Yeah, I think that is it. There are too many wars due to lack of humiliation.
Sadly if one were to rewatch most American movies aimed at teenagers since the 1980s, I think you'll find the predominant cultural moral message has been pretty much exactly that.
Act 1: A young wimpy kid/cop/spy/soldiert is pushed around by bullies/criminals/Soviets/terrorists. Act 2: The bullies continue to push the wimp who is tragically plagued by common sense/compassion/robots. This nearly loses the lunch money/case/mission/Vietnam. Act 3: Pushed to the wall, the young wimp faces his/her deep inner fears of his/her own glorious American manifest destiny. Hoo-rah! Act 4: The former wimp utterly humiliates the enemy in the most embarrassing way possible with a devastating rock solo. This ends all wars everywhere and there is no such thing as blowback, at least until the sequel.
I'm pretty sure that if this formula worked for Marty McFly and Rambo, it will work for the United States diplomatic corps.
FB's failing is due to it's users, mostly. About 3-6 months ago, everyone decided that pictures with text on them is all they were going to post.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think for me, this is because of security concerns. I'm on Facebook because I want to hear what's going on with my friends, not necessarily to reveal too much personal information about me. Posts about my actual life events - I'm very careful about doing those. Random funny pictures that have zero connection to my life and probably won't get me in trouble, on the other hand, I'm quite happy to forward those on.
I can see a problem arising where as more people get security-literate on Facebook, the amount of useful posts will diminish and be replaced by the trivia. It's possible that for many people this point has already been reached. Then what, I wonder?
Unless you're going to build something out of concrete, no, there's no distinction.
You're sure about that? Around here, you wouldn't even make a driveway out of pure cement, but you would make one out of concrete, ie, a concretion of fairly large stones (about an inch across) held together with cement.
But just pour a bag of cement and water onto the ground? It wouldn't have a lot of strength in it, and would be fairly thin and brittle, I think. Maybe okay for some kind of rough outer coating of a house, but you need the chunkiness of the stones to make it strong enough to walk on.
Also, quit saying "preventative"! There is no such word. You take preventive measures to prevent an event from happening.
I agree that "preventative" is not an adjective. But it could possibly be (and I believe in older usage, was) a noun - a preventative, a thing which prevents, analogous to a sedative which sedates, or a curative which cures.
But don't even get me started on "to administrate" or "to remediate". The well-brought-up gentleman or lady only ever administers or remedies, and certainly never "leverages" even if they find themself locked in the engine room of a steam zeppelin with a stockbroker and a pointy piece of well-tempered steel.
read "How to Wind Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
This book really gets into how people tick. It might look like just spin and hot air, but he's not blowing smoke. Carnegie's toolkit runs like clockwork. Get cranking and you'll soon become a big wheel, not just a cog.
It's at least true in Aus that it is illegal to lock things down to a region....Does NZ have the same law?
Yes. At least for as long as it takes our current Prime Minister to sell it down at the pub for a couple of extra bucks to play on the pokie machines at Sky City Casino.
(So, gone by next Tuesday, probably.)
But it's been great having it for as long as we have. Region-locked DVD players made in China come into our stores by the pallet-load, and we buy them, smile and ask "can we have it region-unlocked, please?" and the guy behind the counter does it for free while we wait. Then we buy any DVD we want (even the cheap import ones usually cost twice as much as in the USA anyway) and play them.
Then we boot up Windows or OS X and whoops, the US-made software DVD player flatly refuses to change region codes more than three times. Which is illegal here in NZ, but who you gonna sue? So, um, hooray for the proprietary desktop OS, I guess.
I'd also be grateful if Hollywood could stop ending almost every movie with a 20-30 minute long horribly exaggerated CGI action-movie sequence
I dunno, I thought the J J Abrams remake of Casablanca where Rick turns into a fifty-foot giant robot and arm-wrestles Hitler on the Moon before riding off into a supernova with Ilsa was pretty good.
Address space layout randomisation sounds like a good idea, long overdue, and I'm glad it's slowly being rolled out.
That said - I think it's an extremely sad reflection on the state of software engineering that we simply accept that "memory corruption bugs in complex pieces of code are inevitable".
