We want a truce, if you do absolutely everything we want and obey us without thinking, then we won't be trying to make you do absolutely everything we want and make you obey without thinking. Ain't we nice.
The music industry suffers from the broken window fallacy. Roughly, the kid who broke a window benefited society since money flowed because the window had to be replaced. The fallacy is that the money would have flowed anyway, but NOT in the replacement of something but in investment or the improving of ones life.
If the music industry goes bankrupt, the economy doesn't suffer because it will simply have meant a shift of money.
The record shop has become the mobile phone shop. I don't have a newspaper subscription, I have an Internet subscription. My money flows into the economy. The smart parts of the economy have moved on, the rest is trying to legislate against the car, the electric light, chance itself. Good luck. They might put a man with a red flag on the internet for a few years, but progress moves on. I will simply pirate over a prepaid 3G connection. I will NOT buy CD's. Time has moved on. Move with it or die.
Right sir, I get right on it. I will make the packages BOTH cutting edge AND give them proven stabilty. While I am at it, how about I make you nice curry sir, both spicy yet bland. A nice coffee, both stimulating and caffeine free.
How many fast-food workers get aids? How many people wanting to run for office have to hide their past flipping burgers? How many fast-food workers are killed by customers? How many fast-food workers are dependent on the turnout of the day for their salary? How many fastfood workers do not get sickdays etc etc (in civilized countries).
You sir are a worthless human being with no redeeming quality. Comparing prostitution with a normal job no matter how much you might look down on is the hallmark of a very narrow mind. The kind who says it is okay his iPod was made with slave labor because else these people would have just starved.
You seem to have swallowled the idea that simply playing some video should require a multi-core 100+ watt machine whole. Amazing. Truly amazing.
To others, sane people, the idea that a atom struggles with a low res video is a damning condemnation of coding standards. What is it with flash that makes people accept you need a multi-core rig consuming more power then a washing machine to do some 2d animation we did years ago on early pentiums?
Do you buy a car and accept that it does 1 mile to the gallon getting out of the drive way? Oh... wait SUV. Guess people do.
Play video through flash and play the exact same same through mplayer. See the cpu difference. THAT is why Adobe sucks donkey balls and all flash developers should be shot.
The entire point is that with extremely primitive means, they turned a volcanic (read liveless) island into a lush paradise. It proves that the creation of an eco system is something that CAN be managed without waiting for nature to do it very very slowly.
It shows we CAN reverse de-forestation and it shows that man CAN have a large impact.
Of course you need to be able to get your head past "but it is not 100% the same so it must be fail" that capability is what seperates the leaders from the sheep. Guess which group you belong too? Baaah!
Since this is not a gay resort, its lack of female customers would put a serious crimp into your plan.
And in some ways, I think the customers don't want a real woman. Contrary to what some think, women are available. Just not on the terms these guys want. Real women got real brains, their own opinions, their own desires.
And AI with a mood can be easily satisfied because that is how it has been programmed. The puzzle is solvable and not all that hard to figure out because else the puzzle (love sim) wouldn't sell.
It is part of why MMO's work so well. We all like to accomplish someday, level up. In real life that is hard and very unpredictable. But log into WoW and you can see exactly how many minutes of grinding you have left to next promotion.
Same with love games, they got little hearts that fill up if you do it right (or so I am told). there are walkthroughs, cheats but most of all, the computer program can be shut off.
Real women not so easily. Well not without the police starting to ask questions and as for restarting them... you just can never get a thunderstorm to pass over when you need one.
And frankly, all this is nothing new. When you read older books or watch older tv-shows it is fairly common to have a character who lives with his/her sister for ever. The unmarried bachelor. The spinster. Tons of people never get married. A large percentage of males never reproduces. It just doesn't fit with the image modern media serves us, but society on the whole has done quit well with a lot of people not taking part in reproduction.
In a way, modern media makes it even harder. Everyone is brought up with this vision of true love and rampant passion between beautifull people who live in spacious houses and never have to work a boring jobs all hours of the day just to make ends meet.
People see one reality on tv, see their own reality and choose the fake one. Sad but the human race will survive.
It is a sad fact that the ONLY rehabilitation that works on criminals is a bullet through the brain. Not a single other system has any noticable effect. The industry beats its chest when it achieves a 1% different on a recidivism rate of 70%+
Imagine if you went to a doctor and 70% of the time the treatment did absolutely nothing but cost a lot of money. How long before you sue? But that is exactly what is going on with both prisons and rehab. It don't make a difference if you lock them up in the worsed pound them in the ass jail or coddle them till even a ragdoll cat gets fed up. Criminals re-offend.
It gets even funnier if you realize that recidivism figures measure ONLY those cons who have been CONVICTED of commiting another crime, and then ONLY if someone happens to notice the connection.
Example, 15yr old rapes. This is NOT marked permanent on his record. If he rapes again at 20, NOBODY links the two. IF of course he is even caught AND convicted the second time. So the bleeding heart who listened to his sob story at 15 beats himself on the chest on how he saved this kid. WRONG!
There fundementally isn't a simple solution. Some criminals belong in the most secure lockup you can image, some people just can't be saved. Others should have been caught and put back on track LONG before BUT that requires lots of money and yes, invasion of privacy. Me looking in YOUR house to see if you kid might be at risk. Don't like it? The alternative is only catching those kids when it is far to late.
