I'm surprised you're even bothering to ask advice about this situation--it seems like a no-brainer to me.
Moving across the country to accept a new job involves significant risk. You are taking a leap into the unknown. You might decide that you really hate your new location, or that you can't find a place to live at a price you can afford. You might find that the job is not to your liking, that your boss is an abusive jerk, or any of a long list of other possible negatives. Plus there is the possibility of financial loss, and the certainty of high stress involved in making any geographical move. If you have a family, the risks and stress become much greater.
The only factor to counterbalance all these negatives is your faith in your new employer: you are trusting them to deliver on the promises they made to you with respect to your job duties and working conditions--and with helping to compensate you for the financial cost of moving, as was promised to you.
The key word here is trust. Sometimes, you just have to go with your gut instincts, and trust people. But trusting people whose actions show a lack of good faith is a dumb thing to do; it's like asking to be abused.
It may be that the headhunter knowingly made false promises to you so that he could get his commission. But the headhunter represents the employer, not you--he is their agent. Depending on exactly what happened, the employer may very well have a moral obligation to keep the headhunter's promise to you--but even that isn't the heart of the issue. The bottom line is this: if these people really wanted to hire you, then they would go out of their way to make you happy, to make you feel good about taking this job. They haven't done that, have they?
As for legalities, like "get it in writing, stupid", they're irrelevant in a situation like this. A deal is a deal, whether it's written on paper or spoken. If the other party breaks the deal before you've made any real investment in it, walk away. It really doesn't matter if the law is on your side or not. The law won't buy back wasted time, suffering or broken marriages. This is not a legal matter, it's a matter of common sense.
I hope you don't feel any moral obligation to take this job. You have been released from any such obligation by their show of bad faith. Write a letter to the employer's HR department telling them politely that you are refusing their job offer and why; be sure to cc it to the CEO and the headhunter.
I hope you haven't already given notice to your present employer. If you have, do anything you must to get them to let you stay. Chances are that you are a valuable employee, and they will be glad you're not leaving.
You're lucky! I got stuck with the Beta version, and the pre-natal EULA ("Do you want to be born? Please click 'Yes' or 'No') obligates me to play until my avatar dies. Due to one of the many bugs in this crappy game, I just take lots of damage, but never quite die. I have to grind experience at this thing called a "job" to make enough in-game money to feed my avatar and its "dependents". (Don't get me started on in-game "marriage".) The only things I can kill are rodents or the occasional deer, and all they ever drop are turds. I still haven't figured out for sure how to tell the NPCs from the PCs, and if you make a mistake you get put in prison and maybe killed! No joke! (Actually, this would be an option...except for the non-death bug.) They've got a pretty good raid going in the "Iraq" zone, where you get to kill anything you want--but the uber players get all the good loot. I'm sure glad they have these in-game forums to whine on.
How about "no two fingerprints are alike". I've always wondered about that one. How do you prove or disprove it? Does it mean no two fingerprints can be alike, or that it's extremely unlikely? How unlikely? What are the criteria for "alike"? How do we eliminate artifacts of the fingerprinting process? What about the normal wear and tear that abrades the skin, and changes everyone's fingerprints slightly over time?
Another one is the belief that the rifling pattern engraved on a fired bullet can be used to positively identify the gun from which it was fired. This assumption rests in turn on the assumption that no two gun barrels are exactly alike. How do we know?
These two examples are a bit more serious than the case of snowflakes, because they're used as evidence in criminal trials. I suppose there must be scientific, peer-reviewed studies out there somewhere about the uniqueness of fingerprints and rifle barrels. But I don't see how they could do any more than establish the probabilities of any two of these objects being sufficiently alike as to be practically indistinguishable. I'd sure like to know what these probabilities are...they're certainly never mentioned in a courtroom.
With this robot (conceptually), it reduces the sniper to only one shot - then since you know where they are you can take them out and keep going.
First of all, one shot is all the sniper needs--then he moves. As a matter of policy, it will probably be the guy holding the remote control who gets shot. (Kinda makes it hard to find people who want to fill this particular job.)
Second, in a match between "professional soldiers" equipped with the latest high tech against determined, intelligent human fighters who are willing to die for their cause, I'll bet on the ill-equipped amateurs every time.
In theory, you are quite right, since the president has not been in charge of interpreting the laws for a long time. In practice, however, very few acts of the "FedGov" are ever challenged in court - a large portion of your constitutional protections arise from what the government decides not to do, rather than from you retroactively getting a court order enforcing your rights. In particular, if the government decides to ignore a particular right, they can effectively nullify it.
All of the law is mere "theory"; it is an idea. Yes, a government can choose to ignore the laws under which it governs, and rule by decree and force. But such a government undermines the foundations of its own power, for its legitimacy is founded on law. Do not underestimate the power of ideas; do not regard the law lightly. The time is coming--and it may be soon--when the people of this nation will realize that their government has become nothing more than a tyranny. Were they wise, the politicians would think on this--and tremble.
Give a whole new meaning to "driver incompatibility". "Driver not found" would be really scary. The most scary one of all would probably be something like "Windows has detected a new device, "Brakes". If you have media for this device, insert it now. Or would you like Windows to search for a new driver on the internet?"
