Add to that, animals in the wild are frequently eaten alive. Wolves have been filmed chewing chunks out of still-struggling deer. Cats happily munch one end of a mouse while the other is still squeaking. And so on. Nope, not at all an improvement over having your throat quickly cut.
If you watch wild rabbits, and cage-raised rabbits, you'll notice a profound difference: The cage-raised rabbits spend most of their time laying around totally relaxed, no worries. But wild rabbits are in a constant state of fear, flinching at every shadow, for the very good reason that everything wants to eat them. Since you're gonna get eaten in the end anyway, which life would you prefer to have in the meantime??
As someone's book points out, animals may have *chosen* domestication, because it was safer -- which in turn allowed their numbers to increase and improved their chance of reproducing (which is what biology is ultimately all about).
Actually, torture and cruelty exist among animals too. It is not at all unusual for dogs, cats, apes, horses, and probably others I've not personally observed, to pick out an individual and tease, bite, knock down, deliberately frighten, or otherwise generally bully, abuse, injure, and maybe eventually kill that individual -- just because they CAN.
Humans are not only animals, human behaviour is by no means unique among animals. Remember the study (it was discussed here) on wild chimps that found they actually hold wars, complete with weapons, border patrols, ambushes, and genocide of the losing tribe??!
Or view the videos of the foxes bred for tameness, vs those bred for aggression... BIG difference.
Amazing how whenever something like this comes up, all the one-pet-wonders come out of the woodwork. There's so much uninformed opinion posted this time around, that I don't even know where to start.
[And this IS in my field of expertise; I am a professional dog breeder/trainer, with 40 years experience.]
I've been saying for a while that we need gun turrets at the border... this is a good start. Now if even a few of these turrets, er, cameras were equipped with autoaiming and autofiring, say at infrared signatures of the appropriate profile, methinks warmbody smuggling would evaporate overnight.;)
Well, yeah, right on the surface would be like having an 18 wheeler drive *through* your living room rather than down the street out front:) Even so, I wouldn't expect it to do more than rattle things a bit.
Considering that Basil WAS flattened by a quake some 600-odd years ago, and sits directly atop a fault line, yeah, a little stress-relieving might not be a bad thing. Tho as some point out, stress relieved HERE sometimes adds stress over THERE, so it's not a highly predictable improvement, and maybe not an improvement at all.
Still, methinks those folks are just seeing free home upgrades for old damage, probably mostly from frost-heave, which cracks a whole lot more stone, concrete, and plaster than quakes ever did.
As I recall from a discussion 10+ years ago, the problem isn't that the commercials are inherently louder; they're not (supposedly being louder is already against the rules). As I vaguely recall the explanation, it is (or at least was at the time) that commercials were in mono, which made them inherently louder than the surrounding programs, which were in stereo. I probably misremember the details but that was the gist of it.
I've noticed it works that way with a friend's fancy audio/TV setup -- when it's set to stereo it sounds half-muted, but when it's set to mono the sound is loud and clear.
Actually, no. SoCal gets shallow 3.x quakes all the time (the shallowest I happened to notice on the USGS map somelone linked to above was 9km), and frankly most of the time you don't even notice them.
Just for comparison (and remmeber Richter is a log scale): About a year ago there was a 4.2 practically next door and fairly shallow, and all it did was make my monitor bobble on its stand for a few seconds. And at the time of the 6.8-to-7.0 (depending who you believe) Northridge quake, I was living only about 10 miles away from the epicenter, and tho it jolted my trailer pretty good, slopped water out of a bucket, and threw some small stuff off a shelf, it did no other damage. It cracked a wall in the badly-neglected 60 year old adobe house next door to me, but that was the total damage for the entire neighbourhood.
Remember that Swiss buildings have to cope with snow load and frost heave, so they can't be built too wimpy. I'd guess it would take a 5.0 or better, directly underfoot, to do any damage that actually needs repair.
Methinks the villagers are taking the opportunity to get repairs made on stuff that's been broken for a long time... blaming a quake they would not even have NOTICED if the news media hadn't informed them about it.
"However it was unlikely to activate the major fault line that runs beneath Basel, which led to a huge quake that devastated the city in 1356."
Methinks their faultline coincidentally shrugged, and the research dude makes a convenient scapegoat. (Aside from the fact that you're right, 3.4 is at worst "did you hear something?" territory, not "OMG the sky^H^H^H roof is falling".)
It also occurs to me that given the mountainous structure of central Europe, they may be long overdue for a major quake. Anyone know??
If a 3.4 is literally right under your house, you'll get a little rattling, akin to a heavy truck going down your street. (I live in an active quake zone, we get them all the time.) If it's a few miles off, you might get a slight vibration. At worst it is very unlikely to so much as shake stuff off shelves, tho it may make an unsecured cupboard door swing open.