There is a solution, but it involves a lot of money and having lots of answers to all the various problems. Prevention, removal of incentive, intervention with gateway crimes (this includes speeding you speed freaks), harsh punishment for those who refuse to change, providing openings for those willing to change.
But that don't fit on a signpost. No slogan can be made out of it. So it won't happen.
And so does Sony AND Nintendo. I am of course talking about game consoles. Closed platforms where the owner of the platform (not you dear consumer sheep) decides what gets to run on it.
Apple has made the decision to follow the console model rather then the PC model. That is their choice. Your choice as a consumer is whether you choose to buy it or not. Your choice is NOT to force Apple to go another way other then through voting with your dollars.
Why has Apple made this decision? One of the many stupid mistakes MS has made in its lifetime is to allow Emails to contains executable code. For the email reader, the application to run external code. Abobe is regularly blamed for doing the same with PDF's. Lots of people here claim that data should not contain code. So when Apple decides that it does not want the option on ITS platform for 3rd party apps to run totally unknown 4th party code, of course they are COMPLETLY wrong in doing so...
Apple has made a reputation for itself by having a better, more solid, hassle free user experience. But how has it gotten this? Partially by its users being UNABLE to install the crap they do under windows. IF the mac platform got the same kind of malware and cripple ware attention as the PC, it would be just as bad an experience, with DRM overwriting sectors on the HD it has no business overwriting.
Is Apple right in believing that a controlled environment makes for a better user experience? Who knows, what I do know is that they sell millions of iPhones. People are voting with their dollars. Apparently they like SOMETHING about the iPhone more then they don't like.
Don't buy/develop for a closed platform and then complain it is closed. That is like breaking into a prison and then complaining they won't let you go.
There have been THOUSANDS of terrorists attacks since 9/11, try Iraq and Afghanistan. What about Madrid and London? Those don't count? Because they don't strike were YOU claim they should strike? Here is a hint: THAT is how terrorism works. Strike ANYWHERE with the implied threat that it could happen ANYWHERE.
There have also been attempts on US targets, FOUR at least. (Shoe-bomber, nigerian via dutch airline, car on times-sqaure, fort hood shooting) 1 out of 4 succeeded. Stupid attemps? No, just unlucky ones. 9/11 got lucky, very lucky. 3 planes hit their target, one didn't. That is NOT exactly a high success rate but it was high enough. But can you bank on that? Never had a fire in my adult life != do not need the fire department.
People are smarter? Doubt it if you are the example. Not exactly blessed with logical thinking skills are you? You go on how about 9/11 could only happen because the terrorists did something DIFFERENT and then completly assume a next attempt will be foiled because we know what to do now... so the terrorist are not capable of changing the rules YET again? Who says the NEXT 9/11 will be the same? Madrid, London and the fort hood shooting were not. Why touch the airport at all? I can think up of thousands of different attacks especially if the attacker doesn't value his own life. No doubt so can the terrorists.
They are rare? Yes... getting rarer all the time with the thousands of suicide attacks. Odd that they don't seem to be running out at all. Could it be that with a population in the billions, any fraction of a percentage still gets you tons of people? And yet all these billions of people who are not terrorists did NOT stop 9/11 or London or Madrid or Fort Hood or the countless attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan or the attack in Mumbai and god knows how many more.
There is a very real risk that in the fear of terrorists we do exactly what the terrorists want, which is to life in terror.
But sticking our head in the sand like you do is NOT the answer either. You are a silly person who has banked his entire idea that there is another group of a dozen muslim men waiting with box-cutters to fly aircraft into buildings and that you, you who cower already on a forum at the thought of a terrorists, will fight them off with the old lady next to you.
The people in the fourth plane tried that. Why don't you ask them for tips... oh wait, they ALL died didn't they? So much for your brilliant plan to foil the evil terrorists. Maybe we should leave it to someone smarter. Shouldn't be hard, by my estimate there about 6 billion smarter people on this planet then some guy who thinks terrorists have to strike in the same place twice in the same way.
The problem both you and the original poster and most on this forum have is this: Some areas of the world have no traffic rules. India has a simple rule, do not cross rails at the station. People do and people die. Constantly, daily. Why? Culture mostly. It can be very hard to grasp this if you follow some rules instinctively.
Do you jump from the rail platform on to the rails to save you have to go through a tunnel less then a hundred meters away? No? Why not? Because it is the law or because some laws do actually make sense? Do you wear a helmet on a motorcycle because it is the law or because you think it actually makes sense? Do you not drive on the wrong side of the road because some cop might catch you or because you don't fancy plowing into another car at 200km/h?
Simply installing traffic lights is NOT going to convince people to obey them. Only when the culture has changed to see that the traffic lights are NOT there as restrictor but as an enabler (traffic flows more smoothly allowing everyone to pass the junction more smoothly) will the traffic light start to work.
Frankly having been to such places, I think the guys changes are hopeless. It just doesn't fit with how people think. In India, if you get killed in traffic, it is bad karma, NOT you stepping in front of a speeding train that did it. Life just doesn't have the same value. Not that you have to look far for such attitudes. The west prefers SUV which kill more people then 9/11 each year including kids and never consider smaller vehicles which don't cause such injuries. Bull bars? Say bye bye to any kid hit with it.
Traffic, where humanity takes a nose dive. get used to it or start patrolling the roads with a machine gun.
