Yeah. Canada *used to* deal with mental health. Many institutions were shut down, and people with severe illnesses essentially end up in general society - as you say, filled with pills - or on the streets (unless they cut of somebody's head on a Greyhound).
Now mental health issues go somewhat through the general medical system (already overburdened) or through the judicial system (similarly burdened)
High gun ownership is a result of a certain culture around firearms. In many cases they're almost seen a toys. Consequently, gun violence is also caused by the same culture. They're related, but by virtue of having the same parent rather than a direct link. If you reduce ownership it may somewhat effect opportunistic gun crimes, but dealing with the cultural issues that result in the glorification of "gangsta" lifestyles and gun violence would likely do more.
However, there is something to be said for *ease* of gun ownership and anonymity. In the U.S, it's also much easier to acquire a gun without a strong paper trail. There's a fairly huge grey/black market, which causes firearms to flow from legit owners to criminals. The Scandanavians do have lots of guns, but they're more highly regulated than the USA, and it's generally harder to get one for black-market activity.
And yet, here Apple is doing so because they say it helps preserve privacy, a thing that many hackers also tend to have a stronger interest in than laypersons. The car->phone analogy was stupid. You could argue that he changed his MAC to obscure his identity, but it's a far cry from changing the VIN on a car.
For a lot of people the "ick" factor seems to center around the long bald tails of the rat. I'm not really sure why. I've had various rats over the years. I generally go for females as the males tend to be rather well endowed, and I didn't really want them running up my arm dragging their business over my skin:-)
If it is that virulant, then wouldn't be a fairly *huge* risk in the meat market as well. I mean, you've got nearby animals, slaughterhouse floor, instruments, workers, etc...
Everything I've always read indicated infection came from absorbing materials that had direct contact with the cerebral-spinal system due to infectious prions, and that there wasn't much risk even with meat on the same animal but away from such areas (obviously you still wouldn't want to eat it though).
And that's totally fine by me, so long as the FOSS drivers are relatively within the performance/feature threshold of the proprietary ones by the time the hardware is no-long supported by Catalyst.
In my case the hardware is effectively supported by the fglrx/catalyst drivers in the aspect that they still detect it and install, it's just that there's a new bug introduced. I've seen various other laptops that also seem to be bitten by this (mainly Asus and I think some Acer) so it may be that it'll be fixed before the hardware is listed as "deprecated" for Catalyst.
FOSS driver longevity is IMHO one of Linux's strong qualities. I've got several machine that work just fine on a Ubuntu/Mint, but they can't run newer versions of windows due to hardware incompatibility. Soundcards tended to be particularly bad after XP as a lot of perfectly viable dual-core rigs didn't have drivers for the onboard sound chips (or SBLive, and for windows the FOSS driver had noise issues). In Linux, those same sound-cards have continued to work on the open-source ALSA drivers without any issues.
It used to be that most FOSS video-card drivers sucked, and it was a crapshoot whether a newer version of X/Kernel would be supported by the older proprietary drivers (if the newer ones didn't like your hardware). I am still not terrible fond of Nouveau (open-source Nvidia driver), but it seems that AMD's investment in FOSS is paying off. These days I'd rather by an ATI video card than an Nvidia, which is something I'd never have thought to hear myself say a few years ago.
Yeah, to be specific, fglrx (proprietary) worked very nicely until an update (I believe a combination of new backlight functionality in a recent kernel and/or updated fglrx) caused it disable the backlight in X11.
I went back to using the GPL driver, which is working much nicer than it was the last time I used it. This is good because otherwise I'd have to choose between slow unaccelerated video (suck) or dim barely visible video (more suck).
I recently updated my Mint install and discovered that the newer AMD/FGLRX drivers have a big issue with the backlight on various laptops (mainly, that they turn it off or down to zero). At first I thought I had no display, but later noticed that if there is some front-light I could vaguely see the login window.
As it's an older model, it seems to get less attention from AMD (Nvidia is much the same). However, I was happy to see how much better the FOSS driver seems to work these days, so for now I'm back to using that. Backlight works, and video seems reasonably fast. I haven't tried any 3d/gaming yet but it will be interesting to see how that stacks up.
