The various flavors aren't that different from each other, especially in the areas that (should) matter to students. As long as they all run OOo and Firefox, are free of spyware and WoW clients, and can talk to each other, little more will be required. A heterogenous Linux environment isn't the end of the world, nor an administration nightmare. This has the same reason as the switch in the first place: the OS matters less and less. (Of course it'd be all different with proprietary business software or groupware, but these aren't needed here.)
Don't forget the whole accusation is based on Pakistani intelligence interrogations - yes they do have an interested in reporting there are terrorist attacks planned, yes they do torture, and yes that does sparkle the imagination of the tortured. There is, from what little information there was in the press releases, the serious possibility this whole panic is based on nothing but rumor and the ideas of someone who saw Die Hard With A Vengeance and learned there are liquids that become explosive when you mix them.
Many of you will probably already know that the timing of the "bust" was carefully planned between Bush and Blair to coincide with a vote of no confidence planned against Blair on the same day.
In a very similar way, Syrian intelligence has been known to produce extremely convenient intelligence. They were the guys who said Al-Zarqawi was in the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq - and sole proof of the Saddam-Terrorism connection - in the beginning of 2003, when Al-Zarqawi was neither a leader, nor an Al-Qaeda member, nor in Iraq.
The above is not off topic, but means there is no reason to be surprised when the whole story is implausible. It also means there is no reason to be surprised that Scotland Yard and all involved intelligence services, despite the knowledge of their weapon experts, fail to announce the plan was nonsensical.
So they will have a subscriber model and need people to connect to their servers to make money. But, crucially, they neither have hardware lock-in to make sure no-one sets up an alternative server to connect to, nor the resources to survive a dragged-out court battle if someone does. I want to be the guy who wrote the server code, has a copy of it all somewhere far away, and walks up to the boss demanding ten times the pay for not doing anything.
Automatic encryption of calls. Powerful scripting: at [date], call [number], playback [message1], record [message2]... Lots of games. It does run Linux!
Israeli airlines and airports have the reputation for being the safest in the world.
They also have the reputation for being blatantly racist. Security checks of Arab-looking and Caucasian-looking people aren't even remotely comparable.
His job basically amounts to representative/propaganda roles because he doesn't have any significant executive powers. And he's certainly more competent at it than a couple of other politicians. Try his letter to Bush for a preview of what he's going to write there.
You may even consider starting a card/miniature trading deal in your shop where you buy things from your customers and sell them back.
Or at least have a pinboard somewhere for people to put up notes about stuff they want to sell. You won't make money from the deals directly, but if you become a known trading hub, people will get used to dropping by for new deals. Add another pinboard for people looking for groups to play with, and a third for convention dates and the like. Information brings in people, and too many make the simple mistake of cramming it all on one pinboard.
162 million people, or four per cent of the world's adult population, use cannabis and thousands of people seek medical attention for problems related to their cannabis use.
Thousands, they say? They do not say "tens of thousands" (and they certainly would have if they could), so lets assume they meant 10,000 people. So there is 1 in 12600 cannabis users for who this caused a known medical problem. Almost 0,008 percent. This is not evidence for
serious mental health consequences associated with cannabis
by any stretch of the imagination. Of course, if "thousands" doesn't stand for 10,000 but 2,000, that would happen to also be the approximate annual number of people struck by lightning. Let's outlaw walking outside in thunderstorms.
Electrical light is "needed" because there are certain optimum numbers of hours of lighting for best growth, and they vary with the maturity of the plants. This is why there are identifiable patterns in the electricity use of growers. A simple fourier transform of the daily power use in a household (all the data is available to the supplier) will produce telltale marks that give away stupid growers with a lamp configuration above, say, 400 watts. For the same reason, you do not need to continuously put load on the stairwell lighting circuit - you will need a few hours at most.
Netherlands taxation is average for Europe: corporate income tax 29.60%, individual income tax 0-52%, VAT 19%. And the homeless are largely coming from Eastern Europe because begging in the 16th greatest economy in the world (with just 16.3 million people) pays a lot better than it does in Romania.
The experiment with drug politics has turned out to be quite successful. Or at least it showed that controlled sale of marijuana doesn't trigger the end of the world. Other parts of Europe (especially Belgium and Switzerland) have already taken steps into the same direction.
Basically, you take the electricity from somewhere else where noone is likely to examine the bill too closely. Staircase or cellar lighting of apartment buildings are typical. More rarely, people take electricity from street lamps.
I guess lighting with solar power and batteries will be the next step.
