it is a fair question about our society. What good does it do to punish any law breakers.
Theft is a crime. When criminals face justice, society benefits. If the police were able to track down this thief, establish that he or she committed the crime, and bring him or her before a court of law to judge the offense, that would be OK. This isn't that. This is an individual saying, "They took my stuff, so I want them to get burned because of it." That's not justice, not in the societal sense.
I get the "if people think it's useless to steal them, they won't steal them so much" idea. Fine. But I'm not sure your average junkie casing a coffee shop is thinking that far ahead. They're just thinking, "I see some kind of laptop."
And again, so the device gets bricked, the thief can never get it to switch on, and it ends up in a landfill. Is that justifiable? How many days of use should an electronic device have before we tally it up as waste? What if every Walkman that was ever stolen had the same remote bricking capability? You'd see a little mountain of Walkmans at every city dump. I guess then you'd get a little cottage industry of Walkman recycling...but still, what's the point if there was nothing wrong with the Walkman before it got bricked?
And just to turn the melodrama up to maximum: What if it became common practice to bake a little device into every loaf of bread, so that when someone steals the bread, the baker can flip a little switch and have it turn to poison in their mouths? Is that justice?
Why should it be a big deal for them to brick it on HIS request? If there's an issue with whoever wants to use it, it's between the other user and him, not him and Amazon.
And what's the issue? He's mad because he left it on the table when we went up to the counter to get another latté?
I get it. Theft is bad. But how is bricking the device the answer? It won't un-steal the Kindle. So they brick it and what then? It goes into a landfill? Charming.
Mr. Borgese, who lives in Manhattan, questions whether hunting down a $300 e-book reader would rank as a priority for the New York Police Department.
If that's the case, then what does he hope to achieve by finding out the location of the Kindle? Rhetorical question -- we all know what he hopes to achieve, and Amazon wants no part of it.
There are a ton of posts here on/. along the lines of, "Stay home if you're sick, wash your hands, you'll be alright, etc.", and I have a feeling a lot of those people would change their tune if their much older or much younger relatives became ill.
Uhhh... why? The more the disease spreads, the smarter this advice becomes. It really is a good idea for everyone to wash your hands often, and to not spread the disease if you think you may be infected.
"Tough shit" is not a valid response to a valid concern.
Sure it is. When you're attending university, you don't call the shots. Period. Yes, you pay tuition -- but that doesn't mean your college professors "work for you" or that the school needs to bend over backwards to meet your needs. This attitude is becoming rife in American schools and it's pathetic. The truth is rather the contrary: Schools give you assignments. You are expected to complete them. If you fail, you... hey, that's interesting. When you fail in school, you Fail. Similarly, if you can't (or won't) do what's expected of you, you don't advance. Why anyone would expect differently in the first place is beyond me; but here is their opportunity to learn a new way of thinking, one that is more closely aligned with the real world.
You pay for books. You pay for ball point pens, binders, paper to write on, Blue Books, a backpack, a programmable calculator, and a sweatshirt to show you have school spirit. If your school wants you to use Windows, suck it up and use Windows. If you don't have a copy of Windows, buy one like you bought all that other stuff -- it probably costs less than any one of your textbooks. If you refuse to do that, go to the computer lab and use Windows. If you refuse to do even that, don't expect anyone to dry your tears. Which was more important -- your dedication to being a 1337 Linux user, or your education? Up to you, man.
There are usually ways around this, e.g. restaurants are allowed to serve alcohol. Local alcohol codes usually stipulate some minimum amount of food served to qualify.
Put yourself in the reverse situation. What if your school/workplace required you to run Linux at home, when you're currently using Windows?
Seriously? Tough shit.
I mean, what if your school required you to use time outside of school to do homework, instead of going to work or playing videogames? That would pretty seriously cramp your style too, wouldn't it?
Why on Earth would I answer truthfully? Is falsifying an immigration document ]worse than being a war criminal?
Question 3 was, "What is your date of birth?"
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
Tolkien's characters are very different - and way more sympathetic - than the characters in the myths and legends that inspired him.
