Sure, they've got to ride around in a car all day though, so it'd be a pain in the ass to carry a rifle. In other countries though, it's not uncommon to see cops walking around with submachine guns, and I doubt cops here would complain much if we required it.
For a civilian? Put a strap on your shotgun and carry it like a purse. Talk about yer man purse.
Anti-social behavior is considered a hallmark of "insanity" (a term which no self-respecting psychologist would ever use). You can be rational, and still be seriously mentally ill.
I don't think there is any question that he was rational. He acted very rationally all the way through, with tons of forethought and advance planning.
Does that make him sane? Fuck no! He was nuttier than a fricking squirrel convention. Just from what I've read about the guy it seems like he fits the DSM-IV definition of a Sociopath quite well. I don't know how the hell they committed him and missed that.
People are stupid. I had it out with a guy who spit on a muslim friend of mine on 9/11...The girl's father had been in the goddamn second tower (he got out) and some whitebread assmonkey was giving her crap for being a muslim when his most personal connection to the damn towers was they he'd seen pictures of 'em? Oh HELL no.
To blame an ethnic group for the actions of individuals in that group is absurd. Not that that's ever stopped people from doing it, but the actions of an individual are the responsibility of that individual, and no one else.
One of the most appealing arguments I ever heard for gun control was for pistols specifically.
I believe in the right to bear arms, but pistols make me nervous, and hell, they're not much use in most cases. Home invasion? 12 gauge semi-auto loaded with buckshot...Only get 5 shots, but the last three will only be making tiny pieces out of little pieces. Guerrilla war against a repressive government? Automatic rifles.
Pistols? I can't think of a single situation where I wouldn't rather have a bigger, more accurate gun. The only thing they're good for is carrying concealed, and I don't believe in carrying concealed. If you're armed, it should be right out there in the open, none of this sneaky ass concealed crap...What possible rationale is there for carrying concealed? The point is to deter crime, right? Isn't that always the argument? You're not deterring crap if it's concealed. Come up with a better deterrent than walking down the street with a shotgun over one shoulder...You'll have the whole damn sidewalk to yourself.
I've known a lot of pistol carriers in my life, and just about every damn one of 'em pissed me off. Every dumbass with kids who keeps a loaded pistol under the seat of his car, or in his damn desk...If I ever hear the phrase "the safety's on" (after they've pointed it at me) one more time, I'm killing the dumbass who says it.
You know whats sad? Introspecting here. I don't think guns should be controlled because I want to keep them away from criminals...It'd be nice, but it won't happen. What I want to do is keep 'em away from goddamn tubby suburbanites who think they need that gun. What a world.
On the part of their parents, perhaps? You don't get choices when you're that age, you get things handed to you. If you manage to be born without contracting HIV from an HIV positive mother, which is pretty likely if you can score a c-section, but still possible for a natural birth, you can still catch it from breast milk.
I still think coming out of the body of someone who is HIV positive qualifies as "hard to get this disease", and "drinking the breast milk of an infected individual" is pretty high up there as well.
And here, I was just thinking you were employed by them.
Cisco makes some decent equipment, but it is all exponentially more expensive than their competition, and surrounded by promises that I haven't seen play out in the real world at all like they do in the fluffy commercials.
Additionally, Cisco has a history of occasional boneheaded security lapses, like the backdoor with the hardcoded user name and password, or the lawsuits a few years back against the guy who demonstrated security flaws at the black hat conference.
For my money, I'll just buy some HP Procurves for 1/4 of the cost...I'll be able to buy more, so I can actually have high end managed L2 switching hardware throughout the infrastructure, rather than just at the top, and I'll still have money left over to buy all the anti-virus and network monitoring crap that you still have to have, even if you buy all cisco.
By this rationale, if I see a sick person walking down the street, I can walk up to him and inject him with a concoction of my own design that I firmly believe will make him better, but which probably hasn't been tested very well, and may kill him.
