Never seen the special, but that sounds about right. I can understand why Hemingway went the way he did, but it's damn frustrating to have to lose what good time you have left.
There's a problem, though - both Go and Chess are generally multiplayer games. Tetris is in its purest form singular. Any sort of competitive game is much harder to get into for a novice, as it is only fun for them to be playing other novices, and you have the situation you see in general with Chess and Go - the few people who are really good, and the many who rarely play because they do not have the dedication to compete.
Look at the many addictive "casual" games - almost all of them are single player, and the ones that are multiplayer (such as farmville, or even wow) are multiplayer mostly in the social aspect than in the competitive aspect. There's a reason the majority of WoW players are on PvE. When you are facing a controlled computer opponent, you can apply a constantly ramping difficulty level that starts at a place a novice can still have fun. When you're playing competitively, the moment you have a significant skill imbalance the fun disappears.
Personally I'm worried about the following dilemma.
As long as enough of my brain and body is functioning to be capable of taking action, I'd probably prefer to be alive. As long as I can talk or type and listen or read there are plenty of useful things I could set myself to.
Once I lose that ability, I'd really rather just off myself.
The problem is... at that point, I doubt I'd be very able to handle it myself. So you'd essentially be asking someone in your family and friends to go to jail for murder.
Personally I'm leaning toward some kind of old folks home suicide pact, where we all agree to kill each other when the time comes. Because, hey, when you're getting close, what's the worst they can do to you?
I watched my grandfather on his death bed beg his God to kill him for over a year. We need to stop this bullshit clinging to lives that aren't ours and allow people to die with dignity.
The worst moment is when you're reading a classic and suddenly realize you know the ending because you've seen the exact same plot (under a different name) fifty times growing up in different cartoons, sitcoms, and other series. Much classic literature is more commonly experienced as sort of a TV folk tale any more.
You are, however, still vulnerable to small arms fire and surface to air missiles. More than that, you are responsible for the lives of everyone one of the soldiers on the ground whom you are supporting, and if you fail to take out the targets, you'll have your friend's blood on your hands.
That said... there are still rules of engagement, and how to identify targets that these men are trained in. The story here is not that this horrible thing happened -- these things are not excusable, but not unexpected, either -- it's that it was covered up, and that apparently no one was held responsible for it. Empathy is not separate from justice or real standards of conduct.
I remember watching a documentary on the first gulf with my veteran cousin. On one shot they showed an armored vehicle through the bore camera of an american tank. My cousin immediately said "wait, that's a friendly" right before it opened fire, and the announcer started talking about the friendly fire incident. They spend a lot of time training people what they are and are not supposed to shoot at.
Re:Location without GPS
on
iPad Review
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It's also fun when it gets an old value for your address. I moved two years ago, but when I turned on my new ipod it thought I was in another state.
Will Smith seems like one of those actors who is really dependent on good direction. By that I mean someone who doesn't just let him run out of control with a scene. Personally I see that in a lot of comedians - they've got talent, but you need someone who can direct that talent instead of just letting them go on way past the point where the joke was funny or the character was believable.
You are correct. I thought that the motorist site linked to *another* study which did support my findings, and that I had read previously but was unable to relocate in a couple minutes of searching. In any case, people driving slowly are *more* dangerous, to themselves and others.
I just get tired of everyone doing the wikipedia [citation needed] when I mention a study on a forum that I know I read, but can't find a link to immediately.
Enforcement does reduce speeds... for the area enforced. It also makes cops spend a lot of time sitting in a squad car ticketing people (and hoping that no one who was speeding slams on their brakes and causes more of an accident) instead of doing useful cop stuff.
As for grooves in the road, your solution to keep a few people from speeding is to incredibly annoy anyone who ever uses the road?
I would be surprised if assholes were deterred by narrower lanes. Anyone on a residential road who feels that *they* are safe at 90 mph isn't paying attention to rational queues.
Studies show that drivers adjust to the speed at which they feel safe, regardless of posted speed. So the only way to make them go slower is to make the road inherently *less* safe.