Getting people home safely is part of getting repeat business for your trip into space business. But nobody EVER claimed anywhere that an astronaut has to survive his trip for it to count as a journey into space.
Or are you saying that if I die on my trip to Australia (and may god have mercy on my soul) I have never visited Australia? Would make the entry into heaven a bit easier but somehow I think it will still be held against me.
The ISP doesn't CARE. This is old news and the data has been used by the ISP to show data limits are useless AND they dropped them therefor.
So the ISP isn't complaining, it is advertising. Both making its competitors seem like cheapo's AND showing that you can download what you want with them as well as showing that overall, the average consumer doesn't even come close. Because the difference between 1 and 2 is already huge but number 10 barely counts.
Why else do you think some of the users agreed to have their username printed on the list?
Lets face it, if McD gets sued because people like their hamburgers so much they can't stop eating, everybody is a target. Just waiting for the first thief to claim the object he stole was simply to tempting.
On a more serious note, this is exactly what people who claim women cause rape by dressing to sexy are claiming AND have at times got away with.
Anything to get off facing the consequence of your own actions.
And I played Lineage II. It is not that good a game. And you got to wonder what the hell he was doing. These game have no real end-game worth speaking off and with 5 years of 11 hours play, my god he must have reached the end game hundreds of times and done what? What could POSSIBLY keep you playing a dumb grind game for SO long.
No, this guy is just a recluse, a lock-in. He could have been folding paper hats or read soccer scores. The game is not the problem, his own mind is. That is sad, but not NCSofts problem. Just as McD is not to blame if you never excersise and eat a hamburger each and every day.
3142 times she walked past her bedroom window, with the curtains just open enough to show her in her lace underwear.
Flirty looks at you as you passed by on your way to the 7-11 for ramen. 0% returned.
Yes, you are the reason she had to hook up with that jock. She is sueing YOU for emotional traume and unsatisfied sexual desire of her self and her close female friends because YOU spend all that time on slashdot instead.
When are we human? Abortion hinges on this, WHEN is the foetus a human being with a human brain. Is there some magic moment the brain switches on OR are we a bacteria that evolves rapidly into a complex life form?
Can it be that the brain "knows" the human body and how to operate it because it "grew up" with it? We imagine a robot being build typically on a long assembly line and only at the last moment the head is connected and the robot switches on. Could a brain instead function as a very small simple "cpu" that has more and more peripherals (but small ones) learns about it when they are still simple and then grows familiar with them as they and itself grow? Are WE created from a single egg, not the just he body but the WE, the spirit, the bit that makes us, makes any animal able to think? It would explain low level functions far more. A full grown heart is hard to control, but when you can get to grips with it when it is still just a few cells, that makes a lot more sense. Even fits what we know of brain cells being able to learn how to fly. Start simple, then add more complexity rather just plump some brain cells into a 747 and asking it to fly to Hong Kong and boink the stewardess.
But building something like this? Fat chance. We use rat brain cells for a reason. Even building an AI that could teach itself to fly is beyond us. We can build AI that can fly but NOT AI that can teach itself to fly. Not even in very simple environments. That says something.
I think the old "And the egg starts to divide" bit is a bit more complex then we think.
The froth at my mouth? Enough for 10.000 bud weisers... provided you can find enough american to supply the piss. I doubt it, considering amazon is taking it.
My god, and I stopped watching tv becomes of the constant advertising, haven't heard radio in years and now books too? Books I pay for? Pay through the nose for because I have noticed that despite all the savings with ebooks (basically, pay writer/editor, and that is it) the price hasn't dropped a bit.
Oh and all the bad news about print media? A lie actually. Dutch newspapers were literally printing money before 2K and right now they are just photocopying it. The recession? Good for more newspapers. Yeah yeah, some are in trouble but check their books, most likely because they spend fortunes on idiotic ventures. It is kinda like MS claiming it is going bankrupt because they are loosing money on the x-box project. It is true, they are, but they are raking it in with Windows and Office and that is what counts.
Book publishers that are loosing money do so because they got insanely ineffecient work practices and print tons of books that nobody wants to read. Rather then cry about lost revenue on books that don't sell more then 2 copies (and that is both parents are still alive), be a bit more commercial. Ebooks should have happened a long time ago, why was Amazon first? Because not a single publisher could be bothered.
Advertising in bought books? Good, give me more reasons to pirate.
Please, PLEASE use sarcasm tags. Or in the case you are serious, please castrate yourself so your defective genes will never spread.
You just don't get a crappy connections do you?
EVEN if error correction works as you describe (and it doesn't, you are thinking network error corrections) then a crappy cable would REMAIN crappy ALL the time and therefor the corrections would also fail and you would never get any data ever.
In networking, you can indeed request resending of lost data but this DOES NOT WORK if your connection is down. This simply reroutes around crappy connections by waiting until it is gone (this doesn't happen when the cable at the end point is bad) or by re-routing around it. Problems with your MODEM in the past when you noticed it go slow at times happend because of the ANALOGUE part of the connection, not the digital path.
Error correction in for instance CD's and memory (ECC) works by having more bits which tell the hardware what the bits should be arranged. One of the most basic is for an extra bit that indicated that the majority of other bits must be like. If that isn't correct, then there is something wrong. More complex ones can actually correct the mistakes. This isn't a resending of data, the data itself contains the error correction. The idea a HDMI requests for a resending of data is so insane, so stupid, so misguided that I think you heard something somewhere once and apply it to everything without understanding it.
