It's funny that here in Ireland, people shun the immigrants in the local repair shops but happily send hundreds of Euro to multinational sweatshops overseas where 90% of the money leaves the EU, never to return. The repair tax break is a good start but I can see right now that this is a small problem. We really need to repair our society so that we don't have so much shit for people like you to shovel onto the backs of immigrants and refugees.
As an American, I think that describing the UK or Ireland as having "a lack of language barriers" to be hopelessly naive.
"The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language." -- George Bernard Shaw
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Germany had a higher percentage of people who are fluent in American English than the UK or Ireland.:)
Kudos for quoting an Irish poet to make your point. But language variations within the UK and Ireland are broader than between Ireland and the U.S. And if you think there are no cultural variations within the US, you need to broaden your circle of friends. A New Yorker is far more likely to understand an Dubliner than a creole from the rural Louisiana. Culturally Ireland is nearer to the US than the UK is, more cliques than classism. Politically Ireland is also nearer to the NorthEastern US and even Silicon Valley than either is to the rural south or Midwest. Germany may have more cultural similarity to the upper Midwest.
Anyway, according to the EU, Ireland speaks Irish Gaelic, and when the UK leaves, there will no longer be any officially-English-speaking countries in the EU. That's going to have some interesting repercussions! (Unless Scotland manages to wrangle a way to stay when the rest of the UK leaves. Which I know they desperately want to do.)
But yeah, Brexit could be a real boon for Ireland. Possibly enough to make up for the fact that their current biggest trading partner is planning to leave the union. I'd certainly be looking at Dublin as a strong alternative to London. If I were the Irish government, I'd be out pitching "we're not leaving!" to all sorts of companies!
I wish this were true but Dublin is currently a very poor alternative to London. Its planning laws restrict development both vertically and horizontally. Decent architectural firms might be able to raize or remodel the thousands of derelict buildings but nothing happens overnight here and the transportation infrastructure is abysmal. Another of a series of planned strikes by Dublin Bus tomorrow will bring an already clogged city to a screeching halt. Ireland's real-estate bubble was the worst in the world and its government has been trying to reinflate it since 2007. As a result rent to wage ratios are about as bad as London with the caveat that the properties here are kips (look it up, if it's not an American word, it should be.) Ireland's government-owned "bad bank" NAMA may have organized some sweetheart deals on foreclosed properties with foreign REIT firms including one managed by former US VP Dan Quayle. Where the military-industrial complex and agribusiness own the US, the property industry seems to own the Irish government.
As for "not leaving the E.U.",Britain's Brexit Minister David Davis seems to have forgotten that Ireland isn't part of the UK. In fact several EU diplomats and nearly all US corporations and websites treat the Republic of Ireland as a part of the UK, now 100 years after the 1916 Easter Rising eventually led to this terrible beauty that we call Ireland.
Given access to the pixels in a bit-mapped character, how would you blink a cursor? You'd XOR the pixels in the cursor. It's trivial. Give a kid access to the logical operations available on 8-bit microprocessors and she'll probably reinvent this within a week. But cadtrack was granted U.S. Patent 4,197,590. They filed a lawsuit against Commodore computers. A US judge filed an injunction against Commodore blocking its sale of the Amiga CD32. This cemented Microsoft's virtual monopoly on desktop computers, setting back the PC industry a decade. (Amiga had unix-like pre-emptive multi-tasking, Windows 95 color windowed desktop, multimedia capabilities, stereo sound, built in speech synthesizer.. in 1985 when you were still looking at the A:\> prompt and that ugly green blinking cursor.)
I'm claiming Irish citizenship through a reverse agreement. Anyone born on the island before 2005 can claim it. On a darker note, I didn't say it would bring peace. If anything it will inflame tensions in NI. Source : From NI
You'd better check your sources. Ireland's Citizenship referendum ended Irish citizenship by birth in 2005 after a campaign reminiscent of UKIP's xenophobic frothing at the mouth. Tax-funded RTE and the Irish newspapers played up rumors of hundreds of "non-national" anchor babies being born in Dublin airport every day, just as state media, BBC decided to report scary UK immigration statistics on election day. Contrary to popular belief, public funding of broadcasting doesn't magically make it less biased than the US corporate-owned media, the BBC used TV licenses from white and non-white British citizens to fund shows such as George Mitchell's Black and White Minstrel show until the late 1970s.
Ireland's citizenship referendum didn't do as much damage as the Brexit vote because sensible heads in Dáil Éireann interpreted that populist vote as slightly less tyranny of the majority than the majority would have preferred. A grandfather rule allowed parents of Irish born children born before 2005 to have the equivalent of a dodgy green card, with expensive renewals every three years via a chaotic and draconian bureaucracy, proof that we are supporting ourselves and proof that we had not committed ANY crimes (we had to submit documentation of any parking tickets and speeding fines.) This was not citizenship, it was limbo and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. If you've found a short-cut to Irish citizenship, don't tell the others who've wasted years, spent thousands of Euro and presented their first born child (I kid you not.) They will tell you to get to the back of the queue.
Let's hope Britain's parliament has as much courage to do the right thing despite what mob democracy prescribes. Referendums would have kept institutionalized slavery and segregation well into the 21st century.
The attack code exploits vulnerabilities in older versions of applications such as Flash, Java, Internet Explorer, and Silverlight. At this point, it isn't clear exactly how many users are affected.
So, only the stupid users then.
And your arrogance ^ my friend, is the root of the problem. If we in the IT community are so much smarter than end users, why was telnet, ftp, smtp, http, Microsoft Windows, IoT... all designed without even the most basic considerations for security? Shouldn't an information appliance be designed so that a child, grandmother, astronaut or household pet be able to "click on" or view anything without damaging the information appliance, leaking personal details, joining a botnet.
