Near where the road ends, Nattrass followed the tire tracks that turned onto "a closed road in the wilderness area going over several small bushes and rocks lined along the road to designate closure," her report says.
Pro-tip! "Small bushes and rocks lined along a road" do not "designate closure." You know what designate's closure? A fucking sign that says "Hey asshole, this road is closed, back your shit up or get fucked." Humans have been communicating with pictures since at least the Paleolithic, like actually discernible drawings: cavemen didn't settle for taking a dump on a wall, sticking a leaf on top, and being satisfied that said configuration designated "auroch."
Question:
Things went more smoothly with TomTom, a major manufacturer of GPS units for cars. "I had a representative right here. He was real professional. I was able to sit down and say, 'Nope, that doesn't exist,' " Callagan said.
That representative was Matthew Rinaldi, a geographic sourcing analyst for the company. "I knew there were issues in Death Valley, consumer-wide, for all GPS devices, not just TomTom," Rinaldi said.
In all, Rinaldi said he made adjustments to 185 Death Valley road segments in the company's navigation database and removed about 50 altogether.
So I have to fork over a few bucks to TomTom so that their GPS won't kill me? Thanks TomTom! You can GoGo FuckFuck YourselfYourself.
Because it's a complex game. It's sort of like playing 10 bingo cards at the same time. You need a way to mark what spots on each card have been drawn. To do that, you scratch off the spaces to mark them. If you have to scratch off the entire game board, then you have no way to mark the spaces on your cards (since lottery tickets are designed so that you don't need anything but your scratching device to play).
It's nothing of the sort; it's not an actual tic-tac-toe game in which you mark spaces to win. From the article:
On the right were eight tic-tac-toe boards, dense with different numbers. On the left was a box headlined "Your Numbers," covered with a scratchable latex coating. The goal was to scrape off the latex and compare the numbers under it to the digits on the boards. If three of "Your Numbers" appeared on a board in a straight line, you'd won.
The tic-tac-toe part of the board is already revealed, it's the "Your numbers" part that is scratched, no marking of boxes was involved. And the purpose?
One important strategy involves the use of what lottery designers call extended play. Although extended-play games — sometimes referred to as baited hooks — tend to look like miniature spreadsheets, they've proven extremely popular with consumers. Instead of just scratching off the latex and immediately discovering a loser, players have to spend time matching up the revealed numbers with the boards. Ticket designers fill the cards with near-misses (two-in-a-row matchups instead of the necessary three) and players spend tantalizing seconds looking for their win.
The design of the game is pure busy work meant to "extend" the time it took a person to figure out if they won, thus giving them the impression that the game is more involved than a regular scratch ticket. A secondary consequence of this "hunt for all of your numbers in a grid of 72 squares" game is that it makes it a lot easier for players to accidentally overlook a win, thus reducing the number of payouts made by the State Lotto commission
Step 2) Take all the scratched tickets that people throw away onsite, and scan them for hints as to how to pick winners.
By virtue of having already been scratched, the information needed to find the pattern of winners has been removed. What you would need to do is buy a few tickets, photograph the unscratched surface, scratch the tickets, and then go back to the reference photos of the known winners and try to find a pattern.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have an erection to attend to.
I'm saying if you don't like the place, don't take your business there.
I gave four scenarios in which individuals can't opt to refuse taking their business there" - "anyone who is admitted to an ER, anyone living in a town with one hospital, and anyone whose doctor of choice or insurance carrier" - and you can't even address one.
Laws affect other people whether you're friendly about it or not. I'll agree to disagree when you agree to stop forcing your choices on me.
In your scenario, you are forcing your choice upon anyone who is admitted to an ER, anyone living in a town with one hospital, and anyone whose doctor of choice or insurance carrier is aligned with the "insecure network" hospital.
"Stop forcing your choices" is a false argument if you're doing the same damned thing
Well clearly you're much smarter than me, so I guess you're right
It has nothing to do with "being smarter", it comes down to assessing cost vs. risk, and protecting the privacy of patients. Don't get all pissypants with me, just because you haven't been able to articulate why the costs will be just so overbearing, or how the risk is minimal. HIPAA and HITECH weren't enacted out of the blue: history had shown health care records as requiring protection that hospitals weren't providing on their own. If you're even a casual/. reader, you know full-damned well how insecure wireless networks can be; ensuring that hospitals protect these systems is the only means of ensuring HIPAA and HITECH compliance.
