"In America, you can get someone locked up as insane. He doesn't need a trial. It is a serious problem."
That is flat out wrong. From the part of the law you quoted:
"a mental health professional can decide to issue a temporary detention order"
Notice the word TEMPORARY. If you read further in the link you posted it says:
"H. The duration of temporary detention shall be sufficient to allow for completion of the examination required [...] but shall not exceed 48 hours prior to a hearing."
Is it time for the admins of Slashdot to realize their moderation system doesn't really work all that well anymore? The fact that this completely incorect post is rated at 5 shows that it doesn't.
The article seems a little alarmist. For instance, this line:
"The 2008 outages hit local economies hard and a stronger quake could plausibly bring Mediterranean economies to their knees, by denying them access to crucial global markets for days or weeks.
A 2005 study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich calculated that a nationwide internet blackout would cost Switzerland 1% of its GDP per week."
But of course a cut in the Mediterranean will not be a "nationwide internet blackout" for Switzerland much at all. In fact, if India and the mid-east gets cut off from the rest of the Internet, the rest of the world won't care all that much.
"They had an agreement and it was broken"
What agreement? They got a rumor and went to Sony to ask if it was true. Sony could have just said "no comment", but they said "don't publish that or we will punish you", and then did so. WTF is that?
They never told them anything "off the record". They just told them not to publish a rumor they heard from someplace else or else they would punish them. Big difference.
"I would disagree with this point made in the paper "Among online dating members, "marital status" and "wants children" are the two most influential characteristics to match.""
I agree, that actively disagrees with other studies I have seen about dating.
In a study of speed dating, for the desirability of guys, the most important indicators are an attractive face, attractive body, height, age, and BMI, in that order, though no single predictor is higher than 26%. For the desirability of girls, BMI is a 50% predictor of being chosen. Ouch. The second highest is age at 29%, and nothing else seems to matter all that much.
Other studies based on personal ads have shown that education level is a huge factor in male desireability, as well as levels of success and income. That this study did not see that is not surprising given the fact that it is speed dating.
"Other than the very broad and unsurprising result that women are more
selective than men
are (Trivers, 1972), the centrally predictable fact from HurryDate
events is that women's
desirability is dominated by their relative thinness, a finding
consistent with data from personal ads (Lynn & Shurgot, 1984; Sitton &
Blanchard, 1995). Such findings support both theoretical emphasis on
men's attention to physical attractiveness and lay intuitions that men
care most deeply about women's body size and shape. Our findings also
indicate that, at least in the context of HurryDate events, women show
similar physically driven preferences (compare with Feingold, 1990).
While men at HurryDate events are strongly attracted to women who are
thin, young, attractive, and of a similar race, women strongly prefer
men who are physically attractive, tall, young, of medium build, and
of a similar race. Women's preferences are not strongly determined by
a single trait, but, collectively, their preferences are driven by
appearance."
Oh come on now. The PVR-500 is recently and barely supported by IVTV, and not well. I have never been able to get both my 500s working in the same computer, and only recently have I been able to a 500 and a 350 in the same computer, with a lot of tweaking. IVTV is a complete nightmare, and unless you get a PVR-350 and just that, it is going to be a source of pain and suffering. Not that I blame the creator of IVTV, it must be a horrendous task to support all this different hardware, but that doesn't change the fact it is a major weak link in the whole Myth setup.
MythTV has been my Linux trial by fire. I have used Unix for years as a user, and set up a Linux box 5 or 6 times over the last ten years. Each time it has ended in heartbreak. Every time Linux has imploded and become unusable, or I couldn't figure out how to do something that should be trivial and gave up.
I installed Knoppmyth this time around, and admit the initial installation was cake. But then I had to spend countless hours researching and configuring the myraid of little things; playing all my video file formats, get other capture cards working, combine my hard drive space, get the remote control working, setting up streaming audio, getting tv out, get Firefox working and in Myth, securing the web page...the list goes on. For a Linux newbie like me it was extremely tough and time consuming. For a non computer geek or someone with no Unix experience at all, I expect it is nearly impossible.
