Laughter is a relief mechanism. Sometimes it's relief that the character is OK, other times it's relief that it's not you. But one thing that seems to be common is a sort of tension that is followed by an unexpected resolution of the situation. I think the theory that it originated as a communal signal has merits. I also think the theory that it lets the energy caused by the tension to dissipate also has merits. Evolution at work, taking something designed for one purpose and finding a new, accidental use for it.
Take the Dick Van Dyke ottoman: he trips over it enough times for it to be funny ("he did it AGAIN! Haha!") until it becomes routine, then he dances around it because we expect him to trip over it. And then, when we get accustomed to it, WHAM! Or when Wile E. Coyote runs off of a cliff edge, the tension comes because he's in danger, then suddenly we realise he hasn't fallen yet, until he himself realises it, and the chances of him getting to safety go down again. Chuck Jones mastered that timing perfectly.
That's also why so many jokes get a belly laugh once. The good ones can elicit strong memories of the laugh, so that the emotion can be recalled (though not as strong).
Oh dear. You are so "black is white" wrong that it's not even funny. The aforementioned monopolies sprang up due to Reagan-era deregulation - in other words, without a government enforcing competition, business competition does end up looking like a game of Monopoly with one player squeezing all others off of the board.
I guess it's no wonder that you value cold, lifeless lumps of metal more than helping the community.
There is a chart here that I found with a bit of googling. Apparently minimum wage has such a low impact on overall employment that it doesn't really matter in comparison to other factors.
Which makes sense, really. Minimum wage jobs are nowadays impossible to ship overseas. It's the kids starting out at a burger joint or the single mothers working the registers in the supermarket and cleaning up after us that draw only minumum wages.
You must be an American, or you would have realised that this right to have the costs supported by the general public is enshrined in British law.
It is a common concept throughout Europe that government-sponsored media provides basic services, and that private media are free to compete with it. There is less trust of millionaires to support the common good than there is to trust an elected body. A privately owned press suppresses any report that might harm its owners.
Your fatal misunderstanding of minimum wages is where your model fails. Legislating minimum wages is designed to reduce disparity between bottom-rung wage earners and the top rungs of the ladder. When minimum wages stagnate, the top incomes increase even more dramatically. Also, empirical evidence is against you, with higher minimum wages actually triggering even more employment since (among other reasons) the lower incomes don't save, they spend.
Oh, and please avoid the canard about the Government killing off businesses. Wal Mart, Best Buy, Clear Channel and their brethren have killed off far more small businesses than any government program has. In fact, government often keeps smaller busiesses alive with construction projects... or did you think the road crew companies work out of the goodness of their hearts?
More appropriate, it's common for studios to give each actor/crew member on a set screenplays with subtle changes in the text, typos, even unique kerning to find and punish whoever leaked the script to the wild. The more fan potential, the stricter the controls.
It's all a case of the priviliged mentality: they only see themselves as the aggrieved, and are blind to those they run roughshod over.
After trying my best to understand the issues involved, I think it boils down to the following:
- Most wireless routers broadcast a signal, a sort of "hey, I'm here, and my name is..." so that other devices can find them. It's this signal that Google is interested in. I consider this signal a "chirp". - Since Google's interested in mapping these "chirps", they record the broadcasted signals. Most comments and reports I've read suggest they used off the shelf components. To me, this step resembles using a normal microphone and tape deck to record bird chirps. - In the process of recording the info Google thought was acceptable, they discovered that they were inadvertantly recording other data as well, things that were personal and possibly unlawful to record in the EU. Falling back on my metaphor, it's as if reviewing the tapes to catalogue the bird calls, they discovered they were also recording private conversations from people passing by the microphone. - Now as I understand it, Google at this stage (three years ago) decided to not tell anyone since they weren't using the data. That's their claim, and for now there is no reason to doubt it. "We're just interested in the chirps," is what they seemed to have thought, "and we won't keep the parts of the tape that aren't relevant, so let's not get people worked up over nothing." - But someone did get worked up, and now the German government wants to have a look since they don't trust the people at Google. Google, for its part, doesn't trust the government inspectors with the data and would rather just let them "incinerate the tapes" with no one taking a further peek on them.