The company I work for certainly didn't switch immediately...to XP. In fact, we still run on Windows 2K. Not only do we use it for our internal business, the software we make to control our medical instruments works on W 2K also. Management had just screwed up its courage to the point of switching to XP when someone said, "But why don't we just wait for Vista and switch to that instead?" Management is now confused again. You would think this might result in a state of permanent paralysis, where no one ever upgrades to the latest OS because there's no real (i.e. technical) reason to do so.
Of course, MS has a solution for that. They will give us non-technical reasons...like refusing to allow VARs to distribute any more W 2K licenses. That would mean we couldn't distribute our product, because each instrument we sell requires a W2K license. So we would have to switch to XP. Er, Vista.
Congratulations. You have managed to lurch to an insightful conclusion from largely irrelevant premises.
The phrase "free will" has been thrown about in many contexts for millenia--the "religous" example you give is only one of many. Before we can even begin to argue about "fee will", we will have to anchor that discussion in a specific context. The context of this particular instance (i.e. TFA) is the apparent conflict between our inclination to assign moral responsibility to actors, and the view that all actions are governed by physical (specifically, biochemical) phenomena. If someone rapes and strangles a three year old, most of us have a tendency to condemn the actor as morally depraved, evil, or--to put it in pithier terms--a plain shithead. But if the perpetrator was driven to his deed by misfiring neurons, does it make any sense to speak of a moral fault, or to punish him at all?
There are several modern variants of this theme. For example, some people hold that we are all the product of our upbringing (or genetics--take your pick), and that those who do "bad" things are not "bad" people, but just defective due to the circumstances of birth or ancestry. Then there is behaviorism--expressed in its starkest form by B.F. Skinner, which views people as mechanisms "conditioned" to behave in a certain way by external causes ("stimuli").
What all these arguments have in common is that one side wants to assign praise or blame to actors, while the other finds no place for moral judgment in the universe. We can say that the first party believes in "free will", while the second does not. But as you so acutely point out in your concluding sentence, introducing the subject of "free will" into the discussion does nothing to clarify it. "Free will" is philosophical dust thrown into the air to confuse the issue (and usually both parties to the argument).
Stripped of its philosophical baggage, the question seems simple: do we imprison people to punish them, or to prevent them from doing bad things? Put like this, the second alternative seems very attractive, if only for its practicality. If you live in a secular society (and most people who read this forum do live in such a society), then it seems to make sense to throw out the whole idea of moral judgment, and the concomittant notion of punishment for "evil" deeds: let's just imprison people who are prone to harm others to keep them from doing so.
But not everything that seems to make sense really does. Examined more closely, the "practical" viewpoint has certain disturbing corollaries. For example, TFA suggests that the British government envisions the imprisonment of persons who are likely to do harm, not just those who have actually done harm. I find this notion disquieting at the least, and I hope you do also. How certain must the government be that a given person is likely to do harm at some time in the future, before he is imprisoned for the public good? We don't understand people well enough to come close to absolute certainty; but nothing is absolutely certain, so certainty seems too strict a criterion. Suppose we determine--through rigorous scientific study--that it is possible to predict with 90% accuracy whether a person will do serious harm to another at some time in his life. Should we imprison people using this nearly perfect method? What if the rate of successful prediction is shown to be only 85%? What degree of certainty is enough?
For that matter, would we be satisfied even if the predictive method were perfect? Suppose the police come to your house and drag you off to jail. Might you protest, "But I didn't do anything?" I think it's likely that words of that sort would come to anyone's lips (unless they knowingly broke the law, of course). It's hard to truly rid ourselves of the idea that being dragged off to jail is punishment, and that punishment should only follow a culpable deed. Every child knows the outrage of undeserved punishment; by what right do we strive to override this fee
I agree. I love the PalmOS for its usability. I've been using Palm devices for...um...ever, and am the proud owner of a brand new Treo 680. I love this thing. It's completely intuitive, has no major drawbacks that I've found (except it's fatter than my Razr was), and I expect to use it for the next couple of years.
When I think "PalmOS", I don't think "programming model", I think GUI. Just because another OS is easier to program for doesn't make it "better" in any sense of the word that is meaningful to me. Running any variant of Windows on a phone seems nuts. This is not a little computer, folks. It's a phone (and a contacts manager, calendar, music player, picture shower, whatever), and it cries out for an interface that is simple, intuitive, and quick. Has anyone ever thruthfully used any of those words in the same sentence with "Windows"?
And don't forget that if you get a WinCE phone, it's going to expect you to sync with Outlook. The horror, oh the horror...
Maybe...but I've been hearing this since the early eighties, so pardon me if I remain skeptical. Back then, "hard drives" were huge stacks of platters spinning inside units the size of a washing machine. I don't remember what their capacity was...1Mb? Obviously, we needed something better than that...preferably something without moving parts. I was told in my first computer class (Data Processing 100) that magnetic disks would soon be replaced by solid state devices, like "bubble meory" (no, I don't remember what that was). But instead of getting a radically new technology, we got magnetic hard drives that were a lot better, so that now you can carry around a roomfull of those old washing machines in your ipod. Often, incremental development of old technology beats starting from scratch.
I can certainly see the advantages of booting up my PC instantaneously from flash memory, and I think having 2Gb flash cards and such is great...but I think the demise of the magnetic disk may be further off than you think. Remember, data expands to fill the space available, and when it comes to size, hard disks are still king.
So? Where do you think you live, America? This is The Homeland, buddy--the place that just repealed habeas corpus by an overwhelming majority vote comprised of both political parties. Stop your whining and show me your papers, Mr Anonymous. Now!
