Many polls do exactly this. You would be surprised at how many polls actually are well and objectively composed---more often than not, when you don't see questions published with the results, it's because of space or time constraints---not an effort to conceal skewed questions.
Commissioned polls, OTOH, can get amazingly sloppy. When the Handgun Control, Inc. wants to prove there's support for the assault weapons ban, they won't hesitate to ask "How do you feel about strangers being allowed to bring loaded assault weapons into your neighborhood?"
Pro-gunners can ask "If you came home and found your wife being raped on the floor, would you wish you had a gun so you could stop it from happening?" Then they'll publish all those "hell, yeah!" answers as proof that we're all pro-gun. My answer ("I'd wish I had a taser to stun him and then use pliers and a blowtorch to work him over for a few days in the privacy of my own basement") gets marked down as "undecided."
Okay, this has been discussed elsewhere in this topic; I'm just feeling particularly graphic this morning.
Unless you know how to erase a person's brain, there will always be a hole.
ITYM that after I erase a person's brain, there will always be a hole. There's a fantastic brain-erasing device, an implant made mostly of lead, about 9mm in diameter, installed at high velocity while the erasure candidate begs you please Ghod no. Costs about $0.35 per round^H^H^H^H^H implant, plus court costs.
Re-installing the OS after the wipe is something of a challenge---better to replace the entire unit, after showing it what happened to the previous unit.
[Y]ou'd see a sharp rise in religious fanaticism, proclamations about Chosen Ones, armed malcontents preying on less-organized survivors, and paranoid conspiracy theorists blaming events on others and seeking revenge.
Hell, we get that every time oil prices fluctuate...
If that's how we end our time on Earth, then emmigration to space is a good way of protecting the species. But:
A disaster or climate change that destroys 99% of the population still leaves 70,000,000 people. Even with a disaster that wipes out Damned Near Everything, like an asteroid, the human species will survive: If you can dig a hole big enough for a thousand peole, a library and a hydroponics farm, humanity can survive anything short of the elimination of oxygen from the atmosphere---and we could probably survive that, too if we spring for the good duct tape.
But there's something space colonization might not protect us from: a highly contagious, high-mortality disease with a long incubation period. It's entirely possible that just about everybody is now carrying a disease that incubates for fifteen years, then goes Ebola on your ass. If one person on a colonization ship is carrying the disease, everybody on the ship dies.
Even in the case of a catastrophic disease, humanity will almost certainly survive on Earth. There is simply too large a gene pool for our species for all of us to be vulnerable.
The only things I can think of that would destroy humanity are:
God throws a big enough rock at us that we can't deflect it in time.
God turns the Sun up from simmer to broil.
The universe ends.
The last two are inevitable. Still, by the time the Sun thing happens we may be advanced enough to move the whole damned planet, like Pierson's Puppeteers. Nevertheless, I view these both as problems whose solutions we have plenty of time to consider, although I freely admit that the latter is somewhat tricker than the former.
"You mean, once the toilet's stopped up and overflowing, I shouldn't flush it anymore? And now you're telling me I need to wait for you before I crap in it again? When I want to crap, I'll crap! Now clean this mess up! What do you mean, you're going to charge me for it? You charged me last week! Now it's broken again---It's obvious you didn't fix it correctly last time!
"A pipe wrench? What do you need a pipe wrench for? Don't swing that at me! You're the problem here, not me!"
Taking a year off to travel is a little different than taking a year off to work or "find yourself". It's a bracketed experience with a return ticket.
That said, many if not most U.S. liberal arts colleges have "Junior Year Abroad" programs. A number of my friends spent a year at a foreign university, learning the language and culture through total immersion. Well, not quite total---there were other people from their schools there along with them, which can be a damned good thing when you're having a crappy day and you're thousands of miles from home flunking classes taught in a language you almost---but not quie--understand.
If you don't want to do a whole year in one place, do what my wife did her junior year: basically a world ecology tour that gave her between three weeks and two months in locations like England, Hungary, India, Thailand, New Zealand, and Belize.
Since these trips count as school, you can cover a lot of the expenses under tuition assistance.
But don't just take a "year off". I took one in 1989 and am just now finishing my undergraduate degree. A year off has a way of turning into a year and one term off, then two years off, then that dumpy McJob you've been holding in the meantime offers you a raise, and you start dating somebody seriously, and it all gets harder and harder to leave behind when you have more and more of your life invested in the "real world".