And with all that, a month later, I turned on the TV to discover Myth crashed and, long story short, took out my entire root partition with it in an apparently unrecoverable manner. Well, that has never happened to me in Windows, at least without an actual major hardware problem. And I thought Linux was more stable (and before anyone can say it, I hadn't changed anything in more than a week when it happened, it was not anything I did.) If I hadn't plowed so much money into this project already, this would have likely been another case of Linux failing me and me giving up. But alas, I'm back up again, if not fully. Now I have to figure out how to make a backup on DVD...add it to the list.
When it works, it works very well. It does crash occasionally. Fine. It's not often enough to be really annoying, and it's just the frontend, it still records in the backend so I don't miss shows just because of it. But it can do stuff Tivo can't. I don't have to fight Tivo to get shows off and onto DVD or another computer, or add more hard drive space. I can play mp3s and videos off the network and do streaming Inet radio. I can put a web browser on it, and plug in just about an Linux application right into the Myth menus. I can access it from the Internet and program it to record from my office. The featureset is excellent; the program guide and recording options put Tivo to shame. The picture quality is very good and only occasionally stutters, mostly just after you change the channel.
This experience has taught me one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt, Linux is not ready for the general public, and I suspect never will be. I want to love Linux, I really do. Free as in freedom and all that, and Myth is good example of why that freedom is valuable. But until every developer on every project treats config files as evil, makes settings easily accessible, writes programs where no one ever goes to the command line, and has some kind of standards czar keeping things consistant between applications, the general public will never be converted, and of course that will never happen.
I have been involved with the Planetary Society before and they are a group of good people. If you put a note saying this is specifically what you want your money spent on, I'm sure they would honor it.
> Why do people so often think that quality and price goes hand and hand in the software market?
Because they often do. I have rarely seen an open source program that is as easy to use as the pay equivalant. If you don't pay programmers, they have a tendency to do what is fun (making the program work) then to do what is a pain in the butt (like make the UI good). Open source has many advantages, like being free (in both senses), but it also has disadvantages.
Well, this is great and all, but their archive is way too incomplete to really make statments like this is the first post mentioned this or that. Just looking at my own posts from even 10 years ago I can see huge gaps of stuff they just don't have. Hell, just pick an early thread and look at all the posts that have another post quoted, but the original post is not there.
Just stick it in the microwave for a few seconds, and TADA, no more working RFID chip. If someone asks just say "RFID? What's that? I have no idea why your little machine doesn't work, guess you are going to have to enter the info by hand. Oh well."
I mean, seriously, they ask for the make and model of every single piece of equipment in my machine, and they require an answer. What make and model is your DSL modem, what make and model is your monitor, what make and model is your fucking cd-rom drive...what the hell, it is a standard fucking IDE cd-rom drive, what the fuck do you care what make and model it is! Screw this shit, I was going to try it out but I got better things to do then answer a billion pointless questions.
This is not meant to be a troll, but I am bitterly disappointed in this game. I admit I am not that far in, but so far I see nothing revolutionary about it. It seems just a rehash of the same old types of industrial mazes and randomly placed monsters that I have seen countless times before.
And the game does two very annoying things; they like to surprise you with monsters appearing out of nowhere, which has always bugged me, and they like to just turn out all the lights so you can't see anything and just start throwing monsters at you. How is firing blindly in the dark while some monster that can somehow see perfectly is whittling down your health with a machine-gun fun? Yes it is scary, but not in a good way.
Please someone tell me it gets better, because right now I am unsure if I am ever going to bother to play any more and instead go load up one of the more interesting recent FPS games like Farcry or Call Of Duty.
I have been using the 0.9rc since the day it came out. It's ok, maybe a bit better than 0.8, but hardly this amazing new day for Internet browsing. They squashed some bugs, but some long term bugs and annoyances still remain, and unfortunately it appears they have added one or two. Pesonally, it does not seem any more or less stable, but about the same. Regardless of all that, like 0.8 before it, it is still a hell of a lot better than IE.
I set up an encrypted proxy for my father who is working in U.A.E., so he could get around their national firewall. After he used it once, they found it and banned my IP in less than a day. The belief that no censorship can work on the Internet is a common one here, but basically a wrong one.
I would think the existing laws are plenty good enough, if they would just be enforced. The most recent spyware I got, from the truly evil people at coolwebsearch, came through a security flaw in IE, bypassing all my screwed down security settings, installed itself without asking me in any way, purposefully evaded the programs like spybot and adaware and hijackthis, and changed setting on my computer without my permission. This already breaks all kind of laws against hacking and viruses and who knows what else. Why not try and apply these laws first, then if they don't work for whatever reason, then create new ones.
