I was pointing out that apathy is the Achilles heel of a democratic society, not suggesting that you personally offer up a verdict. When people only care about issues that affect them directly (such as the contract law you brought up), they're missing the bigger picture. It's fine to be *more* concerned with issues that are more clear and present threats, but to ignore others altogether is foolish. Although I personally believe that being more concerned with whether a lawyer should have to pay up than with the fate, possibly including the actual life, of another human being, is neither productive nor desirable as a society. But since no one person is a society, we're all free to hide behind our individualism.
Playing life is just as pointless as playing WoW. They are both treadmills and neither mater when all is said and done. However, life is 10000x more boring then WoW could ever be.
What an apathetic observation. If that's your conclusion, then you're doing it wrong.
There's a constant refrain among MMORPGers (of which I've been counted as one for nearly 10 years) of "we're having fun, just leave us alone." The thing is, you'll find lots of people who have left MMORPGs and literally gotten a life, who will never look back, but you'll never find anyone who's given up their life to play MMORPGs and said "Holy shit, I've really been missing out. Hey everyone, check out these murlocs, they make a funny sound when they agro!"
Don't get me wrong, games have their place, but that place should be as a part of life, not a substitute for it. Even Stephen Hawking gets out, and he's a 67-year old quadriplegic who can't speak.
If you're bored, then you're boring. Create your own challenges and stop expecting the world to dance for your sole entertainment. Stop making excuses and start making up for lost time.
Except that they're two sides of the same coin. Strong passwords are worthless without good filtering, common sense, and vigilance, and all of that is for naught if your password is "12345". A more appropriate observation would be, "Using a hard to guess password is worthless if you tell everyone what it is."
The problem is establishing causation. If you punch someone and stop their heart, the causality is clear. But can anyone ever *cause* someone else to commit suicide against their will? Answering that is probably impossible, particularly since we can't question the victims.
Since it's impossible to demonstrate that this woman's actions *caused* the girl to commit suicide, as opposed to, say, simply confirming the girl's feelings of worthlessness. And if the latter, then that's clearly an issue with the girl, not the woman. It could have been anything that set her off, from a rude gesture to an embarrassing spill in the lunch room. The only practical and reasonable charge -- the only thing that IS demonstrable -- is egregious harassment of a minor by an adult. That crime simply doesn't exist to my knowledge, but clearly we need it, or something like it, so that we don't have to misuse other laws, which is basically the pursuit of vengeance, not justice.
I've personally found Pandora to be underwhelming. It just reminds me of the old saying, "if you want something done right you have to do it yourself," which seems to be doubly true for anything that's a matter of taste. Pandora tries to quantify taste, but the problem is that taste is not quantifiable.
When presented with new music, I'll see something like "we picked this song because we noticed that you like heavy guitar riffs and a pulsing bass drum." Which is about as meaningless as saying "we picked this match for you because she has great breasts." While I may strongly favor women who fall into that category, it doesn't narrow things down enough, while simultaneously presuming I don't like variety by excluding women with a great smile and a sense of humor. Finding music you like is no different.. although fortunately music pretty much never gets jealous when you listen to other music, or decides it's not interested, or bleeds for a week without dying. Anyway, the only way I've seen to get variety out of Pandora is to create multiple "stations", and if I have to constantly switch "stations" throughout a listening experience, I might as well create the playlists myself or just throw in a few CDs and explore each of them.
I've worked with a lot of data files haphazardly created by some developer or another, which don't always work well or easily with the language I'm using.
I've found that in most cases, especially if you're limited to read-only operations, it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel, no matter how far from a circle that wheel might be. The fact is that either way, you'll have to flesh out the data types, offsets, etc., and write code to handle it. Once you've done that, you're only creating even more code by then writing it to your preferred format, and then creating another method to read that format.
If the storage format ever changes (which it probably won't in this case, but just for the sake of argument) then there are changes you might have to make in several locations, whereas if you're reading straight from the native data file, you'll only have to make changes once.