Another danger (besides being totally useless) is that "recommendation" book sites can be used to promote certain books by skewing the search algorithm so the book you want to sell shows up a lot. I'm pretty sure this has been done (and not only by Amazon).
to open one of those bubble packages, I just get my handy tin-snips. Tin snips will win over plastic every time. Of course, that doesn't prevent me from cutting the user manual in half, like another poster mentioned.
I hear there's a new annex in Dante's Hell for the guy who invented bubble wrap: He's confined in a room knee-deep in bite-sized portions of delicacies and drink...all packaged in bubble wrap. And of course, the poor guy is not equipped with tools. I hear he lost his last tooth after a week.
"It's a great game and a really good training tool that creates conditions for learning, teaches strategic thinking and tactical thinking, and it's got really cool weapons," Nash says...
So it's unrealistic, but a good training tool? I guess that's the kind of nonsense I should expect from an "e-learning expert". Unfortunately, judging from the performance of the US Army in Iraq, it looks like they really have learned their tactics and "strategic thinking" from a video game.
BBC is saying specifically Po-110 now. The more I think about it, the weirder it seems. It's hard for me to imagine how this poison could have been administered. Remember, we're dealing with a very small quantity here. In the case of Po-110, "large" means greater than a few mg (From the LANL link you gave):
The energy released by its decay is so large (140W/g) that a capsule containing about half a gram reaches a temperature above 500C. The capsule also presents a contact gamma-ray dose rate of 0.012 Gy/h. A few curies (1 curie = 3.7 x 1010Bq) of polonium exhibit a blue glow, caused by excitation of the surrounding gas.
Given the rarity of Po-110, the problems inherent in having much of it in one place, and its extreme efficacy as a poison, we are probably talking about a quantity of less than a microgram. Exactly how do you carry this tiny amount of deadly stuff around? Do you put it in a little capsule and sprinkle it in tea or sushi? But the quantity involved is so tiny that you can't be sure what you're doing--are you certain you got those microscopic grains where they're supposed to go? Or did they float and land somewhere else? Are you sure you didn't get even one speck on your hands? Better not chew your nails. (In fact, judging by the traces found in at least two places Litvinenko had been, the administration of the poison must have been a bit messy.)
I'm not saying it can't be done; it was done. It just seems to me that the implementation of an assasination plan involving Po-110 by a governmental agency would be seen by such an agency as presenting insuperable difficulties in planning, logistics, technical knowledge, and risk, so that using it in this fashion at all would be dismissed out of hand. I don't think this is how professional spies or assassins work. Even professional criminals would use something else. An amateur, on the other hand, who does not feel obliged to to adhere to high professional standards in his handling of Po-110, would have a much simpler task.
So who would and could do something like this? A smart person with little regard for his own safety. Someone acting alone who has access--through his work or his political connections--to quantities of a very rare material sufficient for his purpose. Someone with a point to make, or a grudge to even out. The list can't be very long, and--it must be said--Litvinenko himself cannot be excluded.
Ah, that's interesting! Thanks for introducing (gasp) facts into the discussion. I think you're very likely correct.
What about Polonium 209, though? It has a half-life of 100 years. From what I can tell, reports seem to specify Po-210 as the culprit, but the British haven't exactly been fast on the uptake here.
Certainly, it's possible...but there's no proof. Moreover, I fail to see how Litvinenko's very public death would benefit Putin. The old KGB apparat splintered into many pieces after the demise of the USSR. Some of them work for the present Russian government, some are self-employed, and some work for...other organizations. It's possible that Litvinenko's poking around was getting close to someone in the "Russian Mafia" who had the means to pull this off, or the motive may be something as banal as a personal grudge held by an ex-subordinate. Litvinenko certainly flouted one of the basic rules for enjoying a long life: avoid making enemies whenever possible. He not only had many enemies—his enemies were dangerous.
It does seem likely to me that Litvinenko's death can be attributed to the ex-KGB, if for no other reason than that they are one of the few organizations that would have had quantities of exotic poisons stashed away. The problem is which faction or members of the ex-KGB might be responsible. Russian mafia? Rogue clique within the present Russian secret police org? An old boy (or a whole pissed-off department of the defunct KGB) pulling in some favors and activating connections to finally get even? Insufficient facts, I'm afraid.
In German, the "special" characters (ä, ö, ü and ß) can be replaced by ae, oe, ue, and ss, respectively. This isn't orthographically orthodox, but it's generally recognized as an expedient for people who don't have proper keyboards. Google seems to recognize these substitutions. So German isn't a problem.
I'd like to know exactly who is insisting on this "inclusiveness". Do the Chinese really want to include their thousands of characters in domain names? Are the Japanese clamoring for Hiragana, Katagana, and Kanji domain names? If it's just some stupid UN agency or the European non-Union, I'd say ignore them.
Sometimes, compromises have to be made for the sake of practicality, even if those compromises aren't culturally sensitive. For example, the internationally accepted language for civilian air communications is English. Can you imagine the result if everyone insisted talking only their own language? I can just see the black box transcript:
Pilot: What the f*ck does "ändern Sie sofort Höhe zu 3000 Meter" mean? He wants me to climb another 3000 meters? Or is it lower? Or..hey Jack, can you bring up Babelfish on your cellphone?