I'll just shut up and let you make all of my decisions for me.
We're talking about hospital care. How can you possibly be presenting this as if we always have a choice of which hospital to go to? "I'm having a heart-attack, is there a doctor in the house?! Wait, wait, make sure you bring me to a hospital with a secure IT network!" Give me a break.
The point is that I'm not forcing you to go to my hospital, but with these regulations, you want to force me to go to yours.
First off, it's not your hospital, it's not my hospital, it's the community's hospital.
Your mental calculus concludes that the cost of securing a network outweighs the risk of a network being compromised. My mental calculus concludes that not only does the degree of the risk necessitate the cost, it also has the benefit of potentially reducing costs associated with identity theft, law suits due to HIPAA violations, and of course, the reputation risk of the hospital and doctors associated with it.
The problem is that a heavily regulated system like this raises prices, so your only choices become the best healthcare or no healthcare. It's perfectly fine if you have the money for the first option, but not everyone does.
"...Boo, my social security number, credit card number, and license number were stolen due to a poorly-secured network!" And all because a few doctors couldn't take a small paycut to afford the cost of securing their systems.
Not to mention that some people would be willing to take the risk to save money. Everything you do in life has a risk, why regulate just that one? There are many cases where I'd be willing to go to a hospital with a crappy wireless network to save some money.
And why should the contents of my personal health records and financial records be put up for grabs, because you're willing to accept the risk? You act is if it's like the choice to wear or not wear a seatbelt, in which it's your life at stake if your coin comes up tails.
That is of course, your prerogative. Faith, by definition, is accepting extraordinary circumstances despite perfectly valid, scientifically verifiable, objectively-experienced, subjectively-observed facts that also provide the same answer. Why one chooses one over the other, I'll never know. I'm not trying to insult you; I'm just trying to tell you that it is illogical to make a leap of faith, when none is required.
I'm not surprised to hear that you were previously an atheist. The consequences of atheism can create a lot of hopelessness in an often depressing, cruel world.
Some people believe wholeheartedly in acupuncture, and the notion of Qi energy being associated with the number of rivers in China. A post-cellular model of the world reveals that acupuncture can be accounted for by the placebo effect and a state of induced meditation/relaxation.
Some people still believe in auras, but the modern world has many explanations. When I was a teenager, and deep into "magic" and whatnot, I swore I could see an aura of "mana" surrounding people, but I finally realized that I was seeing something that I wanted to see, and that I was making up explanations for visual illusions and eye fatigue.
I used to be amazed by psychics and empaths, but then learned about cold-reading (while done intentionally by charlatans, or unintentionally by ourselves at a subconscious level.)
But most importantly, the paranormal is just plain insulting on a romantic level: the universe and the physics we know of it are endlessly beautiful and fascinating, and to distort that beauty by making up stories about it -- when we know how truly awful the human brain is at understand coincidence and probability, when we know that ancient models of the world developed due to a lack of a science in technology -- is a disdainful mockery of the wonders that this 13 billion year old universe has provided for us.
It was a spring day with moderate weather, and no construction going on anywhere in the neighborhood.
Power can surge or go out briefly due to a car accident or fallen branch from miles away; events in the immediate local neighborhood have nothing to do with it.
just that the likelihood of a coincidence happening at that very moment would have to be pretty small I'd think.
Not really. Unfortunately, the laws of probability dictate that the improbable still happens. The probability of a slot machine's jackpot being triggered at the very moment of inputting a coin, is just that: a coincidence. It was still likely that nothing at all would have happened.
How many times do people ask for signs and get no sign? Is God just saying to those desperate souls, "eh, fuck that guy, he deserves to be depressed and filled with doubt for a bit longer"?
The primary impact that such energy entities have is psychological.
Oh, please.
You claim that "their" primary impact is psychological, but have somehow just ruled out that maybe you're experiencing a psychological problem. The brain is an incredibly complex machine receiving constant, uninterrupted input from 5 senses. Senses that can be tricked by optical illusions, auditory illusions, tactile illusions, false pattern-finding, and just plain old everyday hallucinations: what does the brain do every night except provide us fully-realized hallucinations by mucking with the chemicals in our head? We are literally transported to new wholly false environments that don't require the input of our senses; even without the senses receiving input, our brain is still capable of creating completion environments and emotions. Is it so inconceivable that some of those same chemicals may not accidentally get pumped out during our waking hours?