Despite being funny, he definitely took no prisoners, and really did help identify a lot of the issues * Tons of bills written in endless droning lawyerspeak which nobody can read through * A lobbiest placed in a position of oversight over his former industry * B.S. like saying "fast and faster" instead of the real "fast and slow" * More B.S. like the claims that nobody was slowing down Netflix etc deliberately
Why should anyone have to work 2-3 jobs just to survive when corporate profits are at an all time high.
People aren't just working 2-3 jobs because of minimum wages, they're doing so because of shitty hours. Even if you had a $25/hr or even $50/hr job, it's not much use if you're only getting 5h/week. A lot of "minimum" wage jobs aren't just for crappy pay, they're also for hours that barely make them worth working at all. Where I live, you could get by on minimum wage if you work full-time (say 35-40h/week). You wouldn't be living in a huge house with a 60" TV, but it would cover rent in a decent place, food, and a little bit to spare. If you're in a relationship and both working minimum, then things would not be too bad (shared rent, etc).
The problem: almost *nobody* offers full-time hours. A lot of places offer 4-5h/day (and then a 6-7 day work-week), and more often than not on a variable schedule. That means that those at the bottom of the wage pool have to balance multiple jobs, trying to resolve conflicts in hours, and with little to no free time. It's a *huge* drain on quality-of-life, and an oft-ignored issue in comparison to wage.
Since a vaccine just stimulates your body to produce antibodies via exposed to a "dead virus", shouldn't having had it before mean her body has already been exposed and thus created antibodies?
There are other ways to prevent corrosion - at least rusting - other than gold-plating, and of course any components in an non-oxygenated area don't need to worry about this. You could possibly take advantage of vacuum here, by using airlock mechanisms to rotate airflow between areas which would otherwise be O2 free.
So it's not "not enough examiners" but rather "not enough time to examine" and probably "too many patent applications."
Why too many patent applications? Because companies have decided that's it's a potential goldmine (or landmine depending on which side of the patent suit you're on). If you reduce the b.s. patent cases or approved B.S. patents (or add a penalty for filing truly B.S. patents), then you reduce the attraction to filing tons of crap patents, which results in less work on the shoulders of the examiners.
Yeah, because the drone strikes etc don't have any sort of 'collateral damage' at all. For that matter, remember the "collateral murder" helicopter video?
But anybody within a certain age limit and fairly generous radius of a drone target is considered to be collaborating with the target... so they're not considered civilian casualties. If you don't like the statistics, change the parameters... (but lots of innocents still get killed).
And that's not even a locked-in jury like they have in big cases. Part of moving towards a fair court system is fair recompense for one's time. If being on a jury costs me being able to buy a big TV or possibly go to Mexico, I can live with that. If it costs me my house and possibly my marriage... not so good.
Suppose bitlocker was knowingly backdoored, the amount of reputational harm that Microsoft would endure would literally be crippling
Well, it's not like the NSA would go ahead and surreptitiously do it without permissing. Kinda like the NSA intercepting Cisco gear deliveries and backdooring it with hardware bugs. Good thing that sort of thing never... oh wait!
OK, so the NSL is basically a secret letter, that nobody wants to talk about. How do they (recipients) even know if/when they're legit. It's not like there's a 1-800-DIAL-NSA number to check it out.
What's to stop "shady group X" from getting some serious looking guys with suits, sunglasses, and some fake ID's+forms to drop by the local datacentre and say "OK, we're NSA and we need records/access from this group of servers here. Oh, and you can't talk about this to anyone. Delay us and very bad things will happen to your and/or your business"
This is no closer to a hoverboard than a skateboard is. Seriously, a hoverboard is a futuristic technology which through some form of anti-gravity field or whatever FLOATS IN THE FRICKING AIR. This is essentially a cross between a skateboard and a segway. Cool, but still attached to the ground.
I guess what I want to say is: Yes, misogyny exists. Crazy psychopathic narcissistic people exist as well. Quite often they overlap. Video games can sometimes seem to contain stereotypes.
So...
a) Misogyny is bad. Is should be fought against. In the office. In the internet. Wherever. Just like all the dark things in the world, it will always exist, but we should avoid actively promoting it, and speak against it when it rears up.
b) Crazy killers. With all this talk of Mario and Big Bang Theory, I think we're missing that this guy was Identifiably crazy and Despite plenty of clues and push to deal with it, the issue wasn't properly addressed before this guy went on a killing spree, especially when he was known to have weapons.