Also, similar studies show that driving about 5-10 mph faster than posted is actually about the safest speed you can go. http://www.motorists.org/speedlimits/
All in all, one of the dumbest proposals I've ever heard. It seems that one of the easiest mistakes to make as an organization is to try to optimize for one contributing factor (speed) while ignoring the point of restricting that factor in the first place (reducing accidents).
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that only amateurs really care that much about which API they're using. The professionals are too busy figuring digging through the weird special cases you need to make anything work.
I think that's a related problem of being completely unwilling to separate out different levels of achievement at early grades. It really seems sometimes that if you moved kids around properly you'd have half of the class doing calculus by 7th grade, when the rest could then start worrying about arithmetic, which is about all they'll ever need to know anyway.
Some people just don't seemed to be wired right for math, yet we insist on forcing it on them in the most boring way possible just on the outside chance that it might suddenly take and they can go on to become engineers, instead of businessmen or teachers or whatever-the-hell they actually want to be.
Judging inter-societal conflict and history through the same morality used to describe individual behavior makes for great righteous indignation, but poor history.
Human history is a story of cultural migrations full of bloodshed. Every piece of land owned by a society was taken from another society. The Americas were full of warrior tribes and ethos... who were they fighting before the white man arrived? Cortes' invasion was successful because he started an uprising against the last warlike conqueror. Europe was invaded by (at various times) by the Persians, Moors, Goths, Celts, Romans, Mongols, and Turks. Egypt was conquered by the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Romans.
The European empires are just the most recent technologically and culturally advanced civilization to use that advancement for expansion. You may call it evil, but it is no less evil than any other successful culture.
As for applying that logic to individual actions regarding your neighbors, well that's a whole different lecture on social contracts, and the difference between norms within a societal group and with other societies.
If high school had anything in common with "the real world" aside from being stuck someplace for 8 hours, I might agree with you. In any case, they're going to go immediately from this to college, where they have the freedom to schedule their first class at noon and nothing on Fridays if they work it right, so I think they'll be in for a bit of an adjustment anyway.
It kind of amazes me that people take as gospel that the European systems are inherently better than the American ones. When adjusted for racial and cultural differences (including the fact that more americans are in, say, car accidents) the American system arguably does a better job on average for its people. It's more expensive, and it's possibly less efficient, but it is better.
Also, taken as a whole, the model European countries have overall a worse economy and worse per capita living standards than the US. Yes, Sweden is better... but not compared to Swedes living in the US. And France is significantly worse. It's not just that the rich americans are richer, either - the middle class is as well.
I'd much rather we looked at what aspects of care are better in Europe (less diabetes due to a better diet, more preventative medicine due to better compensation for primary care physicians) rather than what seems to be the level of inspection going on in most of these debates, which is "I get free healthcare in France so therefore it's better."
This reform will be great for some percentage of the 30 million people in the US right now who don't have insurance. At what cost to the rest of us I don't know (so far all medical entitlements actual costs have come in at several multiples of their expected cost). It's not going to do anything to slow down the rising cost of healthcare, though, as those rising costs are driven directly by the third-party payer model that this not only continues but now requires of all people.
Healthcare is expensive because we are fat and unhealthy. Because primary care physicians don't make half of what technicians make (the US has far fewer primary care physicians per capita than Europe) so we get worse preventative care. Because most people never see how much their medical care is costing them beyond a $50 deductible, so they don't think twice before going in for a $10,000 MRI. Because doctors know this, and hospitals get paid by insurance companies based on how many tests they run, and because they don't want to be sued because they *didn't* run the tests.
None of these are addressed by current legislation. So great, you're helping 10% of the country get medical care at a possible (giant number) cost. But expecting it to make any real dent in real medical costs, which are the real reason that insurance costs are going up... more than any evil conspiracy of corporations who care about dollars instead of people... I don't see it.
You're missing something, though. The suit is about "alleged" treasonous scumbags.
If an American citizen moves to Afghanistan, buys and AK-47, and starts shooting at US soldiers, no one even begins to claim they can't fire back and shoot the bastard.