By objective experience, we know that the brain fills in gaps where none exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion
It's not magic, it's not Jesus, it's the operation of a complex, yet incomplete organic machine, doing an incredible, yet imperfect job of forming a mental conception of its environment.
Surround yourself with enough occult/new age literature and "practitioners" and you prime your brain to see things out of the corner of your eye. You prime yourself to hear and feel things, and to trick yourself into hearing sounds and feeling sensations where none exist. I sometimes hear phantom ringtones coming from my pocket. Is it Jesus? Or just some fragment of my brain chemistry hallucinating that my phone just rang? What would Occam say?
There are entheogens beyond entheogens that can cause ego-death. MDMA aka ecstacy, is used in psychotherapy to create synthetic emotions: it is literally used to induce empathy as a means of treating PTSD. So based on our objective experience of dream creation, based on what we know of chemically-induced emotion, is it Jesus and Demons? What would Occam say?
The idea that God would finally present himself to you, but only in a discrete manner that could also be explained by natural phenomena that effects everybody instead of just full-on revealing himself is ridiculous. If God is going to make the effort to reveal himself, why would he hint at it? By definition, he's literally eschewing the requirement that his presence be believed on faith. Is the logic that he's on the fence about it? Does coincidence ever get a chance in this world? As soon as you turn improbable into a synonym for impossible, you're making the choice to redefine the word, you're making the choice to let hucksters and scam artists turn fear and anxiety of the unknown against you. There's tons of books and forums full of "experts" disproving the moon-landing, "experts" revealing that Paul McCartney really is dead; you can find an "expert" on anything, it's up to you to realize when you've let yourself get taken.
I'm sorry that life is depressing; making up stories about it isn't the way to fix it.
I once gave the Bally's box office $135 to see George Carlin do a show that, I was disappointed to realize, I'd seen him do on HBO six months before. I'm sure he got a fat slice of that.
He always was a funny guy, and nailed it when he's right, but he's not immune to the double standard, hypocrisy, or half-though-out premise.
Holy sweet hell, this is like watching a broadcast performance of The Nutcracker, catching a live performance 6 months later, and complaining that the theatre company put on the same show.
Outside of an improv act, comedians perform a written set; were you under the assumption that they write brand new jokes for each performance, or that they don't perform a routine verbatim, with a specifically crafted opening, middle, and closing set?
6 months is not a long time for a comedian's set to change. There's no double-standard, hypocrisy, or half-thought-out premise, especially in response to the comment you're responding to.
Mate, I do agree that they didn't need to "jail-break" the hardware, they only needed to "break the protocol/encoding".
However, it still seems that MS is
"royaly not amused":
To support your case, you link to a statement Microsoft made prior to the release of the opensource driver. A statement that was made explicitly about "product tampering."
But look what slashdot reported two weeks after your failed scavenger hunt --
Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation:
The first thing to talk about is, Kinect was not actually hacked. Hacking would mean that someone got to our algorithms that sit inside of the Xbox and was able to actually use them, which hasn't happened. Or, it means that you put a device between the sensor and the Xbox for means of cheating, which also has not happened. That's what we call hacking, and that's what we have put a ton of work and effort to make sure doesn't actually occur.
What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor.
But yet you insist that Microsoft is "royally not amused" and will involve "law enforcement" (bold-face makes things sound scary, amiright?)
So with that said, can you please stop the attempts at pedantry?
No, no, I've been married for 6 years, and my mommy didn't dictate neither where nor what position to bed my bride. Nice assumptions though! They worked out real good for ya.
My mother selected 3 of the 4 hotels for my honeymoon
This might be the saddest comment I've ever read in slashdot history. You had your mother book your honeymoon suites? Did she also pick out the condoms, and provide a stack of index cards dictating the order of foreplay?: "Honey, I'd love to squeeze your left breast right now, but mother says it is pertinent that I first graze my tongue against your popliteal fossa, but try not to get too excited, mother has ordered up a bunch of bananas so that we can mind our potassium."
Fighter jets aren't public. They are owned by the military. Roads are public.
Roads are owned by the government, and thus are public.