Of course new laws, like the old ones, will have little effect anyway since this crap mostly comes from overseas.
As an aside, Spybot and Adaware don't catch everything, like the one I had. Another good tool for a windows sys-admin's arsenal is Hijackthis (http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/), kind of a better and much more complete msconfig. It requires some more understanding to use correctly, but it will catch stuff nothing else will.
I would mod you down if I had the points, not because you disagree, but because you are a dick about it. If the information is wrong, you should be pointing the finger at BBC news, which the headline here is entirely consistant with. Yes, the Arstechnica article has a good point that the article is perhaps wrong, but that is hardly the fault of the slashdot editor. I nice "well, arstechnica has evidence that casts doubt on the validity of this article" would have served the purpose just as well, and you would not looked like an ass doing it. And posting a link would have been nice too like Link would have been nice too.
The Thief series have been a couple of my favorite games of all time, but everytime I hear Thief III mentioned, it is in connection with some unfortunate news. It got juggled around for a long time, then a ton of the developers left a while back, and now this. I am afraid; I would hate to see this highly original and extremly enjoyable series die a miserable death, but it is looking increasingly likely at this point.
Hats off to Viacom for this brazen and underhanded move. Not only did they post Dish's number and completely flood Dish's phone network with irate customers, they also hurt Dish by scaring off people who saw the scroll and will avoid Dish network so they don't miss channels.
But I think it will come back to haunt them. They set the tone, and I hope they will remember who was trying to screw who first when those stations go off air to be replaced by a black title card with a Viacom's phone number urging customers to call them and demand their stations back. Dish has the propaganda power then, and the two days of irate people calling Dish will easily be countered by weeks of irate people calling Viacom.
Well, I do not think that to be true in my case, considering I have 3ghz processor. And it is slow in everything for me; from changing the channel to going from one screen to the next to skipping video. And all of this is without even getting to the recording functions. The program that came with ATI is a lot better on all counts. And considering how bad ATI's software really is compared to a real PVR, that is a very pathetic statement.
I have no doubt some people get it working, but it is far from a commercial grade program from everything I have seen and read. Maybe in another couple of versions, but not now.
By some amazing coincedence, I tried it today before this story came up in an attempt to find a better alternative than the software that comes with ATI All-in-wonder cards. I deleted it soon after, it is slow and buggy and just doesn't work right. It is even worse than the piece of junk that comes with my ATI card, which I didn't think was possible. Reading the forums on their site makes it clear that unless you have a clean system you have no chance of really getting it working, and even then your odds are low and you are looking at a lot of work.
It is a damn shame, but this is not the Tivo you are looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
"In America, you can get someone locked up as insane. He doesn't need a trial. It is a serious problem."
That is flat out wrong. From the part of the law you quoted:
"a mental health professional can decide to issue a temporary detention order"
Notice the word TEMPORARY. If you read further in the link you posted it says:
"H. The duration of temporary detention shall be sufficient to allow for completion of the examination required [...] but shall not exceed 48 hours prior to a hearing."
How is that a serious problem?
Is it time for the admins of Slashdot to realize their moderation system doesn't really work all that well anymore? The fact that this completely incorect post is rated at 5 shows that it doesn't.
The article seems a little alarmist. For instance, this line: "The 2008 outages hit local economies hard and a stronger quake could plausibly bring Mediterranean economies to their knees, by denying them access to crucial global markets for days or weeks. A 2005 study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich calculated that a nationwide internet blackout would cost Switzerland 1% of its GDP per week." But of course a cut in the Mediterranean will not be a "nationwide internet blackout" for Switzerland much at all. In fact, if India and the mid-east gets cut off from the rest of the Internet, the rest of the world won't care all that much.
"They had an agreement and it was broken" What agreement? They got a rumor and went to Sony to ask if it was true. Sony could have just said "no comment", but they said "don't publish that or we will punish you", and then did so. WTF is that?
They never told them anything "off the record". They just told them not to publish a rumor they heard from someplace else or else they would punish them. Big difference.