The idea that bad digital cables can introduce digital errors is valid enough, but it would cause such massive errors that the signal would be completly unusable. A digital cable either works or doesn't work. When it works, it works perfectly. There is no such thing as a better digital signal. SATA cables are designed to spec, they transmit far more then just the data you requested, the command instructions are also send over it. If there was interference your HD would throw a hissy fit from having to do insane commands, most of which wouldn't even make any sense or even be commands at all. Digital audio/video itself has an oddity that a bit flip might still be valid audio/video. But if I start bit flipping in HD commands I endup talking gibberish.
Really mate, LEARN something about computers. What next, a bad light bulb in a morse code flasher might cause problems in the morse code? No. Either the light goes on and off as it should or it does not go on and off at all and then there is no morse code.
Stop trying to reason that you didn't get scammed with your monster cables.
Digital signals just don't work that way.
What next? MP3's stored on a cheap drive sound worse then ones on a proper SCSI drive? Personally I prefer the old time sound of MP3's stored on a floppy. It just sounds richer.
Digital is simple, it either works or it doesn't. There is no grey area with digital. Your MP3 player doesn't go "mmm, well this could be a 1 or a 0. oh well, I make it 0.5 and nobody will be the wiser."
But go right ahead, draw an arrow on your cable so the bits know how to flow (on a two way connection), just be prepared to be seen as a fool by everyone else. Crappy cables don't get sold. If they were crap they would be returned by anyone because even normal people can tell the difference between a cable that doesn't work and one that does.
Because having zombie bears around REALLY helps things along. Oh wait, ALL the animals are NOT affected? You see, this article starts of bad RIGHT here, it assumes the zombie apocalypse starts with ONE. It rarely does in the fantasy stories I know off. It is usually either the dead rising or living humans being converted by some event. The zombies don't come as one, they come as many. And the dogs? Either they are zombies too OR afraid of this predator that is NOT afraid of them and dares to take them on. And no, rotting human beings are NOT easy food for all predators, cats tend to stay away from rotten diseased meat. It is generally assumed that the consumption of zombie meat is not a healthy thing to do, even turning you into a zombie yourself. So now we got zombie bears, zombie maggots and zombie vultures. Does this increase our odds of survival?
6# They can't take the heat
Dead meat doesn't walk around (unless you leave it out REALLY long). Zombies do. So it stands to reason that whatever a zombie might be, it isn't actually dead meat anymore. SOMETHING is going on that turns them into the UNDEAD, not the actual dead. If zombies were REALLY fully dead then they would be even worse because they would be even harder to stop. How do you kill a steak? Skeletons are harder enemies in D&D precisly for this reason. Assuming that zombies will start to rot is trying to make the zombie apocalypse fit in our understanding of the natural world. But zombies don't exist in our understanding of the natural world. So either you have zombies and they can somehow escape the normal rules, or they simply don't exist. Either there is a hord of them, or not a single one. And the hord does NOT simply explode in the sun. That would make a lousy movie.
5# They can't handle the cold
Same deal. Either zombies work, or they don't. Zombies are NOT the dead, they are the UNDEAD. Big difference. Dead people don't move around a lot. Zombies do. So they can't be the same thing. The article is basically saying that "trucks drive on petrol, and if they run out they can't move. Ergo robots, which are not trucks stop when you empty their gas tank" Who says robots have gas tanks? And anyway, neither can we. Remember the breakdown of civilization thing? Bye bye central heating.
The bit about freezer burned meat is just plain silly. The dead don't WALK. If they start walking then SOMETHING has changed! Really, this is like saying "Ooh look gravity has reversed, but not to worry, we won't float of into space because gravity has always kept us down." The article is argueing against the logic of a SINGLE zombie being able to exist. NOT against the zombie apocalypse itself. The zombie apocalypse takes it for granted that zombies CAN exist, it doesn't matter how. Either no zombie can exist, or any can and not suffer from the usual defects of being dead.
#5 Biting is a terrible way to spread a disease.
Tell that to the mosquito. And who got vampires mixed up in all this? Zombies are the undead rising OR some other event causing the living to turn into zombies (note TURN into ZOMBIES, not kill. Zombies ain't dead, they are zombies (at best they are undead)). I keep hammering on this because the article just doesn't seem to be able to get a hang of the idea. The biting part, is just a means to add extra horror to the story. The idea that just escaping the original event is not enough and that those with who you have survived might be turned at any moment. It is NOT a way for the disease to spread, it is a plot element to cause further horror.
Zombiesm is NOT a social disease for crying out loud. Learn to seperate the apocalypse from the sniffles for crying out loud. There is a REASON the movie only joins the few survivors AFTER society has collapsed and that is because the zombie apocalypse will come with a bang, world wide, all at once. Not by some diseased foreigner going around biting people. And even if it did. That is
Slashdot Mirror
We want a truce, if you do absolutely everything we want and obey us without thinking, then we won't be trying to make you do absolutely everything we want and make you obey without thinking. Ain't we nice.
The music industry suffers from the broken window fallacy. Roughly, the kid who broke a window benefited society since money flowed because the window had to be replaced. The fallacy is that the money would have flowed anyway, but NOT in the replacement of something but in investment or the improving of ones life.