It seems to me that the real issue here is how the German government doesn't trust Google not because they suspect Google is nefarious, but because Google has been too starry-eyed about making data available and forgetting that there are people behind that data whose lives will be changed against their will. Google on its part seems to be acting out of embarrassment and a genuine desire to do good. However, that means also not letting any cop take a peek, so they're holding out until they feel the auditor can be trusted as well. I also suspect that Google itself doesn't know what's in the raw data, and is afraid they might get accused of illegal filesharing, kiddy porn, or whatever an ambitious prosecutor can glean out of the files.
And in the meantime, what to do about the recorded chirps? Apparently they were legal, since the whole brouhaha is about accidental recording. That means the data Google *meant* to record must be acceptable...
If it's someone with a reliable track record, then yeah. In this case, it's Rupert Murdoch who has a track record of being reliable, in the sense that all he's endorsed in the past has been bad for me. I simply don't share his taste, and what's good for him makes the world worse off for me.;-)
The simplest thing to do is make groups/lists of contacts. "Family"/"Friends"/"Buzztrusted", and so on. From that point on, only make private posts to the selected groups. The others can follow you all they want, they just won't see any updates ever.
Oh, and don't show your "following/followers" list, since there's no fine tuning there either.
I disagree. Facebook doesn't really have a claim of infringement, any more than Paramount has a claim against the book "The Science of Star Trek". It refers to the protected name without claiming ownership or competing in the same market. All the site and the script comments need, really, is a disclaimer that it is not in any way associated with Facebook or their related properties.
Facebook already got Streisanded here. By grasping at the only available straw (the name), they've helped the script get noted by the Slashdotters, and it will be impossible to stop now. Even if the original script site is ordered removed, multiple branches will be created, since they can't forbid the underlying code.
Re:A space agency for the UK, for crying out loud
on
UK Space Agency Launched
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Now now, just because it has a consultant who goes by the name of "the Doctor", and the first interplanetary cruiser to be named "HMS Camden Locks" doesn't mean it has to be all fanciful..
Well, there are a couple of senators who are sick and cannot attend, and if it wasn't for the amendment to the health care reform bill, many of them would have been off on junkets or in committee meetings. 93 is actually a high number for such an uncontroversial bill.
I think you encapsule the problem most people have with Google: we don't know what they want. Viacom, sure, that's the devil we know. They're in it for the quick buck, and only see things in terms of profit. Ethics are a mere afterthought, and only then because getting too amoral hurts profits.
Google, however, has been wildly successful despite acting as if profits were not so important. That confuses the heck out of people, because past behavior from Yahoo, Lycos, Microsoft, Apple and all the other companies have made us paranoid and cynical. That's why Google Buzz got such a poor reception, and why people are leery of giving Google as much information about themselves as they have their internet provider or telephone service.
If you are worried about that, then state upfront that you have added to the Wikipedia entry, providing a hardcopy (or at least a screenshot) of the history page. Most instructors will accept that, some might check the history page themselves to make sure you really did make a contribution that wasn't merely cosmetic, and a few might still mark you for plagiarism simply because there are bullies amongst teachers as well.
Long story short, if you're worried about that, then hold off on editing the Wiki entry until your paper's been graded. If you did it already, document your changes and submit them before your teacher asks.
Technically, due to the whole speed of light thingy, often we are looking for signs that intelligent life existed thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago. Civilisations could have blinked out of existance long before our capacities to collect their signals were up to speed. Or they exist right now, but their signals won't arrive for another century or so.
Actually, we only need to look at our own example of how well we've been advertising our existence. The switch to digital and satellite broadcasting has severely cut down on the number of signals we've been sending into the void. Things like Arecibo are mere blips, in the hopes that the other radio antenna is listening at that moment and not sweeping a different sector. By the time they look at our solar system again our signals may not be discernable against the background noise of our sun.
And yes, maybe Professor Sagan was right, but on the time scale that Lovecraft used: our planet may have been visited by intelligent life, but it could have been during one of the great die-outs, and they moved on with little more than a note to check again in a few millenia, and forgot about this rock.
Scientology is allowed to operate and exist in Germany, but it is considered a for-profit organisation. That means it doesn't even enjoy charity status, much less the much-coveted tax exemption.
So yes, they could attempt to get a temporary restraining order, but I doubt that this will go well for them. It's too close to the broadcast date, and the editors and producers have most likely done their homework.