That brings us to (c). Video Games and Big Bang Theory. Where the hell did we draw the relation? It's a red herring. Removing Mario and BBT isn't going to remove people with dangerous personality disorders, or those with a narcissistic detached world-view on humanity. We must be very careful about building relations between these, lest we end up regressing back to "D&D caused satanism which breeds our kids to be killers."
Suddenly everyone is talking about how a fairly simple video game is rooted in misogyny. Sometimes a simple video game is just a simple video game. We need to stop drawing relations between things that - frankly - have little effect upon the bigger issue. It's a distraction, and really it's just painting targets on people that really aren't involved in this sort of crap anyhow.
But this crime was specifically targeted against women
No. It wasn't. He killed both genders, including his male "nerd" roomates. Yes, he had a thing against women, but it's because he was a self-entitled prick and couldn't accept rejection. Yes, he's a f**cked up little man. He had a thing against women. Yes, geeks can improve their view of women as well, but drawing a correlation in wake of some psycho draws some very broad and un-necessary relations.
How about "the way they get to show heroism is by rescuing weak women, and that's fucked up?"
Only if you choose that as a focal point. It's one meme among many (and notably, one that seems to be expiring with time). As mentioned, there are also women who rescue weak men (moreso these days), and protagonists that save whole civilizations of humans or even aliens. Move on to Mario Bros 2 and the Princess is a playable character (and more useful as she can do that cool floaty thing).
Cherry-picking examples doesn't lend a fair viewpoint. Heck, some of the best games lately have opened the options for strong male or female leads. Mass Effect's Female Sheppard was one of the most bad-ass characters. Lightning from FFXII was a tough cookie (even though the gameplay itself was kinda crappy). I've not yet played "The Last of Us" but I've heard that Ellie is awesome.
I guess one thing to recognise is: Things are already changing in Geekland. Playable female leads in games are increasing. Strong female protagonists in films are also going up. You've got House but you've also got Bones. You've got Shrek, but you've also got Fiona (arguably the stronger of the two).
Hell, we still have people who believe that blacks are inferior (wasn't one of those guys a recent Republican candidate), or those like Ronald Sterling. You've got plenty who believe gays shouldn't marry. I'll bet a lot of those people also think women belong at home barefoot in the kitchen.
Some of those people are pretty visibly an anachonism, and almost laughable. They're dinosaurs. Why wasn't the shooter popular (with women and/or likely most men)? Because overall his views are unacceptable in modern society. Unfortunately his crazy views were also sprinkled with an extra dab of insanity sauce.
Should we get rid of princesses trapped in castles? Why would we? There will always be type who prefers to be a "helpless" castle princess awaiting a shining knight. Not my type of girl, but they exist. I think the thing to remember is that nobody *HAS* to be a castle princess anymore. You can be a rockstar, a scientist, or even a galaxy-saving heroine. Maybe Mario will save Peach, or maybe Peach will save Mario... but there's no reason it can't be both ways not that one necessarily has to be negative. If Mario saves Peach and then says "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich, woman", then we've got a serious problem!
I think a lot of my attitudes towards women did come from reading materials with heroic male characters. Ultimately, those characters were often respectful and their antagonists were the self-absorbed shits that I think we can both agree the world needs less of. Even if the female characters were weaker (and certainly not all were) there was always a respect between the genders.
There's nothing wrong with hoping for some level of appreciation from the opposite gender by being a nice guy and/or maybe even in hero in some cases. That seems like a cool thing. Learning the difference between being "awesome" (to yourself) while in reality being a prick (to others) is important though. Obviously, this guy was no Mario... more like a Wario or Bowser.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Canada *used to* deal with mental health. Many institutions were shut down, and people with severe illnesses essentially end up in general society - as you say, filled with pills - or on the streets (unless they cut of somebody's head on a Greyhound).
Now mental health issues go somewhat through the general medical system (already overburdened) or through the judicial system (similarly burdened)
High gun ownership is a result of a certain culture around firearms. In many cases they're almost seen a toys. Consequently, gun violence is also caused by the same culture.