That's not the point. Gold contacts have two advantages:
they don't corrode
they are more resistant to arcing
The comparatively high resistivity of (usually 18k) gold is mitigated by the fact that your signal is passing through a layer of gold maybe two microns thick---and a surface area much larger than a cross-section of the wire. Remember, this is the contacts we're talking about, not the whole wire.
there are societies in England that are having an awfully good time fighting the cigarette. They can't do anything else, so they fight cigarettes. And they say that the cigarette causes lung cancer. And they've -- you've been hearing something of this, I'm sure. Yeah.
Not smoking enough will cause lung cancer. Not smoking enough will cause lung cancer!
I believe the idea is that radiation causes cancer, hidden in the lung's cells, but that cigarette smoke causes it to "run out." You want it to run out, but if it doesn't run out far enough, see, it starts to spread like crazy. Therefore if you don't smoke enough, you get cancer and die.
Scientology offers something called a "purification rundown," evidently involving saunas and high doses of niacin, coupled with Scientologically-proven happy thoughts, to help you run all the toxins out. The reader is invited by Scientology to research the efficacy of this method on their own.
Re:Nothing to fall back on, either
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 2
For what it's worth, Mr. Gates bought most of those products fair and square. Buying out one's competition is not stealing---not from the sellers, anyway. Nor is expanding into a new market by buying into an existing player.
Nothing to fall back on, either
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Here we see what happens to companies with nasty and unsustainable business models:
Instead of building a good product, they tried to steal an existing one. Instead of getting ahead in the market with innovation, they sued their competitors and many potential allies. Instead of building a loyal client base, they sued their own customers.
They sued their own customers! And they sued their ex-customers. Who would do business with a company like that? Their customers are fleeing in droves. Their vendors and resellers are dropping them for what they are. Nobody trusts them. And since nobody has to do business with them, nobody will.
And at the risk of saying what's already been said: Good riddance.
As opposed to the current 23.5 hours/day? I thought you used that half hour for Slashdot.
Question: What's the difference between 24 hours of Slashdot and 24 hours of porn?
Answer: One's a bunch of online wanking, the other is a bunch of nekkid pictures.
The copyright on information belongs to the writer, not the subject of the piece
I created my address by purchasing a house and moving into it. I created my credit history by obtaining credit, using it, and paying it off (or not). I created my salary history by getting a job and drawing a salary. I created my education history, GPA, major, minor, and concentration by getting an education. I created this message. I created my marital status. I created my child, though they are creating original art of his own in the form of barf stains and poopy diapers. I created my driving record in the car I purchased (thereby creating a transaction). I created a trip to Alaska last year. I created the purchase of several souvenirs while there. I created a speeding ticket near Healey, though I will concede that the public has the right to know what sorts of idiots they are sharing the road with and place that in thee public domain.
I created every single item in that database through my own actions. Any score, categorization, or classification created from that data is a derivative work. Who the hell are they to act like they have more of a right to it than I do?
RFID tags make sense in this, but setting up mandatory checkpoints for night watchmen is hardly new. I can remember walking through the small town where my mother grew up and seeing these little metal boxes bolted to the walls of various buildings. I looked in one or two and found an odd looking key on a chain. It turns out that the key fit a night watchman's clock. The watchman wore this special clock on his belt. It was actually several clocks---timers, actually---one for each stop on his route. The clock had one keyhole for each key on his route. As he passed the checkpoint, he would use that key to wind up the clock some more. If he skipped a checkpoint, that timer stopped and could not be restarted and the watchman would have some serious explaining to do at the end of his shift.
Perhaps the next time someone searches for "Louis Vuitton" on Google, a single page should pop up reading as follows:
Due to ongoing litigation against Google by the Louis Vuitton corporation, we are unable to provide any results for this query.
Of course, the search "alternatives to Lois Vuitton" should work just fine.
Google doesn't have to provide services that benefit or even mention any specific entity. I think a freeze-out is a perfectly suitable response to this sort of bullying.
I ever so seriously doubt that. If the MS engine tries to knock Google off its mountain, it will go the way of the XFL.
Microsoft has had an Internet search engine for some time now, and IE has used it as its default and only search engine that whole time, yet Google is the world's #1 search engine.
Sometimes the Right Thing wins: Compare the success of.NET with the success of Java. Compare the success of IIS with the success of Apache.
Google didn't get to be a verb by sucking, and a search engine being subsidized by a monopoly will not cause Google to suck or go away or lose any meaningful part of its market share.