Fighter jets are owned by the military, which is a part of the government, and thus are public.
I do not need a license to use the swings at a public park or to watch a concert on public tv. I don't need a license to visit a public museum or ride public transportation.
That's all true, but there is nothing in the use of those services that could be a significant threat to public safety; driving a car irresponsibly could be a significant threat to public safety, thus why a license is required to use one.
I truly don't understand your confusion.
From what I wrote:
He did not have authorization to access gmail's computer system using her credentials.
And your analogies:
So what you're saying is that Google does not permit my wife to access my gmail account even though I've given her permission and the password? I think you're a bit off there. I have several clients that setup one gmail account and give all their office staff access to that account. Is that illegal according to you too?
In case you're still confused by the bolding: in one situation, the person has not been given permission to access to a system, and in both of your scenarios, the person has been given permission.
Two other laws that might apply are the one that prohibits unauthorised access to a computer system, and the one that prohibits unauthorised wire-tapping.
It was authorized. By him. It's his computer.
FTFA: Using her password, he accessed her Gmail account and learned she was having an affair.
He did not have authorization to access gmail's computer system using her credentials.
"Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit." -- Paul, Ephesians 5:18 (NIV)
So what you're telling me is that Paul didn't pay attention to when Jesus converted perfectly good water into wine? Man, that Jesus, what a heretic, right?
Sex, for instance, is perfectly fine within the lifelong bond of marriage. However, when we use it as a source of pleasure, we find ourselves in all sorts of painful and distracting situations.
You know what puts a person in a painful and distracting situation? Not masturbating. But nooooooo, can't do that, Jesus says that masturbation is adultery:
"Matthew 5:28 – “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who has looked a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”"
As for intoxication, there are several problems. Other than the fact that you are out of control (depending on the intoxicant), you also have the tendency to get wrapped up in it and become less productive.
It's interesting that the Bible doesn't actually ban any drugs or alcohol. Hell, Jesus was such a lush that he couldn't pass a glass of water without turning it into a fine chianti. Word on the street is that if he happened upon a pretty little thing having a casual sip of water, he'd miracle it into wine as it was falling down her esophagus. Crazy! I know! But probably justifiable since Genesis says that every plant on the earth was made for us to eat:
Genesis 1:29 - Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.
I mean, literally, God is saying "Did I hear someone say pot brownies? Pass the plate, man."
The real problem is trying to define your life by pleasure, which is fleeting.
Dude, you live in a world in which eating shellfish is an abomination that will cast you into hellfire and that slaves are Bibically told to obey their masters. Anyone who doesn't seek out a life of pleasure before they're cast into eternal damnation is just being practical.
Sadly, I have known many people who have had their life ruined by drug addiction......and I thank God that He loves and forgives even the worst and will remove them from the things they can't leave on their own.
So God loves and forgives and will remove people from the things they can't leave on their own, yet you know people who have ruined their lives due to drug addiction? Those two sentences contradict eachother. Please spend the rest of the holiday season visiting kids in terminal cancer wards and telling them that God loves them. See how far that goes to consoling their families when the kid can't overcome the tumors that are overtaking his body. "Thank" God; I'm sure that'll go over real well.
If he doesnt have a large number of devices, AND he doesnt add new devices with any frequency, then adding a few address to a MAC list isnt a bad idea.
The problem is that the scenario involves a neighbor who has gone through the effort of breaking WEP; anyone using the tools to break WEP already has the tools available to see the MAC addresses of whitelisted clients, and thus can just spoof a valid MAC address.
Considering that the creation story was being dictated to people who had no concept of relativity, it's pretty damned safe to assume that when they were told that an event occurred within "a day", that that "day" was the 24 hours that said people were familiar with. These people couldn't even comprehend that their pork wasn't creating maggots via spontaneous generation, and you're trying to tell me that the almighty was all "fuck those guys, I'll tell'em all this shit happened in a day cause that's just how I roll?"
god could have just as easily said "a billion years", so what's the logical choice of not doing so? As an omniscient being, you'd think he'd be, I dunno, aware of the issue this would pose to us 2010 earthly inhabitants.
Slashdot Mirror
Near where the road ends, Nattrass followed the tire tracks that turned onto "a closed road in the wilderness area going over several small bushes and rocks lined along the road to designate closure," her report says.