By which you mean the characters in The Hobbit (a children's book) and The Lord of the Rings (a mainstream novel, and one that was written at the request of The Hobbit's publisher, who wanted a sequel). It was not true of the characters he invented in The Silmarillion, however. Despite the fact that Tolkien considered The Silmarillion to be his most "important" work, it was never published in his lifetime, and one reason was surely because its characters were far less sympathetic and accessible than the ones in his more mainstream works.
As for the "message" you cite, I don't really see much of a message there. You're more talking about the themes of the novel. Any good book is going to feature some kind of themes; in fact, it's hard to avoid it. That doesn't mean Tolkien was sitting there, coming up with scenes and saying to himself, "But how does this scene fit into my theme? The readers must be able to grasp my theme!" I don't think he was that kind of author at all.
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
Bad people (Draco) judge good people (Hermoine) solely based on the circumstances of their birth ("Pureblood", "Halfblood" or "Mudblood"). Good people (Harry) don't care, and don't hang out with the racists (Voldemorte and his crew).
But if everything in Rowling's world is as black-and-white as you say, why didn't the wizards just do the obvious, and get rid of Slytherin House? It was explicitly stated that most of the rotten wizards in the world came from Slytherin. So why not simply disband it, and stop emphasizing the character traits it represents? Why tolerate it? I'm not a particular fan of the Potter series, but I think Rowling's worldview is perhaps broader than you suggest.
I'm skeptical. I see Lev Grossman basically as an opportunist. He wrote Codex when mystery-thrillers about musty old books were popular (sort of a side effect of the Da Vinci Code craze, I think) and the result was a pretty average novel that broke little ground. Based on this latest effort, breaking ground doesn't seem to be one of his interests.
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
C.S. Lewis was out to make a point and tell a story. So was Tolkien. In contrast Potter seems to be "just a story" without an underlying point.
I'll concede Lewis, but what was the "point" that you perceive Tolkien set out to make? That invented languages are fun? If I may quote from Tolkien's "Forward to the Second Edition" (page 6 in the Houghton Mifflin hardcover edition):
As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none.
Of course, there will always be those people who read a statement like that from an author and instantly start looking for inner meanings and messages, but those people are silly.
As for the Harry Potter series, I'd say there's as little or as much "point" to it as you want to read into it. If nothing else, Rowling's characterizations are much more nuanced and "modern" than those of either Lewis or Tolkien. Dumbledore, Rowling's analogue to Gandalf, is shown to be flawed and fallible, and even Rowling's take on the archetypal Dark Lord can be read as just some poor guy who had a rotten life and went sour because of it. Maybe that was her point -- that for all the wizardry and wonder we would have in a world where magic was real, human beings would still have to muddle through the way they always do, and that children in such a world would no more be able to rely on the infallibility and immortality of their elders than children in our own world do? I don't care enough about the series to formulate a hard opinion one way or the other, but to suggest that it "has no point" seems to say more about the critic than about Rowling herself.
Or, he could have booked a flight on RyanAir same-day, and because neither leg of the voyage touched U.S. soil, it wouldn't have been any of the DHS's business.
I became a U.S. citizen sometime before 9/11, and the form for that still asked me whether I had worked for the government of Germany between the years 1933 and 1945. No joke.
To this day, I use an advanced form of hunt-and-peck, where I don't look at the keys but I cross my fingers in odd ways sometimes and I definitely never use home position.
For the last ten years or so, I've made my living as a writer. So go figure.
And besides, this seems like an odd idea to have now. Isn't it the old parents' lament that their kids always know how to use the computer ten times better than they do? How do you get to be fluent on a computer without knowing how to use a keyboard? Seriously -- even in the age of the GUI, what are kids doing with computers if not sending messages to each other?
I agree; your ignorance (coupled with your overweening self-importance) really is astounding.
This is one of the main causes of war: Fear of change.
How can I put this in terms that you, a young person, might understand? How about: Fucking citation needed.
Yeah, actually. I don't need to know specifics: I need to know patterns, I need to understand why things happen. Examples can help with that, but they're not intrinsically needed.