I suspect I could buy the exhaust system from a 2005 without buying the entire car and slap it on a 2004
Not if Toyota introduced egegious incompatibilities between the 2004 and 2005 exhaust system. Not if Toyota has successfully filed for overly broad patents and DMCA protection to prevent "pirates" from creating compatible equivalents using "hacking tools" like arc welders and pipe benders. Not if Toyota could get armed federal marshalls to kick in your door and leave you handcuffed face down on the floor while they seize your cars, garage, and tools for electronically publishing a photograph of a 2004 Toyota's exhaust system.
[Whatever happened] to just producing a decent product and letting the market decide if it wants it or not? Why does every corporation have to be a blood thirsty, morally defunct, money grabing ass?
What happened is that Quicken captured a monopolistic share of the market. At this point, Intuit can treat its customers like abolute shit, because it won't occur to them to look for alternatives.
This is probably Intuit's way of making the transition to subcription-based software.
They would've had access to his card (and typically, kids don't have much cash either).
My card came as a set of one card and three key fobs. Whoever drives to the store automatically has a card. The wife could have bought it. The kid could have bought it. The wife's best friend could have bought it while she and the friend were shopping together and the wife scanned her card so the friend could get 10% off.
The man's wife allegedly first spotted the fire, which makes me doubt it'd be her.
The idea that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime isn't just a useful plot device---it happens a lot, particularly with set fires. Also, many, many arsonists are in it for the public ruckus a fire causes---an amazing number of arsons are reported by the arsonist, who stays at the scene to enjoy all the attention his "project" has started. Many fire chiefs carry video cameras with them: if they respond to suspicious fire, they videotape the crowd to see who has shown up for more than one fire.
Hanging a presumably already troubled kid out to dry in the media wouldn't be very constructive.
An elected official passing up the opportunity to get in front of the cameras? A reporter passing up the chance to say "A startling twist in the case of a firefighter who has been accused...of arson" on the 11 o'clock news?
As an aside, the motivations for arson make a fascinating study. My uncle's restaurant in Columbia, SC, was burned down a few years ago by a recently fired employee and I got mildly interested in the subject. Motives include:
revenge
crime concealment
attention-getting
pyromania
insurance fraud, competitive attack or other profit motive,
vandalism, malicious or otherwise,
terror, extremism, or other intimidation.
Look up the etymology of the word "fired" some time for another, rather pragmatic, use of arson.
If you're close enough to somebody to sniff their RFID car keys, you're close enough use coercive methods to take their keys away.
RFID is not going to be a deterrent to professionals: It will only delay them a few months while somebody figures out how to defeat the technology. This is not going to be a deterrent to amateurs: They will continue to threaten owners and take their keys away. How do you think the whole "carjacking" phenomenon came into existence? Because unattended cars were getting too hard to steal.
Slashdot Mirror
Commissioned polls, OTOH, can get amazingly sloppy. When the Handgun Control, Inc. wants to prove there's support for the assault weapons ban, they won't hesitate to ask "How do you feel about strangers being allowed to bring loaded assault weapons into your neighborhood?"
Pro-gunners can ask "If you came home and found your wife being raped on the floor, would you wish you had a gun so you could stop it from happening?" Then they'll publish all those "hell, yeah!" answers as proof that we're all pro-gun. My answer ("I'd wish I had a taser to stun him and then use pliers and a blowtorch to work him over for a few days in the privacy of my own basement") gets marked down as "undecided."
Okay, this has been discussed elsewhere in this topic; I'm just feeling particularly graphic this morning.
ITYM that after I erase a person's brain, there will always be a hole. There's a fantastic brain-erasing device, an implant made mostly of lead, about 9mm in diameter, installed at high velocity while the erasure candidate begs you please Ghod no. Costs about $0.35 per round^H^H^H^H^H implant, plus court costs.
Re-installing the OS after the wipe is something of a challenge---better to replace the entire unit, after showing it what happened to the previous unit.
Hell, we get that every time oil prices fluctuate...
If that's how we end our time on Earth, then emmigration to space is a good way of protecting the species. But:
A disaster or climate change that destroys 99% of the population still leaves 70,000,000 people. Even with a disaster that wipes out Damned Near Everything, like an asteroid, the human species will survive: If you can dig a hole big enough for a thousand peole, a library and a hydroponics farm, humanity can survive anything short of the elimination of oxygen from the atmosphere---and we could probably survive that, too if we spring for the good duct tape.
