games, but it performs swimmingly in any non-time wasting process that I want it to do, and I'd like to see that same performance from a G5 four years from now. Without a PCI Express slot, I don't know if that'll happen or not.
But there's onr thing to remember about this. It is completely legal to make a new arrangement of a song with no permission from the original author. Think about high school marching bands. Do you think they have enough money to pay for the rights to Louie Louie and other popular songs? Certainly not, but if you can sit down and pound out the melody and give certain parts of the song to certain groups of instruments, then that sheet music becomes yours, and you have sole rights to it. Even if it's obviously a version of a very recognizable copyrighted song, you still did all the work in arranging it, so it's all yours.
But you're definitely right about the industry wanting to double and triple charge for music. I read an article once (may have been posted here on/.) that was about the industry wanting a cut of used cd sales. These are store-bought cds that they already got the full market price for, and they want to charge again for it just becuase they can. There was even a quote in the article which accused used cd stores of thievery. I can't believe the audacity these people have.
I guess that's what pisses me off most about the RIAA, is the sheer arrogance they've shown in all of this. They're laughing like crazy at all the people they've sued because they know they can get away with it over and over again. Everything is going exactly their way and they love flaunting it as much as thy can.
I came up with a theory about The Tick way back when I first watched it, and I'd like to know if I'm anywhere near correct...
Are most of the jokes references to movies that don't actually exist? Are you able to jump to another dimension, watch their movies and TV shows, then come back here and make reference to them in The Tick? That seemed to be the most rational, down-to-Earth, believable explaination for the incredible creativity and unpredictability of it all.
You're supposed to be the parents of your children, not their overlord. They are individuals, who you shouldn't be trying to mold in your own image. If you want them to do what you tell them, try being nice to them. Try giving them freedom and letting them make their own decisions from the day they're born. Which would you rather, a kid who grudgingly acknowledges your requests and does things "because my parents are forcing me" or a kid with enough sense to stand up and show you that you're wrong. The fact that people are steeped in the idea that a 12 year old kid is a mindless idiot who has no idea about the consequences of their actions frightens me.
I guess the good news is that the hacker types will tear these system into little pieces because the teachers and administration will have no idea what they're doing.
"Parents will start using the V-Chip as soon as their children show them how." -Craig Kilborn, the Daily Show
Violent video games hardly play any role at all in these kinds of things. It's the infamous third parent.. TV. It's shows that make people stupid and force them into living other people's psuedo-real lives while their minds are eaten alive by advertisers. If they really want to sue anybody (and apparently they do, so I guess that their childrens' lives are worth 7 figures or so) they should sue the people who produce shows like Survivor, Cops, or any number of the unbelievably mind numbing shitcoms that infest the airwaves.
They also might want to sue the companies that produce behavior modifiying drugs, which most of the school shooters to date have been on. Those stupid pills are like a cheap way out for parents who don't want to deal with kids who are acting their age.
It's cowardice I say... The fear of tackling an issue which is fuzzier than "the violent video game industry" has driven these parents to completely miss the underlying reasons behind their losses, and I say it's pathetic and cowardly. The shouldn't be suing anyone, they should be getting on with their lives...
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Burning Man doesn't rely on the 911 system for any of its EMS issues. There are two large aid stations that are staffed by professional doctors, nurses, paramedics, etc. (people who are certified to be able to provide Basic Life Support services at a minimum), which are open 24/7 while the event is taking place, and before and after for all of the people who volunteer their time to construct and deconstruct the city.
On top of that, there is a fully functional Advanced Life Support facility (called Rampart) that is established in the center of the city and is meant to handle the very serious cases, of which there are of course a few every year. They have the ability to radio for air transport to Reno (the nearest large city with a real hospital) at a moment's notice. Rampart is airlock-sealed to keep the pervasive dust out and provide an environment that is as sterile as can be expected.
Emergency services are taken very, very seriously at Burning Man, and they have a history that goes back a long, long way.
I had a go at Google Glass a few days ago (courtesy of a friend with connections), and I had a rather unexpected problem with them. The display is set on the right side of the frame and can't be moved. I'm extremely left-eye dominant, to the the point where reading with my right eye alone is next to impossible. I can make out the scenery, but the center of my vision in that eye has the acuity of peripheral vision, and I can't parse complex shapes (ie text) with that eye alone. I hate to claim "I have a medical condition", but I do, and it's called amblyopia. Until Google makes the display switchable to the left side, this is a show-stopper for me.
I can certainly see that as the kind of thing that will show up in version 2 or 3, but they would be a waste of money for me at this point.
My company gave us the option of switching to 9/80 about a year ago, and while I hemmed and hawed about it for a while, I absolutely have no regrets about taking it. The Friday off is excellent because it frees you up for longer trips away without using vacation time.
It can also make some really nice situations when coupled with holidays. For example, since this most recent Christmas was on a Thursday, and my company gave us the following Friday off, I got to apply my 9/80 day off to the day before Christmas. That meant that I had Wednesday through Friday off just naturally, so I only had to take Monday and Tuesday off as vacation days to score the entire week off.
