Grown men who play with children's toys are creepy. An occasional animated show is fine; making it the center of your life is weird.
The good thing about being a "grown man" is that you can make anything you want the center of your life without caring whether someone else thinks its weird, creepy or just plain nuts.
The hell do folks' personal gaming interest have to do with their professional life?
Because, as the song says, "high school never ends" and "all that matters is climbing up that social ladder".
Work is basically a LARP where you play a role to get the gold. You might not actually be a lvl 1 Office Drone, but you damn well better learn to pretend. And it makes sense, from viewpoint of efficiency: no one there knows you, at least not initially, but they know what to expect from an Office Drone.
Life is pretty surreal most of the time. Don't get upset about it, just enjoy the implicit comedy.
Go back to putting appropriately sized engines and gear ratios in cars and they will be able to accelerate quickly, get good fuel economy, and limit their top speed to about 1.25 times the maximum speed limit allowed. After all, why manufacture cars with a top speed of 150-200mph when the maximum legal speed limit is 70mph?
Trailers. If you the car is able to pull them, as many do, it needs extra engine power to do so. Also, there's a huge difference between traveling by yourself and having (the standard maximum of) 4 passengers and their stuff in the trunk. Finally, the harder the engine works the faster it wears off, and likely gets worse fuel economy, which means you need a power margin to keep it at its sweet spot.
It seems that if the state can revoke your license for dwi because you might hurt somebody while driving while intoxicated, the same rational would work for driving well above the posted speed limit.
Of course it can. And of course it's pretty much useless, especially for drunk drivers: they'll simply drive without it. You need to confiscate the car for the duration to have any effect.
Of course they can. Which leads us to the only real solution: don't go anywhere near the United States. Of course that still doesn't make you save from random drone strikes or kidnapping, but at least that requires targetting you or someone who happens to be in the general area.
What this says is that every rich person in this country is lying through their teeth about needing immigrants.
The Top doesn't want immigrants, they want visa workers. The difference is that an immigrant moves into a country, builds a life there and isn't affected by possible unemployment any more than anyone else, while a visa worker takes what his employer cares to give him and thanks him for it or gets evicted.
And yes, the Top does need visa workers, to drive down wages and working conditions. It's part of their War on the Middle Class, the same as most other things they do.
So if your stupid crotch fruit eats some drain cleaner it's the drain cleaner manufacturers fault fault, right? No moron. It's your fault.
If you use terms like "crotch fruit" that's usually a sign that you felt your argument can't stand on its own and needed emotional appeal for the "har har look how tough my callousness makes me" -crowd. The interesting question, then, is why make said argument in the first place? Vested interests? Psychological problems? Trolling?
Also, drain cleaner usually comes in bottles with safety caps, presumably because manufacturers of dangerous chemicals think they might be held responsible for not taking reasonable precautions.
Robin Hood was a thief. You are only a wannabe thief, too cowardly to steal for yourself, insisting that the government do it for you.
These two claims are in direct contradiction with each other. If taxation is thieft, then Robin was a hero who took stolen property from thiefs and returned it to the rightful owners. If it's not, then why call it that?
The really problem wouldn't be that you simply want to side with the Sheriff of Nottingham and his modern-day counterparts, now would it?
I've only taken one for a lousy Circle K job that I never got, so I don't know if I failed it or if they just didn't want to give me the job. It was very weird too, involving meeting some guy in a motel room to take the test.
Did the test require you to strip? Because this sounds very much like the kind of test that requires stripping and testing rods.
The problem is that LEOs are always looking for "magic bullets" that will make it as easy as "its that guy" but the simple fact is none exist or are likely to ever be found.
A theory that doesn't ultimately accept its inputs and provide its outputs in terms of human experience is not only untestable, but also incomprehensible (by definition - you have no idea what it's talking about). Science is, at the end of the day, just systematic use of common sense and senses. It's entirely based on human experience and can never escape it.
It is embarrassing that over two millennia after the birth of Western civilisation,we have degenerated to a point where we still believe that simple indicators can determine whether someone will steal, lie, or be just wonderful.