Similarly, if he joins Al Qaeda, is present while the training camp is raided, and ends up killed in the shooting, the soldiers get a reasonable level of leeway that they didn't *know* he was a citizen before they started shooting - they aren't going to be required to check ID's before they can open fire.
This is about the government deciding, through whatever process (even if it is correct), that an American citizen is a terrorist operative, and then taking steps to eliminate that person with no due process.
If they decided that someone in Michigan had been helping terrorists, they can't put a sniper on a rooftop and take him out on his way to McDonald's. If he's a serial killer they can't do it either.
The fact that this is being done with drones is only tangential to the real constitutional problem here. The drones are just an effective and lower-risk form of assassination.
So, is that clear enough? Actively engaged in a terrorist act = blow the fucker up. Suspected of engaging in terrorist actions = due process of law, just like being suspected of rape, murder, or any other horrible a person can do.
My dad's a midwestern folk musician who plays a lot of Irish stuff. His stage "Irish" accent sounds about as authentic as the leprechaun on the lucky charms commercials. And he constantly gets people asking him if he's actually from Ireland. He says he just cringes inside every time someone asks.
I have tried three or four different brands of CFL's. All of them take longer to turn on than an incandescent. Some of them are still usable. However... with incandescents, I can buy whatever cheapass brand I want, and they still work. I now have several packages of generally useless light bulbs that combined cost me $30 to find out that they suck. Moreover, I have to remember which brands do and do not suck, and no, just buying the expensive ones doesn't cut it. This is a lot of annoyance for something as simple as a light bulb.
The argument about heating during the winter is weak? Not everyone lives in California. I spend $1,000 in propane every winter. I spend zero dollars on air conditioning during the summer. Any excess heat put out during the winter is definitely going to work. Central Ohio isn't exactly the frozen tundra, either. I'm working on improving insulation in my house for the winter, but that's not going to make me suddenly grow a giant air conditioning bill. Now, the excess heat shouldn't be as cost-effective as the propane, but it's not waste inherently.
Finally, a point that no one seems to mention - what about all of the legacy light fixtures that CFL's don't fit in? I tried three different CFL bulbs and none of them fit in my garage opener. The same holds for three or four other fixtures in the house, as well as several of our lamps. Time to buy all new fixtures for the house and install them just to save a $3 a year in energy costs?
Look, I use CFL's in a lot of places in my house. In some spaces I really like that they don't burn out as often, or that they don't put off as much heat. In some use cases it doesn't matter that if you pick a random one off the shelf at a hardware store there's a 50% chance it's not going to turn on before you've already walked across the room. But they aren't a unilateral improvement over incandescents, and it'd be nice if people stopped pretending that they were.
I'd also like to see the ebook store that doesn't have DRM'd content. There's plenty of free content if you like commons stuff, and a few individual publishers sell their own things.. but a mainstream, bookstore-like experience? Nada.
Look, I hate it, too, but it's not an ipad specific fault.
Have you interacted with anyone who wasn't a geek recently? I love what control I have over my computer, too, but the vast majority of users struggle to install something other than internet explorer! They use their computer for facebook, music, word, and porn. The only installers they run personally are pop cap games and malware.
Aside from our nerdy philosophical objections to the idea, the fact that the garden has a wall doesn't matter if it has everything you want or care about inside of it.
I mean, I don't care if you buy an ipad. I'm not touching one and I don't own an iphone. But the amount of complete denial of the state of computing users here amazes me.
I actually did hit up about ten links, I just hit the mayo clinic one because it was from an reputable medical source.
You could argue that those trace minerals have some benefits, but the only real difference in the actual salt is the size of the crystals, which has jack all effect as the salt immediately dissolves when you eat it.
Slashdot Mirror
Never seen the special, but that sounds about right. I can understand why Hemingway went the way he did, but it's damn frustrating to have to lose what good time you have left.