I agree, that actively disagrees with other studies I have seen about dating.
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/PLEEP/pdfs/2005%20Kurzb an%20&%20Weeden%20EHB.pdf
In a study of speed dating, for the desirability of guys, the most important indicators are an attractive face, attractive body, height, age, and BMI, in that order, though no single predictor is higher than 26%. For the desirability of girls, BMI is a 50% predictor of being chosen. Ouch. The second highest is age at 29%, and nothing else seems to matter all that much.
Other studies based on personal ads have shown that education level is a huge factor in male desireability, as well as levels of success and income. That this study did not see that is not surprising given the fact that it is speed dating.
"Other than the very broad and unsurprising result that women are more selective than men are (Trivers, 1972), the centrally predictable fact from HurryDate events is that women's desirability is dominated by their relative thinness, a finding consistent with data from personal ads (Lynn & Shurgot, 1984; Sitton & Blanchard, 1995). Such findings support both theoretical emphasis on men's attention to physical attractiveness and lay intuitions that men care most deeply about women's body size and shape. Our findings also indicate that, at least in the context of HurryDate events, women show similar physically driven preferences (compare with Feingold, 1990). While men at HurryDate events are strongly attracted to women who are thin, young, attractive, and of a similar race, women strongly prefer men who are physically attractive, tall, young, of medium build, and of a similar race. Women's preferences are not strongly determined by a single trait, but, collectively, their preferences are driven by appearance."
Thank you. I get sick of people saying Gauntlet was the first of its kind and groundbreaking and all that. Dandy was a lot more fun too.
Oh come on now. The PVR-500 is recently and barely supported by IVTV, and not well. I have never been able to get both my 500s working in the same computer, and only recently have I been able to a 500 and a 350 in the same computer, with a lot of tweaking. IVTV is a complete nightmare, and unless you get a PVR-350 and just that, it is going to be a source of pain and suffering. Not that I blame the creator of IVTV, it must be a horrendous task to support all this different hardware, but that doesn't change the fact it is a major weak link in the whole Myth setup.
I installed Knoppmyth this time around, and admit the initial installation was cake. But then I had to spend countless hours researching and configuring the myraid of little things; playing all my video file formats, get other capture cards working, combine my hard drive space, get the remote control working, setting up streaming audio, getting tv out, get Firefox working and in Myth, securing the web page...the list goes on. For a Linux newbie like me it was extremely tough and time consuming. For a non computer geek or someone with no Unix experience at all, I expect it is nearly impossible.
And with all that, a month later, I turned on the TV to discover Myth crashed and, long story short, took out my entire root partition with it in an apparently unrecoverable manner. Well, that has never happened to me in Windows, at least without an actual major hardware problem. And I thought Linux was more stable (and before anyone can say it, I hadn't changed anything in more than a week when it happened, it was not anything I did.) If I hadn't plowed so much money into this project already, this would have likely been another case of Linux failing me and me giving up. But alas, I'm back up again, if not fully. Now I have to figure out how to make a backup on DVD...add it to the list.
When it works, it works very well. It does crash occasionally. Fine. It's not often enough to be really annoying, and it's just the frontend, it still records in the backend so I don't miss shows just because of it. But it can do stuff Tivo can't. I don't have to fight Tivo to get shows off and onto DVD or another computer, or add more hard drive space. I can play mp3s and videos off the network and do streaming Inet radio. I can put a web browser on it, and plug in just about an Linux application right into the Myth menus. I can access it from the Internet and program it to record from my office. The featureset is excellent; the program guide and recording options put Tivo to shame. The picture quality is very good and only occasionally stutters, mostly just after you change the channel.
This experience has taught me one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt, Linux is not ready for the general public, and I suspect never will be. I want to love Linux, I really do. Free as in freedom and all that, and Myth is good example of why that freedom is valuable. But until every developer on every project treats config files as evil, makes settings easily accessible, writes programs where no one ever goes to the command line, and has some kind of standards czar keeping things consistant between applications, the general public will never be converted, and of course that will never happen.
I have been involved with the Planetary Society before and they are a group of good people. If you put a note saying this is specifically what you want your money spent on, I'm sure they would honor it.