Airplane: Crunch
If we're going the internationalization route with domain names, I'd say we'd be better off just using IP numbers. Domain names were supposed to make navigating to (and remembering) web sites more convenient; this change would make domain names more cumbersome than just a string of numbers. Well, that'll work until someone insists on using Roman numerals for IP addresses...
I got to vote this morning on a Diebold touch-screen machine. I didn't want to waste the time of the people in line behind me by arguing with the staff, but it occurred to me that if a bank--or any financial institution--tried to do something like this, they'd be out of business pronto.
To me, there are three obvious deficiencies with these machines and the way they have been put in place. Listed in order of increasing severity they are:
No printed verification that the machine recorded what you think it should have. Would you deposit $1000 into a bank machine if you knew it doesn't give out receipts?
No accounting trail of any sort. Would you do business with a bank that only keeps track of how many dollars it thinks you owe it, with no corroborating information that would permit an audit?
No way to verify that the system works as designed.
This last one is the killer. Everyone who has ever had anything to do with automating a previously manual system--or even replacing one automated system with another--knows that you have to be very cautious. It's probably not going to work right the first time. You want to have the ability to track how well the new system is doing, to be sure it's working as designed. For example, I'd make sure each voting machine also prints a paper ballot that can be inspected by the voter and put into the usual ballot box. Then I'd be able to do statistical sampling of the electronic polling results to see how they correlate to the paper results. In the beginning, I'd want to do a lot of checking. If it turns out that the results are mostly OK, then we could cut down the amount of manual sampling--but I'd never want to give it up completely. To me, it just makes sense to do this. It's a way to assure the continuing integrity of the process.
So here we have a bank that has replaced all its human tellers with machines that look remarkably like Daleks, and Daleks do not give out receipts--they just take your money and eat it. The Daleks will also tell you that they're transferring money to cover payments that you've requested. But they can't be bothered with keeping records of how much was transferred when, or to whom. They just keep track of your balance...or of what they say is your balance. "Just trust us", say the Daleks.
Seriously now, would you do business with these guys? And if the answer is "no", why in the world would you let them decide who runs your government?
The truth is that the polygraph is a form of psychological testing. The results are meaningless unless the "operator" is a well trained psychologist.
Actually, the operator has to be a well-trained interrogator. Lie detectors have nothing to do with science. There has never been a credible peer-reviewed study that shows "polygraphs" really work--that is, that they can distinguish truth from lies. As far as I know, no other civilized country uses "polygraphs". The "polygraph" is an instrument of intimidation; once you are hooked up to one, the interrogator can ask you anything he likes, and you--trapped in a web of hoses and wires--feel obliged to answer.It's a "scientific" instrument, after all, and you can't just get up and walk away (not without doing a lot of damage to that delicate instrument, anyway). If you believe it works, your blood pressure will probably go through the ceiling when you lie. Furthermore, the interrogator is free to interpret the results in any way he likes. If someone disagrees with his interpretation of the little squiggles on the paper, why then he's not a "skilled operator". The interrogator can even lie about the results of the test to you...hoping you'll break down and confess.
Given these facts, I would never submit to a lie detector test. To do so is to put yourself at the mercy of a ju-ju-man, and being innocent is not going to protect you against his shenanigans.
The solution is regularly teaching business ethics to students. Perhaps even make it mandatory to earn a degree. Certainly mandatory for a graduate degree.
I have to disagaree with this. You are saying that if a person has no compunctions about reading the private correspondence of others, then this is a sort of ignorance, and that it can be remedied by academic education...perhaps at the graduate level. But adults who do this sort of thing habitually aren't ignorant--such persons have a flawed character; they have no regard for the rights of others. Sadly, I have yet to find an academic course that will improve anyone's character.
This is not to say that well-taught courses on business ethics are without value. There are many situations one may encounter in business that present a moral dilemma, and it is not always easy to recognize such a situation. A course taught by an experienced instructor could definitely benefit students who wish to act morally by teaching them to recognize an ethical dilemma when they are in one. But no amount of lecturing will change a person who simply does not care.
WoW doesn't have near the effect on gamers that Evercrack had. WoW is just more mainstream.
Yeah, but once you get hooked on a simple-minded game like WoW, you start to crave the hard stuff! 8)
Seriously, I've been playing Evercrack since it first came out...sometime in the dim past...the nineties. At first, I did go overboard, playing til 4AM, then falling asleep at work. I eventually realized that I had to put a stop to that (I fell asleep while my boss was talking to me 8^), so I set rules for myself: playing time on week days is from 10PM to midnight. On weekends, it's 10PM to...well whenever I want to quit. My goal is to have fun, not to be the most powerful Enchanter or Magician in the game. Killing monsters is just one aspect of the game: I also like to just chat with people, crack jokes while we're slaying MOBs, and get to know the people in my group and my guild.
This arrangement has worked very well for me. I feel that I have a balanced life, holding a job, supporting my wife and 3 kids (well, two have grown up and left home); so why is spending a few hours each day doing something I really enjoy wrong? (I should mention I don't watch TV--something I consider a real waste of time.) Also, I'm using time that would not ordinarily be productive anyway--if anything is an evil influence in my life it's my brain-sucking job that leaves me fit only for activities requiring trivial amounts of thought in the evenings.
People are different. Some people should definitely not be playing these games; if a game is sucking up your real life, then you need to change that. If you can't set limits to the degree of your involvement in the game, then don't play. But do find something else that's fun to do. To quote Dr. Seuss, "Fun is good!"