There's a problem, though - both Go and Chess are generally multiplayer games. Tetris is in its purest form singular. Any sort of competitive game is much harder to get into for a novice, as it is only fun for them to be playing other novices, and you have the situation you see in general with Chess and Go - the few people who are really good, and the many who rarely play because they do not have the dedication to compete.
Look at the many addictive "casual" games - almost all of them are single player, and the ones that are multiplayer (such as farmville, or even wow) are multiplayer mostly in the social aspect than in the competitive aspect. There's a reason the majority of WoW players are on PvE. When you are facing a controlled computer opponent, you can apply a constantly ramping difficulty level that starts at a place a novice can still have fun. When you're playing competitively, the moment you have a significant skill imbalance the fun disappears.
Personally I'm worried about the following dilemma.
As long as enough of my brain and body is functioning to be capable of taking action, I'd probably prefer to be alive. As long as I can talk or type and listen or read there are plenty of useful things I could set myself to.
Once I lose that ability, I'd really rather just off myself.
The problem is... at that point, I doubt I'd be very able to handle it myself. So you'd essentially be asking someone in your family and friends to go to jail for murder.
Personally I'm leaning toward some kind of old folks home suicide pact, where we all agree to kill each other when the time comes. Because, hey, when you're getting close, what's the worst they can do to you?
I watched my grandfather on his death bed beg his God to kill him for over a year. We need to stop this bullshit clinging to lives that aren't ours and allow people to die with dignity.
The typical "This book was boring" post is what happens when you *force* people do anything.
The worst moment is when you're reading a classic and suddenly realize you know the ending because you've seen the exact same plot (under a different name) fifty times growing up in different cartoons, sitcoms, and other series. Much classic literature is more commonly experienced as sort of a TV folk tale any more.
You are, however, still vulnerable to small arms fire and surface to air missiles. More than that, you are responsible for the lives of everyone one of the soldiers on the ground whom you are supporting, and if you fail to take out the targets, you'll have your friend's blood on your hands.
That said... there are still rules of engagement, and how to identify targets that these men are trained in. The story here is not that this horrible thing happened -- these things are not excusable, but not unexpected, either -- it's that it was covered up, and that apparently no one was held responsible for it. Empathy is not separate from justice or real standards of conduct.
I remember watching a documentary on the first gulf with my veteran cousin. On one shot they showed an armored vehicle through the bore camera of an american tank. My cousin immediately said "wait, that's a friendly" right before it opened fire, and the announcer started talking about the friendly fire incident. They spend a lot of time training people what they are and are not supposed to shoot at.
It's also fun when it gets an old value for your address. I moved two years ago, but when I turned on my new ipod it thought I was in another state.
Thankfully you can fix this on skyhook's website.
Will Smith seems like one of those actors who is really dependent on good direction. By that I mean someone who doesn't just let him run out of control with a scene. Personally I see that in a lot of comedians - they've got talent, but you need someone who can direct that talent instead of just letting them go on way past the point where the joke was funny or the character was believable.
Fun fact - the mini-roundabouts they installed near my house to slow down traffic can be taken in almost exactly the same manner as a chicago box.
Addition - don't try this in the snow. Don't ask my wife how she knows this.
You are correct. I thought that the motorist site linked to *another* study which did support my findings, and that I had read previously but was unable to relocate in a couple minutes of searching. In any case, people driving slowly are *more* dangerous, to themselves and others.
I just get tired of everyone doing the wikipedia [citation needed] when I mention a study on a forum that I know I read, but can't find a link to immediately.
Enforcement does reduce speeds... for the area enforced. It also makes cops spend a lot of time sitting in a squad car ticketing people (and hoping that no one who was speeding slams on their brakes and causes more of an accident) instead of doing useful cop stuff.
As for grooves in the road, your solution to keep a few people from speeding is to incredibly annoy anyone who ever uses the road?
I would be surprised if assholes were deterred by narrower lanes. Anyone on a residential road who feels that *they* are safe at 90 mph isn't paying attention to rational queues.
Studies show that drivers adjust to the speed at which they feel safe, regardless of posted speed. So the only way to make them go slower is to make the road inherently *less* safe.