That is just fantasy. If you get into that situation where your weapon is not ready and your opponent is grappling, then trying to draw it only raises the risk of yourself getting shot in the scuffle. The deterrent purpose of the gun is already gone, since (in your scenario) you are already under attack, and there is also a significant chance that the assailant could snatch the gun from you.
Now step back, and reflect again: a gun serves primarily as a deterrent, which means it does not need to have a round chambered. Secondly, if you do need to fire it, it is a trivial act to chamber a round. Thirdly, if the weapon does end up in the hands of a person who plans to use it against you, then you have a few more seconds to react since the other person will try to fire on the empty chamber to his or her frustration.
After reading the article, I have to respectfully disagree about this case. It does seem like this is criminal negligence on the part of the stepfather as well as the mother. They neglected to teach their child about the dangers of firearms, and by letting it play with a realistic toy made the situation worse by making it seem harmless. This is on top of the grossly negligent way the firearm was left loaded and unsupervised.
Still, I don't think further punishment is necessary because it won't have any preventative effect. The guy isn't likely to make that mistake again, and the chance that prosecuting him will scare others into being more careful is also just not there. But yes, investigate, find out what went wrong and how to avoid a repeat.
It actually has come to the point where botnets are actively removing other malware from the infected computer, much like a parasite killing off other parasites so that it has sole possession of the host.
It looks like the GP typo'ed/brainfarted. The statement should read:
All four were accused of two crimes: failure to comply with the Italian privacy code and criminal defamation. Three of the four were convicted on the first one (failure to comply with the Italian privacy code). None were found guilty on the second (criminal defamation).
This may be what happened here, the lower court judges expecting their decision to be overturned but still wanting to make a statement. They don't care that it clogs up the system and eats up lawyer time on both sides, it's all about showing everyone that they're boss. To them, Google is rich and can afford it, so they don't care.
Of course, I don't wholly discount the idea of Berlusconi agents applying pressure and greasing palms to chill the atmosphere either. I merely think it's the less likely excuse, yet still very plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
Laughter is a relief mechanism. Sometimes it's relief that the character is OK, other times it's relief that it's not you. But one thing that seems to be common is a sort of tension that is followed by an unexpected resolution of the situation. I think the theory that it originated as a communal signal has merits. I also think the theory that it lets the energy caused by the tension to dissipate also has merits. Evolution at work, taking something designed for one purpose and finding a new, accidental use for it.
Take the Dick Van Dyke ottoman: he trips over it enough times for it to be funny ("he did it AGAIN! Haha!") until it becomes routine, then he dances around it because we expect him to trip over it. And then, when we get accustomed to it, WHAM! Or when Wile E. Coyote runs off of a cliff edge, the tension comes because he's in danger, then suddenly we realise he hasn't fallen yet, until he himself realises it, and the chances of him getting to safety go down again. Chuck Jones mastered that timing perfectly.
That's also why so many jokes get a belly laugh once. The good ones can elicit strong memories of the laugh, so that the emotion can be recalled (though not as strong).
Oh dear. You are so "black is white" wrong that it's not even funny. The aforementioned monopolies sprang up due to Reagan-era deregulation - in other words, without a government enforcing competition, business competition does end up looking like a game of Monopoly with one player squeezing all others off of the board.
I guess it's no wonder that you value cold, lifeless lumps of metal more than helping the community.
There is a chart here that I found with a bit of googling. Apparently minimum wage has such a low impact on overall employment that it doesn't really matter in comparison to other factors.
Which makes sense, really. Minimum wage jobs are nowadays impossible to ship overseas. It's the kids starting out at a burger joint or the single mothers working the registers in the supermarket and cleaning up after us that draw only minumum wages.
You must be an American, or you would have realised that this right to have the costs supported by the general public is enshrined in British law.
It is a common concept throughout Europe that government-sponsored media provides basic services, and that private media are free to compete with it. There is less trust of millionaires to support the common good than there is to trust an elected body. A privately owned press suppresses any report that might harm its owners.
Your fatal misunderstanding of minimum wages is where your model fails. Legislating minimum wages is designed to reduce disparity between bottom-rung wage earners and the top rungs of the ladder. When minimum wages stagnate, the top incomes increase even more dramatically. Also, empirical evidence is against you, with higher minimum wages actually triggering even more employment since (among other reasons) the lower incomes don't save, they spend.