Memory corruption has such far-reaching consequences - causing the failure of pretty much every assumption of guarantee that it simply shouldn't be possible, let alone inevitable, in any industrial-strength language. We don't accept that, say, integer addition should sometimes randomly fail - although that used to happen back in the days of vacuum tubes. But we found and fixed the problem, and now our hardware is (relatively) trustworthy - yet our software is worse than ever. That we just shrug and accept memory corruption as normal - with an entire ecosystem of cybercrime and cyberwarfare created because of it - and don't seem to even think about why it might be, and how to fix the issue, but just keep slapping half-thought-out bandaid after bandaid is shameful to our profession.
(Insert image of Edsger Dijkstra surveying our burnt-out CloudPad 2.0 PHP/C++/Javascript cyberjungle with a single tear.)
Do Kiwis fear the sun too??? Is sunlight banned in NZ?
Yep, most definitely. You should see all the "Be sun smart! Slip, slap, slop! SKIN CANCER IS SCARY!" ads we've had for years. It's a wonder anyone goes to the beach at all when we've basically been taught it's crispy fried insta-death to go outside.
IF it looked like we were going down, you bet your ass we will launch nukes at you.
Yeah, about that foreign policy of "looking and acting like a crazy guy wearing an explosive vest and a loud ticking detonator". You guys might want to get that looked at sometime. It doesn't always endear you even to your friends.
Admittedly the USA is still - barely - the nicest of the paranoid meth-crazed explosive-vest-wearing gang-bangers on the global block... except for the occasional drunken bouts of violent rage... but that's not exactly a career path you really want to aspire to, y'know? Yes, you're still better than North Korea. But you have a bigger gun, and you're still swigging from the hip flask.
And given that the feminised socialist government of NZ in 2001 removed all the new zealand air forces combat aircraft they couldn't even launch a token protest against it.
I'll take the feminised socialist government of Helen Clark which at least pretended to stand up to the US and refused to send combat troops to Iraq without a UN declaration of war rather than the manly masculine men's-man free-market government of John Key which is currently bending all ways at once to do Washington's bidding, auctioning off both our law and public assets with unholy haste to the first bidder that shows up.
But that's just me, as a New Zealand citizen with still a little bit of national pride left.
But then, I'd expect nothing less from a committee of pseudo-scientists
You, sir, have very low expectations for the noble profession of pseudo-science. I both demand and expect a whole lot more from my committees of space pseudo-scientists:
1. At least three separate and conflicting theories about the catastrophic formation of the solar system as a result of an interplanetary war between four and eight thousand years ago. 2. A dozen formulations of the Lorentz Contraction as a result of the pre-Einsteinian ether 3. A gigantic laser mounted on Mimas 4. A baroque dying Martian civilisation clustered in glorious decadent splendour among the Red Weed entwined canals and pentagonal pyramids of Cydonia. 5. Ancient space Egyptians and Mayans with lasercats. 6. Space Mormons versus robots. 7. A literary analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet as really being about the precession of the equinoxes. 8. An apocalyptic prediction involving Halley's Comet. 9. An Electric Universe theory, preferably one that makes Saturn a former star. 10. A homebuilt antigravity demonstration device harnessing the awesome power of magnets.
Phones don't track you, people who want to know what you're doing track you.
That's a little like saying that hidden cameras don't invade privacy but people who look at photographs taken by hidden cameras invade privacy.
There's an obvious device with an obvious function which generates a huge dataset which, once it's out in the wild, the purposes for which it's then used can't be easily controlled. It seems like it's fairly simple to assign causality to the big obvious device rather than the fuzzy nebulous cloud of potential onlookers.
But then, using common sense is why I'm not a lawyer.
how? This must be the same sense in which you get poorer when Zuckerberg makes an extra million.
I keep hearing this argument repeated from free market advocates, and it doesn't make any more sense than when I first heard it. Let me explain why.
Money is not a measure of absolute wealth. Wealth is actual, practical things which exist: food, water, housing, goods, viable ecology. We are all richer when we have these things. But a money ticker going upwards has absolutely nothing to do with wealth.
What money measures is social power: someone who has a million dollars can command the resources of other people to do things for them. This means that money is a relative measure, not an absolute measure: it exists only because other people offer to place themselves in a socially inferior position relative to the money-holder.