Also, similar studies show that driving about 5-10 mph faster than posted is actually about the safest speed you can go.
http://www.motorists.org/speedlimits/
There's also the argument that restricting the ability to drive quickly kills, as you slow emergency response vehicles as well. http://www.bromleytransport.org.uk/Ambulance_delays.htm
All in all, one of the dumbest proposals I've ever heard. It seems that one of the easiest mistakes to make as an organization is to try to optimize for one contributing factor (speed) while ignoring the point of restricting that factor in the first place (reducing accidents).
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that only amateurs really care that much about which API they're using. The professionals are too busy figuring digging through the weird special cases you need to make anything work.
I think that's a related problem of being completely unwilling to separate out different levels of achievement at early grades. It really seems sometimes that if you moved kids around properly you'd have half of the class doing calculus by 7th grade, when the rest could then start worrying about arithmetic, which is about all they'll ever need to know anyway.
Some people just don't seemed to be wired right for math, yet we insist on forcing it on them in the most boring way possible just on the outside chance that it might suddenly take and they can go on to become engineers, instead of businessmen or teachers or whatever-the-hell they actually want to be.
Judging inter-societal conflict and history through the same morality used to describe individual behavior makes for great righteous indignation, but poor history.
Human history is a story of cultural migrations full of bloodshed. Every piece of land owned by a society was taken from another society. The Americas were full of warrior tribes and ethos... who were they fighting before the white man arrived? Cortes' invasion was successful because he started an uprising against the last warlike conqueror. Europe was invaded by (at various times) by the Persians, Moors, Goths, Celts, Romans, Mongols, and Turks. Egypt was conquered by the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Romans.
The European empires are just the most recent technologically and culturally advanced civilization to use that advancement for expansion. You may call it evil, but it is no less evil than any other successful culture.
As for applying that logic to individual actions regarding your neighbors, well that's a whole different lecture on social contracts, and the difference between norms within a societal group and with other societies.
If high school had anything in common with "the real world" aside from being stuck someplace for 8 hours, I might agree with you. In any case, they're going to go immediately from this to college, where they have the freedom to schedule their first class at noon and nothing on Fridays if they work it right, so I think they'll be in for a bit of an adjustment anyway.
It kind of amazes me that people take as gospel that the European systems are inherently better than the American ones. When adjusted for racial and cultural differences (including the fact that more americans are in, say, car accidents) the American system arguably does a better job on average for its people. It's more expensive, and it's possibly less efficient, but it is better.
Also, taken as a whole, the model European countries have overall a worse economy and worse per capita living standards than the US. Yes, Sweden is better... but not compared to Swedes living in the US. And France is significantly worse. It's not just that the rich americans are richer, either - the middle class is as well.
I'd much rather we looked at what aspects of care are better in Europe (less diabetes due to a better diet, more preventative medicine due to better compensation for primary care physicians) rather than what seems to be the level of inspection going on in most of these debates, which is "I get free healthcare in France so therefore it's better."
This reform will be great for some percentage of the 30 million people in the US right now who don't have insurance. At what cost to the rest of us I don't know (so far all medical entitlements actual costs have come in at several multiples of their expected cost). It's not going to do anything to slow down the rising cost of healthcare, though, as those rising costs are driven directly by the third-party payer model that this not only continues but now requires of all people.
Healthcare is expensive because we are fat and unhealthy. Because primary care physicians don't make half of what technicians make (the US has far fewer primary care physicians per capita than Europe) so we get worse preventative care. Because most people never see how much their medical care is costing them beyond a $50 deductible, so they don't think twice before going in for a $10,000 MRI. Because doctors know this, and hospitals get paid by insurance companies based on how many tests they run, and because they don't want to be sued because they *didn't* run the tests.
None of these are addressed by current legislation. So great, you're helping 10% of the country get medical care at a possible (giant number) cost. But expecting it to make any real dent in real medical costs, which are the real reason that insurance costs are going up... more than any evil conspiracy of corporations who care about dollars instead of people... I don't see it.