Sounds like you've invented the scientific method! Or wait, maybe I'm thinking of something else...
Fault is entirely irrelevant in the decision-making process.
Evidently. You keep saying amazingly ignorant things, and while others point out the obvious faults in your thinking, it doesn't affect your decision-making at all.
From the sound of your posts, I'd place your age at about 17. That's generally the intellectual peak of the human life-cycle, as represented by the point when one knows absolutely everything about everything. Unfortunately, the process of forgetting begins almost immediately after this peak and continues for the rest of one's life. I recommend you print out your current posts -- which represent your compiled wisdom at this, the peak of your capacity -- and keep them in a safe deposit box where they cannot be damaged by fire or natural disaster. That way, when you're 35 or so, you can go back and re-read everything you've written and regain all the knowledge you've forgotten in the intervening period.
Well, we're talking statistics here (and damned lies, and all that). If the chance of you catching the disease was 1 in ten million, you might still catch it the first time. That's the thing about statistics -- they're not prophecy.
But in strict point of fact... define "quite easily." Measles is incredible easy to catch. If I was giving a talk about measles and I had the disease and I coughed at the podium, more than likely every single person in the room would come down with measles within a week.
By comparison, the chance of catching HIV through vaginal intercourse is very, very low, no matter who has it and who doesn't. The chance of catching it through anal intercourse is much higher -- but only in a statistical sense. HIV is nowhere near as infectious as measles, or even chicken pox.
The difference, of course, is that HIV will kill the fuck out of you; chicken pox, less so. So who's willing to risk it?
I can't imagine what it must be like to work on a production like this. The actors, the writers, the directors... everybody. Imagine knowing, every day you go in to work, that you're working on inane, pointless crap that's nothing more than the result of an endless negotiation between lawyers for the sake of earning a few bucks. Imagine knowing that out there, somewhere, is a truly classic work of art that you had absolutely nothing to do with. Knowing that somewhere inside you there might be a person who's just as intelligent and creative as Patrick McGoohan, but instead you're stuck making some senseless drivel that borrows the name of his vision. What a horrible, sad, soulless existence that must be. Truly, I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
For AIDS, you only need to have unprotected sex a few times and the virus will be successful. SO if you don't notice symton for a coupl of years, and you are sexually active, that's more then enough for the virus to propagate.
Actually, AIDS is not considered a highly infectious disease. Seriously. If you're having unprotected vaginal sex, it might take a great many times before the virus is successfully transmitted from a woman to a man. Scientists believe the actual rate of infection in such cases may be less than 1 percent. Sooooooooo.... feel better? Wanna risk it? Didn't think so.
Kinda thought that went without saying, judging from the number of viruses worldwide that exhibit the property of killing you one minute after infection (zero).
Supposedly many of the viruses that now plague us have adapted to us by way of our domestic livestock, especially fowl. We may be setting the table for the little critters with our obsessive need for antibiotics
Trust me on this one: "Our obsessive need for antibiotics" isn't going to affect viruses in the slightest.
and wiping all indoor surfaces down with lethal cleaners.
If you're suggesting that disease pathogens get stronger when subjected to chemical microbicides, that's about as silly as suggesting we could breed a race of superhumans who are immune to poisoning by feeding people arsenic and letting the survivors breed.
The Swiss did some research and found that farm kids raised tending livestock had stronger immune systems than Swiss city kids raised in sanitized urban housing.
You'll have to clarify what that means. Does "stronger immune system" mean more antibodies were found in their bloodstreams? That just means they have been exposed to more pathogens. Which is only natural -- since, like you say, the majority of diseases are believed to be zoonotic in origin. Hang around animals, get exposed to animal diseases. Eventually some will mutate and cross the species barrier. The only way to avoid it would be to exterminate the animals -- because contrary to your analogy, when an animal dies, all the diseases it carries do not suddenly leap from its body and go scurrying off looking for new kinds of animals to infect. They pretty much just die with the animal.
Slashdot Mirror
it is a fair question about our society. What good does it do to punish any law breakers.