A country is an artificial abstraction. You should be happy for your peers in India building a parallel high technology business that will help the whole human race move forward more quickly by providing global IT at reduced rates while supporting investments into the Indian school system.
Geographic location, a common culture and laws are "artificial abstractions"? I don't understand that statement. Maybe you meant something like, "nation-states are becoming increasingly irrelevant to commerce"?
Be that as it may, I am, in an abstract sense, happy that my fellow Earthlings in that "artificial abstraction" formerly known as "India" are doing well. I don't blame them a bit for taking the jobs that are offered to them. However, I think it's downright dumb to expect me to rejoice over the fact that the economy in my particular "artificial abstraction" (formerly known as the U.S.A.) is getting flushed down the toilet.
I am particularly unhappy that the ones who are benefitting most from "globalization" are the corporate bosses. The global economy is not a happy care-free party where kindness flows like beer once did at Friday evening bashes in Silicon Valley. We in fact have a new ruling class that feels no loyalty to anyone but themselves; they will move jobs to wherever labor is cheapest. To them, people are an abstraction, and the globalization of the labor market is a tool to drive down wages, not to spread around wealth. Just wait until those Indian IT folks get a little too cocky, and the international corporations discover there are lots of Chinese geeks who speak English, and are willing to work for much less.
I work for a large firm, let's call it FooCorp. At a recent "all-employee meeting", someone asked the company president whether the manufacture of a certain product line would be transferred to Ireland, along with the associated jobs. The president said, "I don't want to hear any more about Irish jobs, or Indian jobs or American jobs--they're all FooCorp jobs!" If this man has an allegiance, it's to FooCorp--which he sees as an extension of himself. At present, FooCorp still has its headquartes in the U.S., but that may change. The regulatory climate here is pretty strict for the kind of work FooCorp does. That may be great for FooCorp, and its president will continue to draw his breathtakingly outrageous salary, but what about me? What do I care about FooCorp, or about someone else who may soon be doing my job in a labor pool to which I have no access?
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I'm surprised you're even bothering to ask advice about this situation--it seems like a no-brainer to me.
Moving across the country to accept a new job involves significant risk. You are taking a leap into the unknown. You might decide that you really hate your new location, or that you can't find a place to live at a price you can afford. You might find that the job is not to your liking, that your boss is an abusive jerk, or any of a long list of other possible negatives. Plus there is the possibility of financial loss, and the certainty of high stress involved in making any geographical move. If you have a family, the risks and stress become much greater.
The only factor to counterbalance all these negatives is your faith in your new employer: you are trusting them to deliver on the promises they made to you with respect to your job duties and working conditions--and with helping to compensate you for the financial cost of moving, as was promised to you.
The key word here is trust. Sometimes, you just have to go with your gut instincts, and trust people. But trusting people whose actions show a lack of good faith is a dumb thing to do; it's like asking to be abused.
It may be that the headhunter knowingly made false promises to you so that he could get his commission. But the headhunter represents the employer, not you--he is their agent. Depending on exactly what happened, the employer may very well have a moral obligation to keep the headhunter's promise to you--but even that isn't the heart of the issue. The bottom line is this: if these people really wanted to hire you, then they would go out of their way to make you happy, to make you feel good about taking this job. They haven't done that, have they?
As for legalities, like "get it in writing, stupid", they're irrelevant in a situation like this. A deal is a deal, whether it's written on paper or spoken. If the other party breaks the deal before you've made any real investment in it, walk away. It really doesn't matter if the law is on your side or not. The law won't buy back wasted time, suffering or broken marriages. This is not a legal matter, it's a matter of common sense.
I hope you don't feel any moral obligation to take this job. You have been released from any such obligation by their show of bad faith. Write a letter to the employer's HR department telling them politely that you are refusing their job offer and why; be sure to cc it to the CEO and the headhunter.
I hope you haven't already given notice to your present employer. If you have, do anything you must to get them to let you stay. Chances are that you are a valuable employee, and they will be glad you're not leaving.
You're lucky! I got stuck with the Beta version, and the pre-natal EULA ("Do you want to be born? Please click 'Yes' or 'No') obligates me to play until my avatar dies. Due to one of the many bugs in this crappy game, I just take lots of damage, but never quite die. I have to grind experience at this thing called a "job" to make enough in-game money to feed my avatar and its "dependents". (Don't get me started on in-game "marriage".) The only things I can kill are rodents or the occasional deer, and all they ever drop are turds. I still haven't figured out for sure how to tell the NPCs from the PCs, and if you make a mistake you get put in prison and maybe killed! No joke! (Actually, this would be an option...except for the non-death bug.) They've got a pretty good raid going in the "Iraq" zone, where you get to kill anything you want--but the uber players get all the good loot. I'm sure glad they have these in-game forums to whine on.
Another one is the belief that the rifling pattern engraved on a fired bullet can be used to positively identify the gun from which it was fired. This assumption rests in turn on the assumption that no two gun barrels are exactly alike. How do we know?
These two examples are a bit more serious than the case of snowflakes, because they're used as evidence in criminal trials. I suppose there must be scientific, peer-reviewed studies out there somewhere about the uniqueness of fingerprints and rifle barrels. But I don't see how they could do any more than establish the probabilities of any two of these objects being sufficiently alike as to be practically indistinguishable. I'd sure like to know what these probabilities are...they're certainly never mentioned in a courtroom.
DNA matching is probably on firmer ground, right?