The only exception to this is, IMO, if you really need a human-readable format such as XML for some reason. In most cases, the data itself might never be human-readable (coordinates, bitmaps, etc) no matter which container you place them in. I guess the other exception would be exposure to patent litigation, such as with long filenames in FAT, although I've never personally had to deal with anything like that.
It's already common practice for ID thieves to troll Monster and Craigslist posing as potential employers. In most cases, the fake employers are easy to spot, but I imagine the technique will become more sophisticated in the future, if it hasn't already.
Then charge her for that. They basically decided to make up some bullshit about unauthorized access to a computer system and charge her with that.
The difficulty here is that killing oneself is generally considered to be an irrational action, and therefore it defies a typical causal relationship. Should this woman have known that her actions would cause the girl to commit suicide? Personally, I wouldn't think that anything I could do would make anyone else kill themselves. We've all acted cruelly to others, and had others act cruelly towards us, but still, most of us don't kill ourselves (and presumably nobody reading this has killed themselves). And when others do kill themselves, e.g. because a relationship ended, we're all quick to point out that it wasn't the fault of the other person. We acknowledge that the suicide victim had deeper issues and behaved abnormally to normal events.
It's hard to say what the case is here. Clearly adults should be held more responsible for their behavior toward minors, the same way they are for sexual assault, or providing substances to minors. The same should probably apply for harassment as well. If there's not already a law for this, then we can make one. But our goal should be to fix the problem(s), not to find vengeance. Vengeance is not a solution, and the respite it brings is virtually inconsequential. Nobody ever says that everything is better after a murderer is executed -- the healing process continues in the same way, as it must, whether they're executed, locked away for life, or escape to some third world country. It does bring a sense of order, in that people suffer the consequences of their actions, but that sense is only illusory anyway. Bad things happen to good people, just as good things can happen to bad people, and it's just something we have to accept at times. And when there's no law in place to punish certain actions, that's one of those times. The potential damages of writing laws that are effective retroactively far outweighs any benefit or solace we might find in "setting things right," particularly because it's not setting things right when we have to compromise our values in the process. In effect, we as a society bear some of the responsibility here for not having clearly defined such behavior to be off limits in the first place.
I try not to talk about it unless other people drag me into it.
Oh yeah, we really had to twist your arm to wrangle that post out of you. For the record, it was probably below most people's reading threshold, but there was a virtual flood of posts begging Sandbags to give his thoughts on the iPhone until he finally acquiesced.
BTW, I do love my iPhone 3GS, and haven't loved another piece of technology this much since the Amiga.;)
Ah, but is it any coincidence that hi-res images are only becoming available now that Photoshop has made it all but impossible to spot quality fakes? I mean seriously, in the latest movie, I couldn't even tell which Transformers were CGI and which were real! </tinfoil>
12 hour work days + 1 hour of exercise basically describes my entire time in the military, and I was never in better shape or felt better. I'm pretty sure I've shaved more off of my life expectancy as an 8 hour desk jockey and couch potato in the years since.
It's pretty much like the First Post'er said: Either you make time, or you don't. The OP said he can't get up early or work out before bed, which is nonsense. Everybody's a little different, but I found that I actually needed less sleep, slept more soundly, and felt more refreshed in the morning, when I exercised regularly, particularly when I did so shortly before bedtime. Exhausting my body also helped to keep it more in sync with my mental state, whereas after an 8 hour day I can feel mentally drained, but not get sleepy for hours after a normal bedtime.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as lazy as anyone, and I will probably go home tonight and do some 12 ounce curls on the couch instead of hitting the weights or going for a run, but I know that's a choice I make every day. On the other hand, maybe I've just talked myself into making better choices.
The difference is that you can avoid or reduce a travel tax by using public transportation or carpooling, while the only way to avoid an income tax is to earn less money. The former can leave you richer; the latter only poorer.