They're related, but by virtue of having the same parent rather than a direct link. If you reduce ownership it may somewhat effect opportunistic gun crimes, but dealing with the cultural issues that result in the glorification of "gangsta" lifestyles and gun violence would likely do more.
However, there is something to be said for *ease* of gun ownership and anonymity. In the U.S, it's also much easier to acquire a gun without a strong paper trail. There's a fairly huge grey/black market, which causes firearms to flow from legit owners to criminals. The Scandanavians do have lots of guns, but they're more highly regulated than the USA, and it's generally harder to get one for black-market activity.
Aaron intended to change his MAC address
And yet, here Apple is doing so because they say it helps preserve privacy, a thing that many hackers also tend to have a stronger interest in than laypersons. The car->phone analogy was stupid. You could argue that he changed his MAC to obscure his identity, but it's a far cry from changing the VIN on a car.
For a lot of people the "ick" factor seems to center around the long bald tails of the rat. I'm not really sure why. :-)
I've had various rats over the years. I generally go for females as the males tend to be rather well endowed, and I didn't really want them running up my arm dragging their business over my skin
If it is that virulant, then wouldn't be a fairly *huge* risk in the meat market as well. I mean, you've got nearby animals, slaughterhouse floor, instruments, workers, etc...
Everything I've always read indicated infection came from absorbing materials that had direct contact with the cerebral-spinal system due to infectious prions, and that there wasn't much risk even with meat on the same animal but away from such areas (obviously you still wouldn't want to eat it though).
And that's totally fine by me, so long as the FOSS drivers are relatively within the performance/feature threshold of the proprietary ones by the time the hardware is no-long supported by Catalyst.
In my case the hardware is effectively supported by the fglrx/catalyst drivers in the aspect that they still detect it and install, it's just that there's a new bug introduced. I've seen various other laptops that also seem to be bitten by this (mainly Asus and I think some Acer) so it may be that it'll be fixed before the hardware is listed as "deprecated" for Catalyst.
FOSS driver longevity is IMHO one of Linux's strong qualities. I've got several machine that work just fine on a Ubuntu/Mint, but they can't run newer versions of windows due to hardware incompatibility. Soundcards tended to be particularly bad after XP as a lot of perfectly viable dual-core rigs didn't have drivers for the onboard sound chips (or SBLive, and for windows the FOSS driver had noise issues). In Linux, those same sound-cards have continued to work on the open-source ALSA drivers without any issues.
It used to be that most FOSS video-card drivers sucked, and it was a crapshoot whether a newer version of X/Kernel would be supported by the older proprietary drivers (if the newer ones didn't like your hardware). I am still not terrible fond of Nouveau (open-source Nvidia driver), but it seems that AMD's investment in FOSS is paying off. These days I'd rather by an ATI video card than an Nvidia, which is something I'd never have thought to hear myself say a few years ago.
Yeah, to be specific, fglrx (proprietary) worked very nicely until an update (I believe a combination of new backlight functionality in a recent kernel and/or updated fglrx) caused it disable the backlight in X11.
I went back to using the GPL driver, which is working much nicer than it was the last time I used it. This is good because otherwise I'd have to choose between slow unaccelerated video (suck) or dim barely visible video (more suck).
I recently updated my Mint install and discovered that the newer AMD/FGLRX drivers have a big issue with the backlight on various laptops (mainly, that they turn it off or down to zero).
At first I thought I had no display, but later noticed that if there is some front-light I could vaguely see the login window.
As it's an older model, it seems to get less attention from AMD (Nvidia is much the same). However, I was happy to see how much better the FOSS driver seems to work these days, so for now I'm back to using that. Backlight works, and video seems reasonably fast. I haven't tried any 3d/gaming yet but it will be interesting to see how that stacks up.
Despite being funny, he definitely took no prisoners, and really did help identify a lot of the issues
* Tons of bills written in endless droning lawyerspeak which nobody can read through
* A lobbiest placed in a position of oversight over his former industry
* B.S. like saying "fast and faster" instead of the real "fast and slow"
* More B.S. like the claims that nobody was slowing down Netflix etc deliberately
Why should anyone have to work 2-3 jobs just to survive when corporate profits are at an all time high.