We know this because money is predicated on, and created as debt - nobody creates money for free, they require real goods in trade. That this is true is obvious from the panic re debt repayment in the Eurozone: bankers are starting to worry that money they created might have inadvertently been given away for free, accidentally creating rather than merely transferring money! This accident, we are told - ie, the potential that people could have been made rich without someone else becoming poor in equal measure - could endanger the entire global money system, and the system now requires harsh sacrifices - "austerity" - from those made accidentally rich. The money-creation system nearly became non-zero-sum - it must be made to balance again.
Therefore the possession of money creates a differential of power; it does not create wealth, it creates a soft form (and sometimes hard forms) of enslavement. So yes: we do all get poorer when the Zuckerbergs of this world get richer. Because that's how money is constructed.
i'm not a paranoid schizophrenic, but we are talking about an amazing fantastic control device for locking our behavior into that of perfect little worker bees
Nonsense! That will never happen. Humanity will always remain fully in control of all our cybernetic infrastructure. Now, hurry and click your Mafia Cow, it's five minutes overdue for a drive-by milking on Seventh and Vendetta. Plus you get a free Corrupt Orcish FDA Administrator if you send this email to all your friends.
Actually I print it all out onto paper tape which then gets sealed in an environmentally-controlled container which is then stored in an underground bunker with a nuclear auto-destruct mechanism against any possible intrusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I think that is it. There are too many wars due to lack of humiliation.
Sadly if one were to rewatch most American movies aimed at teenagers since the 1980s, I think you'll find the predominant cultural moral message has been pretty much exactly that.
Act 1: A young wimpy kid/cop/spy/soldiert is pushed around by bullies/criminals/Soviets/terrorists.
Act 2: The bullies continue to push the wimp who is tragically plagued by common sense/compassion/robots. This nearly loses the lunch money/case/mission/Vietnam.
Act 3: Pushed to the wall, the young wimp faces his/her deep inner fears of his/her own glorious American manifest destiny. Hoo-rah!
Act 4: The former wimp utterly humiliates the enemy in the most embarrassing way possible with a devastating rock solo. This ends all wars everywhere and there is no such thing as blowback, at least until the sequel.
I'm pretty sure that if this formula worked for Marty McFly and Rambo, it will work for the United States diplomatic corps.
FB's failing is due to it's users, mostly. About 3-6 months ago, everyone decided that pictures with text on them is all they were going to post.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think for me, this is because of security concerns. I'm on Facebook because I want to hear what's going on with my friends, not necessarily to reveal too much personal information about me. Posts about my actual life events - I'm very careful about doing those. Random funny pictures that have zero connection to my life and probably won't get me in trouble, on the other hand, I'm quite happy to forward those on.
I can see a problem arising where as more people get security-literate on Facebook, the amount of useful posts will diminish and be replaced by the trivia. It's possible that for many people this point has already been reached. Then what, I wonder?
Unless you're going to build something out of concrete, no, there's no distinction.
You're sure about that? Around here, you wouldn't even make a driveway out of pure cement, but you would make one out of concrete, ie, a concretion of fairly large stones (about an inch across) held together with cement.
But just pour a bag of cement and water onto the ground? It wouldn't have a lot of strength in it, and would be fairly thin and brittle, I think. Maybe okay for some kind of rough outer coating of a house, but you need the chunkiness of the stones to make it strong enough to walk on.
I'm not even a builder and I know that.
Also, quit saying "preventative"! There is no such word. You take preventive measures to prevent an event from happening.
I agree that "preventative" is not an adjective. But it could possibly be (and I believe in older usage, was) a noun - a preventative, a thing which prevents, analogous to a sedative which sedates, or a curative which cures.
But don't even get me started on "to administrate" or "to remediate". The well-brought-up gentleman or lady only ever administers or remedies, and certainly never "leverages" even if they find themself locked in the engine room of a steam zeppelin with a stockbroker and a pointy piece of well-tempered steel.
>I had more issue back in the 1990's where people thought AOL was the internet. And the Only Way to get on it.
That's so funny! We know much better now. In 2012, The One True Way to get the Internet is Facebook.
read "How to Wind Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
This book really gets into how people tick. It might look like just spin and hot air, but he's not blowing smoke. Carnegie's toolkit runs like clockwork. Get cranking and you'll soon become a big wheel, not just a cog.
Especially recommended for steampunks.
With his secret weapon, hot cider.
No, he's from Kintyre.