The issue seems to be that people believe they should not have to pay for things simply because they have not paid for them in the past, but that's ignoring the fact that a cost has been incurred, even though it was an external cost. If you believe that external costs should be summed and averaged without regard to consumption, then congratulations, you're a socialist.
Right now we don't need anything to discourage moving toward electric / hybrid / high mileage vehicles.
And applied equally, it wouldn't.
What I want to know is, what's to prevent someone from parking in their garage and disconnecting their antenna for four days out of every five? We'd have to put some sort of system in place to catch those who were "opting out," and that system would likely be ineffective, arbitrary, and capricious.. much like most other traffic law enforcement.
Or you'd get an extra one. Either way is ~99% accurate, assuming a weekly paycheck, though neither is precisely that.
Re:Hundred Millions or Hundred Thousands?
on
China Bans Gold Farming
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's a pretty safe bet that the figure is in the millions USD, but beyond that it's hard to say.
While my sample size is very small, 3 out of the 4 people I know IRL who play WoW have each dropped $200 on such services. If we assume that 1% of the WoW population spends half that, and that each 8 characters represent 1 account, that gives us $772k by itself. And that's just a very conservative estimate for one game, since some self-reported figures are much higher. If we expand our assumptions to say that each 4 characters represents 1 account, and that 15% of those accounts have purchased $100 worth of gold or other services, we end up around $23M -- a number which I still suspect is conservative.
Slashdot Mirror
I was pointing out that apathy is the Achilles heel of a democratic society, not suggesting that you personally offer up a verdict. When people only care about issues that affect them directly (such as the contract law you brought up), they're missing the bigger picture. It's fine to be *more* concerned with issues that are more clear and present threats, but to ignore others altogether is foolish. Although I personally believe that being more concerned with whether a lawyer should have to pay up than with the fate, possibly including the actual life, of another human being, is neither productive nor desirable as a society. But since no one person is a society, we're all free to hide behind our individualism.
I couldn't give two hoots about the guilt of the lawyer's client.
And therein lies the problem with our justice system.. nobody really gives a fuck what happens to people they don't know.
Playing life is just as pointless as playing WoW. They are both treadmills and neither mater when all is said and done. However, life is 10000x more boring then WoW could ever be.
What an apathetic observation. If that's your conclusion, then you're doing it wrong.
There's a constant refrain among MMORPGers (of which I've been counted as one for nearly 10 years) of "we're having fun, just leave us alone." The thing is, you'll find lots of people who have left MMORPGs and literally gotten a life, who will never look back, but you'll never find anyone who's given up their life to play MMORPGs and said "Holy shit, I've really been missing out. Hey everyone, check out these murlocs, they make a funny sound when they agro!"
Don't get me wrong, games have their place, but that place should be as a part of life, not a substitute for it. Even Stephen Hawking gets out, and he's a 67-year old quadriplegic who can't speak.
If you're bored, then you're boring. Create your own challenges and stop expecting the world to dance for your sole entertainment. Stop making excuses and start making up for lost time.
Except that they're two sides of the same coin. Strong passwords are worthless without good filtering, common sense, and vigilance, and all of that is for naught if your password is "12345". A more appropriate observation would be, "Using a hard to guess password is worthless if you tell everyone what it is."
People who you dislike rarely say the dumb things you think they did
Noted.. I won't get fooled again!
The problem is establishing causation. If you punch someone and stop their heart, the causality is clear. But can anyone ever *cause* someone else to commit suicide against their will? Answering that is probably impossible, particularly since we can't question the victims.
Since it's impossible to demonstrate that this woman's actions *caused* the girl to commit suicide, as opposed to, say, simply confirming the girl's feelings of worthlessness. And if the latter, then that's clearly an issue with the girl, not the woman. It could have been anything that set her off, from a rude gesture to an embarrassing spill in the lunch room. The only practical and reasonable charge -- the only thing that IS demonstrable -- is egregious harassment of a minor by an adult. That crime simply doesn't exist to my knowledge, but clearly we need it, or something like it, so that we don't have to misuse other laws, which is basically the pursuit of vengeance, not justice.