First of all, one shot is all the sniper needs--then he moves. As a matter of policy, it will probably be the guy holding the remote control who gets shot. (Kinda makes it hard to find people who want to fill this particular job.)
Second, in a match between "professional soldiers" equipped with the latest high tech against determined, intelligent human fighters who are willing to die for their cause, I'll bet on the ill-equipped amateurs every time.
All of the law is mere "theory"; it is an idea. Yes, a government can choose to ignore the laws under which it governs, and rule by decree and force. But such a government undermines the foundations of its own power, for its legitimacy is founded on law. Do not underestimate the power of ideas; do not regard the law lightly. The time is coming--and it may be soon--when the people of this nation will realize that their government has become nothing more than a tyranny. Were they wise, the politicians would think on this--and tremble.
Give a whole new meaning to "driver incompatibility". "Driver not found" would be really scary. The most scary one of all would probably be something like "Windows has detected a new device, "Brakes". If you have media for this device, insert it now. Or would you like Windows to search for a new driver on the internet?"
The company I work for certainly didn't switch immediately...to XP. In fact, we still run on Windows 2K. Not only do we use it for our internal business, the software we make to control our medical instruments works on W 2K also. Management had just screwed up its courage to the point of switching to XP when someone said, "But why don't we just wait for Vista and switch to that instead?" Management is now confused again. You would think this might result in a state of permanent paralysis, where no one ever upgrades to the latest OS because there's no real (i.e. technical) reason to do so.
Of course, MS has a solution for that. They will give us non-technical reasons...like refusing to allow VARs to distribute any more W 2K licenses. That would mean we couldn't distribute our product, because each instrument we sell requires a W2K license. So we would have to switch to XP. Er, Vista.
The phrase "free will" has been thrown about in many contexts for millenia--the "religous" example you give is only one of many. Before we can even begin to argue about "fee will", we will have to anchor that discussion in a specific context. The context of this particular instance (i.e. TFA) is the apparent conflict between our inclination to assign moral responsibility to actors, and the view that all actions are governed by physical (specifically, biochemical) phenomena. If someone rapes and strangles a three year old, most of us have a tendency to condemn the actor as morally depraved, evil, or--to put it in pithier terms--a plain shithead. But if the perpetrator was driven to his deed by misfiring neurons, does it make any sense to speak of a moral fault, or to punish him at all?
There are several modern variants of this theme. For example, some people hold that we are all the product of our upbringing (or genetics--take your pick), and that those who do "bad" things are not "bad" people, but just defective due to the circumstances of birth or ancestry. Then there is behaviorism--expressed in its starkest form by B.F. Skinner, which views people as mechanisms "conditioned" to behave in a certain way by external causes ("stimuli").
What all these arguments have in common is that one side wants to assign praise or blame to actors, while the other finds no place for moral judgment in the universe. We can say that the first party believes in "free will", while the second does not. But as you so acutely point out in your concluding sentence, introducing the subject of "free will" into the discussion does nothing to clarify it. "Free will" is philosophical dust thrown into the air to confuse the issue (and usually both parties to the argument).
Stripped of its philosophical baggage, the question seems simple: do we imprison people to punish them, or to prevent them from doing bad things? Put like this, the second alternative seems very attractive, if only for its practicality. If you live in a secular society (and most people who read this forum do live in such a society), then it seems to make sense to throw out the whole idea of moral judgment, and the concomittant notion of punishment for "evil" deeds: let's just imprison people who are prone to harm others to keep them from doing so.
But not everything that seems to make sense really does. Examined more closely, the "practical" viewpoint has certain disturbing corollaries. For example, TFA suggests that the British government envisions the imprisonment of persons who are likely to do harm, not just those who have actually done harm. I find this notion disquieting at the least, and I hope you do also. How certain must the government be that a given person is likely to do harm at some time in the future, before he is imprisoned for the public good? We don't understand people well enough to come close to absolute certainty; but nothing is absolutely certain, so certainty seems too strict a criterion. Suppose we determine--through rigorous scientific study--that it is possible to predict with 90% accuracy whether a person will do serious harm to another at some time in his life. Should we imprison people using this nearly perfect method? What if the rate of successful prediction is shown to be only 85%? What degree of certainty is enough?
For that matter, would we be satisfied even if the predictive method were perfect? Suppose the police come to your house and drag you off to jail. Might you protest, "But I didn't do anything?" I think it's likely that words of that sort would come to anyone's lips (unless they knowingly broke the law, of course). It's hard to truly rid ourselves of the idea that being dragged off to jail is punishment, and that punishment should only follow a culpable deed. Every child knows the outrage of undeserved punishment; by what right do we strive to override this fee
When I think "PalmOS", I don't think "programming model", I think GUI. Just because another OS is easier to program for doesn't make it "better" in any sense of the word that is meaningful to me. Running any variant of Windows on a phone seems nuts. This is not a little computer, folks. It's a phone (and a contacts manager, calendar, music player, picture shower, whatever), and it cries out for an interface that is simple, intuitive, and quick. Has anyone ever thruthfully used any of those words in the same sentence with "Windows"?
And don't forget that if you get a WinCE phone, it's going to expect you to sync with Outlook. The horror, oh the horror...
I can certainly see the advantages of booting up my PC instantaneously from flash memory, and I think having 2Gb flash cards and such is great...but I think the demise of the magnetic disk may be further off than you think. Remember, data expands to fill the space available, and when it comes to size, hard disks are still king.