But I've never seen a house built so poorly that a 3.4 quake *could* damage it, and I wouldn't expect damage even if the house was wattle-and-daub.
As to Swiss houses, they are built to withstand a considerable winter snow load, and I'd guess the walls and foundations also need to withstand a lot of frost heave. Snow load/frost heave cause a lot more structural stress than any quake below about 4.0 or so, even were said quake pretty much right underfoot.
Per some other comments, from folks who damaged their brains by actually reading the entire patent, it appears that it covers the process of withholding part of the software itself until it's registered, then providing a program to install the rest.
This was tried with a few DOS-era apps (only ones I can think of offhand were BBS-related software) and there were so many full-featured no-bullshit competitors, that it didn't go over well in the userland market (dunno about commercial apps). I can't recall having seen it since then.
Anyway, it appears what they really need is a time machine, to go back and sue a few minor companies that are long-gone from the software landscape. Lacking that, they've decided to attack the next nearest thing, straight-up activation, before their patent runs out in a few months. I assume they're hoping that someone will pay them a go-away-and-stop-bothering-us settlement, since the patent itself doesn't appear relevant.
Something like that was done with some DOS-era software -- the free part was a sort of launcher and demo, but to get the functioning innards you had to pay, and receive either another install disk or a download. Needless to say such apps did not become widespread in userland. Not sure about commercial/enterprise-level apps, tho.
Along similar lines of thought, it occurred to me: the patent is 16 years old. It will run out soon. It must not have been enforceable against common practices, or they WOULD have been going after the big companies for the past 5 or 6 years at least, since remote activation became common.
Therefore I conclude that this is a last-ditch effort to make money (if only via "please go away' settlements made out of court) from a patent that doesn't really apply in the real world and had no actual value.
The patent is dated 1993. Whycome it took them this long to get around to trying to enforce their ownership? Practically the whole more-than-$50-per-copy software world has been doing remote activation since the early days of WinXP, so it's not like they had to wait this long for everyone to get entrenched in the practice.
An AC says, "Well if you want to talk mortgage-backed securities and the Bernie Madoff bandwagon, I'm with you. There's more to natural selection than health. There's also economics. -oc"
I can't argue with that. Businesses (and buying a home is a sort of business venture) start, grow, reproduce, fail, and die, just like living organisms. Supporting nonviable specimens is generally not good for the ecosystem as a whole, whatever that may be.
"This life of phony compassion is a life of transferred costs. Liberals who wax lyrical on the sufferings of the poor do not, on the whole, give their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. On the contrary, they campaign for the state to assume the burden. The inevitable result of their sentimental approach to suffering is the expansion of the state and the increase in its power both to tax us and to control our lives. As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs -- the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness -- serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square. I call this sentimentality 'totalitarian' since -- like totalitarian government -- it seeks out opposition and carefully extinguishes it, in all the places where opposition might form. Its goal is to 'solve' our social problems, by imposing burdens on responsible citizens, and lifting burdens from the 'victims,' who have a 'right' to state support. The result is to replace old social problems, which might have been relieved by private charity, with the new and intransigent problems fostered by the state...." --columnist Roger Scruton
I know that's the theory, but observationally, methinks that's probably a form of the Broken Window fallacy. Exponential growth of gov't and taxes (which wind up costing the citizens a lot more overall than do crime or beggars) historically begins when a gov't initiates the institution of the dole, and this has been true all the way back to the Roman Empire.
Conversely, beggars cost society no more than it wishes to give. (And per the surveys of professional beggars, they make a good living at it, considerably better than they would on the dole.) And the cost of criminals tends to be a function mainly of whether citizens are armed and willing to defend themselves.
Itninja wants to know, "The issues comes in a few decades from now. When YOUR problem destroys your hearing and you go on the government dole. Then it becomes MY problem. Why should I have to pay for your disability welfare?"
A better question is, "If your disability is self-inflicted, why should you be eligible for the dole at all??"
Nope, it'll do ONE useful thing (if not for consumers) -- it will protect the manufacturers from lawsuits over damaged hearing, since they'll be able to point at the imposed volume limit and say "It's not OUR fault".
So do I understand this right -- they produce an equal but opposite noise (waveform) so in fact you're being subjected to double the noise level, but can't hear any of it??
Slashdot Mirror
I suggested Nair to my sheep-ranching uncle, but he insists on using those old-fashioned clippers. ;)
Add to that, animals in the wild are frequently eaten alive. Wolves have been filmed chewing chunks out of still-struggling deer. Cats happily munch one end of a mouse while the other is still squeaking. And so on. Nope, not at all an improvement over having your throat quickly cut.