I'm not opposed to people taking vigilante action on botnets, but the reality is, vigilantes are also breaking the law, and I likewise don't have any qualms about seeing them face the consequences of their actions when their homebrew fix-it app runs amok.
Comparing AIDS and the common cold is ridiculous. You can get the cold from almost anything, but to get AIDS you have to either have sex with someone who has it, or inject their blood...As a virus goes, it's extremely difficult to catch.
While blaming the victim is rarely worthwhile, this is a disease that could basically be eradicated by education, testing, and self control. The reason it's spread so widely is that people aren't into any of those things.
Noam Chomsky later used it as an example in a linguistics thought experiment.
"Time flies like an arrow" is a simile, whereas "Fruit flies like a banana" is either a simile or a simple declarative sentence (depending on whether fruit is flying or infested by flies). The problem is teaching a computer to understand the difference.
Heh. Square isn't most stable, but it is more easily constructed, and more space efficient. In a place where stability is paramount, you'd see a lot more domes.
I understand what you're saying though. I've seen things like that myself, where teachers are so dogmatic and so set on their tiny subset of information that anything that's not on their holy fact list is completely incorrect.
"When asked the question, 'what is consciousness?' we become conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this consciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is not true."
--Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The book's basically one long, roundabout, assault on god, but it's well written.
Postulate fancy physics, and you're heading toward spiritualism. Now I don't dispute for an instant that we've probably got a lot of quantum crap going on in our bodies; that many reactions, with electrons transferring everywhere, it's a given.
But there is no magic thinking "you" hanging around out there in the quantum flux. Sub atomic particles rattling around aren't carrying with them the experience of the color blue (almost sounds like you're arguing phenomenal qualia there...Classic dualist argument), so while there may, in fact, be some part of your cognitive cycle that flirts with the quantum side of physics, it's really unlikely that that is the seat of consciousness.
There are examples everywhere of complex structures arising out of simple parts. There is no reason, aside from wishful thinking, to imagine that we are any different.
Sad but true. I even have a philosophy degree, and people talking about consciousness make me want to slap them. Meat needs stimulus/response; we react when stuff happens around us. Meat also needs fuel and replication, which requires a certain amount of introspection and planning...This is internal equivalent of stimulus/response. Our brains are chock full of stim/response, and the sum of them works out to be what we call "consciousness".
Nothing mystical about it. While I do believe that stuff on a quantum level affects us in many ways, putting consciousness in the realm of a pure quantum event serves no purpose but to try and salvage ideas like the immortal soul...The stuff going on in our heads isn't as sexy as most people think.
The difference is, someone who is secure is going to say, "I worked a good 8 hours today (not counting lunch), I'm going to go home and have a nice dinner, because people can look at what I did today and know I'm an excellent worker."
Whereas an insecure person will work 11 hours, and worry when they go home because they don't value themselves and therefore think that no one values them either, and don't understand that their work is better than other people's work, and worry worry worry about being fired all the time.
Frankly, if someone doesn't want to hire me because I project as self-confident, then screw them. If you actually look at that from an HR point of view, you're purely out to mindf*ck your employees, because the only thing you care about is that they produce until they have a breakdown.
I remember sneering when it was brought up with tones of awe and wonder; I think it was accepted pretty commonly earlier than the movie suggested at the very least.
This sort of stuff always makes me laugh...The idea that bigass dino's like the T-Rex were slow and ungainly hunters...When does nature ever produce slow ungainly hunters? The selection is always for high speed or decent speed and endurance.
Saw a special about the first filming of the giant squid a few months ago (though it was an old documentary), and they were talking about how the theory had been that the giant squid was a lazy predator that just hung out with it's arms dangling, snagging things that drifted through them, and that what the film suggested was that it was a fast, energetic predator...They're saying this with awe, like it had never occurred to them that this could be the case, while showing film of smaller squids doing their lightning fast attacks.