The scum and script kiddies who write the ransomware are not rocket scientists. They're simply vandalizing a cyber-society where front and back doors are left unlocked. If we built cities as we build software, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury is more of a poetic look at the topic of youth, ageing and death. I vaguely remember a short story which touched on the specific topic of what eternal youth was possible by drinking a potion made out of something cheap and ubiquitous, like a dandelion. How would a person decide when to stop taking this elixir? I don't remember the name of that story but it might have been in the book Dandelion Wine.
So, America should just follow Canada and do whatever it does? Where did that idea even come from?
What do people say when Canada slavishly follows America? "Screw those foreigners, they have nothing to do with us, we will make our own decisions, and if those foreigners think we've made the wrong decision, then they can go screw themselves." What an interesting sentiment indeed.
Hey hey, be nice, the national niceness datamining results for Slashdot have not yet been released. The US may yet have a f*~&ng chance against those *&)@# Canuks! -- Oh $(*#, Damn!
If only his evil genius had been used for niceness. -- Maxwell Smart
So your hypothetical choices would be to die by the shooter or die trying to save yourself from the shooter should your DNA lock idea become a reality. And No, this isn't some strawman remark...
Why not? The shooter in Newtown stole the guns from his mother after killing her. His DNA would most likely have been in the database. The guy in Washington state purchased them legally, and the recent ones in California all were purchased by a neighbor and given to them..
It's more than likely that in any of those situations the gun's master database would have allowed the mass shootings.
Those who practice the religion of Gun Idolatry have a peculiarly anachronistic worldview. They apply 17th century law in-situ to 21st century killing technology but reject 250 years of advancement in safety technology. They remind me of the motorcyclists who come up with all sorts of strawmen arguments against helmets or drivers who rejected seatbelts and airbags.
Beyond the obvious improvements such as RFID/fingerprinting (already used by hundreds of millions of people to preserve money but not yet to preserve life). We could have a DNA whitelist a no-fire blacklist and something inspired by Frank Herbert's The White Plague, a device to detect whether the trigger finger has an XX chromosome (female) or XY (male.) While this is a disturbing idea to western minds, imagine what an equalizer it would be in parts of the world dominated by violent people with Y chromosomes. Yet another possibility is SQUID fMRI or face emotional recognition to detect the patterns associated with psychopathy.
While we're constructing straw-men situations for the exceedingly rare situations where guns save lives, let's imagine what would have happened if the guns left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan had been useless to anyone with a Y chromosome. It might not have saved the world but it's difficult to imagine that things would be any worse.
Even before Bruce wrote this timely article, I wondered whether more women in open source might be a cause or an effect of better moderation. My brief time working with the late Telsa Gwynn at GUADEC 2003 suggested that moderation was one of her under-appreciated roles. But she was attacked by the misogynistic mob (AKA the open source community.) Were it not for Telsa's thick skin and an overdeveloped sense of forgiveness, none of us would have benefited from her work. Many other women and others outside of a particularly narrow age/race/religion/gender profile have experienced similar when attempting to contribute and most gave up. We tolerate Linus's rantings and ignore that only timing and humility separated Linus from countless other early *nix hackers. We tolerate Gangolf Jobb's racist license and Trumpish rantings because he is a good coder. My family and remote team members met at GUADEC Istanbul where a very well-known opensource developer spewed misogynistic rantings that embarrassed and offended me, projected a terrible impression of Christians and Euro/American society to my global team who were experiencing western society for the first time. He came very near to inspiring at least one person to push him into the Bosporus. Why does this happen? Part of it is the same reason Whitney Houston and other rock , movie and sports superstars are bat shit insane. Society should be a counterbalance to the Id, but when we worship people as superstars, there is no counterbalance and Id rules. The defence mechanism takes over when the inner demons unleashed by bad decisions are externalized, possibly as police brutality. Similar forces were at play when Hans Reiser became our OJ Simpson.
In the past that role of moderation was performed by a central government (e.g. the FCC), a tight group of highly educated individuals, a class/caste system. Twitter and Facebook use something close to a democracy but the S/N ratio can quickly fall to the level of CB radio, AOL and usenet. The more sophisticated merit-based moderation system used by Slashdot, some opensource projects and creative sites such as worth1000 works well, at least above a certain threshold. But these systems must be designed to prevent individuals or small groups from becoming immune to criticism. Within government legal frameworks the censor or impeachment is a mechanism for moderation. We could do something within opensource communities where an individual's ethics could taint their contributions. Each of us would be able to choose whether we want to contribute or use ethically-tainted patches.
Back in the 1980s when I may have been the last male to wirewrap a PDP-11 core memory board, a friend commented, "Did you ever notice that men in the comp-sci program are (80s equivalent of "Meh") but the women are brilliant?" Yes, I did notice that. But whatever happened to Karen Norwood, Maureen T, Kathy Christiansen, Norah K, and the sole woman in our Physics program?
This is where overloading the == operator comes in. Equality is an overloaded word. Here in Ireland, the word was a slogan for LBGT marriage rights which passed referendum with an overwhelming majority. But the word "equality" doesn't apply to gender, race, religion or immigration issues here. But do we really want women to become equal to 20-something males who live in their parent's basement who have the moral and emotional depth of comic book and video game heros? I don't. Let's take the best woman have to offer and not try to force them into our broken mold.
See the US Supreme Court decision way back in the mid-1800's regarding a railroad company calling itself a 'person' under the law. A Corporation is a person, at least under the law.
This stupid error could have been fixed at any time in the intervening ~150 years by Congress passing a law stating otherwise. It hasn't.
The day that I see a law-breaking Corporation either jailed or put-to-death for their crimes, I might then consider viewing them as people. Until then, they are not—Corporations (profit or non-profit) are legal structures that represent and act for a particular group of people—Corporations are not people.
Also keep in mind that multinational corporations can behave irresponsibly across international borders damaging US reputation and security, destabilizing foreign economies and governments. But unlike refugees, asylum seekers and all other categories of non-fictional human immigrants, corporations have no visa or passport that might be revoked.