The days off are generally respected at my company, usually not more than a brief phone call in the event that something comes up that only I can take care of.
I should caveat all of this by saying that I like my job, I'm good friends with most of my co-workers and really wouldn't mind getting a phone call from them on a day off anyway. I imagine that a lot of other people who aren't in that situation would be more uptight about their time being respected, but I personally don't mind giving a little extra time here and there.
It also tends to make my evening commute a little easier since I'm leaving work at 6, and most of the people battling their way home at 5 have cleared off the road by then.
Something which has bothered me about games, particularly those in the realistic war genre (aka every WWII game made in the last 10 years... thanks Saving Private Ryan), is that the enemy always fights absolutely to the death. Even in games where enemies slow down after a few hits, they'll still hold onto their weapon and try to kill you as they crawl along the floor. If they're going for realism, then these guys should drop their weapon after a hit to leg, put their hands up, and you then lose points for killing them.
I'm a wildlife biologist, and I do a lot of work in the Bay Area near where all of this happened. Trespassing is practically part of my job description, because even though we always notify landowners before we arrive on site, they aren't always happy to see you regardless. Honestly, I have enough problems with angry ranchers when I'm actually allowed and supposed to be on their land. Just two weeks ago, my boss got accosted by a notoriously angry rancher who claimed that she had parked on his land (she had not) and that we had almost killed his horse a few years ago (no one had any idea what this lunatic was talking about). This happened within 5 miles of where the geohashers were.
Incidentally, it's not at all unusual for those guys to have firearms with them in their trucks. It's a very hilly area along Bollinger Canyon Road, and there's an enormous coyote population with plenty of hiding places. It's entirely possible that the weapons the rancher had weren't specifically meant for the XKCDers, but it doesn't change how scary it is to have an irate person with a firearm coming after you.
Also, there are meth labs all over the place around there. Get too near one of those things and you're screwed.
What's really sad is that this family is probably now on a terror watch list, even though it's obvious that it was all a mix-up. Homeland Security is so bored because there's no actual terrorism to deal with that they'll just be devoting their resources to harassing innocent people and refusing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
I'm dead serious, these people are probably all having their phones warrantlessly wiretapped and their emails read by some orderly in an FBI data center.
Can we just get over this terrorism nonsense, disband the department of homeland security, and get on with our lives?
Area 51 is still clear as a bell. I guess you can't blur what doesn't technically exist.
A professor of mine once pointed out something very interesting about the Indian volcano theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Indian subcontinent was, 65 million years ago, more or less on the exact opposite side of the Earth from what would eventually become the Yucatan Peninsula. Remember that the Earth is really like a huge ball of liquid, molten rock (the mantle) with a thin crust of solidified material on the outside. What happens when you flick a water balloon really hard with your finger, but don't break it? The force of the blow causes waves to radiate throughout the water from the point of impact in all directions, and dissipates against the inside of the balloon. The point of strongest force for these waves will be on the direct opposite side of the balloon from the point of impact, which bubbles out briefly before returning to place.
On a global scale, a massive meteor impact would actually cause massive and very sudden volcanic eruptions on the opposite side of the Earth as it causes a wave of magma to concentrate on one very small spot.
Undying was a brilliant, brilliant game, and I would LOVE to see a sequel. It created an atmosphere of Lovecraft-style terror better than any game has ever done.
Plus, the ending of the game set it up specifically to have a sequel.
I was forced to sign an NDA which is worded so vaguely that it effectively gives my employer the power to claim as their own anything I do outside of work, on my own time, using ZERO company resources. And seeing as the owner of the company is extremely litigious, I'm put in the position that I have no choice but to lie through my teeth about what I do outside of work time in order to make any kind of career advancement.
Sometimes I hear the argument "Well you signed the contract and if you don't like it then you should quit and go somewhere else." This is the biggest cop-out argument ever, and all it does is allow policies which hurt employees to become the new norm. No, folks... It's MY time, MY resources, they're MY inventions. I don't care what I signed.
Even if the kids were doing exactly as the police claim they were, stripping every branch in a malicious manner, that is quite simply not a crime which warrants a DNA sample to be put on file. There's NO justification for that.
The parents really ought to sue the police department to have the DNA samples destroyed and removed from the database, then continue on and sue them for emotional damages. Magnify the pain: sue the department, sue the individual officers involved, sue their superiors, and drag it out as long as is physically possible. If they've got enough resources to spend time and effort jailing and DNA sampling 12 year olds, then they can certainly spare some for legal fees to defend their actions. I know this sounds like a sue-happy idiot talking, but the police went way out of line and are, as usual, totally unapologetic about it. The only way to get them to stop is to show them that there are brutal consequences for such actions. The entire department has to suffer in order to create a culture where they'll think twice about doing it again.
That reminds me of an incident depicted in a docu-drama that was on the History Channel a few years back called "My Father's Gun." The show was partly interviews with guys from a family whose members had been Chicago police officers for several generations, and partly dramitizations of some of their stories.