If the music industry goes bankrupt, the economy doesn't suffer because it will simply have meant a shift of money.
The record shop has become the mobile phone shop. I don't have a newspaper subscription, I have an Internet subscription. My money flows into the economy. The smart parts of the economy have moved on, the rest is trying to legislate against the car, the electric light, chance itself. Good luck. They might put a man with a red flag on the internet for a few years, but progress moves on. I will simply pirate over a prepaid 3G connection. I will NOT buy CD's. Time has moved on. Move with it or die.
Right sir, I get right on it. I will make the packages BOTH cutting edge AND give them proven stabilty. While I am at it, how about I make you nice curry sir, both spicy yet bland. A nice coffee, both stimulating and caffeine free.
How many fast-food workers get aids? How many people wanting to run for office have to hide their past flipping burgers? How many fast-food workers are killed by customers? How many fast-food workers are dependent on the turnout of the day for their salary? How many fastfood workers do not get sickdays etc etc (in civilized countries).
You sir are a worthless human being with no redeeming quality. Comparing prostitution with a normal job no matter how much you might look down on is the hallmark of a very narrow mind. The kind who says it is okay his iPod was made with slave labor because else these people would have just starved.
Disgusting.
What with hell freezing over and all. Could freeze the balls of even the Duke!
You seem to have swallowled the idea that simply playing some video should require a multi-core 100+ watt machine whole. Amazing. Truly amazing.
To others, sane people, the idea that a atom struggles with a low res video is a damning condemnation of coding standards. What is it with flash that makes people accept you need a multi-core rig consuming more power then a washing machine to do some 2d animation we did years ago on early pentiums?
Do you buy a car and accept that it does 1 mile to the gallon getting out of the drive way? Oh... wait SUV. Guess people do.
Play video through flash and play the exact same same through mplayer. See the cpu difference. THAT is why Adobe sucks donkey balls and all flash developers should be shot.
The entire point is that with extremely primitive means, they turned a volcanic (read liveless) island into a lush paradise. It proves that the creation of an eco system is something that CAN be managed without waiting for nature to do it very very slowly.
It shows we CAN reverse de-forestation and it shows that man CAN have a large impact.
Of course you need to be able to get your head past "but it is not 100% the same so it must be fail" that capability is what seperates the leaders from the sheep. Guess which group you belong too? Baaah!
Johny Walker Green Label is people!
Get it, green, soylent green. Oh I kill myself... what do you mean "yes please".
Since this is not a gay resort, its lack of female customers would put a serious crimp into your plan.
And in some ways, I think the customers don't want a real woman. Contrary to what some think, women are available. Just not on the terms these guys want. Real women got real brains, their own opinions, their own desires.
And AI with a mood can be easily satisfied because that is how it has been programmed. The puzzle is solvable and not all that hard to figure out because else the puzzle (love sim) wouldn't sell.
It is part of why MMO's work so well. We all like to accomplish someday, level up. In real life that is hard and very unpredictable. But log into WoW and you can see exactly how many minutes of grinding you have left to next promotion.
Same with love games, they got little hearts that fill up if you do it right (or so I am told). there are walkthroughs, cheats but most of all, the computer program can be shut off.
Real women not so easily. Well not without the police starting to ask questions and as for restarting them... you just can never get a thunderstorm to pass over when you need one.
And frankly, all this is nothing new. When you read older books or watch older tv-shows it is fairly common to have a character who lives with his/her sister for ever. The unmarried bachelor. The spinster. Tons of people never get married. A large percentage of males never reproduces. It just doesn't fit with the image modern media serves us, but society on the whole has done quit well with a lot of people not taking part in reproduction.
In a way, modern media makes it even harder. Everyone is brought up with this vision of true love and rampant passion between beautifull people who live in spacious houses and never have to work a boring jobs all hours of the day just to make ends meet.
People see one reality on tv, see their own reality and choose the fake one. Sad but the human race will survive.
It is a sad fact that the ONLY rehabilitation that works on criminals is a bullet through the brain. Not a single other system has any noticable effect. The industry beats its chest when it achieves a 1% different on a recidivism rate of 70%+
Imagine if you went to a doctor and 70% of the time the treatment did absolutely nothing but cost a lot of money. How long before you sue? But that is exactly what is going on with both prisons and rehab. It don't make a difference if you lock them up in the worsed pound them in the ass jail or coddle them till even a ragdoll cat gets fed up. Criminals re-offend.
It gets even funnier if you realize that recidivism figures measure ONLY those cons who have been CONVICTED of commiting another crime, and then ONLY if someone happens to notice the connection.
Example, 15yr old rapes. This is NOT marked permanent on his record. If he rapes again at 20, NOBODY links the two. IF of course he is even caught AND convicted the second time. So the bleeding heart who listened to his sob story at 15 beats himself on the chest on how he saved this kid. WRONG!
There fundementally isn't a simple solution. Some criminals belong in the most secure lockup you can image, some people just can't be saved. Others should have been caught and put back on track LONG before BUT that requires lots of money and yes, invasion of privacy. Me looking in YOUR house to see if you kid might be at risk. Don't like it? The alternative is only catching those kids when it is far to late.
There is a solution, but it involves a lot of money and having lots of answers to all the various problems. Prevention, removal of incentive, intervention with gateway crimes (this includes speeding you speed freaks), harsh punishment for those who refuse to change, providing openings for those willing to change.