You're missing something, though. The suit is about "alleged" treasonous scumbags.
If an American citizen moves to Afghanistan, buys and AK-47, and starts shooting at US soldiers, no one even begins to claim they can't fire back and shoot the bastard.
Similarly, if he joins Al Qaeda, is present while the training camp is raided, and ends up killed in the shooting, the soldiers get a reasonable level of leeway that they didn't *know* he was a citizen before they started shooting - they aren't going to be required to check ID's before they can open fire.
This is about the government deciding, through whatever process (even if it is correct), that an American citizen is a terrorist operative, and then taking steps to eliminate that person with no due process.
If they decided that someone in Michigan had been helping terrorists, they can't put a sniper on a rooftop and take him out on his way to McDonald's. If he's a serial killer they can't do it either.
The fact that this is being done with drones is only tangential to the real constitutional problem here. The drones are just an effective and lower-risk form of assassination.
So, is that clear enough? Actively engaged in a terrorist act = blow the fucker up. Suspected of engaging in terrorist actions = due process of law, just like being suspected of rape, murder, or any other horrible a person can do.
My dad's a midwestern folk musician who plays a lot of Irish stuff. His stage "Irish" accent sounds about as authentic as the leprechaun on the lucky charms commercials. And he constantly gets people asking him if he's actually from Ireland. He says he just cringes inside every time someone asks.
A few thoughts.
I have tried three or four different brands of CFL's. All of them take longer to turn on than an incandescent. Some of them are still usable. However... with incandescents, I can buy whatever cheapass brand I want, and they still work. I now have several packages of generally useless light bulbs that combined cost me $30 to find out that they suck. Moreover, I have to remember which brands do and do not suck, and no, just buying the expensive ones doesn't cut it. This is a lot of annoyance for something as simple as a light bulb.
The argument about heating during the winter is weak? Not everyone lives in California. I spend $1,000 in propane every winter. I spend zero dollars on air conditioning during the summer. Any excess heat put out during the winter is definitely going to work. Central Ohio isn't exactly the frozen tundra, either. I'm working on improving insulation in my house for the winter, but that's not going to make me suddenly grow a giant air conditioning bill. Now, the excess heat shouldn't be as cost-effective as the propane, but it's not waste inherently.
Finally, a point that no one seems to mention - what about all of the legacy light fixtures that CFL's don't fit in? I tried three different CFL bulbs and none of them fit in my garage opener. The same holds for three or four other fixtures in the house, as well as several of our lamps. Time to buy all new fixtures for the house and install them just to save a $3 a year in energy costs?
Look, I use CFL's in a lot of places in my house. In some spaces I really like that they don't burn out as often, or that they don't put off as much heat. In some use cases it doesn't matter that if you pick a random one off the shelf at a hardware store there's a 50% chance it's not going to turn on before you've already walked across the room. But they aren't a unilateral improvement over incandescents, and it'd be nice if people stopped pretending that they were.
This sounds a little fishy to me, too, considering how many hooks the OS X API's have for GPU accelerated... well, anything.
I'd also like to see the ebook store that doesn't have DRM'd content. There's plenty of free content if you like commons stuff, and a few individual publishers sell their own things.. but a mainstream, bookstore-like experience? Nada.
Look, I hate it, too, but it's not an ipad specific fault.
Have you interacted with anyone who wasn't a geek recently? I love what control I have over my computer, too, but the vast majority of users struggle to install something other than internet explorer! They use their computer for facebook, music, word, and porn. The only installers they run personally are pop cap games and malware.
Aside from our nerdy philosophical objections to the idea, the fact that the garden has a wall doesn't matter if it has everything you want or care about inside of it.
I mean, I don't care if you buy an ipad. I'm not touching one and I don't own an iphone. But the amount of complete denial of the state of computing users here amazes me.
I actually did hit up about ten links, I just hit the mayo clinic one because it was from an reputable medical source.
You could argue that those trace minerals have some benefits, but the only real difference in the actual salt is the size of the crystals, which has jack all effect as the salt immediately dissolves when you eat it.