Plus I really dont think there are 640million empty properties right now in the US ("multiple empty houses for every man, woman and child" is what you said, combined with the current estimated population of 322million). A quick googling shows a recent estimate is only 18.6million, and most of those need significant extra work as they are uninhabitable.
As of Q3 2015 the St. Louis Fed estimates 17,443,000 vacant homes in the USA. and the OP began with an obvious typo, this is more than enough supply for our 500,000 homeless. But banks and corporate slumlords manage these property hoards to optimize their 3-month GAAP balance sheet which usually means the houses are not being efficiently used as homes, they are corporate gambling chips. That would be fine if our government of the people was for the people. But our corporate-owned government uses public resources to optimize fiat money stock prices of fictional people (aka corporations) instead of public health and well-being. So we socialize 800 billion dollar corporate losses and ignore the fallout of personal foreclosures and homelessness. (We also ignore that over the past 8 years, the ROI is approximately 1.5% on the extremely high-risk investment of bailing out a number of failed corporation. There are MUCHbetter ways to spend 800 billion dollars.)
In one of this century's first destructive supreme court rulings, Kelo v. City of New London decided that the US government can use eminent domain to seize your property and give it to Walmart, Oracle or any other private corporation. Homelessness is by design in an economy optimized for corporate stock prices. We've been here before. From the Grapes of Wrath:
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
It is truly bizarre to new that in USA, the capitalist centre of the world, so many people scream for special rights to *renters* as if they are owners....
It is truly bizarre to new that in USA, the capitalist centre of the world, so many people scream for special rights to *renters* as if they are people!...
I have seen an ad for a drug on one of the national tv channels then immediately following that commercial was a lawyer commercial, advertising that if you'd taken THE SAME DRUG IN THE PREVIOUS COMMERCIAL and had experienced the listed side effects, you should call "1-800-BADDRUG", and you might be entitled to substantial compensation...
Without ads for prescription drugs and ads for class-action lawsuits against said drugs, Fox loses 99% of its revenue stream, ISIS doesn't get the holy war they were looking for and World War Whatever never happens.
Sadly, his manifesto would be endorsed by the majority of people even in the countries he hates for welcoming immigrants. We freely allow the migration of money, but, but not people. Jobs don't have to climb a border wall, cross a sea or desert or even get a visa before leaving their home country.
Countries such as the US treat corporations as people, except when it comes to national borders. We require a passport for living-breathing people but not for corporations. I've never heard of a corporation being held against its will for decades in a prison/refugee camp while its immigration status is being evaluated. Corporations needn't cross deserts or crowd onto rickety boats. They are seldom convicted of treason or Logan act violations regardless of the havoc and resentment they create as representatives of their homeland in other parts of the world.
Gangolf, I don't know what immigrants did to you to make you so angry. I am one of the 232 million people who live outside my birth country. If we were counted, 0th generation immigrants would be the 5th most populous country in the world, ahead of Brazil. But we are shunned and labelled as if refugee == immigrant == illegal. I'm truly surprised that you count the US as a country that is "too welcoming." As an insular isolationist, you might not be aware that US immigration policy has changed considerably since the waves of 19th and early 20th century immigrants. The US solved its 1990s boat people crisis by warehousing refugees at Gitmo. It's solving the central American crisis by building a wall and letting people die. "Illegal" is a good definition of these border policies which violate international law. Rest assured that I will never use your software until you understand more about the people who provide a convenient scapegoat for politicians and a convenient target for your hate.
The premise behind these simulations is that giving directions to crowds will improve flow of people.
It's a mighty big assumption that the folks in the crowds would follow a signal to "slow down". Between the culture in general (ever see a tidy British style queue in the middle east?), and the general human dynamics of large crowds of people, I don't have much hope of this being a success...
...The activity of the crowd is determined by a very weak signal, if you can give them a strong signal instead they'll probably follow it.
Imagine you have a bunch of giant LED billboards overhead showing everyone in the crowd "SLOW DOWN" or "STOP" or "TURN RIGHT AT 42nd STREET".
A baffle sends a strong signal that is impossible to ignore. Cylindrical pillars seem to be among the most efficient at transmitting this signal in the right directions through the crowd so that it slows them in time to prevent crush injuries without panicking anyone into a stampede. Forget cultural stereotypes and objective cultural differences, at this scale all Muslims, Christians, Soccer fans, British Royals, bipeds, quadrapeds... behave as particles in a non-Newtonian fluid. If these particles encounter a barrier faster than the signal from the barrier can propagate against the flow of the fluid, you get a shock-wave not unlike a sonic boom.
Correctly placed barriers can significantly REDUCE the chance of "crowd crush" and stampedes, it's a common and well-understood technique that is often used to control "mosh pits" at large concerts and similar events.
The basic principle is no different to putting baffles in a petrol tanker truck to stop it sloshing about uncontrollably and derailing the truck, a crowd has a "pressure" that is related to it's density, volume, and overall direction of motion. A larger space can build up much higher "spot" pressures than a small space with the same density and motion. As I understand the problem in TFA, the sheer number of people makes it impossible/expensive to simulate the effect of crowd control measures in real time. However the basic principles of "crowd baffles" are well understood and have significantly reduced the likelihood of tragedy over the last few decades that they have been in use. If you find that hard to believe, try obtaining public liability insurance for a large event without having a credible crowd control plan.
The stoning columns probably served this purpose until they were replaced with walls to prevent pilgrims from stoning other pilgrims. Essentially they replaced the pillar "baffles" with a solid barrier. The solution to the stray stone problem may have led to the stampede deaths.
Irish water's smart meters block several digits of each consumer's water meter. This makes it nearly impossible for anyone to see their own utility usage. The data is sent via an unpublished protocol to Irish water's meter readers. When consumer's receive a bill, they must believe and pay it, or face fines, legal action and jail.
Some consumers are concerned by the exposure to an unknown amount of RF from the unknown protocol. Others are concerned by the safety of the haphazardly installed meter system or the possibility that the poorly installed meters might be causing leaks or mis-configured meters causing artificially high bills.