People aren't just working 2-3 jobs because of minimum wages, they're doing so because of shitty hours. Even if you had a $25/hr or even $50/hr job, it's not much use if you're only getting 5h/week. A lot of "minimum" wage jobs aren't just for crappy pay, they're also for hours that barely make them worth working at all.
Where I live, you could get by on minimum wage if you work full-time (say 35-40h/week).
You wouldn't be living in a huge house with a 60" TV, but it would cover rent in a decent place, food, and a little bit to spare. If you're in a relationship and both working minimum, then things would not be too bad (shared rent, etc).
The problem: almost *nobody* offers full-time hours. A lot of places offer 4-5h/day (and then a 6-7 day work-week), and more often than not on a variable schedule. That means that those at the bottom of the wage pool have to balance multiple jobs, trying to resolve conflicts in hours, and with little to no free time. It's a *huge* drain on quality-of-life, and an oft-ignored issue in comparison to wage.
Wouldn't the irradiation that weakens the parasite also kill/weaken the mosquito?
Since a vaccine just stimulates your body to produce antibodies via exposed to a "dead virus", shouldn't having had it before mean her body has already been exposed and thus created antibodies?
corrosion is a big issue
There are other ways to prevent corrosion - at least rusting - other than gold-plating, and of course any components in an non-oxygenated area don't need to worry about this. You could possibly take advantage of vacuum here, by using airlock mechanisms to rotate airflow between areas which would otherwise be O2 free.
So it's not "not enough examiners" but rather "not enough time to examine" and probably "too many patent applications."
Why too many patent applications? Because companies have decided that's it's a potential goldmine (or landmine depending on which side of the patent suit you're on). If you reduce the b.s. patent cases or approved B.S. patents (or add a penalty for filing truly B.S. patents), then you reduce the attraction to filing tons of crap patents, which results in less work on the shoulders of the examiners.
Yeah, because the drone strikes etc don't have any sort of 'collateral damage' at all. For that matter, remember the "collateral murder" helicopter video?
But anybody within a certain age limit and fairly generous radius of a drone target is considered to be collaborating with the target... so they're not considered civilian casualties. If you don't like the statistics, change the parameters... (but lots of innocents still get killed).
Yup, known issue. But even more than that, *HOW* do you verify something that's by its very nature a nearly unverifiable secret?
Specifically a guy who seemed at least a bit nerdy
Seriously!? "A little bit nerdy"
That's the connection now?
What even makes him remotely nerdy. What's the commonality? Except that perhaps nerds are often unpopular, and - deservedly - so was he.
And that's not even a locked-in jury like they have in big cases. Part of moving towards a fair court system is fair recompense for one's time. If being on a jury costs me being able to buy a big TV or possibly go to Mexico, I can live with that. If it costs me my house and possibly my marriage... not so good.
One thing to keep in mind with many of these statistics is that it only accounts for "reported" (and to some extent acknowledged) issues.
Certainly abuse of women is a big issue, but keep in mind that often abuse of (or violence towards) men is ignored or under-reported.
And any number of people who were/are allergic to the medium in which the vaccine was delivered and thus had to exempt themselves.
Suppose bitlocker was knowingly backdoored, the amount of reputational harm that Microsoft would endure would literally be crippling
Well, it's not like the NSA would go ahead and surreptitiously do it without permissing. Kinda like the NSA intercepting Cisco gear deliveries and backdooring it with hardware bugs. Good thing that sort of thing never... oh wait!
OK, so the NSL is basically a secret letter, that nobody wants to talk about. How do they (recipients) even know if/when they're legit. It's not like there's a 1-800-DIAL-NSA number to check it out.
What's to stop "shady group X" from getting some serious looking guys with suits, sunglasses, and some fake ID's+forms to drop by the local datacentre and say "OK, we're NSA and we need records/access from this group of servers here. Oh, and you can't talk about this to anyone. Delay us and very bad things will happen to your and/or your business"
Not A Hoverboard, but Close
This is no closer to a hoverboard than a skateboard is. Seriously, a hoverboard is a futuristic technology which through some form of anti-gravity field or whatever FLOATS IN THE FRICKING AIR. This is essentially a cross between a skateboard and a segway. Cool, but still attached to the ground.