Pro-tip! "Small bushes and rocks lined along a road" do not "designate closure." You know what designate's closure? A fucking sign that says "Hey asshole, this road is closed, back your shit up or get fucked." Humans have been communicating with pictures since at least the Paleolithic, like actually discernible drawings: cavemen didn't settle for taking a dump on a wall, sticking a leaf on top, and being satisfied that said configuration designated "auroch."
Question:
Things went more smoothly with TomTom, a major manufacturer of GPS units for cars. "I had a representative right here. He was real professional. I was able to sit down and say, 'Nope, that doesn't exist,' " Callagan said. That representative was Matthew Rinaldi, a geographic sourcing analyst for the company. "I knew there were issues in Death Valley, consumer-wide, for all GPS devices, not just TomTom," Rinaldi said. In all, Rinaldi said he made adjustments to 185 Death Valley road segments in the company's navigation database and removed about 50 altogether.
So I have to fork over a few bucks to TomTom so that their GPS won't kill me? Thanks TomTom! You can GoGo FuckFuck YourselfYourself.
Because it's a complex game. It's sort of like playing 10 bingo cards at the same time. You need a way to mark what spots on each card have been drawn. To do that, you scratch off the spaces to mark them. If you have to scratch off the entire game board, then you have no way to mark the spaces on your cards (since lottery tickets are designed so that you don't need anything but your scratching device to play).
It's nothing of the sort; it's not an actual tic-tac-toe game in which you mark spaces to win. From the article:
On the right were eight tic-tac-toe boards, dense with different numbers. On the left was a box headlined "Your Numbers," covered with a scratchable latex coating. The goal was to scrape off the latex and compare the numbers under it to the digits on the boards. If three of "Your Numbers" appeared on a board in a straight line, you'd won.
The tic-tac-toe part of the board is already revealed, it's the "Your numbers" part that is scratched, no marking of boxes was involved. And the purpose?
One important strategy involves the use of what lottery designers call extended play. Although extended-play games — sometimes referred to as baited hooks — tend to look like miniature spreadsheets, they've proven extremely popular with consumers. Instead of just scratching off the latex and immediately discovering a loser, players have to spend time matching up the revealed numbers with the boards. Ticket designers fill the cards with near-misses (two-in-a-row matchups instead of the necessary three) and players spend tantalizing seconds looking for their win.
The design of the game is pure busy work meant to "extend" the time it took a person to figure out if they won, thus giving them the impression that the game is more involved than a regular scratch ticket. A secondary consequence of this "hunt for all of your numbers in a grid of 72 squares" game is that it makes it a lot easier for players to accidentally overlook a win, thus reducing the number of payouts made by the State Lotto commission
Step 2) Take all the scratched tickets that people throw away onsite, and scan them for hints as to how to pick winners.
By virtue of having already been scratched, the information needed to find the pattern of winners has been removed. What you would need to do is buy a few tickets, photograph the unscratched surface, scratch the tickets, and then go back to the reference photos of the known winners and try to find a pattern.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have an erection to attend to.
I'm saying if you don't like the place, don't take your business there.
I gave four scenarios in which individuals can't opt to refuse taking their business there" - "anyone who is admitted to an ER, anyone living in a town with one hospital, and anyone whose doctor of choice or insurance carrier" - and you can't even address one.
Laws affect other people whether you're friendly about it or not. I'll agree to disagree when you agree to stop forcing your choices on me.
In your scenario, you are forcing your choice upon anyone who is admitted to an ER, anyone living in a town with one hospital, and anyone whose doctor of choice or insurance carrier is aligned with the "insecure network" hospital.
"Stop forcing your choices" is a false argument if you're doing the same damned thing
How about you shut up because you make shitty arguments? I'd say that's a much better reason.
Of course. We've already established that you're so smart I shouldn't make my own decisions
We've also established that you're so smart, that you didn't even realize the person you just responded to wasn't me.
Well clearly you're much smarter than me, so I guess you're right
It has nothing to do with "being smarter", it comes down to assessing cost vs. risk, and protecting the privacy of patients. Don't get all pissypants with me, just because you haven't been able to articulate why the costs will be just so overbearing, or how the risk is minimal. HIPAA and HITECH weren't enacted out of the blue: history had shown health care records as requiring protection that hospitals weren't providing on their own. If you're even a casual /. reader, you know full-damned well how insecure wireless networks can be; ensuring that hospitals protect these systems is the only means of ensuring HIPAA and HITECH compliance.