> Why do people so often think that quality and price goes hand and hand in the software market? Because they often do. I have rarely seen an open source program that is as easy to use as the pay equivalant. If you don't pay programmers, they have a tendency to do what is fun (making the program work) then to do what is a pain in the butt (like make the UI good). Open source has many advantages, like being free (in both senses), but it also has disadvantages.
Well, this is great and all, but their archive is way too incomplete to really make statments like this is the first post mentioned this or that. Just looking at my own posts from even 10 years ago I can see huge gaps of stuff they just don't have. Hell, just pick an early thread and look at all the posts that have another post quoted, but the original post is not there.
Just stick it in the microwave for a few seconds, and TADA, no more working RFID chip. If someone asks just say "RFID? What's that? I have no idea why your little machine doesn't work, guess you are going to have to enter the info by hand. Oh well."
I mean, seriously, they ask for the make and model of every single piece of equipment in my machine, and they require an answer. What make and model is your DSL modem, what make and model is your monitor, what make and model is your fucking cd-rom drive...what the hell, it is a standard fucking IDE cd-rom drive, what the fuck do you care what make and model it is! Screw this shit, I was going to try it out but I got better things to do then answer a billion pointless questions.
How much does the goverment of China pay you to come on sites like this and be a shill for them? Is it money or just things?
And the game does two very annoying things; they like to surprise you with monsters appearing out of nowhere, which has always bugged me, and they like to just turn out all the lights so you can't see anything and just start throwing monsters at you. How is firing blindly in the dark while some monster that can somehow see perfectly is whittling down your health with a machine-gun fun? Yes it is scary, but not in a good way.
Please someone tell me it gets better, because right now I am unsure if I am ever going to bother to play any more and instead go load up one of the more interesting recent FPS games like Farcry or Call Of Duty.
Yeah, the "Drake equation" breaks one big wild-ass guess into a bunch of interconnected wild-ass guesses. And that is so much better.
I have been using the 0.9rc since the day it came out. It's ok, maybe a bit better than 0.8, but hardly this amazing new day for Internet browsing. They squashed some bugs, but some long term bugs and annoyances still remain, and unfortunately it appears they have added one or two. Pesonally, it does not seem any more or less stable, but about the same. Regardless of all that, like 0.8 before it, it is still a hell of a lot better than IE.
I set up an encrypted proxy for my father who is working in U.A.E., so he could get around their national firewall. After he used it once, they found it and banned my IP in less than a day. The belief that no censorship can work on the Internet is a common one here, but basically a wrong one.
Of course new laws, like the old ones, will have little effect anyway since this crap mostly comes from overseas.
As an aside, Spybot and Adaware don't catch everything, like the one I had. Another good tool for a windows sys-admin's arsenal is Hijackthis (http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/), kind of a better and much more complete msconfig. It requires some more understanding to use correctly, but it will catch stuff nothing else will.
I would mod you down if I had the points, not because you disagree, but because you are a dick about it. If the information is wrong, you should be pointing the finger at BBC news, which the headline here is entirely consistant with. Yes, the Arstechnica article has a good point that the article is perhaps wrong, but that is hardly the fault of the slashdot editor. I nice "well, arstechnica has evidence that casts doubt on the validity of this article" would have served the purpose just as well, and you would not looked like an ass doing it. And posting a link would have been nice too like Link would have been nice too.
The Thief series have been a couple of my favorite games of all time, but everytime I hear Thief III mentioned, it is in connection with some unfortunate news. It got juggled around for a long time, then a ton of the developers left a while back, and now this. I am afraid; I would hate to see this highly original and extremly enjoyable series die a miserable death, but it is looking increasingly likely at this point.
Hats off to Viacom for this brazen and underhanded move. Not only did they post Dish's number and completely flood Dish's phone network with irate customers, they also hurt Dish by scaring off people who saw the scroll and will avoid Dish network so they don't miss channels. But I think it will come back to haunt them. They set the tone, and I hope they will remember who was trying to screw who first when those stations go off air to be replaced by a black title card with a Viacom's phone number urging customers to call them and demand their stations back. Dish has the propaganda power then, and the two days of irate people calling Dish will easily be countered by weeks of irate people calling Viacom.
I have no doubt some people get it working, but it is far from a commercial grade program from everything I have seen and read. Maybe in another couple of versions, but not now.
It is a damn shame, but this is not the Tivo you are looking for.