I wonder how much of that is actual faith and how much is simply being told you must determine whether a total stranger will steal, lie or be just wonderful. Impossible tasks incentivize ass-covering, and shifting the blame for wrong guesses is an effective method.
If this were happening in an open field where only the two sides of the fight were present, I can't see any difference between explosive and chemical attacks.
Scale. You need to shoot a lot of bullets or artillery shells to kill everyone in the field, but a cloud of poison does it fast and effective. Chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction, which means using them will likely result in the conflict escalating - perhaps even to the point of spilling into the neighbouring countries. Clouds of poison gas don't care about national borders, after all.
It's the "gun in a fistfight" principle - it means things are going to get ugly(er).
But it really is a key underlying principle for why we have rules of war at all. I personally find the concept kind of odd.
Not at all silly. Wars are costly affairs even for winners, so it's in everyone's interest to keep them from getting out of control. World War I is an excellent example of how a regional game of one-upmanship snowballed into an utter worldwide fustercluck. Every time someone went a step farther, someone else responded with two, or another combatant joined the fight.
The ultimate purpose of the rules of war is to keep US and GB's Excellent Iraq Adventure from escalating into World War Part Three: Armageddon. People will cross the line of starting a war in the first place, so you'll need more of them and hope some remain unbroken. Defence in depth and all that. And if they also keep some people unlucky enough to get caught in the mess from getting gruesomely killed or maimed, that's a nice bonus.
Mine is a 24 letter memorable phrase with a single number inside it as well. Nobody on Earth can decrypt that and it's written down nowhere.
But useful details about it are written down right here on Slashdot. How many combinations of words add up to 24 or 23 letters, with or without spaces? A lot less than add up to a random amount.
This is the biggest threat to security: people like to brag about how smart they are, and as they do they give up information. Joe Hacker can follow you and learn more and more about your uber-secure password to speed up his brute-forcing, and any near-future botnet data mining Internet forums can do the same.
Maybe it's time to repurpose those old WWII propaganda posters about how security starts with STFU?
The problem is finding people with skill sets and costs aligned to what the business needs.
Businesses want everything for free, just like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, they're sociopaths, so they are absolutely ruthless in pursuing that goal.
This isn't some sort of emotional worship of business.
Really? If I complain I can't get a mansion at the cost of a doghouse, what will your response be? Yet when a business says it can't get the employees it wants for what it's willing to pay, that warrants a serious discussion about how to lower wages.
That's how trade worked before we invented currency.
No, that's how slavery worked: "work at the price I'm willing to pay (nothing) or I'll make you".
Since the human nature is a violent one, I don't think violent behavior is abnormal, only not accepted in most circumstances by our social standards.
And assuming we haven't all been brainwashed by aliens to remember a false history or something, our society is a product of our nature, as are the social mores that make violence unacceptable, so just what do you mean when you say our nature is violent? How would you even observe human nature apart from nurture?
In any case, as long as most people don't engage in violence most of the time, violence is abnormal, even if these people are boiling volcanoes of poo-flinging murderous rage underneath their calm exterior. We are talking about a behavior observing, not thought reading, robot.
Except the US federal reserve has been the biggest buyer of US treasuries for the last 5 years.
So... is there a huge national debt or not? Because you can't have it both ways.
There is no market in US government debt. The government is selling it to itself.
So there is not, in fact, a huge national debt, just some "creative" accounting?
Answering the question: What happens when a Treasury bond auction doesn't sell out. Answer: It doesn't, The federal reserve has infinite cash.
So the US can't, in fact, go bankrupt, having literally unlimited credit? But of course all that money entering the economy is causing a huge inflation... nope, it's hovering steady at around 2%.
It would be simpler to just rise taxes 2%, but I guess this weird virtual debt scheme works too, having basically the same effect.
This is the step before the 'treasury bubble' pops.
How, exactly speaking, will it pop? Will it run out of its "infinite cash"? Will the inflation rate suddenly skyrocket (and why would it)?
I'm sorry, but what you're saying just isn't adding up. Please elaborate.
And you might be amazed at how much of that is the fault of management.
Between ridiculous timelines, cutting budgets for QA, management who change their minds fairly often, and salespeople who promise the world -- there's often quite a disconnect between what people are saying and what's happening.