I guess what I want to say is: Yes, misogyny exists. Crazy psychopathic narcissistic people exist as well. Quite often they overlap. Video games can sometimes seem to contain stereotypes.
So...
a) Misogyny is bad. Is should be fought against. In the office. In the internet. Wherever. Just like all the dark things in the world, it will always exist, but we should avoid actively promoting it, and speak against it when it rears up.
b) Crazy killers. With all this talk of Mario and Big Bang Theory, I think we're missing that this guy was
Identifiably crazy
and
Despite plenty of clues and push to deal with it, the issue wasn't properly addressed before this guy went on a killing spree, especially when he was known to have weapons.
That brings us to (c). Video Games and Big Bang Theory. Where the hell did we draw the relation? It's a red herring. Removing Mario and BBT isn't going to remove people with dangerous personality disorders, or those with a narcissistic detached world-view on humanity. We must be very careful about building relations between these, lest we end up regressing back to "D&D caused satanism which breeds our kids to be killers."
Suddenly everyone is talking about how a fairly simple video game is rooted in misogyny. Sometimes a simple video game is just a simple video game. We need to stop drawing relations between things that - frankly - have little effect upon the bigger issue. It's a distraction, and really it's just painting targets on people that really aren't involved in this sort of crap anyhow.
But this crime was specifically targeted against women
No. It wasn't. He killed both genders, including his male "nerd" roomates. Yes, he had a thing against women, but it's because he was a self-entitled prick and couldn't accept rejection. Yes, he's a f**cked up little man. He had a thing against women. Yes, geeks can improve their view of women as well, but drawing a correlation in wake of some psycho draws some very broad and un-necessary relations.
How about "the way they get to show heroism is by rescuing weak women, and that's fucked up?"
Only if you choose that as a focal point. It's one meme among many (and notably, one that seems to be expiring with time). As mentioned, there are also women who rescue weak men (moreso these days), and protagonists that save whole civilizations of humans or even aliens. Move on to Mario Bros 2 and the Princess is a playable character (and more useful as she can do that cool floaty thing).
Cherry-picking examples doesn't lend a fair viewpoint. Heck, some of the best games lately have opened the options for strong male or female leads. Mass Effect's Female Sheppard was one of the most bad-ass characters. Lightning from FFXII was a tough cookie (even though the gameplay itself was kinda crappy). I've not yet played "The Last of Us" but I've heard that Ellie is awesome.
I guess one thing to recognise is: Things are already changing in Geekland. Playable female leads in games are increasing. Strong female protagonists in films are also going up. You've got House but you've also got Bones. You've got Shrek, but you've also got Fiona (arguably the stronger of the two).
Hell, we still have people who believe that blacks are inferior (wasn't one of those guys a recent Republican candidate), or those like Ronald Sterling. You've got plenty who believe gays shouldn't marry. I'll bet a lot of those people also think women belong at home barefoot in the kitchen.
Some of those people are pretty visibly an anachonism, and almost laughable. They're dinosaurs.
Why wasn't the shooter popular (with women and/or likely most men)? Because overall his views are unacceptable in modern society. Unfortunately his crazy views were also sprinkled with an extra dab of insanity sauce.
Should we get rid of princesses trapped in castles? Why would we? There will always be type who prefers to be a "helpless" castle princess awaiting a shining knight. Not my type of girl, but they exist. I think the thing to remember is that nobody *HAS* to be a castle princess anymore. You can be a rockstar, a scientist, or even a galaxy-saving heroine. Maybe Mario will save Peach, or maybe Peach will save Mario... but there's no reason it can't be both ways not that one necessarily has to be negative. If Mario saves Peach and then says "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich, woman", then we've got a serious problem!
I think a lot of my attitudes towards women did come from reading materials with heroic male characters. Ultimately, those characters were often respectful and their antagonists were the self-absorbed shits that I think we can both agree the world needs less of. Even if the female characters were weaker (and certainly not all were) there was always a respect between the genders.
There's nothing wrong with hoping for some level of appreciation from the opposite gender by being a nice guy and/or maybe even in hero in some cases. That seems like a cool thing. Learning the difference between being "awesome" (to yourself) while in reality being a prick (to others) is important though. Obviously, this guy was no Mario... more like a Wario or Bowser.