In retrospect it seems silly to have ever believed that dinosaurs could have been anything like as slow as was commonly thought, but it's a mistake that is not uncommon.
And then there were the rest of us. I am not a pacifist; I like a good war as much as the next guy. But if we're sending people to die, it damn well better be for a good reason. The case against Iraq was utter bullshit; it was a regurgitation of crap that we've known for fricking decades wrapped in a smoking 9/11 flag, and if you fell for it you should be ashamed for being so damn stupid.
Genocide among the Kurds? No, really? There were goddamn Doonesbury strips about it at the end of Gulf War I. Chemical Weapons? Duh. See Gulf War I, and the SCUD launchers that had everybody crapping their pants. Giving money to terrorists? That's like a sport in the Middle East...You don't see us invading Saudi Arabia do you?
If you didn't see through that case, to the fricking drooling they were doing at the thought of invading Iraq, you really need to work on your bullshit detector.
Seriously. How far do you think you'll get in the army if you walk around dumping on the president? The joker was blacklisting generals who disagreed with him before the damn war even started.
Keep dreaming. The amount of money they make on WoW will keep them making expansions for a loooong time...They'd be insane not to.
Still, Blizz has been known to run more than one in house development team. I wouldn't be surprised if they dedicated a second team to working on RTS and Diablo-esque titles.
Or Final Fantasy XII, if you count the occasional console game.
Single player isn't dead, but the days of mediocre single player are gone. You need a kicking story, excellent voice talent (or writing talent), and a good interface. Otherwise it's just not going to cut it in a competitive market.
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Sure, they've got to ride around in a car all day though, so it'd be a pain in the ass to carry a rifle. In other countries though, it's not uncommon to see cops walking around with submachine guns, and I doubt cops here would complain much if we required it.
For a civilian? Put a strap on your shotgun and carry it like a purse. Talk about yer man purse.
Their own gun? I punched a guy in the face with his own gun after he shot out a window in my office proving that the safety was "on".
Anti-social behavior is considered a hallmark of "insanity" (a term which no self-respecting psychologist would ever use). You can be rational, and still be seriously mentally ill.
I don't think there is any question that he was rational. He acted very rationally all the way through, with tons of forethought and advance planning.
Does that make him sane? Fuck no! He was nuttier than a fricking squirrel convention. Just from what I've read about the guy it seems like he fits the DSM-IV definition of a Sociopath quite well. I don't know how the hell they committed him and missed that.
People are stupid. I had it out with a guy who spit on a muslim friend of mine on 9/11...The girl's father had been in the goddamn second tower (he got out) and some whitebread assmonkey was giving her crap for being a muslim when his most personal connection to the damn towers was they he'd seen pictures of 'em? Oh HELL no.
To blame an ethnic group for the actions of individuals in that group is absurd. Not that that's ever stopped people from doing it, but the actions of an individual are the responsibility of that individual, and no one else.
One of the most appealing arguments I ever heard for gun control was for pistols specifically.
I believe in the right to bear arms, but pistols make me nervous, and hell, they're not much use in most cases. Home invasion? 12 gauge semi-auto loaded with buckshot...Only get 5 shots, but the last three will only be making tiny pieces out of little pieces. Guerrilla war against a repressive government? Automatic rifles.
Pistols? I can't think of a single situation where I wouldn't rather have a bigger, more accurate gun. The only thing they're good for is carrying concealed, and I don't believe in carrying concealed. If you're armed, it should be right out there in the open, none of this sneaky ass concealed crap...What possible rationale is there for carrying concealed? The point is to deter crime, right? Isn't that always the argument? You're not deterring crap if it's concealed. Come up with a better deterrent than walking down the street with a shotgun over one shoulder...You'll have the whole damn sidewalk to yourself.
I've known a lot of pistol carriers in my life, and just about every damn one of 'em pissed me off. Every dumbass with kids who keeps a loaded pistol under the seat of his car, or in his damn desk...If I ever hear the phrase "the safety's on" (after they've pointed it at me) one more time, I'm killing the dumbass who says it.