But that's always the case in every industry. There's no endavour whatsoever where someone didn't try to save money everywhere they could, usually causing far more costly problems in he process, but already having cashed in their bonus by the time that becomes apparent. Programmers get no extra consideration for working under the same pointy-haired handicap everyone else does.
From McDonald's to Wall Street, your biggest obstacle to doing good work is almost always whoever you report to.
OS localization has always been a VERY tough nut to crack, and no one does any adequate job.
And if you do it well, the reward is making it hard for your customers to Google for help.
The best solution would be to simply standardize on English. The chances are that the potential users of your program know it anyway, so why make things harder for them and you than they need to be? It's not like regional dialects can survive anyway in a world where the whole concept of a region is becoming meaningless, at least as far as communication is concerned.
The problem is rockets. They suck and will never get us anywhere useful in space.
The problem is not rockets, the problem is chemical fuel. It simply doesn't have energy density high enough to be economical. You need a lot of low-density fuel to lift your final payload the final ascend, which means you need even more fuel to rise that fuel, and then more fuel to rise the fuel that rises the fuel that rises the payload, and then there's the issue of tanks to hold all this fuel...
We need to invent something better. There is something out there that is undiscovered and impossible right now that will change all this. Some new source of energy, or method of storing energy.
Except that it won't help. It's either as low-density as chemistry, in which case it has all the same problems, or it's high-density, in which case it has all the problems of nuclear power. "Powerful" and "dangerous" are synonyms. The only way to get around that would be have the energy be aware of what it's doing and avoid harmful effects; in other words, be alive, smart and benevolent.
Not quite sure whether to laugh or cry at the amount of irony coming from this when referring to a country that is trillions in debt. Seems "for too long" has been redefined.
Yes. It's been redefined from the traditional "when the creditors think you're at a risk of defaulting and thus either charge outrageous interest or outright refuse to lend any more" to "when some random jackass thinks so".
The real irony is that it's the same people who preach the wisdom of the Invisible Hand of the Free Market who then cry foul when the Hand decides lending the US government trillions is a good investment. The Hand apparently thinks the country is financially stable enough it's willing to pay for the privilege of having it hold its money. But obviously the Anonymous Coward of Slashdot is a greater expert in economics.
Such a system will collapse because the top 1% needs the rest of the population to buy the products they make.
Why? It's not like they need money to pay their robots to make things for them. Each of them is like a leader of a nation-state of his own; these robotic economies might trade with each other, but they no longer need the masses to buy their things than, say, the US needs the Afghans customership.
What is most likely to happen under extreme automation and AI is that the robots will grow our food, cut our hair, mine the land, drive our cars and take care of us...and humanity can just sit back and relax forever.
That would happen in a society that doesn't worship greed, if such a thing has every existed. This one does, however, so those who can buy robots do so and reap the exponentially increasing benefits and the rest fall ever deeper into poverty. Just as is already happening.
But you buy food from a store, do you not? Guess how it gets there.
It's the beginning of the end. A society which expects everyone to work for a living can't survive all low-skilled jobs being automated. Everyone can't be an engineer or an artist, and even those positions will eventually be gone. The only questions are how violent the collapse will be, and what will rise from the ruins. Utopia or dystopia, those are the possible futures.
By the way, my free time is worth approximately ã100/minute,
You meant your answering machine's time, right? And with phone lines being digital nowadays, is there some reason you can't get, say, 1000 numbers all connecting to the same machine configured to pick up and slam immediately? Maybe something running on a Rasberry Pi...
Slashdot Mirror
The good thing about being a "grown man" is that you can make anything you want the center of your life without caring whether someone else thinks its weird, creepy or just plain nuts.
So gaze upon my cute puppy wallpaper and despair.
Because, as the song says, "high school never ends" and "all that matters is climbing up that social ladder".
Work is basically a LARP where you play a role to get the gold. You might not actually be a lvl 1 Office Drone, but you damn well better learn to pretend. And it makes sense, from viewpoint of efficiency: no one there knows you, at least not initially, but they know what to expect from an Office Drone.