The Irish government supports this private company intervening between public water and private users. So if a consumer's remote control or outdoor thermometer on the crowded 433Mhz or 900Mhz bands interferes with the unknown protocol, they are likely to be charged with hacking.
An open protocol would have allowed independent companies to develop inexpensive consumer-focused smart meters which would have helped with the goal of reducing water wastage. As it is now, Irish water decides if and when consumer have access to their own consumption patterns, they will decide what to charge for meter-readers and they alone will determine the accuracy of the flow meters which determine their revenue.
Petrol stations don't regulate their pump's flow meters.
Grocery stores don't calibrate their own fruit scales.
Butchers don't calibrate their own weighing scales.
So why do we let utilities decide how their product is measured?
Most reasonable people agree that some adult authority figures made serious mistakes. These mistakes suggest a combination of islamophobia, teenagemalephobia, plain old racism and technophobia. For Ahmed, our binary political rhetoric collapsed into two states and since Ahmed's accusers were wrong, then Ahmed must be right.
I can't think of any of my science or engineering friends who would have made it through school in the 70s and 80s under such a zero tolerance system. But I do have a number of questions: Does Ahmed deserve the praise he is getting or is he merely being used as a political campaign? Put another way, if you had done something like this and Obama stood up and declared you brilliant and innocent, would you feel worthy or would you feel a tiny bit of guilt over the fact that you lie somewhere on the spectrum between guilty and genius?
With all that has been written on Ahmed and his clock, I have a number of unanswered technical questoins:
What noise did it make? Was a ticking sound also part of its functionality?
Was the 110V cord plugged in during English class? Why?
Why was the briefcase/suitcase described as a pencil case? Every pencil case I've seen is large enough to hold no more than a few dozen pencils. Ahmed's seems like it could hold 1000.
When was the pencil case purchased? Was it a reuse of an old case or was it purchased purposely for the clock? If it was purchased for the clock, why not use a case which would allow the clock's display to be seen from the outside.
Cool clock? Seriously? Is assembling this really exceptional for an American kids of his age? I work with younger kids at a coderdojo, I've met kids at makeshops and science fairs. Most are capable of far more complex, interesting and scary inventions. A volcano or potato clock might even be more interesting.
Where was Obama, the tech industry and the press when 14-year old Domanik Green's faced felony cybercrime charges instead of internships and invitations to the Whitehouse?
Start with the OpenSolaris rock stable (since the early 1992-2010?) ABI, add ZFS for its efficient support of flash, snapshots, encryption, RAID-z... Add BEOS/Haiku's user-meta-data indexed filesystem and AmigaDOS's backward/forward linked file allocation "table" (To turn off the computer, you switch it off, no fscking "start->shutdown" nonsense.) Graft OSX's time-machine onto ZFS's efficient copy-on-write snapshots for an improvement on VMS's auto-versioning files. Use Ubuntu's package manager, huge application repository and ATK accessibility features. Glitz it up with OSX's Quartz extreme GUI.
An Irish language documentary broke the news on the US Mortgage Backed Security driven property bubble back in 2005 so why doesn't it surprise me that another foreign news source is the first to piss off US real-estate corporations and reveal that rental backed securities are also teetering on the brink of disaster? Here we go again, another replay of tulip madness. In the words of Yogi Berra, it's Deja-vu all over again.
The real problem is that boom-bust cycles driven by loose monetary policy (whether it be Reagan's trickle down or Greenspan's helicopter drops) help those with deep pockets. Playing with matches around the global economic gas-tank eventually causes an explosion and as John Maynard Keynes put it, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." (unless you happen to be a corporate slumlord.)
The average college graduate has around $30,000 of debt, hardly hundreds of thousands.
The average trade school graduate has $10,000 of debt.
Given that college grads have significantly higher salaries, and significantly more horizontal and vertical movement potential, I'd hardly say that a college degree is not worth it....
You must be talking about the US. In Europe I'd be surprised if the average university debt is even 1/4th of that. The last time I checked Oxford medical school had almost exactly the same tuition as MBTI (before their financial scandals saw daylight.) Asian, South American and African Universities cost even less and techies (unlike some tradesmen) are competing in this global market. Yes, your college degree is worth something but first consider that in India there are tens of millions of middle-class people with PhDs in whatever you think you're an expert at. In Spain, Brazil, China there are hundreds of millions of highly-educated and unemployed university graduates.
If I were a chancellor or comptroller of a state or alumni-subsidized university I'd be worried that people will find out that many US universities don't even give a fiscal ROI, much less a societal one. They are morphing into either trade schools or glorified country clubs.
Those with money focus on the fraternity aspect, rub elbows with wealth and push themselves into a cushy job with friends. They can major in some of the useless esoteric degrees (believe me, philosophy and psychology are quite practical compared to some college curriculum.) The others are channeled down the "trade- school" quick fiscal ROI path. They get a degree in Management Information Systems, Accounting, MBA or Computer Science and hope what they learned is relevant for at least as long as it takes to payoff their student loan.
I was using a Vic-20's resistive analog joystick ports for potometry of a solar eclipse in the mid 1980s but the more hacky invention was my setup for numerical analysis class. The teacher cared about algorithms, not the details of what OS or hardware we were using but the code and results had to be printed out. So I used a pair of transistors and an optocoupler to interface the Vic's TTL RS232 port to a BELL R33 current loop teletype machine. The Vic wasn't terribly fast so the printer would chug out a result every minute or two which I could hear from anywhere in the house. 3.14159265358979...
A (New) Coke bottle, toilet roll tube, floating styrofoam bernouli ball to redirect the power supply fan's airflow over the hot running 386 CPU card on Zenith's passive backplane. This was all strapped to a 1960s era portable reel-to-reel tape recorder case with duct tape. Lots and lots of duct tape.
Slashdot Mirror
The immigrants..
(yada yada...)