(oh mist rolling in from the sea)
It's at least true in Aus that it is illegal to lock things down to a region....Does NZ have the same law?
Yes. At least for as long as it takes our current Prime Minister to sell it down at the pub for a couple of extra bucks to play on the pokie machines at Sky City Casino.
(So, gone by next Tuesday, probably.)
But it's been great having it for as long as we have. Region-locked DVD players made in China come into our stores by the pallet-load, and we buy them, smile and ask "can we have it region-unlocked, please?" and the guy behind the counter does it for free while we wait. Then we buy any DVD we want (even the cheap import ones usually cost twice as much as in the USA anyway) and play them.
Then we boot up Windows or OS X and whoops, the US-made software DVD player flatly refuses to change region codes more than three times. Which is illegal here in NZ, but who you gonna sue? So, um, hooray for the proprietary desktop OS, I guess.
I'd also be grateful if Hollywood could stop ending almost every movie with a 20-30 minute long horribly exaggerated CGI action-movie sequence
I dunno, I thought the J J Abrams remake of Casablanca where Rick turns into a fifty-foot giant robot and arm-wrestles Hitler on the Moon before riding off into a supernova with Ilsa was pretty good.
Address space layout randomisation sounds like a good idea, long overdue, and I'm glad it's slowly being rolled out.
That said - I think it's an extremely sad reflection on the state of software engineering that we simply accept that "memory corruption bugs in complex pieces of code are inevitable".
Memory corruption has such far-reaching consequences - causing the failure of pretty much every assumption of guarantee that it simply shouldn't be possible, let alone inevitable, in any industrial-strength language. We don't accept that, say, integer addition should sometimes randomly fail - although that used to happen back in the days of vacuum tubes. But we found and fixed the problem, and now our hardware is (relatively) trustworthy - yet our software is worse than ever. That we just shrug and accept memory corruption as normal - with an entire ecosystem of cybercrime and cyberwarfare created because of it - and don't seem to even think about why it might be, and how to fix the issue, but just keep slapping half-thought-out bandaid after bandaid is shameful to our profession.
(Insert image of Edsger Dijkstra surveying our burnt-out CloudPad 2.0 PHP/C++/Javascript cyberjungle with a single tear.)
NZ is lucky that they are mostly populated by English speaking people of European decent.
Some of my European ancestors weren't all that decent, actually. There were some scoundrels, a couple of bounders, and at least one rapscallion.
And that was just the judges.
Do Kiwis fear the sun too??? Is sunlight banned in NZ?
Yep, most definitely. You should see all the "Be sun smart! Slip, slap, slop! SKIN CANCER IS SCARY!" ads we've had for years. It's a wonder anyone goes to the beach at all when we've basically been taught it's crispy fried insta-death to go outside.
IF it looked like we were going down, you bet your ass we will launch nukes at you.
Yeah, about that foreign policy of "looking and acting like a crazy guy wearing an explosive vest and a loud ticking detonator". You guys might want to get that looked at sometime. It doesn't always endear you even to your friends.
Admittedly the USA is still - barely - the nicest of the paranoid meth-crazed explosive-vest-wearing gang-bangers on the global block... except for the occasional drunken bouts of violent rage... but that's not exactly a career path you really want to aspire to, y'know? Yes, you're still better than North Korea. But you have a bigger gun, and you're still swigging from the hip flask.
And given that the feminised socialist government of NZ in 2001 removed all the new zealand air forces combat aircraft they couldn't even launch a token protest against it.
I'll take the feminised socialist government of Helen Clark which at least pretended to stand up to the US and refused to send combat troops to Iraq without a UN declaration of war rather than the manly masculine men's-man free-market government of John Key which is currently bending all ways at once to do Washington's bidding, auctioning off both our law and public assets with unholy haste to the first bidder that shows up.
But that's just me, as a New Zealand citizen with still a little bit of national pride left.
But then, I'd expect nothing less from a committee of pseudo-scientists
You, sir, have very low expectations for the noble profession of pseudo-science. I both demand and expect a whole lot more from my committees of space pseudo-scientists:
1. At least three separate and conflicting theories about the catastrophic formation of the solar system as a result of an interplanetary war between four and eight thousand years ago.