Life is pretty surreal most of the time. Don't get upset about it, just enjoy the implicit comedy.
Trailers. If you the car is able to pull them, as many do, it needs extra engine power to do so. Also, there's a huge difference between traveling by yourself and having (the standard maximum of) 4 passengers and their stuff in the trunk. Finally, the harder the engine works the faster it wears off, and likely gets worse fuel economy, which means you need a power margin to keep it at its sweet spot.
Of course it can. And of course it's pretty much useless, especially for drunk drivers: they'll simply drive without it. You need to confiscate the car for the duration to have any effect.
Of course they can. Which leads us to the only real solution: don't go anywhere near the United States. Of course that still doesn't make you save from random drone strikes or kidnapping, but at least that requires targetting you or someone who happens to be in the general area.
The Top doesn't want immigrants, they want visa workers. The difference is that an immigrant moves into a country, builds a life there and isn't affected by possible unemployment any more than anyone else, while a visa worker takes what his employer cares to give him and thanks him for it or gets evicted.
And yes, the Top does need visa workers, to drive down wages and working conditions. It's part of their War on the Middle Class, the same as most other things they do.
If you use terms like "crotch fruit" that's usually a sign that you felt your argument can't stand on its own and needed emotional appeal for the "har har look how tough my callousness makes me" -crowd. The interesting question, then, is why make said argument in the first place? Vested interests? Psychological problems? Trolling?
Also, drain cleaner usually comes in bottles with safety caps, presumably because manufacturers of dangerous chemicals think they might be held responsible for not taking reasonable precautions.
These two claims are in direct contradiction with each other. If taxation is thieft, then Robin was a hero who took stolen property from thiefs and returned it to the rightful owners. If it's not, then why call it that?
The really problem wouldn't be that you simply want to side with the Sheriff of Nottingham and his modern-day counterparts, now would it?
Did the test require you to strip? Because this sounds very much like the kind of test that requires stripping and testing rods.
Unless the wizard really did it.
A theory that doesn't ultimately accept its inputs and provide its outputs in terms of human experience is not only untestable, but also incomprehensible (by definition - you have no idea what it's talking about). Science is, at the end of the day, just systematic use of common sense and senses. It's entirely based on human experience and can never escape it.
I wonder how much of that is actual faith and how much is simply being told you must determine whether a total stranger will steal, lie or be just wonderful. Impossible tasks incentivize ass-covering, and shifting the blame for wrong guesses is an effective method.
Scale. You need to shoot a lot of bullets or artillery shells to kill everyone in the field, but a cloud of poison does it fast and effective. Chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction, which means using them will likely result in the conflict escalating - perhaps even to the point of spilling into the neighbouring countries. Clouds of poison gas don't care about national borders, after all.
It's the "gun in a fistfight" principle - it means things are going to get ugly(er).
Not at all silly. Wars are costly affairs even for winners, so it's in everyone's interest to keep them from getting out of control. World War I is an excellent example of how a regional game of one-upmanship snowballed into an utter worldwide fustercluck. Every time someone went a step farther, someone else responded with two, or another combatant joined the fight.
The ultimate purpose of the rules of war is to keep US and GB's Excellent Iraq Adventure from escalating into World War Part Three: Armageddon. People will cross the line of starting a war in the first place, so you'll need more of them and hope some remain unbroken. Defence in depth and all that. And if they also keep some people unlucky enough to get caught in the mess from getting gruesomely killed or maimed, that's a nice bonus.
But useful details about it are written down right here on Slashdot. How many combinations of words add up to 24 or 23 letters, with or without spaces? A lot less than add up to a random amount.
This is the biggest threat to security: people like to brag about how smart they are, and as they do they give up information. Joe Hacker can follow you and learn more and more about your uber-secure password to speed up his brute-forcing, and any near-future botnet data mining Internet forums can do the same.
Maybe it's time to repurpose those old WWII propaganda posters about how security starts with STFU?
Businesses want everything for free, just like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, they're sociopaths, so they are absolutely ruthless in pursuing that goal.