Oh, and please avoid the canard about the Government killing off businesses. Wal Mart, Best Buy, Clear Channel and their brethren have killed off far more small businesses than any government program has. In fact, government often keeps smaller busiesses alive with construction projects... or did you think the road crew companies work out of the goodness of their hearts?
Yes, fusion power is always about a decade away...
More appropriate, it's common for studios to give each actor/crew member on a set screenplays with subtle changes in the text, typos, even unique kerning to find and punish whoever leaked the script to the wild. The more fan potential, the stricter the controls.
It's all a case of the priviliged mentality: they only see themselves as the aggrieved, and are blind to those they run roughshod over.
Ah, but those sites ruined my search for a way to trace the age of the vintage muscle car I wanted to buy!
After trying my best to understand the issues involved, I think it boils down to the following:
- Most wireless routers broadcast a signal, a sort of "hey, I'm here, and my name is..." so that other devices can find them. It's this signal that Google is interested in. I consider this signal a "chirp".
- Since Google's interested in mapping these "chirps", they record the broadcasted signals. Most comments and reports I've read suggest they used off the shelf components. To me, this step resembles using a normal microphone and tape deck to record bird chirps.
- In the process of recording the info Google thought was acceptable, they discovered that they were inadvertantly recording other data as well, things that were personal and possibly unlawful to record in the EU. Falling back on my metaphor, it's as if reviewing the tapes to catalogue the bird calls, they discovered they were also recording private conversations from people passing by the microphone.
- Now as I understand it, Google at this stage (three years ago) decided to not tell anyone since they weren't using the data. That's their claim, and for now there is no reason to doubt it. "We're just interested in the chirps," is what they seemed to have thought, "and we won't keep the parts of the tape that aren't relevant, so let's not get people worked up over nothing."
- But someone did get worked up, and now the German government wants to have a look since they don't trust the people at Google. Google, for its part, doesn't trust the government inspectors with the data and would rather just let them "incinerate the tapes" with no one taking a further peek on them.
It seems to me that the real issue here is how the German government doesn't trust Google not because they suspect Google is nefarious, but because Google has been too starry-eyed about making data available and forgetting that there are people behind that data whose lives will be changed against their will. Google on its part seems to be acting out of embarrassment and a genuine desire to do good. However, that means also not letting any cop take a peek, so they're holding out until they feel the auditor can be trusted as well. I also suspect that Google itself doesn't know what's in the raw data, and is afraid they might get accused of illegal filesharing, kiddy porn, or whatever an ambitious prosecutor can glean out of the files.
And in the meantime, what to do about the recorded chirps? Apparently they were legal, since the whole brouhaha is about accidental recording. That means the data Google *meant* to record must be acceptable...
If it's someone with a reliable track record, then yeah. In this case, it's Rupert Murdoch who has a track record of being reliable, in the sense that all he's endorsed in the past has been bad for me. I simply don't share his taste, and what's good for him makes the world worse off for me. ;-)
The simplest thing to do is make groups/lists of contacts. "Family"/"Friends"/"Buzztrusted", and so on. From that point on, only make private posts to the selected groups. The others can follow you all they want, they just won't see any updates ever.
Oh, and don't show your "following/followers" list, since there's no fine tuning there either.
Sort of like how the Daily Kos adds a nag alert about how they are supported by ads, and how rude you are by reading the site with ad blockers.
I disagree. Facebook doesn't really have a claim of infringement, any more than Paramount has a claim against the book "The Science of Star Trek". It refers to the protected name without claiming ownership or competing in the same market. All the site and the script comments need, really, is a disclaimer that it is not in any way associated with Facebook or their related properties.
Facebook already got Streisanded here. By grasping at the only available straw (the name), they've helped the script get noted by the Slashdotters, and it will be impossible to stop now. Even if the original script site is ordered removed, multiple branches will be created, since they can't forbid the underlying code.
Now now, just because it has a consultant who goes by the name of "the Doctor", and the first interplanetary cruiser to be named "HMS Camden Locks" doesn't mean it has to be all fanciful..
Well, there are a couple of senators who are sick and cannot attend, and if it wasn't for the amendment to the health care reform bill, many of them would have been off on junkets or in committee meetings. 93 is actually a high number for such an uncontroversial bill.