Theft is a crime. When criminals face justice, society benefits. If the police were able to track down this thief, establish that he or she committed the crime, and bring him or her before a court of law to judge the offense, that would be OK. This isn't that. This is an individual saying, "They took my stuff, so I want them to get burned because of it." That's not justice, not in the societal sense.
I get the "if people think it's useless to steal them, they won't steal them so much" idea. Fine. But I'm not sure your average junkie casing a coffee shop is thinking that far ahead. They're just thinking, "I see some kind of laptop."
And again, so the device gets bricked, the thief can never get it to switch on, and it ends up in a landfill. Is that justifiable? How many days of use should an electronic device have before we tally it up as waste? What if every Walkman that was ever stolen had the same remote bricking capability? You'd see a little mountain of Walkmans at every city dump. I guess then you'd get a little cottage industry of Walkman recycling...but still, what's the point if there was nothing wrong with the Walkman before it got bricked?
And just to turn the melodrama up to maximum: What if it became common practice to bake a little device into every loaf of bread, so that when someone steals the bread, the baker can flip a little switch and have it turn to poison in their mouths? Is that justice?
Why should it be a big deal for them to brick it on HIS request? If there's an issue with whoever wants to use it, it's between the other user and him, not him and Amazon.
And what's the issue? He's mad because he left it on the table when we went up to the counter to get another latté?
I get it. Theft is bad. But how is bricking the device the answer? It won't un-steal the Kindle. So they brick it and what then? It goes into a landfill? Charming.
Mr. Borgese, who lives in Manhattan, questions whether hunting down a $300 e-book reader would rank as a priority for the New York Police Department.
If that's the case, then what does he hope to achieve by finding out the location of the Kindle? Rhetorical question -- we all know what he hopes to achieve, and Amazon wants no part of it.
There are a ton of posts here on /. along the lines of, "Stay home if you're sick, wash your hands, you'll be alright, etc.", and I have a feeling a lot of those people would change their tune if their much older or much younger relatives became ill.
Uhhh... why? The more the disease spreads, the smarter this advice becomes. It really is a good idea for everyone to wash your hands often, and to not spread the disease if you think you may be infected.
Who's the idiot? Me, or the guy who lets his kid apply for colleges based on whether or not they support Linux? Get some perspective.
"Tough shit" is not a valid response to a valid concern.
Sure it is. When you're attending university, you don't call the shots. Period. Yes, you pay tuition -- but that doesn't mean your college professors "work for you" or that the school needs to bend over backwards to meet your needs. This attitude is becoming rife in American schools and it's pathetic. The truth is rather the contrary: Schools give you assignments. You are expected to complete them. If you fail, you... hey, that's interesting. When you fail in school, you Fail. Similarly, if you can't (or won't) do what's expected of you, you don't advance. Why anyone would expect differently in the first place is beyond me; but here is their opportunity to learn a new way of thinking, one that is more closely aligned with the real world.
You pay for books. You pay for ball point pens, binders, paper to write on, Blue Books, a backpack, a programmable calculator, and a sweatshirt to show you have school spirit. If your school wants you to use Windows, suck it up and use Windows. If you don't have a copy of Windows, buy one like you bought all that other stuff -- it probably costs less than any one of your textbooks. If you refuse to do that, go to the computer lab and use Windows. If you refuse to do even that, don't expect anyone to dry your tears. Which was more important -- your dedication to being a 1337 Linux user, or your education? Up to you, man.
There are usually ways around this, e.g. restaurants are allowed to serve alcohol. Local alcohol codes usually stipulate some minimum amount of food served to qualify.
Put yourself in the reverse situation. What if your school/workplace required you to run Linux at home, when you're currently using Windows?
Seriously? Tough shit.
I mean, what if your school required you to use time outside of school to do homework, instead of going to work or playing videogames? That would pretty seriously cramp your style too, wouldn't it?
Sure, but:
Tolkien's characters are very different - and way more sympathetic - than the characters in the myths and legends that inspired him.