But that don't fit on a signpost. No slogan can be made out of it. So it won't happen.
So I look at a product, BUY it, then am constantly targeted with ads urging me to buy it.
WTF?
And so does Sony AND Nintendo. I am of course talking about game consoles. Closed platforms where the owner of the platform (not you dear consumer sheep) decides what gets to run on it.
Apple has made the decision to follow the console model rather then the PC model. That is their choice. Your choice as a consumer is whether you choose to buy it or not. Your choice is NOT to force Apple to go another way other then through voting with your dollars.
Why has Apple made this decision? One of the many stupid mistakes MS has made in its lifetime is to allow Emails to contains executable code. For the email reader, the application to run external code. Abobe is regularly blamed for doing the same with PDF's. Lots of people here claim that data should not contain code. So when Apple decides that it does not want the option on ITS platform for 3rd party apps to run totally unknown 4th party code, of course they are COMPLETLY wrong in doing so...
Apple has made a reputation for itself by having a better, more solid, hassle free user experience. But how has it gotten this? Partially by its users being UNABLE to install the crap they do under windows. IF the mac platform got the same kind of malware and cripple ware attention as the PC, it would be just as bad an experience, with DRM overwriting sectors on the HD it has no business overwriting.
Is Apple right in believing that a controlled environment makes for a better user experience? Who knows, what I do know is that they sell millions of iPhones. People are voting with their dollars. Apparently they like SOMETHING about the iPhone more then they don't like.
Don't buy/develop for a closed platform and then complain it is closed. That is like breaking into a prison and then complaining they won't let you go.
There have been THOUSANDS of terrorists attacks since 9/11, try Iraq and Afghanistan. What about Madrid and London? Those don't count? Because they don't strike were YOU claim they should strike? Here is a hint: THAT is how terrorism works. Strike ANYWHERE with the implied threat that it could happen ANYWHERE.
There have also been attempts on US targets, FOUR at least. (Shoe-bomber, nigerian via dutch airline, car on times-sqaure, fort hood shooting) 1 out of 4 succeeded. Stupid attemps? No, just unlucky ones. 9/11 got lucky, very lucky. 3 planes hit their target, one didn't. That is NOT exactly a high success rate but it was high enough. But can you bank on that? Never had a fire in my adult life != do not need the fire department.
People are smarter? Doubt it if you are the example. Not exactly blessed with logical thinking skills are you? You go on how about 9/11 could only happen because the terrorists did something DIFFERENT and then completly assume a next attempt will be foiled because we know what to do now... so the terrorist are not capable of changing the rules YET again? Who says the NEXT 9/11 will be the same? Madrid, London and the fort hood shooting were not. Why touch the airport at all? I can think up of thousands of different attacks especially if the attacker doesn't value his own life. No doubt so can the terrorists.
They are rare? Yes... getting rarer all the time with the thousands of suicide attacks. Odd that they don't seem to be running out at all. Could it be that with a population in the billions, any fraction of a percentage still gets you tons of people? And yet all these billions of people who are not terrorists did NOT stop 9/11 or London or Madrid or Fort Hood or the countless attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan or the attack in Mumbai and god knows how many more.
There is a very real risk that in the fear of terrorists we do exactly what the terrorists want, which is to life in terror.
But sticking our head in the sand like you do is NOT the answer either. You are a silly person who has banked his entire idea that there is another group of a dozen muslim men waiting with box-cutters to fly aircraft into buildings and that you, you who cower already on a forum at the thought of a terrorists, will fight them off with the old lady next to you.
The people in the fourth plane tried that. Why don't you ask them for tips... oh wait, they ALL died didn't they? So much for your brilliant plan to foil the evil terrorists. Maybe we should leave it to someone smarter. Shouldn't be hard, by my estimate there about 6 billion smarter people on this planet then some guy who thinks terrorists have to strike in the same place twice in the same way.
But some sysadmin just ends up shooting that pile of crap Dells until you buy him Sun^H^H^HOracle instead.
The "smaller" the shark, the bigger the laser. Same as American males drive really big cars. It is called "compensating".
The problem both you and the original poster and most on this forum have is this: Some areas of the world have no traffic rules. India has a simple rule, do not cross rails at the station. People do and people die. Constantly, daily. Why? Culture mostly. It can be very hard to grasp this if you follow some rules instinctively.
Do you jump from the rail platform on to the rails to save you have to go through a tunnel less then a hundred meters away? No? Why not? Because it is the law or because some laws do actually make sense? Do you wear a helmet on a motorcycle because it is the law or because you think it actually makes sense? Do you not drive on the wrong side of the road because some cop might catch you or because you don't fancy plowing into another car at 200km/h?
Simply installing traffic lights is NOT going to convince people to obey them. Only when the culture has changed to see that the traffic lights are NOT there as restrictor but as an enabler (traffic flows more smoothly allowing everyone to pass the junction more smoothly) will the traffic light start to work.
Frankly having been to such places, I think the guys changes are hopeless. It just doesn't fit with how people think. In India, if you get killed in traffic, it is bad karma, NOT you stepping in front of a speeding train that did it. Life just doesn't have the same value. Not that you have to look far for such attitudes. The west prefers SUV which kill more people then 9/11 each year including kids and never consider smaller vehicles which don't cause such injuries. Bull bars? Say bye bye to any kid hit with it.