...But supposedly it's a good joke and if you're not in then you're a racist fascist anti-democrat.>
(yada yada)
No, it's not a joke. It's not a joke that millions of immigrants are blamed worldwide if one commits a crime somewhere in the world but hundreds of crimes by racist, fascist anti-democrats are too common to be news anywhere. How many people know about the 64 arson attacks on refugee centres in Sweden and numerous similar attacks in Germany, Denmark and daily incidents of violence against immigrants in Ireland, the UK and elsewhere? How many know of the Afghan refugee driven to suicide in Sweden this week?
It's funny that here in Ireland, people shun the immigrants in the local repair shops but happily send hundreds of Euro to multinational sweatshops overseas where 90% of the money leaves the EU, never to return. The repair tax break is a good start but I can see right now that this is a small problem. We really need to repair our society so that we don't have so much shit for people like you to shovel onto the backs of immigrants and refugees.
As an American, I think that describing the UK or Ireland as having "a lack of language barriers" to be hopelessly naive.
"The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language." -- George Bernard Shaw
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Germany had a higher percentage of people who are fluent in American English than the UK or Ireland. :)
Kudos for quoting an Irish poet to make your point. But language variations within the UK and Ireland are broader than between Ireland and the U.S. And if you think there are no cultural variations within the US, you need to broaden your circle of friends. A New Yorker is far more likely to understand an Dubliner than a creole from the rural Louisiana. Culturally Ireland is nearer to the US than the UK is, more cliques than classism. Politically Ireland is also nearer to the NorthEastern US and even Silicon Valley than either is to the rural south or Midwest. Germany may have more cultural similarity to the upper Midwest.
Anyway, according to the EU, Ireland speaks Irish Gaelic, and when the UK leaves, there will no longer be any officially-English-speaking countries in the EU. That's going to have some interesting repercussions! (Unless Scotland manages to wrangle a way to stay when the rest of the UK leaves. Which I know they desperately want to do.)
But yeah, Brexit could be a real boon for Ireland. Possibly enough to make up for the fact that their current biggest trading partner is planning to leave the union. I'd certainly be looking at Dublin as a strong alternative to London. If I were the Irish government, I'd be out pitching "we're not leaving!" to all sorts of companies!
I wish this were true but Dublin is currently a very poor alternative to London. Its planning laws restrict development both vertically and horizontally. Decent architectural firms might be able to raize or remodel the thousands of derelict buildings but nothing happens overnight here and the transportation infrastructure is abysmal. Another of a series of planned strikes by Dublin Bus tomorrow will bring an already clogged city to a screeching halt. Ireland's real-estate bubble was the worst in the world and its government has been trying to reinflate it since 2007. As a result rent to wage ratios are about as bad as London with the caveat that the properties here are kips (look it up, if it's not an American word, it should be.) Ireland's government-owned "bad bank" NAMA may have organized some sweetheart deals on foreclosed properties with foreign REIT firms including one managed by former US VP Dan Quayle. Where the military-industrial complex and agribusiness own the US, the property industry seems to own the Irish government.
As for "not leaving the E.U.",Britain's Brexit Minister David Davis seems to have forgotten that Ireland isn't part of the UK. In fact several EU diplomats and nearly all US corporations and websites treat the Republic of Ireland as a part of the UK, now 100 years after the 1916 Easter Rising eventually led to this terrible beauty that we call Ireland.
Given access to the pixels in a bit-mapped character, how would you blink a cursor? You'd XOR the pixels in the cursor. It's trivial. Give a kid access to the logical operations available on 8-bit microprocessors and she'll probably reinvent this within a week. But cadtrack was granted U.S. Patent 4,197,590. They filed a lawsuit against Commodore computers. A US judge filed an injunction against Commodore blocking its sale of the Amiga CD32. This cemented Microsoft's virtual monopoly on desktop computers, setting back the PC industry a decade. (Amiga had unix-like pre-emptive multi-tasking, Windows 95 color windowed desktop, multimedia capabilities, stereo sound, built in speech synthesizer.. in 1985 when you were still looking at the A:\> prompt and that ugly green blinking cursor.)
I'm claiming Irish citizenship through a reverse agreement. Anyone born on the island before 2005 can claim it. On a darker note, I didn't say it would bring peace. If anything it will inflame tensions in NI. Source : From NI
You'd better check your sources. Ireland's Citizenship referendum ended Irish citizenship by birth in 2005 after a campaign reminiscent of UKIP's xenophobic frothing at the mouth. Tax-funded RTE and the Irish newspapers played up rumors of hundreds of "non-national" anchor babies being born in Dublin airport every day, just as state media, BBC decided to report scary UK immigration statistics on election day. Contrary to popular belief, public funding of broadcasting doesn't magically make it less biased than the US corporate-owned media, the BBC used TV licenses from white and non-white British citizens to fund shows such as George Mitchell's Black and White Minstrel show until the late 1970s.
Ireland's citizenship referendum didn't do as much damage as the Brexit vote because sensible heads in Dáil Éireann interpreted that populist vote as slightly less tyranny of the majority than the majority would have preferred. A grandfather rule allowed parents of Irish born children born before 2005 to have the equivalent of a dodgy green card, with expensive renewals every three years via a chaotic and draconian bureaucracy, proof that we are supporting ourselves and proof that we had not committed ANY crimes (we had to submit documentation of any parking tickets and speeding fines.) This was not citizenship, it was limbo and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. If you've found a short-cut to Irish citizenship, don't tell the others who've wasted years, spent thousands of Euro and presented their first born child (I kid you not.) They will tell you to get to the back of the queue.
Let's hope Britain's parliament has as much courage to do the right thing despite what mob democracy prescribes. Referendums would have kept institutionalized slavery and segregation well into the 21st century.
So, only the stupid users then.
And your arrogance ^ my friend, is the root of the problem. If we in the IT community are so much smarter than end users, why was telnet, ftp, smtp, http, Microsoft Windows, IoT... all designed without even the most basic considerations for security? Shouldn't an information appliance be designed so that a child, grandmother, astronaut or household pet be able to "click on" or view anything without damaging the information appliance, leaking personal details, joining a botnet.