So? Where do you think you live, America? This is The Homeland, buddy--the place that just repealed habeas corpus by an overwhelming majority vote comprised of both political parties. Stop your whining and show me your papers, Mr Anonymous. Now!
Another danger (besides being totally useless) is that "recommendation" book sites can be used to promote certain books by skewing the search algorithm so the book you want to sell shows up a lot. I'm pretty sure this has been done (and not only by Amazon).
to open one of those bubble packages, I just get my handy tin-snips. Tin snips will win over plastic every time. Of course, that doesn't prevent me from cutting the user manual in half, like another poster mentioned.
I hear there's a new annex in Dante's Hell for the guy who invented bubble wrap: He's confined in a room knee-deep in bite-sized portions of delicacies and drink...all packaged in bubble wrap. And of course, the poor guy is not equipped with tools. I hear he lost his last tooth after a week.
So it's unrealistic, but a good training tool? I guess that's the kind of nonsense I should expect from an "e-learning expert". Unfortunately, judging from the performance of the US Army in Iraq, it looks like they really have learned their tactics and "strategic thinking" from a video game.
BBC is saying specifically Po-110 now. The more I think about it, the weirder it seems. It's hard for me to imagine how this poison could have been administered. Remember, we're dealing with a very small quantity here. In the case of Po-110, "large" means greater than a few mg (From the LANL link you gave):
Given the rarity of Po-110, the problems inherent in having much of it in one place, and its extreme efficacy as a poison, we are probably talking about a quantity of less than a microgram. Exactly how do you carry this tiny amount of deadly stuff around? Do you put it in a little capsule and sprinkle it in tea or sushi? But the quantity involved is so tiny that you can't be sure what you're doing--are you certain you got those microscopic grains where they're supposed to go? Or did they float and land somewhere else? Are you sure you didn't get even one speck on your hands? Better not chew your nails. (In fact, judging by the traces found in at least two places Litvinenko had been, the administration of the poison must have been a bit messy.)
I'm not saying it can't be done; it was done. It just seems to me that the implementation of an assasination plan involving Po-110 by a governmental agency would be seen by such an agency as presenting insuperable difficulties in planning, logistics, technical knowledge, and risk, so that using it in this fashion at all would be dismissed out of hand. I don't think this is how professional spies or assassins work. Even professional criminals would use something else. An amateur, on the other hand, who does not feel obliged to to adhere to high professional standards in his handling of Po-110, would have a much simpler task.
So who would and could do something like this? A smart person with little regard for his own safety. Someone acting alone who has access--through his work or his political connections--to quantities of a very rare material sufficient for his purpose. Someone with a point to make, or a grudge to even out. The list can't be very long, and--it must be said--Litvinenko himself cannot be excluded.
What about Polonium 209, though? It has a half-life of 100 years. From what I can tell, reports seem to specify Po-210 as the culprit, but the British haven't exactly been fast on the uptake here.
You know this for a fact? How?
Certainly, it's possible...but there's no proof. Moreover, I fail to see how Litvinenko's very public death would benefit Putin. The old KGB apparat splintered into many pieces after the demise of the USSR. Some of them work for the present Russian government, some are self-employed, and some work for...other organizations. It's possible that Litvinenko's poking around was getting close to someone in the "Russian Mafia" who had the means to pull this off, or the motive may be something as banal as a personal grudge held by an ex-subordinate. Litvinenko certainly flouted one of the basic rules for enjoying a long life: avoid making enemies whenever possible. He not only had many enemies—his enemies were dangerous.
It does seem likely to me that Litvinenko's death can be attributed to the ex-KGB, if for no other reason than that they are one of the few organizations that would have had quantities of exotic poisons stashed away. The problem is which faction or members of the ex-KGB might be responsible. Russian mafia? Rogue clique within the present Russian secret police org? An old boy (or a whole pissed-off department of the defunct KGB) pulling in some favors and activating connections to finally get even? Insufficient facts, I'm afraid.
You might want to pick up Litvinenko's book: Blowing up Russia : Terror from Within.
In German, the "special" characters (ä, ö, ü and ß) can be replaced by ae, oe, ue, and ss, respectively. This isn't orthographically orthodox, but it's generally recognized as an expedient for people who don't have proper keyboards. Google seems to recognize these substitutions. So German isn't a problem.
I'd like to know exactly who is insisting on this "inclusiveness". Do the Chinese really want to include their thousands of characters in domain names? Are the Japanese clamoring for Hiragana, Katagana, and Kanji domain names? If it's just some stupid UN agency or the European non-Union, I'd say ignore them.
Sometimes, compromises have to be made for the sake of practicality, even if those compromises aren't culturally sensitive. For example, the internationally accepted language for civilian air communications is English. Can you imagine the result if everyone insisted talking only their own language? I can just see the black box transcript:
If we're going the internationalization route with domain names, I'd say we'd be better off just using IP numbers. Domain names were supposed to make navigating to (and remembering) web sites more convenient; this change would make domain names more cumbersome than just a string of numbers. Well, that'll work until someone insists on using Roman numerals for IP addresses...
Hmmm...I'll start playing when I can make griefers "listen to Reason".
To me, there are three obvious deficiencies with these machines and the way they have been put in place. Listed in order of increasing severity they are:
No printed verification that the machine recorded what you think it should have. Would you deposit $1000 into a bank machine if you knew it doesn't give out receipts?