You know whats sad? Introspecting here. I don't think guns should be controlled because I want to keep them away from criminals...It'd be nice, but it won't happen. What I want to do is keep 'em away from goddamn tubby suburbanites who think they need that gun. What a world.
On the part of their parents, perhaps? You don't get choices when you're that age, you get things handed to you. If you manage to be born without contracting HIV from an HIV positive mother, which is pretty likely if you can score a c-section, but still possible for a natural birth, you can still catch it from breast milk.
I still think coming out of the body of someone who is HIV positive qualifies as "hard to get this disease", and "drinking the breast milk of an infected individual" is pretty high up there as well.
In full disclosure, I own Cisco stock.
And here, I was just thinking you were employed by them.
Cisco makes some decent equipment, but it is all exponentially more expensive than their competition, and surrounded by promises that I haven't seen play out in the real world at all like they do in the fluffy commercials.
Additionally, Cisco has a history of occasional boneheaded security lapses, like the backdoor with the hardcoded user name and password, or the lawsuits a few years back against the guy who demonstrated security flaws at the black hat conference.
For my money, I'll just buy some HP Procurves for 1/4 of the cost...I'll be able to buy more, so I can actually have high end managed L2 switching hardware throughout the infrastructure, rather than just at the top, and I'll still have money left over to buy all the anti-virus and network monitoring crap that you still have to have, even if you buy all cisco.
By this rationale, if I see a sick person walking down the street, I can walk up to him and inject him with a concoction of my own design that I firmly believe will make him better, but which probably hasn't been tested very well, and may kill him.
I'm not opposed to people taking vigilante action on botnets, but the reality is, vigilantes are also breaking the law, and I likewise don't have any qualms about seeing them face the consequences of their actions when their homebrew fix-it app runs amok.
Comparing AIDS and the common cold is ridiculous. You can get the cold from almost anything, but to get AIDS you have to either have sex with someone who has it, or inject their blood...As a virus goes, it's extremely difficult to catch.
While blaming the victim is rarely worthwhile, this is a disease that could basically be eradicated by education, testing, and self control. The reason it's spread so widely is that people aren't into any of those things.
That's exactly how it works with stocks (except in the case of stock dividends), and that's pretty much what they're talking about.
You can't assess a value on an item in a game without that item having been converted into actual currency...The markets fluxuate too rapidly.
Noam Chomsky later used it as an example in a linguistics thought experiment.
"Time flies like an arrow" is a simile, whereas "Fruit flies like a banana" is either a simile or a simple declarative sentence (depending on whether fruit is flying or infested by flies). The problem is teaching a computer to understand the difference.
Heh. Square isn't most stable, but it is more easily constructed, and more space efficient. In a place where stability is paramount, you'd see a lot more domes.
I understand what you're saying though. I've seen things like that myself, where teachers are so dogmatic and so set on their tiny subset of information that anything that's not on their holy fact list is completely incorrect.
That doesn't change their responsibility for their actions...Anyone could snap, but it's amazing how most people, when they do, harm only themselves.
It's funny how when I see someone pretentiously quote a poet, while misspelling his name, their views seem a little further away and less relevant.
Favorite quote about consciousness:
"When asked the question, 'what is consciousness?' we become conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this consciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is not true."
--Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The book's basically one long, roundabout, assault on god, but it's well written.
Postulate fancy physics, and you're heading toward spiritualism. Now I don't dispute for an instant that we've probably got a lot of quantum crap going on in our bodies; that many reactions, with electrons transferring everywhere, it's a given.
But there is no magic thinking "you" hanging around out there in the quantum flux. Sub atomic particles rattling around aren't carrying with them the experience of the color blue (almost sounds like you're arguing phenomenal qualia there...Classic dualist argument), so while there may, in fact, be some part of your cognitive cycle that flirts with the quantum side of physics, it's really unlikely that that is the seat of consciousness.