But there's something space colonization might not protect us from: a highly contagious, high-mortality disease with a long incubation period. It's entirely possible that just about everybody is now carrying a disease that incubates for fifteen years, then goes Ebola on your ass. If one person on a colonization ship is carrying the disease, everybody on the ship dies.
Even in the case of a catastrophic disease, humanity will almost certainly survive on Earth. There is simply too large a gene pool for our species for all of us to be vulnerable.
The only things I can think of that would destroy humanity are:
- God throws a big enough rock at us that we can't deflect it in time.
- God turns the Sun up from simmer to broil.
- The universe ends.
The last two are inevitable. Still, by the time the Sun thing happens we may be advanced enough to move the whole damned planet, like Pierson's Puppeteers. Nevertheless, I view these both as problems whose solutions we have plenty of time to consider, although I freely admit that the latter is somewhat tricker than the former."A pipe wrench? What do you need a pipe wrench for? Don't swing that at me! You're the problem here, not me!"
Wham! Wham wham crunch crunch crunch wheck wheck spuk spuk spuk spuk
SSNs are a terrible identifier:
Congress later authorized its use for lots of other identification things (like tax ID).
Congress later authorized its use for one other identification thing (tax ID).
What needs to happen is places like banks, universities, etc need to stop treating it like it's secret.
Until SSNs cannot be used in violation of rule 6 and in spite of rule 5, they must treat it as a secret as important as the combination to your safe.
That said, many if not most U.S. liberal arts colleges have "Junior Year Abroad" programs. A number of my friends spent a year at a foreign university, learning the language and culture through total immersion. Well, not quite total---there were other people from their schools there along with them, which can be a damned good thing when you're having a crappy day and you're thousands of miles from home flunking classes taught in a language you almost---but not quie--understand.
If you don't want to do a whole year in one place, do what my wife did her junior year: basically a world ecology tour that gave her between three weeks and two months in locations like England, Hungary, India, Thailand, New Zealand, and Belize.
Since these trips count as school, you can cover a lot of the expenses under tuition assistance.
But don't just take a "year off". I took one in 1989 and am just now finishing my undergraduate degree. A year off has a way of turning into a year and one term off, then two years off, then that dumpy McJob you've been holding in the meantime offers you a raise, and you start dating somebody seriously, and it all gets harder and harder to leave behind when you have more and more of your life invested in the "real world".
That's not the point. Gold contacts have two advantages:
The comparatively high resistivity of (usually 18k) gold is mitigated by the fact that your signal is passing through a layer of gold maybe two microns thick---and a surface area much larger than a cross-section of the wire. Remember, this is the contacts we're talking about, not the whole wire.
And yet, Scienos are the chain-smokingest sumbitches you've ever met in your life.
In 1961, El Ron said:
I believe the idea is that radiation causes cancer, hidden in the lung's cells, but that cigarette smoke causes it to "run out." You want it to run out, but if it doesn't run out far enough, see, it starts to spread like crazy. Therefore if you don't smoke enough, you get cancer and die.
Scientology offers something called a "purification rundown," evidently involving saunas and high doses of niacin, coupled with Scientologically-proven happy thoughts, to help you run all the toxins out. The reader is invited by Scientology to research the efficacy of this method on their own.
Make everything sound really nice while the ship goes down?
For what it's worth, Mr. Gates bought most of those products fair and square. Buying out one's competition is not stealing---not from the sellers, anyway. Nor is expanding into a new market by buying into an existing player.
Instead of building a good product, they tried to steal an existing one. Instead of getting ahead in the market with innovation, they sued their competitors and many potential allies. Instead of building a loyal client base, they sued their own customers.
They sued their own customers! And they sued their ex-customers. Who would do business with a company like that? Their customers are fleeing in droves. Their vendors and resellers are dropping them for what they are. Nobody trusts them. And since nobody has to do business with them, nobody will.
And at the risk of saying what's already been said: Good riddance.
As opposed to the current 23.5 hours/day? I thought you used that half hour for Slashdot.
Question: What's the difference between 24 hours of Slashdot and 24 hours of porn?
Answer: One's a bunch of online wanking, the other is a bunch of nekkid pictures.