I'll just shut up and let you make all of my decisions for me.
We're talking about hospital care. How can you possibly be presenting this as if we always have a choice of which hospital to go to? "I'm having a heart-attack, is there a doctor in the house?! Wait, wait, make sure you bring me to a hospital with a secure IT network!" Give me a break.
The point is that I'm not forcing you to go to my hospital, but with these regulations, you want to force me to go to yours.
First off, it's not your hospital, it's not my hospital, it's the community's hospital.
Your mental calculus concludes that the cost of securing a network outweighs the risk of a network being compromised. My mental calculus concludes that not only does the degree of the risk necessitate the cost, it also has the benefit of potentially reducing costs associated with identity theft, law suits due to HIPAA violations, and of course, the reputation risk of the hospital and doctors associated with it.
The problem is that a heavily regulated system like this raises prices, so your only choices become the best healthcare or no healthcare. It's perfectly fine if you have the money for the first option, but not everyone does.
"...Boo, my social security number, credit card number, and license number were stolen due to a poorly-secured network!" And all because a few doctors couldn't take a small paycut to afford the cost of securing their systems.
Not to mention that some people would be willing to take the risk to save money. Everything you do in life has a risk, why regulate just that one? There are many cases where I'd be willing to go to a hospital with a crappy wireless network to save some money.
And why should the contents of my personal health records and financial records be put up for grabs, because you're willing to accept the risk? You act is if it's like the choice to wear or not wear a seatbelt, in which it's your life at stake if your coin comes up tails.
That is of course, your prerogative. Faith, by definition, is accepting extraordinary circumstances despite perfectly valid, scientifically verifiable, objectively-experienced, subjectively-observed facts that also provide the same answer. Why one chooses one over the other, I'll never know. I'm not trying to insult you; I'm just trying to tell you that it is illogical to make a leap of faith, when none is required.
I'm not surprised to hear that you were previously an atheist. The consequences of atheism can create a lot of hopelessness in an often depressing, cruel world.
Some people believe wholeheartedly in acupuncture, and the notion of Qi energy being associated with the number of rivers in China. A post-cellular model of the world reveals that acupuncture can be accounted for by the placebo effect and a state of induced meditation/relaxation.
Some people still believe in auras, but the modern world has many explanations. When I was a teenager, and deep into "magic" and whatnot, I swore I could see an aura of "mana" surrounding people, but I finally realized that I was seeing something that I wanted to see, and that I was making up explanations for visual illusions and eye fatigue.
I used to be amazed by psychics and empaths, but then learned about cold-reading (while done intentionally by charlatans, or unintentionally by ourselves at a subconscious level.)
But most importantly, the paranormal is just plain insulting on a romantic level: the universe and the physics we know of it are endlessly beautiful and fascinating, and to distort that beauty by making up stories about it -- when we know how truly awful the human brain is at understand coincidence and probability, when we know that ancient models of the world developed due to a lack of a science in technology -- is a disdainful mockery of the wonders that this 13 billion year old universe has provided for us.
It was a spring day with moderate weather, and no construction going on anywhere in the neighborhood.
Power can surge or go out briefly due to a car accident or fallen branch from miles away; events in the immediate local neighborhood have nothing to do with it.
just that the likelihood of a coincidence happening at that very moment would have to be pretty small I'd think.
Not really. Unfortunately, the laws of probability dictate that the improbable still happens. The probability of a slot machine's jackpot being triggered at the very moment of inputting a coin, is just that: a coincidence. It was still likely that nothing at all would have happened.
How many times do people ask for signs and get no sign? Is God just saying to those desperate souls, "eh, fuck that guy, he deserves to be depressed and filled with doubt for a bit longer"?
The primary impact that such energy entities have is psychological.
Oh, please.
You claim that "their" primary impact is psychological, but have somehow just ruled out that maybe you're experiencing a psychological problem. The brain is an incredibly complex machine receiving constant, uninterrupted input from 5 senses. Senses that can be tricked by optical illusions, auditory illusions, tactile illusions, false pattern-finding, and just plain old everyday hallucinations: what does the brain do every night except provide us fully-realized hallucinations by mucking with the chemicals in our head? We are literally transported to new wholly false environments that don't require the input of our senses; even without the senses receiving input, our brain is still capable of creating completion environments and emotions. Is it so inconceivable that some of those same chemicals may not accidentally get pumped out during our waking hours?