2. A dozen formulations of the Lorentz Contraction as a result of the pre-Einsteinian ether
3. A gigantic laser mounted on Mimas
4. A baroque dying Martian civilisation clustered in glorious decadent splendour among the Red Weed entwined canals and pentagonal pyramids of Cydonia.
5. Ancient space Egyptians and Mayans with lasercats.
6. Space Mormons versus robots.
7. A literary analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet as really being about the precession of the equinoxes.
8. An apocalyptic prediction involving Halley's Comet.
9. An Electric Universe theory, preferably one that makes Saturn a former star.
10. A homebuilt antigravity demonstration device harnessing the awesome power of magnets.
Phones don't track you, people who want to know what you're doing track you.
That's a little like saying that hidden cameras don't invade privacy but people who look at photographs taken by hidden cameras invade privacy.
There's an obvious device with an obvious function which generates a huge dataset which, once it's out in the wild, the purposes for which it's then used can't be easily controlled. It seems like it's fairly simple to assign causality to the big obvious device rather than the fuzzy nebulous cloud of potential onlookers.
But then, using common sense is why I'm not a lawyer.
how? This must be the same sense in which you get poorer when Zuckerberg makes an extra million.
I keep hearing this argument repeated from free market advocates, and it doesn't make any more sense than when I first heard it. Let me explain why.
Money is not a measure of absolute wealth. Wealth is actual, practical things which exist: food, water, housing, goods, viable ecology. We are all richer when we have these things. But a money ticker going upwards has absolutely nothing to do with wealth.
What money measures is social power: someone who has a million dollars can command the resources of other people to do things for them. This means that money is a relative measure, not an absolute measure: it exists only because other people offer to place themselves in a socially inferior position relative to the money-holder.
We know this because money is predicated on, and created as debt - nobody creates money for free, they require real goods in trade. That this is true is obvious from the panic re debt repayment in the Eurozone: bankers are starting to worry that money they created might have inadvertently been given away for free, accidentally creating rather than merely transferring money! This accident, we are told - ie, the potential that people could have been made rich without someone else becoming poor in equal measure - could endanger the entire global money system, and the system now requires harsh sacrifices - "austerity" - from those made accidentally rich. The money-creation system nearly became non-zero-sum - it must be made to balance again.
Therefore the possession of money creates a differential of power; it does not create wealth, it creates a soft form (and sometimes hard forms) of enslavement. So yes: we do all get poorer when the Zuckerbergs of this world get richer. Because that's how money is constructed.
i'm not a paranoid schizophrenic, but we are talking about an amazing fantastic control device for locking our behavior into that of perfect little worker bees
Nonsense! That will never happen. Humanity will always remain fully in control of all our cybernetic infrastructure. Now, hurry and click your Mafia Cow, it's five minutes overdue for a drive-by milking on Seventh and Vendetta. Plus you get a free Corrupt Orcish FDA Administrator if you send this email to all your friends.
Actually I print it all out onto paper tape which then gets sealed in an environmentally-controlled container which is then stored in an underground bunker with a nuclear auto-destruct mechanism against any possible intrusion.
I've seen that movie. It turned out well.
"We guided them to a completed transaction."
As the lion said of the zebra.
examples of where Goldman 'analysts' or 'consultants' were wishy washy with the 'trading' folks
I don't think that word means what you think it means, if you think it means "friendly with".
wishy-washy
adj Informal
1. lacking in substance, force, colour, etc.
2. watery; thin
Adj. 1. wishy-washy - weak in willpower, courage or vitality
namby-pamby, spineless, gutless
weak - wanting in physical strength; "a weak pillar"
He told me he thinks that 60% of all trends are made up this way by some company like his.
Is his boss named Hubertus Bigend by any chance?
And they'd argue about whether we were aliens, and if we knew magic.
It's rumoured that the Ancients' civilisation collapsed when they began dabbling in the darkest of proscribed arts - the Black Speech, or PHP.
But most reputable xenoarcheologists consider this to be just a silly myth invented to scare young Intercal programmers.
Seriously. Are we going to have a nuclear war or something?
Maybe..
"the MI6 chief said it was now likely [Iran] would achieve their goal by 2014, making a military strike from the US and Israel increasingly likely."
Eu-ro-pa??? Too 'good' for the rest of the solar system now, are we, huh??
Twelth of never on the sand
We'll be the pirate twins again....
(ta republique)