If you watch wild rabbits, and cage-raised rabbits, you'll notice a profound difference: The cage-raised rabbits spend most of their time laying around totally relaxed, no worries. But wild rabbits are in a constant state of fear, flinching at every shadow, for the very good reason that everything wants to eat them. Since you're gonna get eaten in the end anyway, which life would you prefer to have in the meantime??
As someone's book points out, animals may have *chosen* domestication, because it was safer -- which in turn allowed their numbers to increase and improved their chance of reproducing (which is what biology is ultimately all about).
Actually, torture and cruelty exist among animals too. It is not at all unusual for dogs, cats, apes, horses, and probably others I've not personally observed, to pick out an individual and tease, bite, knock down, deliberately frighten, or otherwise generally bully, abuse, injure, and maybe eventually kill that individual -- just because they CAN.
Humans are not only animals, human behaviour is by no means unique among animals. Remember the study (it was discussed here) on wild chimps that found they actually hold wars, complete with weapons, border patrols, ambushes, and genocide of the losing tribe??!
"20% of all human pregnancies terminate in the first month"
Per some estimates, that number may be as high as 75%, and the principle reason is the presence of lethal genetic defects.
Or view the videos of the foxes bred for tameness, vs those bred for aggression... BIG difference.
Amazing how whenever something like this comes up, all the one-pet-wonders come out of the woodwork. There's so much uninformed opinion posted this time around, that I don't even know where to start.
[And this IS in my field of expertise; I am a professional dog breeder/trainer, with 40 years experience.]
Been to California lately? It's already too late. It has become a hispanic sub-country, culturally and politically.
I've been saying for a while that we need gun turrets at the border... this is a good start. Now if even a few of these turrets, er, cameras were equipped with autoaiming and autofiring, say at infrared signatures of the appropriate profile, methinks warmbody smuggling would evaporate overnight. ;)
Well, yeah, right on the surface would be like having an 18 wheeler drive *through* your living room rather than down the street out front :) Even so, I wouldn't expect it to do more than rattle things a bit.
Considering that Basil WAS flattened by a quake some 600-odd years ago, and sits directly atop a fault line, yeah, a little stress-relieving might not be a bad thing. Tho as some point out, stress relieved HERE sometimes adds stress over THERE, so it's not a highly predictable improvement, and maybe not an improvement at all.
Still, methinks those folks are just seeing free home upgrades for old damage, probably mostly from frost-heave, which cracks a whole lot more stone, concrete, and plaster than quakes ever did.
As I recall from a discussion 10+ years ago, the problem isn't that the commercials are inherently louder; they're not (supposedly being louder is already against the rules). As I vaguely recall the explanation, it is (or at least was at the time) that commercials were in mono, which made them inherently louder than the surrounding programs, which were in stereo. I probably misremember the details but that was the gist of it.
I've noticed it works that way with a friend's fancy audio/TV setup -- when it's set to stereo it sounds half-muted, but when it's set to mono the sound is loud and clear.
Haering: I made the earth move under her feet...
Cellmate: Just ain't no pleasing some wimmen!
Actually, no. SoCal gets shallow 3.x quakes all the time (the shallowest I happened to notice on the USGS map somelone linked to above was 9km), and frankly most of the time you don't even notice them.
Just for comparison (and remmeber Richter is a log scale): About a year ago there was a 4.2 practically next door and fairly shallow, and all it did was make my monitor bobble on its stand for a few seconds. And at the time of the 6.8-to-7.0 (depending who you believe) Northridge quake, I was living only about 10 miles away from the epicenter, and tho it jolted my trailer pretty good, slopped water out of a bucket, and threw some small stuff off a shelf, it did no other damage. It cracked a wall in the badly-neglected 60 year old adobe house next door to me, but that was the total damage for the entire neighbourhood.
Remember that Swiss buildings have to cope with snow load and frost heave, so they can't be built too wimpy. I'd guess it would take a 5.0 or better, directly underfoot, to do any damage that actually needs repair.
Methinks the villagers are taking the opportunity to get repairs made on stuff that's been broken for a long time... blaming a quake they would not even have NOTICED if the news media hadn't informed them about it.
From TFA:
"However it was unlikely to activate the major fault line that runs beneath Basel, which led to a huge quake that devastated the city in 1356."
Methinks their faultline coincidentally shrugged, and the research dude makes a convenient scapegoat. (Aside from the fact that you're right, 3.4 is at worst "did you hear something?" territory, not "OMG the sky^H^H^H roof is falling".)
It also occurs to me that given the mountainous structure of central Europe, they may be long overdue for a major quake. Anyone know??
If a 3.4 is literally right under your house, you'll get a little rattling, akin to a heavy truck going down your street. (I live in an active quake zone, we get them all the time.) If it's a few miles off, you might get a slight vibration. At worst it is very unlikely to so much as shake stuff off shelves, tho it may make an unsecured cupboard door swing open.