By objective experience, we know that the brain fills in gaps where none exist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_illusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion
It's not magic, it's not Jesus, it's the operation of a complex, yet incomplete organic machine, doing an incredible, yet imperfect job of forming a mental conception of its environment.
Surround yourself with enough occult/new age literature and "practitioners" and you prime your brain to see things out of the corner of your eye. You prime yourself to hear and feel things, and to trick yourself into hearing sounds and feeling sensations where none exist. I sometimes hear phantom ringtones coming from my pocket. Is it Jesus? Or just some fragment of my brain chemistry hallucinating that my phone just rang? What would Occam say?
There are entheogens beyond entheogens that can cause ego-death. MDMA aka ecstacy, is used in psychotherapy to create synthetic emotions: it is literally used to induce empathy as a means of treating PTSD. So based on our objective experience of dream creation, based on what we know of chemically-induced emotion, is it Jesus and Demons? What would Occam say?
The idea that God would finally present himself to you, but only in a discrete manner that could also be explained by natural phenomena that effects everybody instead of just full-on revealing himself is ridiculous. If God is going to make the effort to reveal himself, why would he hint at it? By definition, he's literally eschewing the requirement that his presence be believed on faith. Is the logic that he's on the fence about it? Does coincidence ever get a chance in this world? As soon as you turn improbable into a synonym for impossible, you're making the choice to redefine the word, you're making the choice to let hucksters and scam artists turn fear and anxiety of the unknown against you. There's tons of books and forums full of "experts" disproving the moon-landing, "experts" revealing that Paul McCartney really is dead; you can find an "expert" on anything, it's up to you to realize when you've let yourself get taken.
I'm sorry that life is depressing; making up stories about it isn't the way to fix it.
I once gave the Bally's box office $135 to see George Carlin do a show that, I was disappointed to realize, I'd seen him do on HBO six months before. I'm sure he got a fat slice of that.
He always was a funny guy, and nailed it when he's right, but he's not immune to the double standard, hypocrisy, or half-though-out premise.
Holy sweet hell, this is like watching a broadcast performance of The Nutcracker, catching a live performance 6 months later, and complaining that the theatre company put on the same show. Outside of an improv act, comedians perform a written set; were you under the assumption that they write brand new jokes for each performance, or that they don't perform a routine verbatim, with a specifically crafted opening, middle, and closing set? 6 months is not a long time for a comedian's set to change. There's no double-standard, hypocrisy, or half-thought-out premise, especially in response to the comment you're responding to.
And you think you'll be able to make a phone call before it gets confiscated, why exactly? Super plan, superfan!
Mate, I do agree that they didn't need to "jail-break" the hardware, they only needed to "break the protocol/encoding". However, it still seems that MS is "royaly not amused":
To support your case, you link to a statement Microsoft made prior to the release of the opensource driver. A statement that was made explicitly about "product tampering."
But look what slashdot reported two weeks after your failed scavenger hunt -- Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation:
The first thing to talk about is, Kinect was not actually hacked. Hacking would mean that someone got to our algorithms that sit inside of the Xbox and was able to actually use them, which hasn't happened. Or, it means that you put a device between the sensor and the Xbox for means of cheating, which also has not happened. That's what we call hacking, and that's what we have put a ton of work and effort to make sure doesn't actually occur. What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor.
But yet you insist that Microsoft is "royally not amused" and will involve "law enforcement" (bold-face makes things sound scary, amiright?)
So with that said, can you please stop the attempts at pedantry?
No, no, I've been married for 6 years, and my mommy didn't dictate neither where nor what position to bed my bride. Nice assumptions though! They worked out real good for ya.
This might be the saddest comment I've ever read in slashdot history. You had your mother book your honeymoon suites? Did she also pick out the condoms, and provide a stack of index cards dictating the order of foreplay?: "Honey, I'd love to squeeze your left breast right now, but mother says it is pertinent that I first graze my tongue against your popliteal fossa, but try not to get too excited, mother has ordered up a bunch of bananas so that we can mind our potassium."
Fighter jets aren't public. They are owned by the military. Roads are public.
Roads are owned by the government, and thus are public.