The scum and script kiddies who write the ransomware are not rocket scientists. They're simply vandalizing a cyber-society where front and back doors are left unlocked. If we built cities as we build software, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury is more of a poetic look at the topic of youth, ageing and death. I vaguely remember a short story which touched on the specific topic of what eternal youth was possible by drinking a potion made out of something cheap and ubiquitous, like a dandelion. How would a person decide when to stop taking this elixir? I don't remember the name of that story but it might have been in the book Dandelion Wine.
Gee, I wonder why the moderators didn't like this?
Because it would work?
So, America should just follow Canada and do whatever it does? Where did that idea even come from?
What do people say when Canada slavishly follows America? "Screw those foreigners, they have nothing to do with us, we will make our own decisions, and if those foreigners think we've made the wrong decision, then they can go screw themselves." What an interesting sentiment indeed.
Hey hey, be nice, the national niceness datamining results for Slashdot have not yet been released. The US may yet have a f*~&ng chance against those *&)@# Canuks! -- Oh $(*#, Damn!
If only his evil genius had been used for niceness. -- Maxwell Smart
So your hypothetical choices would be to die by the shooter or die trying to save yourself from the shooter should your DNA lock idea become a reality. And No, this isn't some strawman remark...
Why not? The shooter in Newtown stole the guns from his mother after killing her. His DNA would most likely have been in the database. The guy in Washington state purchased them legally, and the recent ones in California all were purchased by a neighbor and given to them..
It's more than likely that in any of those situations the gun's master database would have allowed the mass shootings.
Those who practice the religion of Gun Idolatry have a peculiarly anachronistic worldview. They apply 17th century law in-situ to 21st century killing technology but reject 250 years of advancement in safety technology. They remind me of the motorcyclists who come up with all sorts of strawmen arguments against helmets or drivers who rejected seatbelts and airbags.
Beyond the obvious improvements such as RFID/fingerprinting (already used by hundreds of millions of people to preserve money but not yet to preserve life). We could have a DNA whitelist a no-fire blacklist and something inspired by Frank Herbert's The White Plague, a device to detect whether the trigger finger has an XX chromosome (female) or XY (male.) While this is a disturbing idea to western minds, imagine what an equalizer it would be in parts of the world dominated by violent people with Y chromosomes. Yet another possibility is SQUID fMRI or face emotional recognition to detect the patterns associated with psychopathy.
While we're constructing straw-men situations for the exceedingly rare situations where guns save lives, let's imagine what would have happened if the guns left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan had been useless to anyone with a Y chromosome. It might not have saved the world but it's difficult to imagine that things would be any worse.
Even before Bruce wrote this timely article, I wondered whether more women in open source might be a cause or an effect of better moderation. My brief time working with the late Telsa Gwynn at GUADEC 2003 suggested that moderation was one of her under-appreciated roles. But she was attacked by the misogynistic mob (AKA the open source community.) Were it not for Telsa's thick skin and an overdeveloped sense of forgiveness, none of us would have benefited from her work. Many other women and others outside of a particularly narrow age/race/religion/gender profile have experienced similar when attempting to contribute and most gave up. We tolerate Linus's rantings and ignore that only timing and humility separated Linus from countless other early *nix hackers. We tolerate Gangolf Jobb's racist license and Trumpish rantings because he is a good coder. My family and remote team members met at GUADEC Istanbul where a very well-known opensource developer spewed misogynistic rantings that embarrassed and offended me, projected a terrible impression of Christians and Euro/American society to my global team who were experiencing western society for the first time. He came very near to inspiring at least one person to push him into the Bosporus. Why does this happen? Part of it is the same reason Whitney Houston and other rock , movie and sports superstars are bat shit insane. Society should be a counterbalance to the Id, but when we worship people as superstars, there is no counterbalance and Id rules. The defence mechanism takes over when the inner demons unleashed by bad decisions are externalized, possibly as police brutality. Similar forces were at play when Hans Reiser became our OJ Simpson.
In the past that role of moderation was performed by a central government (e.g. the FCC), a tight group of highly educated individuals, a class/caste system. Twitter and Facebook use something close to a democracy but the S/N ratio can quickly fall to the level of CB radio, AOL and usenet. The more sophisticated merit-based moderation system used by Slashdot, some opensource projects and creative sites such as worth1000 works well, at least above a certain threshold. But these systems must be designed to prevent individuals or small groups from becoming immune to criticism. Within government legal frameworks the censor or impeachment is a mechanism for moderation. We could do something within opensource communities where an individual's ethics could taint their contributions. Each of us would be able to choose whether we want to contribute or use ethically-tainted patches.
Back in the 1980s when I may have been the last male to wirewrap a PDP-11 core memory board, a friend commented, "Did you ever notice that men in the comp-sci program are (80s equivalent of "Meh") but the women are brilliant?" Yes, I did notice that. But whatever happened to Karen Norwood, Maureen T, Kathy Christiansen, Norah K, and the sole woman in our Physics program?
This is where overloading the == operator comes in. Equality is an overloaded word. Here in Ireland, the word was a slogan for LBGT marriage rights which passed referendum with an overwhelming majority. But the word "equality" doesn't apply to gender, race, religion or immigration issues here. But do we really want women to become equal to 20-something males who live in their parent's basement who have the moral and emotional depth of comic book and video game heros? I don't. Let's take the best woman have to offer and not try to force them into our broken mold.
See the US Supreme Court decision way back in the mid-1800's regarding a railroad company calling itself a 'person' under the law. A Corporation is a person, at least under the law.
This stupid error could have been fixed at any time in the intervening ~150 years by Congress passing a law stating otherwise. It hasn't.
The day that I see a law-breaking Corporation either jailed or put-to-death for their crimes, I might then consider viewing them as people. Until then, they are not—Corporations (profit or non-profit) are legal structures that represent and act for a particular group of people—Corporations are not people.