By which you mean the characters in The Hobbit (a children's book) and The Lord of the Rings (a mainstream novel, and one that was written at the request of The Hobbit's publisher, who wanted a sequel). It was not true of the characters he invented in The Silmarillion, however. Despite the fact that Tolkien considered The Silmarillion to be his most "important" work, it was never published in his lifetime, and one reason was surely because its characters were far less sympathetic and accessible than the ones in his more mainstream works.
As for the "message" you cite, I don't really see much of a message there. You're more talking about the themes of the novel. Any good book is going to feature some kind of themes; in fact, it's hard to avoid it. That doesn't mean Tolkien was sitting there, coming up with scenes and saying to himself, "But how does this scene fit into my theme? The readers must be able to grasp my theme!" I don't think he was that kind of author at all.
Bad people (Draco) judge good people (Hermoine) solely based on the circumstances of their birth ("Pureblood", "Halfblood" or "Mudblood"). Good people (Harry) don't care, and don't hang out with the racists (Voldemorte and his crew).
But if everything in Rowling's world is as black-and-white as you say, why didn't the wizards just do the obvious, and get rid of Slytherin House? It was explicitly stated that most of the rotten wizards in the world came from Slytherin. So why not simply disband it, and stop emphasizing the character traits it represents? Why tolerate it? I'm not a particular fan of the Potter series, but I think Rowling's worldview is perhaps broader than you suggest.
I'm skeptical. I see Lev Grossman basically as an opportunist. He wrote Codex when mystery-thrillers about musty old books were popular (sort of a side effect of the Da Vinci Code craze, I think) and the result was a pretty average novel that broke little ground. Based on this latest effort, breaking ground doesn't seem to be one of his interests.
C.S. Lewis was out to make a point and tell a story. So was Tolkien. In contrast Potter seems to be "just a story" without an underlying point.
I'll concede Lewis, but what was the "point" that you perceive Tolkien set out to make? That invented languages are fun? If I may quote from Tolkien's "Forward to the Second Edition" (page 6 in the Houghton Mifflin hardcover edition):
As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none.
Of course, there will always be those people who read a statement like that from an author and instantly start looking for inner meanings and messages, but those people are silly.
As for the Harry Potter series, I'd say there's as little or as much "point" to it as you want to read into it. If nothing else, Rowling's characterizations are much more nuanced and "modern" than those of either Lewis or Tolkien. Dumbledore, Rowling's analogue to Gandalf, is shown to be flawed and fallible, and even Rowling's take on the archetypal Dark Lord can be read as just some poor guy who had a rotten life and went sour because of it. Maybe that was her point -- that for all the wizardry and wonder we would have in a world where magic was real, human beings would still have to muddle through the way they always do, and that children in such a world would no more be able to rely on the infallibility and immortality of their elders than children in our own world do? I don't care enough about the series to formulate a hard opinion one way or the other, but to suggest that it "has no point" seems to say more about the critic than about Rowling herself.
Or, he could have booked a flight on RyanAir same-day, and because neither leg of the voyage touched U.S. soil, it wouldn't have been any of the DHS's business.
I became a U.S. citizen sometime before 9/11, and the form for that still asked me whether I had worked for the government of Germany between the years 1933 and 1945. No joke.
I never learned how to type.
To this day, I use an advanced form of hunt-and-peck, where I don't look at the keys but I cross my fingers in odd ways sometimes and I definitely never use home position.
For the last ten years or so, I've made my living as a writer. So go figure.
And besides, this seems like an odd idea to have now. Isn't it the old parents' lament that their kids always know how to use the computer ten times better than they do? How do you get to be fluent on a computer without knowing how to use a keyboard? Seriously -- even in the age of the GUI, what are kids doing with computers if not sending messages to each other?
I agree; your ignorance (coupled with your overweening self-importance) really is astounding.
This is one of the main causes of war: Fear of change.
How can I put this in terms that you, a young person, might understand? How about: Fucking citation needed.
Yeah, actually. I don't need to know specifics: I need to know patterns, I need to understand why things happen. Examples can help with that, but they're not intrinsically needed.
Sounds like you've invented the scientific method! Or wait, maybe I'm thinking of something else...
Fault is entirely irrelevant in the decision-making process.