Fighter jets are owned by the military, which is a part of the government, and thus are public.
I do not need a license to use the swings at a public park or to watch a concert on public tv. I don't need a license to visit a public museum or ride public transportation.
That's all true, but there is nothing in the use of those services that could be a significant threat to public safety; driving a car irresponsibly could be a significant threat to public safety, thus why a license is required to use one.
From what I wrote:
He did not have authorization to access gmail's computer system using her credentials.
And your analogies:
So what you're saying is that Google does not permit my wife to access my gmail account even though I've given her permission and the password? I think you're a bit off there. I have several clients that setup one gmail account and give all their office staff access to that account. Is that illegal according to you too?
In case you're still confused by the bolding: in one situation, the person has not been given permission to access to a system, and in both of your scenarios, the person has been given permission.
Two other laws that might apply are the one that prohibits unauthorised access to a computer system, and the one that prohibits unauthorised wire-tapping.
It was authorized. By him. It's his computer.
FTFA: Using her password, he accessed her Gmail account and learned she was having an affair.
He did not have authorization to access gmail's computer system using her credentials.
"Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit." -- Paul, Ephesians 5:18 (NIV)
So what you're telling me is that Paul didn't pay attention to when Jesus converted perfectly good water into wine? Man, that Jesus, what a heretic, right?
Sex, for instance, is perfectly fine within the lifelong bond of marriage. However, when we use it as a source of pleasure, we find ourselves in all sorts of painful and distracting situations.
You know what puts a person in a painful and distracting situation? Not masturbating. But nooooooo, can't do that, Jesus says that masturbation is adultery: "Matthew 5:28 – “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who has looked a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”"
As for intoxication, there are several problems. Other than the fact that you are out of control (depending on the intoxicant), you also have the tendency to get wrapped up in it and become less productive.
It's interesting that the Bible doesn't actually ban any drugs or alcohol. Hell, Jesus was such a lush that he couldn't pass a glass of water without turning it into a fine chianti. Word on the street is that if he happened upon a pretty little thing having a casual sip of water, he'd miracle it into wine as it was falling down her esophagus. Crazy! I know! But probably justifiable since Genesis says that every plant on the earth was made for us to eat:
Genesis 1:29 - Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.
I mean, literally, God is saying "Did I hear someone say pot brownies? Pass the plate, man."
The real problem is trying to define your life by pleasure, which is fleeting.
Dude, you live in a world in which eating shellfish is an abomination that will cast you into hellfire and that slaves are Bibically told to obey their masters. Anyone who doesn't seek out a life of pleasure before they're cast into eternal damnation is just being practical.
Sadly, I have known many people who have had their life ruined by drug addiction......and I thank God that He loves and forgives even the worst and will remove them from the things they can't leave on their own.
So God loves and forgives and will remove people from the things they can't leave on their own, yet you know people who have ruined their lives due to drug addiction? Those two sentences contradict eachother. Please spend the rest of the holiday season visiting kids in terminal cancer wards and telling them that God loves them. See how far that goes to consoling their families when the kid can't overcome the tumors that are overtaking his body. "Thank" God; I'm sure that'll go over real well.
"DON'T include a clearly defined method to restore all user data, a single user's data, and individual items"
"DON'T instrument the system so that we can monitor more than just, "Is it up or down?""
"DON'T tell us about security issues." "DON'T use the built-in system logging mechanism"
Yeah, it sounds like you could do well with just one: "DON'T give advice: you clearly have no idea what in the hell you're talking about."
The problem is that the scenario involves a neighbor who has gone through the effort of breaking WEP; anyone using the tools to break WEP already has the tools available to see the MAC addresses of whitelisted clients, and thus can just spoof a valid MAC address.
Considering that the creation story was being dictated to people who had no concept of relativity, it's pretty damned safe to assume that when they were told that an event occurred within "a day", that that "day" was the 24 hours that said people were familiar with. These people couldn't even comprehend that their pork wasn't creating maggots via spontaneous generation, and you're trying to tell me that the almighty was all "fuck those guys, I'll tell'em all this shit happened in a day cause that's just how I roll?"
god could have just as easily said "a billion years", so what's the logical choice of not doing so? As an omniscient being, you'd think he'd be, I dunno, aware of the issue this would pose to us 2010 earthly inhabitants.