Also keep in mind that multinational corporations can behave irresponsibly across international borders damaging US reputation and security, destabilizing foreign economies and governments. But unlike refugees, asylum seekers and all other categories of non-fictional human immigrants, corporations have no visa or passport that might be revoked.
#require_corporate_passports
...
Plus I really dont think there are 640million empty properties right now in the US ("multiple empty houses for every man, woman and child" is what you said, combined with the current estimated population of 322million). A quick googling shows a recent estimate is only 18.6million, and most of those need significant extra work as they are uninhabitable.
As of Q3 2015 the St. Louis Fed estimates 17,443,000 vacant homes in the USA. and the OP began with an obvious typo, this is more than enough supply for our 500,000 homeless. But banks and corporate slumlords manage these property hoards to optimize their 3-month GAAP balance sheet which usually means the houses are not being efficiently used as homes, they are corporate gambling chips. That would be fine if our government of the people was for the people. But our corporate-owned government uses public resources to optimize fiat money stock prices of fictional people (aka corporations) instead of public health and well-being. So we socialize 800 billion dollar corporate losses and ignore the fallout of personal foreclosures and homelessness. (We also ignore that over the past 8 years, the ROI is approximately 1.5% on the extremely high-risk investment of bailing out a number of failed corporation. There are MUCH better ways to spend 800 billion dollars.)
In one of this century's first destructive supreme court rulings, Kelo v. City of New London decided that the US government can use eminent domain to seize your property and give it to Walmart, Oracle or any other private corporation. Homelessness is by design in an economy optimized for corporate stock prices. We've been here before. From the Grapes of Wrath:
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
It is truly bizarre to new that in USA, the capitalist centre of the world, so many people scream for special rights to *renters* as if they are owners....
It is truly bizarre to new that in USA, the capitalist centre of the world, so many people scream for special rights to *renters* as if they are people!...
( Fixed that for you. )
I have seen an ad for a drug on one of the national tv channels then immediately following that commercial was a lawyer commercial, advertising that if you'd taken THE SAME DRUG IN THE PREVIOUS COMMERCIAL and had experienced the listed side effects, you should call "1-800-BADDRUG", and you might be entitled to substantial compensation...
Without ads for prescription drugs and ads for class-action lawsuits against said drugs, Fox loses 99% of its revenue stream, ISIS doesn't get the holy war they were looking for and World War Whatever never happens.
Sadly, his manifesto would be endorsed by the majority of people even in the countries he hates for welcoming immigrants. We freely allow the migration of money, but, but not people. Jobs don't have to climb a border wall, cross a sea or desert or even get a visa before leaving their home country.
Countries such as the US treat corporations as people, except when it comes to national borders. We require a passport for living-breathing people but not for corporations. I've never heard of a corporation being held against its will for decades in a prison/refugee camp while its immigration status is being evaluated. Corporations needn't cross deserts or crowd onto rickety boats. They are seldom convicted of treason or Logan act violations regardless of the havoc and resentment they create as representatives of their homeland in other parts of the world.
We don't bat an eye when a wealthy businessman distorts a third-world economy with their holiday home or an expat REIT vulture fund managed by former US VP Dan Quayle acquires and ruthlessly forecloses on hundreds of properties in Northern Ireland's 6 counties. Your portfolio now "owns" land that the Irish have struggled over for generations.
Gangolf, I don't know what immigrants did to you to make you so angry. I am one of the 232 million people who live outside my birth country. If we were counted, 0th generation immigrants would be the 5th most populous country in the world, ahead of Brazil. But we are shunned and labelled as if refugee == immigrant == illegal. I'm truly surprised that you count the US as a country that is "too welcoming." As an insular isolationist, you might not be aware that US immigration policy has changed considerably since the waves of 19th and early 20th century immigrants. The US solved its 1990s boat people crisis by warehousing refugees at Gitmo. It's solving the central American crisis by building a wall and letting people die. "Illegal" is a good definition of these border policies which violate international law. Rest assured that I will never use your software until you understand more about the people who provide a convenient scapegoat for politicians and a convenient target for your hate.
The premise behind these simulations is that giving directions to crowds will improve flow of people.
It's a mighty big assumption that the folks in the crowds would follow a signal to "slow down". Between the culture in general (ever see a tidy British style queue in the middle east?), and the general human dynamics of large crowds of people, I don't have much hope of this being a success...
...The activity of the crowd is determined by a very weak signal, if you can give them a strong signal instead they'll probably follow it.
Imagine you have a bunch of giant LED billboards overhead showing everyone in the crowd "SLOW DOWN" or "STOP" or "TURN RIGHT AT 42nd STREET".
A baffle sends a strong signal that is impossible to ignore. Cylindrical pillars seem to be among the most efficient at transmitting this signal in the right directions through the crowd so that it slows them in time to prevent crush injuries without panicking anyone into a stampede. Forget cultural stereotypes and objective cultural differences, at this scale all Muslims, Christians, Soccer fans, British Royals, bipeds, quadrapeds... behave as particles in a non-Newtonian fluid. If these particles encounter a barrier faster than the signal from the barrier can propagate against the flow of the fluid, you get a shock-wave not unlike a sonic boom.
Correctly placed barriers can significantly REDUCE the chance of "crowd crush" and stampedes, it's a common and well-understood technique that is often used to control "mosh pits" at large concerts and similar events. The basic principle is no different to putting baffles in a petrol tanker truck to stop it sloshing about uncontrollably and derailing the truck, a crowd has a "pressure" that is related to it's density, volume, and overall direction of motion. A larger space can build up much higher "spot" pressures than a small space with the same density and motion. As I understand the problem in TFA, the sheer number of people makes it impossible/expensive to simulate the effect of crowd control measures in real time. However the basic principles of "crowd baffles" are well understood and have significantly reduced the likelihood of tragedy over the last few decades that they have been in use. If you find that hard to believe, try obtaining public liability insurance for a large event without having a credible crowd control plan.