Evidently. You keep saying amazingly ignorant things, and while others point out the obvious faults in your thinking, it doesn't affect your decision-making at all.
From the sound of your posts, I'd place your age at about 17. That's generally the intellectual peak of the human life-cycle, as represented by the point when one knows absolutely everything about everything. Unfortunately, the process of forgetting begins almost immediately after this peak and continues for the rest of one's life. I recommend you print out your current posts -- which represent your compiled wisdom at this, the peak of your capacity -- and keep them in a safe deposit box where they cannot be damaged by fire or natural disaster. That way, when you're 35 or so, you can go back and re-read everything you've written and regain all the knowledge you've forgotten in the intervening period.
Well, we're talking statistics here (and damned lies, and all that). If the chance of you catching the disease was 1 in ten million, you might still catch it the first time. That's the thing about statistics -- they're not prophecy.
But in strict point of fact... define "quite easily." Measles is incredible easy to catch. If I was giving a talk about measles and I had the disease and I coughed at the podium, more than likely every single person in the room would come down with measles within a week.
By comparison, the chance of catching HIV through vaginal intercourse is very, very low, no matter who has it and who doesn't. The chance of catching it through anal intercourse is much higher -- but only in a statistical sense. HIV is nowhere near as infectious as measles, or even chicken pox.
The difference, of course, is that HIV will kill the fuck out of you; chicken pox, less so. So who's willing to risk it?
Yeah, so I was being a trifle melodramatic about it. The point is made, yeah?
I can't imagine what it must be like to work on a production like this. The actors, the writers, the directors... everybody. Imagine knowing, every day you go in to work, that you're working on inane, pointless crap that's nothing more than the result of an endless negotiation between lawyers for the sake of earning a few bucks. Imagine knowing that out there, somewhere, is a truly classic work of art that you had absolutely nothing to do with. Knowing that somewhere inside you there might be a person who's just as intelligent and creative as Patrick McGoohan, but instead you're stuck making some senseless drivel that borrows the name of his vision. What a horrible, sad, soulless existence that must be. Truly, I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Hmmm. A tech writer with a 4k /. id ... That's a huge amount of street cred. Do you use it?
Hmmm. In a nutshell? No. Quite frankly, I feel a little strange about it...
For AIDS, you only need to have unprotected sex a few times and the virus will be successful. SO if you don't notice symton for a coupl of years, and you are sexually active, that's more then enough for the virus to propagate.
Actually, AIDS is not considered a highly infectious disease. Seriously. If you're having unprotected vaginal sex, it might take a great many times before the virus is successfully transmitted from a woman to a man. Scientists believe the actual rate of infection in such cases may be less than 1 percent. Sooooooooo.... feel better? Wanna risk it? Didn't think so.
Pneumonia is a common complication of the flu, but not of common colds. So in my case, pretty sure, yes.
Kinda thought that went without saying, judging from the number of viruses worldwide that exhibit the property of killing you one minute after infection (zero).
Supposedly many of the viruses that now plague us have adapted to us by way of our domestic livestock, especially fowl. We may be setting the table for the little critters with our obsessive need for antibiotics
Trust me on this one: "Our obsessive need for antibiotics" isn't going to affect viruses in the slightest.
and wiping all indoor surfaces down with lethal cleaners.
If you're suggesting that disease pathogens get stronger when subjected to chemical microbicides, that's about as silly as suggesting we could breed a race of superhumans who are immune to poisoning by feeding people arsenic and letting the survivors breed.
The Swiss did some research and found that farm kids raised tending livestock had stronger immune systems than Swiss city kids raised in sanitized urban housing.
You'll have to clarify what that means. Does "stronger immune system" mean more antibodies were found in their bloodstreams? That just means they have been exposed to more pathogens. Which is only natural -- since, like you say, the majority of diseases are believed to be zoonotic in origin. Hang around animals, get exposed to animal diseases. Eventually some will mutate and cross the species barrier. The only way to avoid it would be to exterminate the animals -- because contrary to your analogy, when an animal dies, all the diseases it carries do not suddenly leap from its body and go scurrying off looking for new kinds of animals to infect. They pretty much just die with the animal.