One story really stuck out to me. They were talking about how they would play "pick the perp", while on routine patrol. In this particular dramatization, two cops are hanging out in their patrol car, and they see a guy cross the street. They're sure that he's done something wrong, so they get out and confront him. They start interrogating him on the street as to where he's been, what he's been doing, and the whole time the guy protests that he's innocent. Just then, a call comes over the radio to keep an eye out for someone in their area who matches this guy's description, and lo and behold, it turns out that he'd just robbed a convenience store (or something like that), and our two cops are heros for having singled him out and hauled him in.
I couldn't help but wonder how many times they played "pick the perp" and wound up harassing and intimidating people who'd done nothing wrong.
I hate to parrot the ACCRC website so blatantly, but if you aren't paying someone to take it, it's probably being shipped to China, stripped of its precious metals, and then dumped in a river.
All this electronic equipment that we love so much is made up of some very, very unpleasant substances. Dumping it in a landfill or shipping it to a country that doesn't care about its environment doesn't count as proper disposal.
Working equipment is fine to be donated to charities who can use or redistribute it, but hardware that's broken, and I mean really broken (fried motherboards, scratched hard drives, etc.) needs to be taken care of the right way. The mindset that these things should be taken care of for free is very dangerous. Proper recycling costs money, and what you pay the ACCRC is the true price for keeping this stuff out of landfills.
As much as I want one of these machines, I'm still going to wait until they include PCI Express. ATI has said that they'll keep up with AGP models of their cards through next year, but what about after that? I don't want to have a machine that I can't upgrade the graphics card on after just one year.
I've been able to keep my current G4 for so long because of its upgradability (upgraded from 500 mhz to 1 ghz, upgraded from a rage 128 to a radeon 8500), and it's still going strong 4 years later. Certainly it can't handle the newest games, but it performs swimmingly in any non-time wasting process that I want it to do, and I'd like to see that same performance from a G5 four years from now. Without a PCI Express slot, I don't know if that'll happen or not.
But there's onr thing to remember about this. It is completely legal to make a new arrangement of a song with no permission from the original author. Think about high school marching bands. Do you think they have enough money to pay for the rights to Louie Louie and other popular songs? Certainly not, but if you can sit down and pound out the melody and give certain parts of the song to certain groups of instruments, then that sheet music becomes yours, and you have sole rights to it. Even if it's obviously a version of a very recognizable copyrighted song, you still did all the work in arranging it, so it's all yours.
/.) that was about the industry wanting a cut of used cd sales. These are store-bought cds that they already got the full market price for, and they want to charge again for it just becuase they can. There was even a quote in the article which accused used cd stores of thievery. I can't believe the audacity these people have.
But you're definitely right about the industry wanting to double and triple charge for music. I read an article once (may have been posted here on
I guess that's what pisses me off most about the RIAA, is the sheer arrogance they've shown in all of this. They're laughing like crazy at all the people they've sued because they know they can get away with it over and over again. Everything is going exactly their way and they love flaunting it as much as thy can.
I came up with a theory about The Tick way back when I first watched it, and I'd like to know if I'm anywhere near correct...
Are most of the jokes references to movies that don't actually exist? Are you able to jump to another dimension, watch their movies and TV shows, then come back here and make reference to them in The Tick? That seemed to be the most rational, down-to-Earth, believable explaination for the incredible creativity and unpredictability of it all.
You're supposed to be the parents of your children, not their overlord. They are individuals, who you shouldn't be trying to mold in your own image. If you want them to do what you tell them, try being nice to them. Try giving them freedom and letting them make their own decisions from the day they're born. Which would you rather, a kid who grudgingly acknowledges your requests and does things "because my parents are forcing me" or a kid with enough sense to stand up and show you that you're wrong. The fact that people are steeped in the idea that a 12 year old kid is a mindless idiot who has no idea about the consequences of their actions frightens me.
I guess the good news is that the hacker types will tear these system into little pieces because the teachers and administration will have no idea what they're doing.
"Parents will start using the V-Chip as soon as their children show them how." -Craig Kilborn, the Daily Show
Violent video games hardly play any role at all in these kinds of things. It's the infamous third parent.. TV. It's shows that make people stupid and force them into living other people's psuedo-real lives while their minds are eaten alive by advertisers. If they really want to sue anybody (and apparently they do, so I guess that their childrens' lives are worth 7 figures or so) they should sue the people who produce shows like Survivor, Cops, or any number of the unbelievably mind numbing shitcoms that infest the airwaves. They also might want to sue the companies that produce behavior modifiying drugs, which most of the school shooters to date have been on. Those stupid pills are like a cheap way out for parents who don't want to deal with kids who are acting their age. It's cowardice I say... The fear of tackling an issue which is fuzzier than "the violent video game industry" has driven these parents to completely miss the underlying reasons behind their losses, and I say it's pathetic and cowardly. The shouldn't be suing anyone, they should be getting on with their lives...