There are examples everywhere of complex structures arising out of simple parts. There is no reason, aside from wishful thinking, to imagine that we are any different.
Sad but true. I even have a philosophy degree, and people talking about consciousness make me want to slap them. Meat needs stimulus/response; we react when stuff happens around us. Meat also needs fuel and replication, which requires a certain amount of introspection and planning...This is internal equivalent of stimulus/response. Our brains are chock full of stim/response, and the sum of them works out to be what we call "consciousness".
Nothing mystical about it. While I do believe that stuff on a quantum level affects us in many ways, putting consciousness in the realm of a pure quantum event serves no purpose but to try and salvage ideas like the immortal soul...The stuff going on in our heads isn't as sexy as most people think.
The sad truth isn't that you have to follow orders: it's that the rest of us voted jackasses into office who give you crappy orders =/
The difference is, someone who is secure is going to say, "I worked a good 8 hours today (not counting lunch), I'm going to go home and have a nice dinner, because people can look at what I did today and know I'm an excellent worker."
Whereas an insecure person will work 11 hours, and worry when they go home because they don't value themselves and therefore think that no one values them either, and don't understand that their work is better than other people's work, and worry worry worry about being fired all the time.
Frankly, if someone doesn't want to hire me because I project as self-confident, then screw them. If you actually look at that from an HR point of view, you're purely out to mindf*ck your employees, because the only thing you care about is that they produce until they have a breakdown.
I remember sneering when it was brought up with tones of awe and wonder; I think it was accepted pretty commonly earlier than the movie suggested at the very least.
This sort of stuff always makes me laugh...The idea that bigass dino's like the T-Rex were slow and ungainly hunters...When does nature ever produce slow ungainly hunters? The selection is always for high speed or decent speed and endurance.
Saw a special about the first filming of the giant squid a few months ago (though it was an old documentary), and they were talking about how the theory had been that the giant squid was a lazy predator that just hung out with it's arms dangling, snagging things that drifted through them, and that what the film suggested was that it was a fast, energetic predator...They're saying this with awe, like it had never occurred to them that this could be the case, while showing film of smaller squids doing their lightning fast attacks.
In retrospect it seems silly to have ever believed that dinosaurs could have been anything like as slow as was commonly thought, but it's a mistake that is not uncommon.
Some people believed the lies.
And then there were the rest of us. I am not a pacifist; I like a good war as much as the next guy. But if we're sending people to die, it damn well better be for a good reason. The case against Iraq was utter bullshit; it was a regurgitation of crap that we've known for fricking decades wrapped in a smoking 9/11 flag, and if you fell for it you should be ashamed for being so damn stupid.
Genocide among the Kurds? No, really? There were goddamn Doonesbury strips about it at the end of Gulf War I. Chemical Weapons? Duh. See Gulf War I, and the SCUD launchers that had everybody crapping their pants. Giving money to terrorists? That's like a sport in the Middle East...You don't see us invading Saudi Arabia do you?
If you didn't see through that case, to the fricking drooling they were doing at the thought of invading Iraq, you really need to work on your bullshit detector.
I don't know, maybe it's because he's their boss.
Seriously. How far do you think you'll get in the army if you walk around dumping on the president? The joker was blacklisting generals who disagreed with him before the damn war even started.
Keep dreaming. The amount of money they make on WoW will keep them making expansions for a loooong time...They'd be insane not to.
Still, Blizz has been known to run more than one in house development team. I wouldn't be surprised if they dedicated a second team to working on RTS and Diablo-esque titles.
Or Final Fantasy XII, if you count the occasional console game.
Single player isn't dead, but the days of mediocre single player are gone. You need a kicking story, excellent voice talent (or writing talent), and a good interface. Otherwise it's just not going to cut it in a competitive market.
Meh. Such a pedestrian bug, and easily fixable. Fallout II had a lot of bugs worse than that.