No accounting trail of any sort. Would you do business with a bank that only keeps track of how many dollars it thinks you owe it, with no corroborating information that would permit an audit?
No way to verify that the system works as designed.
This last one is the killer. Everyone who has ever had anything to do with automating a previously manual system--or even replacing one automated system with another--knows that you have to be very cautious. It's probably not going to work right the first time. You want to have the ability to track how well the new system is doing, to be sure it's working as designed. For example, I'd make sure each voting machine also prints a paper ballot that can be inspected by the voter and put into the usual ballot box. Then I'd be able to do statistical sampling of the electronic polling results to see how they correlate to the paper results. In the beginning, I'd want to do a lot of checking. If it turns out that the results are mostly OK, then we could cut down the amount of manual sampling--but I'd never want to give it up completely. To me, it just makes sense to do this. It's a way to assure the continuing integrity of the process.
So here we have a bank that has replaced all its human tellers with machines that look remarkably like Daleks, and Daleks do not give out receipts--they just take your money and eat it. The Daleks will also tell you that they're transferring money to cover payments that you've requested. But they can't be bothered with keeping records of how much was transferred when, or to whom. They just keep track of your balance...or of what they say is your balance. "Just trust us", say the Daleks.
Seriously now, would you do business with these guys? And if the answer is "no", why in the world would you let them decide who runs your government?
Given these facts, I would never submit to a lie detector test. To do so is to put yourself at the mercy of a ju-ju-man, and being innocent is not going to protect you against his shenanigans.
I have to disagaree with this. You are saying that if a person has no compunctions about reading the private correspondence of others, then this is a sort of ignorance, and that it can be remedied by academic education...perhaps at the graduate level. But adults who do this sort of thing habitually aren't ignorant--such persons have a flawed character; they have no regard for the rights of others. Sadly, I have yet to find an academic course that will improve anyone's character.
This is not to say that well-taught courses on business ethics are without value. There are many situations one may encounter in business that present a moral dilemma, and it is not always easy to recognize such a situation. A course taught by an experienced instructor could definitely benefit students who wish to act morally by teaching them to recognize an ethical dilemma when they are in one. But no amount of lecturing will change a person who simply does not care.
Yeah, but once you get hooked on a simple-minded game like WoW, you start to crave the hard stuff! 8)
Seriously, I've been playing Evercrack since it first came out...sometime in the dim past...the nineties. At first, I did go overboard, playing til 4AM, then falling asleep at work. I eventually realized that I had to put a stop to that (I fell asleep while my boss was talking to me 8^), so I set rules for myself: playing time on week days is from 10PM to midnight. On weekends, it's 10PM to...well whenever I want to quit. My goal is to have fun, not to be the most powerful Enchanter or Magician in the game. Killing monsters is just one aspect of the game: I also like to just chat with people, crack jokes while we're slaying MOBs, and get to know the people in my group and my guild.
This arrangement has worked very well for me. I feel that I have a balanced life, holding a job, supporting my wife and 3 kids (well, two have grown up and left home); so why is spending a few hours each day doing something I really enjoy wrong? (I should mention I don't watch TV--something I consider a real waste of time.) Also, I'm using time that would not ordinarily be productive anyway--if anything is an evil influence in my life it's my brain-sucking job that leaves me fit only for activities requiring trivial amounts of thought in the evenings.
People are different. Some people should definitely not be playing these games; if a game is sucking up your real life, then you need to change that. If you can't set limits to the degree of your involvement in the game, then don't play. But do find something else that's fun to do. To quote Dr. Seuss, "Fun is good!"
And if two physicists were to accidentally emerge in the same stall, they'd be a pair o' docs?
Geographic location, a common culture and laws are "artificial abstractions"? I don't understand that statement. Maybe you meant something like, "nation-states are becoming increasingly irrelevant to commerce"?
Be that as it may, I am, in an abstract sense, happy that my fellow Earthlings in that "artificial abstraction" formerly known as "India" are doing well. I don't blame them a bit for taking the jobs that are offered to them. However, I think it's downright dumb to expect me to rejoice over the fact that the economy in my particular "artificial abstraction" (formerly known as the U.S.A.) is getting flushed down the toilet.
I am particularly unhappy that the ones who are benefitting most from "globalization" are the corporate bosses. The global economy is not a happy care-free party where kindness flows like beer once did at Friday evening bashes in Silicon Valley. We in fact have a new ruling class that feels no loyalty to anyone but themselves; they will move jobs to wherever labor is cheapest. To them, people are an abstraction, and the globalization of the labor market is a tool to drive down wages, not to spread around wealth. Just wait until those Indian IT folks get a little too cocky, and the international corporations discover there are lots of Chinese geeks who speak English, and are willing to work for much less.
I work for a large firm, let's call it FooCorp. At a recent "all-employee meeting", someone asked the company president whether the manufacture of a certain product line would be transferred to Ireland, along with the associated jobs. The president said, "I don't want to hear any more about Irish jobs, or Indian jobs or American jobs--they're all FooCorp jobs!" If this man has an allegiance, it's to FooCorp--which he sees as an extension of himself. At present, FooCorp still has its headquartes in the U.S., but that may change. The regulatory climate here is pretty strict for the kind of work FooCorp does. That may be great for FooCorp, and its president will continue to draw his breathtakingly outrageous salary, but what about me? What do I care about FooCorp, or about someone else who may soon be doing my job in a labor pool to which I have no access?