I've personally found Pandora to be underwhelming. It just reminds me of the old saying, "if you want something done right you have to do it yourself," which seems to be doubly true for anything that's a matter of taste. Pandora tries to quantify taste, but the problem is that taste is not quantifiable.
When presented with new music, I'll see something like "we picked this song because we noticed that you like heavy guitar riffs and a pulsing bass drum." Which is about as meaningless as saying "we picked this match for you because she has great breasts." While I may strongly favor women who fall into that category, it doesn't narrow things down enough, while simultaneously presuming I don't like variety by excluding women with a great smile and a sense of humor. Finding music you like is no different.. although fortunately music pretty much never gets jealous when you listen to other music, or decides it's not interested, or bleeds for a week without dying. Anyway, the only way I've seen to get variety out of Pandora is to create multiple "stations", and if I have to constantly switch "stations" throughout a listening experience, I might as well create the playlists myself or just throw in a few CDs and explore each of them.
I've worked with a lot of data files haphazardly created by some developer or another, which don't always work well or easily with the language I'm using.
I've found that in most cases, especially if you're limited to read-only operations, it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel, no matter how far from a circle that wheel might be. The fact is that either way, you'll have to flesh out the data types, offsets, etc., and write code to handle it. Once you've done that, you're only creating even more code by then writing it to your preferred format, and then creating another method to read that format.
If the storage format ever changes (which it probably won't in this case, but just for the sake of argument) then there are changes you might have to make in several locations, whereas if you're reading straight from the native data file, you'll only have to make changes once.
The only exception to this is, IMO, if you really need a human-readable format such as XML for some reason. In most cases, the data itself might never be human-readable (coordinates, bitmaps, etc) no matter which container you place them in. I guess the other exception would be exposure to patent litigation, such as with long filenames in FAT, although I've never personally had to deal with anything like that.
It's already common practice for ID thieves to troll Monster and Craigslist posing as potential employers. In most cases, the fake employers are easy to spot, but I imagine the technique will become more sophisticated in the future, if it hasn't already.
Then charge her for that. They basically decided to make up some bullshit about unauthorized access to a computer system and charge her with that.
The difficulty here is that killing oneself is generally considered to be an irrational action, and therefore it defies a typical causal relationship. Should this woman have known that her actions would cause the girl to commit suicide? Personally, I wouldn't think that anything I could do would make anyone else kill themselves. We've all acted cruelly to others, and had others act cruelly towards us, but still, most of us don't kill ourselves (and presumably nobody reading this has killed themselves). And when others do kill themselves, e.g. because a relationship ended, we're all quick to point out that it wasn't the fault of the other person. We acknowledge that the suicide victim had deeper issues and behaved abnormally to normal events.
It's hard to say what the case is here. Clearly adults should be held more responsible for their behavior toward minors, the same way they are for sexual assault, or providing substances to minors. The same should probably apply for harassment as well. If there's not already a law for this, then we can make one. But our goal should be to fix the problem(s), not to find vengeance. Vengeance is not a solution, and the respite it brings is virtually inconsequential. Nobody ever says that everything is better after a murderer is executed -- the healing process continues in the same way, as it must, whether they're executed, locked away for life, or escape to some third world country. It does bring a sense of order, in that people suffer the consequences of their actions, but that sense is only illusory anyway. Bad things happen to good people, just as good things can happen to bad people, and it's just something we have to accept at times. And when there's no law in place to punish certain actions, that's one of those times. The potential damages of writing laws that are effective retroactively far outweighs any benefit or solace we might find in "setting things right," particularly because it's not setting things right when we have to compromise our values in the process. In effect, we as a society bear some of the responsibility here for not having clearly defined such behavior to be off limits in the first place.
There's an app for that.
I try not to talk about it unless other people drag me into it.