Traffic, where humanity takes a nose dive. get used to it or start patrolling the roads with a machine gun.
Getting people home safely is part of getting repeat business for your trip into space business. But nobody EVER claimed anywhere that an astronaut has to survive his trip for it to count as a journey into space.
Or are you saying that if I die on my trip to Australia (and may god have mercy on my soul) I have never visited Australia? Would make the entry into heaven a bit easier but somehow I think it will still be held against me.
I think I just have... you guys used to be a lot better at it. TWO girls? For ONE nerd? Who is ever going to believe that?
The ISP doesn't CARE. This is old news and the data has been used by the ISP to show data limits are useless AND they dropped them therefor.
So the ISP isn't complaining, it is advertising. Both making its competitors seem like cheapo's AND showing that you can download what you want with them as well as showing that overall, the average consumer doesn't even come close. Because the difference between 1 and 2 is already huge but number 10 barely counts.
Why else do you think some of the users agreed to have their username printed on the list?
Lets face it, if McD gets sued because people like their hamburgers so much they can't stop eating, everybody is a target. Just waiting for the first thief to claim the object he stole was simply to tempting.
On a more serious note, this is exactly what people who claim women cause rape by dressing to sexy are claiming AND have at times got away with.
Anything to get off facing the consequence of your own actions.
And I played Lineage II. It is not that good a game. And you got to wonder what the hell he was doing. These game have no real end-game worth speaking off and with 5 years of 11 hours play, my god he must have reached the end game hundreds of times and done what? What could POSSIBLY keep you playing a dumb grind game for SO long.
No, this guy is just a recluse, a lock-in. He could have been folding paper hats or read soccer scores. The game is not the problem, his own mind is. That is sad, but not NCSofts problem. Just as McD is not to blame if you never excersise and eat a hamburger each and every day.
3142 times she walked past her bedroom window, with the curtains just open enough to show her in her lace underwear.
Flirty looks at you as you passed by on your way to the 7-11 for ramen. 0% returned.
Yes, you are the reason she had to hook up with that jock. She is sueing YOU for emotional traume and unsatisfied sexual desire of her self and her close female friends because YOU spend all that time on slashdot instead.
Pay up!
When are we human? Abortion hinges on this, WHEN is the foetus a human being with a human brain. Is there some magic moment the brain switches on OR are we a bacteria that evolves rapidly into a complex life form?
Can it be that the brain "knows" the human body and how to operate it because it "grew up" with it? We imagine a robot being build typically on a long assembly line and only at the last moment the head is connected and the robot switches on. Could a brain instead function as a very small simple "cpu" that has more and more peripherals (but small ones) learns about it when they are still simple and then grows familiar with them as they and itself grow? Are WE created from a single egg, not the just he body but the WE, the spirit, the bit that makes us, makes any animal able to think? It would explain low level functions far more. A full grown heart is hard to control, but when you can get to grips with it when it is still just a few cells, that makes a lot more sense. Even fits what we know of brain cells being able to learn how to fly. Start simple, then add more complexity rather just plump some brain cells into a 747 and asking it to fly to Hong Kong and boink the stewardess.
But building something like this? Fat chance. We use rat brain cells for a reason. Even building an AI that could teach itself to fly is beyond us. We can build AI that can fly but NOT AI that can teach itself to fly. Not even in very simple environments. That says something.
I think the old "And the egg starts to divide" bit is a bit more complex then we think.
The froth at my mouth? Enough for 10.000 bud weisers... provided you can find enough american to supply the piss. I doubt it, considering amazon is taking it.
My god, and I stopped watching tv becomes of the constant advertising, haven't heard radio in years and now books too? Books I pay for? Pay through the nose for because I have noticed that despite all the savings with ebooks (basically, pay writer/editor, and that is it) the price hasn't dropped a bit.
Oh and all the bad news about print media? A lie actually. Dutch newspapers were literally printing money before 2K and right now they are just photocopying it. The recession? Good for more newspapers. Yeah yeah, some are in trouble but check their books, most likely because they spend fortunes on idiotic ventures. It is kinda like MS claiming it is going bankrupt because they are loosing money on the x-box project. It is true, they are, but they are raking it in with Windows and Office and that is what counts.
Book publishers that are loosing money do so because they got insanely ineffecient work practices and print tons of books that nobody wants to read. Rather then cry about lost revenue on books that don't sell more then 2 copies (and that is both parents are still alive), be a bit more commercial. Ebooks should have happened a long time ago, why was Amazon first? Because not a single publisher could be bothered.
Advertising in bought books? Good, give me more reasons to pirate.
Insanity, thy name is big business.
Mmm Zerth, how I love thee.
Oh wait... that is what you look like naked... nevermind.
Anyone attractive^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H human around I can stalk?
Please, PLEASE use sarcasm tags. Or in the case you are serious, please castrate yourself so your defective genes will never spread.
You just don't get a crappy connections do you?
EVEN if error correction works as you describe (and it doesn't, you are thinking network error corrections) then a crappy cable would REMAIN crappy ALL the time and therefor the corrections would also fail and you would never get any data ever.
In networking, you can indeed request resending of lost data but this DOES NOT WORK if your connection is down. This simply reroutes around crappy connections by waiting until it is gone (this doesn't happen when the cable at the end point is bad) or by re-routing around it. Problems with your MODEM in the past when you noticed it go slow at times happend because of the ANALOGUE part of the connection, not the digital path.