I created my address by purchasing a house and moving into it. I created my credit history by obtaining credit, using it, and paying it off (or not). I created my salary history by getting a job and drawing a salary. I created my education history, GPA, major, minor, and concentration by getting an education. I created this message. I created my marital status. I created my child, though they are creating original art of his own in the form of barf stains and poopy diapers. I created my driving record in the car I purchased (thereby creating a transaction). I created a trip to Alaska last year. I created the purchase of several souvenirs while there. I created a speeding ticket near Healey, though I will concede that the public has the right to know what sorts of idiots they are sharing the road with and place that in thee public domain.
I created every single item in that database through my own actions. Any score, categorization, or classification created from that data is a derivative work. Who the hell are they to act like they have more of a right to it than I do?
RFID tags make sense in this, but setting up mandatory checkpoints for night watchmen is hardly new. I can remember walking through the small town where my mother grew up and seeing these little metal boxes bolted to the walls of various buildings. I looked in one or two and found an odd looking key on a chain. It turns out that the key fit a night watchman's clock. The watchman wore this special clock on his belt. It was actually several clocks---timers, actually---one for each stop on his route. The clock had one keyhole for each key on his route. As he passed the checkpoint, he would use that key to wind up the clock some more. If he skipped a checkpoint, that timer stopped and could not be restarted and the watchman would have some serious explaining to do at the end of his shift.
Of course, the search "alternatives to Lois Vuitton" should work just fine.
Google doesn't have to provide services that benefit or even mention any specific entity. I think a freeze-out is a perfectly suitable response to this sort of bullying.
You know what would be hilarious? If Microsoft's search engine failed miserably and they sued Google for being a monopoly...
Microsoft has had an Internet search engine for some time now, and IE has used it as its default and only search engine that whole time, yet Google is the world's #1 search engine.
Sometimes the Right Thing wins: Compare the success of .NET with the success of Java. Compare the success of IIS with the success of Apache.
Google didn't get to be a verb by sucking, and a search engine being subsidized by a monopoly will not cause Google to suck or go away or lose any meaningful part of its market share.
You're new here, aren't you?
What's going on here is just mental masturbation.
And that's not what Slashdot is for, right?
Move along.
Wait a second...these are the droids we're looking for! Step out of the speeder, please, and keep your hands where I can see 'em.
</sarcasm>
Not if Toyota introduced egegious incompatibilities between the 2004 and 2005 exhaust system. Not if Toyota has successfully filed for overly broad patents and DMCA protection to prevent "pirates" from creating compatible equivalents using "hacking tools" like arc welders and pipe benders. Not if Toyota could get armed federal marshalls to kick in your door and leave you handcuffed face down on the floor while they seize your cars, garage, and tools for electronically publishing a photograph of a 2004 Toyota's exhaust system.
What happened is that Quicken captured a monopolistic share of the market. At this point, Intuit can treat its customers like abolute shit, because it won't occur to them to look for alternatives.
This is probably Intuit's way of making the transition to subcription-based software.
They would've had access to his card (and typically, kids don't have much cash either).
My card came as a set of one card and three key fobs. Whoever drives to the store automatically has a card. The wife could have bought it. The kid could have bought it. The wife's best friend could have bought it while she and the friend were shopping together and the wife scanned her card so the friend could get 10% off.
The man's wife allegedly first spotted the fire, which makes me doubt it'd be her.
The idea that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime isn't just a useful plot device---it happens a lot, particularly with set fires. Also, many, many arsonists are in it for the public ruckus a fire causes---an amazing number of arsons are reported by the arsonist, who stays at the scene to enjoy all the attention his "project" has started. Many fire chiefs carry video cameras with them: if they respond to suspicious fire, they videotape the crowd to see who has shown up for more than one fire.
Hanging a presumably already troubled kid out to dry in the media wouldn't be very constructive.
An elected official passing up the opportunity to get in front of the cameras? A reporter passing up the chance to say "A startling twist in the case of a firefighter who has been accused...of arson" on the 11 o'clock news?
As an aside, the motivations for arson make a fascinating study. My uncle's restaurant in Columbia, SC, was burned down a few years ago by a recently fired employee and I got mildly interested in the subject. Motives include:
Look up the etymology of the word "fired" some time for another, rather pragmatic, use of arson.
If you're close enough to somebody to sniff their RFID car keys, you're close enough use coercive methods to take their keys away.
RFID is not going to be a deterrent to professionals: It will only delay them a few months while somebody figures out how to defeat the technology. This is not going to be a deterrent to amateurs: They will continue to threaten owners and take their keys away. How do you think the whole "carjacking" phenomenon came into existence? Because unattended cars were getting too hard to steal.