Oh yeah, we really had to twist your arm to wrangle that post out of you. For the record, it was probably below most people's reading threshold, but there was a virtual flood of posts begging Sandbags to give his thoughts on the iPhone until he finally acquiesced.
BTW, I do love my iPhone 3GS, and haven't loved another piece of technology this much since the Amiga. ;)
* Yes.
* Yes.
* Die, you son of a goat herding whore!
* That moderation has now been undone, probably due to the user posting in the discussion after moderating in it.
Ah, but is it any coincidence that hi-res images are only becoming available now that Photoshop has made it all but impossible to spot quality fakes? I mean seriously, in the latest movie, I couldn't even tell which Transformers were CGI and which were real! </tinfoil>
Cue the chorus of HAM fanatics appearing from out of the woodwork in 3, 2, 1...
It's important to remember that a lot of people aren't yet focused on bluray.
They should be. Even Michael Jackson's dad knows Blu Ray is the next step!
12 hour work days + 1 hour of exercise basically describes my entire time in the military, and I was never in better shape or felt better. I'm pretty sure I've shaved more off of my life expectancy as an 8 hour desk jockey and couch potato in the years since.
It's pretty much like the First Post'er said: Either you make time, or you don't. The OP said he can't get up early or work out before bed, which is nonsense. Everybody's a little different, but I found that I actually needed less sleep, slept more soundly, and felt more refreshed in the morning, when I exercised regularly, particularly when I did so shortly before bedtime. Exhausting my body also helped to keep it more in sync with my mental state, whereas after an 8 hour day I can feel mentally drained, but not get sleepy for hours after a normal bedtime.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as lazy as anyone, and I will probably go home tonight and do some 12 ounce curls on the couch instead of hitting the weights or going for a run, but I know that's a choice I make every day. On the other hand, maybe I've just talked myself into making better choices.
So many possible "open sores" jokes, so little time..
The difference is that you can avoid or reduce a travel tax by using public transportation or carpooling, while the only way to avoid an income tax is to earn less money. The former can leave you richer; the latter only poorer.
The issue seems to be that people believe they should not have to pay for things simply because they have not paid for them in the past, but that's ignoring the fact that a cost has been incurred, even though it was an external cost. If you believe that external costs should be summed and averaged without regard to consumption, then congratulations, you're a socialist.
How is the Prius with it's smaller wheels and less weight going to do MORE damage to roads no matter how far they drive?
Half the weight and 3-6X the mileage.. What's deeper, a trench dug in a single, 1 foot sweep, or one dug in six 6-inch sweeps?
Furthermore, petrol consumption can reach zero, but weight and road wear never can.
Right now we don't need anything to discourage moving toward electric / hybrid / high mileage vehicles.
And applied equally, it wouldn't.
What I want to know is, what's to prevent someone from parking in their garage and disconnecting their antenna for four days out of every five? We'd have to put some sort of system in place to catch those who were "opting out," and that system would likely be ineffective, arbitrary, and capricious.. much like most other traffic law enforcement.
Currently if I am driving in a state the state usually gets some percentage of the gas tax.
Yeah well, what if you make it a habit to buy your gas across state lines? No system is foolproof.
Or you'd get an extra one. Either way is ~99% accurate, assuming a weekly paycheck, though neither is precisely that.
It's a pretty safe bet that the figure is in the millions USD, but beyond that it's hard to say.
While my sample size is very small, 3 out of the 4 people I know IRL who play WoW have each dropped $200 on such services. If we assume that 1% of the WoW population spends half that, and that each 8 characters represent 1 account, that gives us $772k by itself. And that's just a very conservative estimate for one game, since some self-reported figures are much higher. If we expand our assumptions to say that each 4 characters represents 1 account, and that 15% of those accounts have purchased $100 worth of gold or other services, we end up around $23M -- a number which I still suspect is conservative.
Ah, but what about the curious case of Benjamin Button?