Error correction in for instance CD's and memory (ECC) works by having more bits which tell the hardware what the bits should be arranged. One of the most basic is for an extra bit that indicated that the majority of other bits must be like. If that isn't correct, then there is something wrong. More complex ones can actually correct the mistakes. This isn't a resending of data, the data itself contains the error correction. The idea a HDMI requests for a resending of data is so insane, so stupid, so misguided that I think you heard something somewhere once and apply it to everything without understanding it.
The idea that bad digital cables can introduce digital errors is valid enough, but it would cause such massive errors that the signal would be completly unusable. A digital cable either works or doesn't work. When it works, it works perfectly. There is no such thing as a better digital signal. SATA cables are designed to spec, they transmit far more then just the data you requested, the command instructions are also send over it. If there was interference your HD would throw a hissy fit from having to do insane commands, most of which wouldn't even make any sense or even be commands at all. Digital audio/video itself has an oddity that a bit flip might still be valid audio/video. But if I start bit flipping in HD commands I endup talking gibberish.
Really mate, LEARN something about computers. What next, a bad light bulb in a morse code flasher might cause problems in the morse code? No. Either the light goes on and off as it should or it does not go on and off at all and then there is no morse code.
Stop trying to reason that you didn't get scammed with your monster cables.
Digital signals just don't work that way.
What next? MP3's stored on a cheap drive sound worse then ones on a proper SCSI drive? Personally I prefer the old time sound of MP3's stored on a floppy. It just sounds richer.
Digital is simple, it either works or it doesn't. There is no grey area with digital. Your MP3 player doesn't go "mmm, well this could be a 1 or a 0. oh well, I make it 0.5 and nobody will be the wiser."
But go right ahead, draw an arrow on your cable so the bits know how to flow (on a two way connection), just be prepared to be seen as a fool by everyone else. Crappy cables don't get sold. If they were crap they would be returned by anyone because even normal people can tell the difference between a cable that doesn't work and one that does.
7# They have too many natural predators
Because having zombie bears around REALLY helps things along. Oh wait, ALL the animals are NOT affected? You see, this article starts of bad RIGHT here, it assumes the zombie apocalypse starts with ONE. It rarely does in the fantasy stories I know off. It is usually either the dead rising or living humans being converted by some event. The zombies don't come as one, they come as many. And the dogs? Either they are zombies too OR afraid of this predator that is NOT afraid of them and dares to take them on. And no, rotting human beings are NOT easy food for all predators, cats tend to stay away from rotten diseased meat. It is generally assumed that the consumption of zombie meat is not a healthy thing to do, even turning you into a zombie yourself. So now we got zombie bears, zombie maggots and zombie vultures. Does this increase our odds of survival?
6# They can't take the heat
Dead meat doesn't walk around (unless you leave it out REALLY long). Zombies do. So it stands to reason that whatever a zombie might be, it isn't actually dead meat anymore. SOMETHING is going on that turns them into the UNDEAD, not the actual dead. If zombies were REALLY fully dead then they would be even worse because they would be even harder to stop. How do you kill a steak? Skeletons are harder enemies in D&D precisly for this reason. Assuming that zombies will start to rot is trying to make the zombie apocalypse fit in our understanding of the natural world. But zombies don't exist in our understanding of the natural world. So either you have zombies and they can somehow escape the normal rules, or they simply don't exist. Either there is a hord of them, or not a single one. And the hord does NOT simply explode in the sun. That would make a lousy movie.
5# They can't handle the cold
Same deal. Either zombies work, or they don't. Zombies are NOT the dead, they are the UNDEAD. Big difference. Dead people don't move around a lot. Zombies do. So they can't be the same thing. The article is basically saying that "trucks drive on petrol, and if they run out they can't move. Ergo robots, which are not trucks stop when you empty their gas tank" Who says robots have gas tanks? And anyway, neither can we. Remember the breakdown of civilization thing? Bye bye central heating.
The bit about freezer burned meat is just plain silly. The dead don't WALK. If they start walking then SOMETHING has changed! Really, this is like saying "Ooh look gravity has reversed, but not to worry, we won't float of into space because gravity has always kept us down." The article is argueing against the logic of a SINGLE zombie being able to exist. NOT against the zombie apocalypse itself. The zombie apocalypse takes it for granted that zombies CAN exist, it doesn't matter how. Either no zombie can exist, or any can and not suffer from the usual defects of being dead.
#5 Biting is a terrible way to spread a disease.
Tell that to the mosquito. And who got vampires mixed up in all this? Zombies are the undead rising OR some other event causing the living to turn into zombies (note TURN into ZOMBIES, not kill. Zombies ain't dead, they are zombies (at best they are undead)). I keep hammering on this because the article just doesn't seem to be able to get a hang of the idea. The biting part, is just a means to add extra horror to the story. The idea that just escaping the original event is not enough and that those with who you have survived might be turned at any moment. It is NOT a way for the disease to spread, it is a plot element to cause further horror.
Zombiesm is NOT a social disease for crying out loud. Learn to seperate the apocalypse from the sniffles for crying out loud. There is a REASON the movie only joins the few survivors AFTER society has collapsed and that is because the zombie apocalypse will come with a bang, world wide, all at once. Not by some diseased foreigner going around biting people. And even if it did. That is