The stoning columns probably served this purpose until they were replaced with walls to prevent pilgrims from stoning other pilgrims. Essentially they replaced the pillar "baffles" with a solid barrier. The solution to the stray stone problem may have led to the stampede deaths.
Irish water's smart meters block several digits of each consumer's water meter. This makes it nearly impossible for anyone to see their own utility usage. The data is sent via an unpublished protocol to Irish water's meter readers. When consumer's receive a bill, they must believe and pay it, or face fines, legal action and jail.
Some consumers are concerned by the exposure to an unknown amount of RF from the unknown protocol. Others are concerned by the safety of the haphazardly installed meter system or the possibility that the poorly installed meters might be causing leaks or mis-configured meters causing artificially high bills.
The Irish government supports this private company intervening between public water and private users. So if a consumer's remote control or outdoor thermometer on the crowded 433Mhz or 900Mhz bands interferes with the unknown protocol, they are likely to be charged with hacking.
An open protocol would have allowed independent companies to develop inexpensive consumer-focused smart meters which would have helped with the goal of reducing water wastage. As it is now, Irish water decides if and when consumer have access to their own consumption patterns, they will decide what to charge for meter-readers and they alone will determine the accuracy of the flow meters which determine their revenue.
Petrol stations don't regulate their pump's flow meters. Grocery stores don't calibrate their own fruit scales. Butchers don't calibrate their own weighing scales.
So why do we let utilities decide how their product is measured?
"I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it would do any good."
Most reasonable people agree that some adult authority figures made serious mistakes. These mistakes suggest a combination of islamophobia, teenagemalephobia, plain old racism and technophobia. For Ahmed, our binary political rhetoric collapsed into two states and since Ahmed's accusers were wrong, then Ahmed must be right.
I can't think of any of my science or engineering friends who would have made it through school in the 70s and 80s under such a zero tolerance system. But I do have a number of questions: Does Ahmed deserve the praise he is getting or is he merely being used as a political campaign? Put another way, if you had done something like this and Obama stood up and declared you brilliant and innocent, would you feel worthy or would you feel a tiny bit of guilt over the fact that you lie somewhere on the spectrum between guilty and genius?
With all that has been written on Ahmed and his clock, I have a number of unanswered technical questoins:
Start with the OpenSolaris rock stable (since the early 1992-2010?) ABI, add ZFS for its efficient support of flash, snapshots, encryption, RAID-z... Add BEOS/Haiku's user-meta-data indexed filesystem and AmigaDOS's backward/forward linked file allocation "table" (To turn off the computer, you switch it off, no fscking "start->shutdown" nonsense.) Graft OSX's time-machine onto ZFS's efficient copy-on-write snapshots for an improvement on VMS's auto-versioning files. Use Ubuntu's package manager, huge application repository and ATK accessibility features. Glitz it up with OSX's Quartz extreme GUI.
An Irish language documentary broke the news on the US Mortgage Backed Security driven property bubble back in 2005 so why doesn't it surprise me that another foreign news source is the first to piss off US real-estate corporations and reveal that rental backed securities are also teetering on the brink of disaster? Here we go again, another replay of tulip madness. In the words of Yogi Berra, it's Deja-vu all over again.
The real problem is that boom-bust cycles driven by loose monetary policy (whether it be Reagan's trickle down or Greenspan's helicopter drops) help those with deep pockets. Playing with matches around the global economic gas-tank eventually causes an explosion and as John Maynard Keynes put it, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." (unless you happen to be a corporate slumlord.)
The average college graduate has around $30,000 of debt, hardly hundreds of thousands. The average trade school graduate has $10,000 of debt. Given that college grads have significantly higher salaries, and significantly more horizontal and vertical movement potential, I'd hardly say that a college degree is not worth it. ...
You must be talking about the US. In Europe I'd be surprised if the average university debt is even 1/4th of that. The last time I checked Oxford medical school had almost exactly the same tuition as MBTI (before their financial scandals saw daylight.) Asian, South American and African Universities cost even less and techies (unlike some tradesmen) are competing in this global market. Yes, your college degree is worth something but first consider that in India there are tens of millions of middle-class people with PhDs in whatever you think you're an expert at. In Spain, Brazil, China there are hundreds of millions of highly-educated and unemployed university graduates.
If I were a chancellor or comptroller of a state or alumni-subsidized university I'd be worried that people will find out that many US universities don't even give a fiscal ROI, much less a societal one. They are morphing into either trade schools or glorified country clubs.
Those with money focus on the fraternity aspect, rub elbows with wealth and push themselves into a cushy job with friends. They can major in some of the useless esoteric degrees (believe me, philosophy and psychology are quite practical compared to some college curriculum.) The others are channeled down the "trade- school" quick fiscal ROI path. They get a degree in Management Information Systems, Accounting, MBA or Computer Science and hope what they learned is relevant for at least as long as it takes to payoff their student loan.
Yes your college degree is worth something, so is a house, so are dot com stocks, beanie babies and tulips. But it isn't worth as much as most people believe it's worth.
I was using a Vic-20's resistive analog joystick ports for potometry of a solar eclipse in the mid 1980s but the more hacky invention was my setup for numerical analysis class. The teacher cared about algorithms, not the details of what OS or hardware we were using but the code and results had to be printed out. So I used a pair of transistors and an optocoupler to interface the Vic's TTL RS232 port to a BELL R33 current loop teletype machine. The Vic wasn't terribly fast so the printer would chug out a result every minute or two which I could hear from anywhere in the house. 3.14159265358979...
And that was the most reliable printer I've ever owned.
A (New) Coke bottle, toilet roll tube, floating styrofoam bernouli ball to redirect the power supply fan's airflow over the hot running 386 CPU card on Zenith's passive backplane. This was all strapped to a 1960s era portable reel-to-reel tape recorder case with duct tape. Lots and lots of duct tape.