Really? If I complain I can't get a mansion at the cost of a doghouse, what will your response be? Yet when a business says it can't get the employees it wants for what it's willing to pay, that warrants a serious discussion about how to lower wages.
No, that's how slavery worked: "work at the price I'm willing to pay (nothing) or I'll make you".
And assuming we haven't all been brainwashed by aliens to remember a false history or something, our society is a product of our nature, as are the social mores that make violence unacceptable, so just what do you mean when you say our nature is violent? How would you even observe human nature apart from nurture?
In any case, as long as most people don't engage in violence most of the time, violence is abnormal, even if these people are boiling volcanoes of poo-flinging murderous rage underneath their calm exterior. We are talking about a behavior observing, not thought reading, robot.
So... is there a huge national debt or not? Because you can't have it both ways.
So there is not, in fact, a huge national debt, just some "creative" accounting?
So the US can't, in fact, go bankrupt, having literally unlimited credit? But of course all that money entering the economy is causing a huge inflation... nope, it's hovering steady at around 2%.
It would be simpler to just rise taxes 2%, but I guess this weird virtual debt scheme works too, having basically the same effect.
How, exactly speaking, will it pop? Will it run out of its "infinite cash"? Will the inflation rate suddenly skyrocket (and why would it)?
I'm sorry, but what you're saying just isn't adding up. Please elaborate.
But that's always the case in every industry. There's no endavour whatsoever where someone didn't try to save money everywhere they could, usually causing far more costly problems in he process, but already having cashed in their bonus by the time that becomes apparent. Programmers get no extra consideration for working under the same pointy-haired handicap everyone else does.
From McDonald's to Wall Street, your biggest obstacle to doing good work is almost always whoever you report to.
And if you do it well, the reward is making it hard for your customers to Google for help.
The best solution would be to simply standardize on English. The chances are that the potential users of your program know it anyway, so why make things harder for them and you than they need to be? It's not like regional dialects can survive anyway in a world where the whole concept of a region is becoming meaningless, at least as far as communication is concerned.
The problem is not rockets, the problem is chemical fuel. It simply doesn't have energy density high enough to be economical. You need a lot of low-density fuel to lift your final payload the final ascend, which means you need even more fuel to rise that fuel, and then more fuel to rise the fuel that rises the fuel that rises the payload, and then there's the issue of tanks to hold all this fuel...
Except that it won't help. It's either as low-density as chemistry, in which case it has all the same problems, or it's high-density, in which case it has all the problems of nuclear power. "Powerful" and "dangerous" are synonyms. The only way to get around that would be have the energy be aware of what it's doing and avoid harmful effects; in other words, be alive, smart and benevolent.
Yes. It's been redefined from the traditional "when the creditors think you're at a risk of defaulting and thus either charge outrageous interest or outright refuse to lend any more" to "when some random jackass thinks so".
The real irony is that it's the same people who preach the wisdom of the Invisible Hand of the Free Market who then cry foul when the Hand decides lending the US government trillions is a good investment. The Hand apparently thinks the country is financially stable enough it's willing to pay for the privilege of having it hold its money. But obviously the Anonymous Coward of Slashdot is a greater expert in economics.
Why? It's not like they need money to pay their robots to make things for them. Each of them is like a leader of a nation-state of his own; these robotic economies might trade with each other, but they no longer need the masses to buy their things than, say, the US needs the Afghans customership.
That would happen in a society that doesn't worship greed, if such a thing has every existed. This one does, however, so those who can buy robots do so and reap the exponentially increasing benefits and the rest fall ever deeper into poverty. Just as is already happening.
But you buy food from a store, do you not? Guess how it gets there.
It's the beginning of the end. A society which expects everyone to work for a living can't survive all low-skilled jobs being automated. Everyone can't be an engineer or an artist, and even those positions will eventually be gone. The only questions are how violent the collapse will be, and what will rise from the ruins. Utopia or dystopia, those are the possible futures.
Interesting times we live in.
You meant your answering machine's time, right? And with phone lines being digital nowadays, is there some reason you can't get, say, 1000 numbers all connecting to the same machine configured to pick up and slam immediately? Maybe something running on a Rasberry Pi...
Badass or just a really bad shot, that is the question.