But I've never seen a house built so poorly that a 3.4 quake *could* damage it, and I wouldn't expect damage even if the house was wattle-and-daub.
As to Swiss houses, they are built to withstand a considerable winter snow load, and I'd guess the walls and foundations also need to withstand a lot of frost heave. Snow load/frost heave cause a lot more structural stress than any quake below about 4.0 or so, even were said quake pretty much right underfoot.
Per some other comments, from folks who damaged their brains by actually reading the entire patent, it appears that it covers the process of withholding part of the software itself until it's registered, then providing a program to install the rest.
This was tried with a few DOS-era apps (only ones I can think of offhand were BBS-related software) and there were so many full-featured no-bullshit competitors, that it didn't go over well in the userland market (dunno about commercial apps). I can't recall having seen it since then.
Anyway, it appears what they really need is a time machine, to go back and sue a few minor companies that are long-gone from the software landscape. Lacking that, they've decided to attack the next nearest thing, straight-up activation, before their patent runs out in a few months. I assume they're hoping that someone will pay them a go-away-and-stop-bothering-us settlement, since the patent itself doesn't appear relevant.
Something like that was done with some DOS-era software -- the free part was a sort of launcher and demo, but to get the functioning innards you had to pay, and receive either another install disk or a download. Needless to say such apps did not become widespread in userland. Not sure about commercial/enterprise-level apps, tho.
Along similar lines of thought, it occurred to me: the patent is 16 years old. It will run out soon. It must not have been enforceable against common practices, or they WOULD have been going after the big companies for the past 5 or 6 years at least, since remote activation became common.
Therefore I conclude that this is a last-ditch effort to make money (if only via "please go away' settlements made out of court) from a patent that doesn't really apply in the real world and had no actual value.
The patent is dated 1993. Whycome it took them this long to get around to trying to enforce their ownership? Practically the whole more-than-$50-per-copy software world has been doing remote activation since the early days of WinXP, so it's not like they had to wait this long for everyone to get entrenched in the practice.
An AC says, "Well if you want to talk mortgage-backed securities and the Bernie Madoff bandwagon, I'm with you. There's more to natural selection than health. There's also economics. -oc"
I can't argue with that. Businesses (and buying a home is a sort of business venture) start, grow, reproduce, fail, and die, just like living organisms. Supporting nonviable specimens is generally not good for the ecosystem as a whole, whatever that may be.
By coincidence, this just came into my emailbox:
"This life of phony compassion is a life of transferred costs. Liberals who wax lyrical on the sufferings of the poor do not, on the whole, give their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. On the contrary, they campaign for the state to assume the burden. The inevitable result of their sentimental approach to suffering is the expansion of the state and the increase in its power both to tax us and to control our lives. As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs -- the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness -- serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square. I call this sentimentality 'totalitarian' since -- like totalitarian government -- it seeks out opposition and carefully extinguishes it, in all the places where opposition might form. Its goal is to 'solve' our social problems, by imposing burdens on responsible citizens, and lifting burdens from the 'victims,' who have a 'right' to state support. The result is to replace old social problems, which might have been relieved by private charity, with the new and intransigent problems fostered by the state...." --columnist Roger Scruton
My point exactly.
Contrary to natural selection, that's how it sounds. And "We're all in this together" becomes untenable once a significant proportion become leeches.
I'm not a big fan of saving everybody, as you might have noticed.
I know that's the theory, but observationally, methinks that's probably a form of the Broken Window fallacy. Exponential growth of gov't and taxes (which wind up costing the citizens a lot more overall than do crime or beggars) historically begins when a gov't initiates the institution of the dole, and this has been true all the way back to the Roman Empire.
Conversely, beggars cost society no more than it wishes to give. (And per the surveys of professional beggars, they make a good living at it, considerably better than they would on the dole.) And the cost of criminals tends to be a function mainly of whether citizens are armed and willing to defend themselves.
Since you asked, my surefire method is to do away with the dole entirely, but I was responding to the previous post's specific case.
Itninja wants to know, "The issues comes in a few decades from now. When YOUR problem destroys your hearing and you go on the government dole. Then it becomes MY problem. Why should I have to pay for your disability welfare?"
A better question is, "If your disability is self-inflicted, why should you be eligible for the dole at all??"
Nope, it'll do ONE useful thing (if not for consumers) -- it will protect the manufacturers from lawsuits over damaged hearing, since they'll be able to point at the imposed volume limit and say "It's not OUR fault".
So do I understand this right -- they produce an equal but opposite noise (waveform) so in fact you're being subjected to double the noise level, but can't hear any of it??