Now now, I don't think the EU would go that far to promote its Galileo system (provided they get it up and running, that is)
I think you encapsule the problem most people have with Google: we don't know what they want. Viacom, sure, that's the devil we know. They're in it for the quick buck, and only see things in terms of profit. Ethics are a mere afterthought, and only then because getting too amoral hurts profits.
Google, however, has been wildly successful despite acting as if profits were not so important. That confuses the heck out of people, because past behavior from Yahoo, Lycos, Microsoft, Apple and all the other companies have made us paranoid and cynical. That's why Google Buzz got such a poor reception, and why people are leery of giving Google as much information about themselves as they have their internet provider or telephone service.
If you are worried about that, then state upfront that you have added to the Wikipedia entry, providing a hardcopy (or at least a screenshot) of the history page. Most instructors will accept that, some might check the history page themselves to make sure you really did make a contribution that wasn't merely cosmetic, and a few might still mark you for plagiarism simply because there are bullies amongst teachers as well.
Long story short, if you're worried about that, then hold off on editing the Wiki entry until your paper's been graded. If you did it already, document your changes and submit them before your teacher asks.
Technically, due to the whole speed of light thingy, often we are looking for signs that intelligent life existed thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago. Civilisations could have blinked out of existance long before our capacities to collect their signals were up to speed. Or they exist right now, but their signals won't arrive for another century or so.
Actually, we only need to look at our own example of how well we've been advertising our existence. The switch to digital and satellite broadcasting has severely cut down on the number of signals we've been sending into the void. Things like Arecibo are mere blips, in the hopes that the other radio antenna is listening at that moment and not sweeping a different sector. By the time they look at our solar system again our signals may not be discernable against the background noise of our sun.
And yes, maybe Professor Sagan was right, but on the time scale that Lovecraft used: our planet may have been visited by intelligent life, but it could have been during one of the great die-outs, and they moved on with little more than a note to check again in a few millenia, and forgot about this rock.
Scientology is allowed to operate and exist in Germany, but it is considered a for-profit organisation. That means it doesn't even enjoy charity status, much less the much-coveted tax exemption.
So yes, they could attempt to get a temporary restraining order, but I doubt that this will go well for them. It's too close to the broadcast date, and the editors and producers have most likely done their homework.
That is just fantasy. If you get into that situation where your weapon is not ready and your opponent is grappling, then trying to draw it only raises the risk of yourself getting shot in the scuffle. The deterrent purpose of the gun is already gone, since (in your scenario) you are already under attack, and there is also a significant chance that the assailant could snatch the gun from you.
Now step back, and reflect again: a gun serves primarily as a deterrent, which means it does not need to have a round chambered. Secondly, if you do need to fire it, it is a trivial act to chamber a round. Thirdly, if the weapon does end up in the hands of a person who plans to use it against you, then you have a few more seconds to react since the other person will try to fire on the empty chamber to his or her frustration.
After reading the article, I have to respectfully disagree about this case. It does seem like this is criminal negligence on the part of the stepfather as well as the mother. They neglected to teach their child about the dangers of firearms, and by letting it play with a realistic toy made the situation worse by making it seem harmless. This is on top of the grossly negligent way the firearm was left loaded and unsupervised.
Still, I don't think further punishment is necessary because it won't have any preventative effect. The guy isn't likely to make that mistake again, and the chance that prosecuting him will scare others into being more careful is also just not there. But yes, investigate, find out what went wrong and how to avoid a repeat.
It actually has come to the point where botnets are actively removing other malware from the infected computer, much like a parasite killing off other parasites so that it has sole possession of the host.
It looks like the GP typo'ed/brainfarted. The statement should read:
All four were accused of two crimes: failure to comply with the Italian privacy code and criminal defamation. Three of the four were convicted on the first one (failure to comply with the Italian privacy code). None were found guilty on the second (criminal defamation).
This may be what happened here, the lower court judges expecting their decision to be overturned but still wanting to make a statement. They don't care that it clogs up the system and eats up lawyer time on both sides, it's all about showing everyone that they're boss. To them, Google is rich and can afford it, so they don't care.
Of course, I don't wholly discount the idea of Berlusconi agents applying pressure and greasing palms to chill the atmosphere either. I merely think it's the less likely excuse, yet still very plausible.