Since Scotland Yard says the death toll would have been greater than 9/11, there would have to have been over 3000 people on those planes. Hence, the terrorists could only have targeted the ones capable of carying at least 350. How could they believe more planes of this type would be in the air after the first two waves of them were destroyed?
According to the current BBC article, there doesn't yet seem to be proof of an organization behind this which might profit off the uproar. (Although the informal "let's scare those infidels" movement surely does.)
In fact, it is way too early to be very excited about this success. Police don't appear to have found actual explosives yet, just plans, and there have been previous cases where "terrorist plans" turned out to be sketches of a fictional airbase, a map of the sights of York, or a tourist video. (See The Power of Nightmares, pt. III.) In each case, a big capture was announced before the case was quietly discontinued. Godspeed to Scotland Yard, but I'm not cheering along just yet.
> No, the unifying aspect is that they're wrong. And so are you.
Hypnotists have been counted among the quacks. Autogenous Training has been regarded a sectarian ploy. NLP was accused of thinly disguised esotericism. These are three cases where the "they're all wrong" hypothesis has failed to predict the data.
You are right about Randi of course, and I am amused that you appear to believe I wasn't aware of that. But I wasn't (exclusively) talking about the part of fringe groups that claims paranormal phenomena. Obviously, there is nothing paranormal about not going to the moon, or about (most) UFO theories. The Ganzfeld experiments, which I linked to and which I called strong proof for telepathy, could not be replicated under Randi's conditions, because the effect observed is so small it requires hundreds of subjects and extensive preparations to achieve statistical significance.
> Thank you for playing, loser.
Thanks for the reply, uninformed person moderated to +5 insightful by other uninformed persons.
Again, I don't say we didn't go to the moon. I'm just saying the world is not as simple as you think it is.
> No, the unifying aspect is that they're wrong. And so are you.
Hypnotists have been counted among the quacks. Autogenous Training has been regarded a sectarian ploy. NLP was accused of thinly disguised esotericism. These are three cases where the "they're all wrong" hypothesis has failed to predict the data.
You are right about Randi of course, and I am amused that you appear to believe I wasn't aware of that. But I wasn't (exclusively) talking about the part of fringe groups that claims paranormal phenomena. Obviously, there is nothing paranormal about not going to the moon, or about (most) UFO theories. The Ganzfeld experiments, which I linked to and which I called strong proof for telepathy, could not be replicated under Randi's conditions, because the effect observed is so small it requires hundreds of subjects and extensive preparations to achieve statistical significance.
> Thank you for playing, loser.
Thanks for the reply, uninformed person moderated to +5 insightful by other uninformed persons.
"And I say that with zero emotional attachment. Not believing that we went to the moon doesn't give me a membership in a tinfoil-hat brigade."
Maybe not a tinfoil hat wearer (signifying paranoia, really) but you're a card-carrying member of the club of crazies like Erich Von Daniken, scientologists, Richard Hoagland, and creationists.
This "club of crazies" thinking is so typical and so wrong. These people are so vastly different from each other that literally their only unifying characteristic is that they're not mainstream.
Now that would be a moot point if the generalization you display (and seems typical on/.) didn't lead to us misestimating those guys. Many times before, some of those fringe groups have turned out to be right (those promoting hypnosis, for example) and people who flatly counted those among the "club of crazies" or whatever have suffered from their premature judgement. (In this case, by denying themselves and others access to a useful form of therapy.)
Of course a solid prejudice against "club of crazies" types makes everything easier and dramatically reduces need of attention. But that doesn't make it right, so it can also hardly justify the usual insultive behaviour that "club of crazies members" experience. Your inability to explain why some people think what they think (and "willful stupidity" isn't an explanation, but an assumption) should tell your something about the presuppositions you are making your judgement from.
Now I don't think the moon landing was faked, but I do so because I've seen the proof against that idea. I guess you have, too. However, to give summary judgement on fringe ideas does you a disservice because it distorts your model of the world. For example, there now is very solid empirical evidence for both UFO sightings and telepathy. The common "it's all bogus" meme leads people to dismiss this data without even looking at it. This very plainly limits everyone's understanding of our world.
Cocaine withdrawal does have physiological effects. Namely, it causes imbalances in the brain's neurochemistry which (outside a full medical checkup) are most visible in various depression-related symptoms like fatigue, nightmares, insomnia, irritability etc. This only happens after chronic abuse so yes, infrequent use means you very probably are not addicted. Period. Which means you don't suffer from compulsive behaviour, don't have an incentive to commit crmes to support an addiction, and generally aren't a problem socially. It is still illegal, and from a medical/psychological viewpoint, there is little reason for that.
What ever happened to people being responsible for their own actions?
Psychology happened. It is impossible to condense a century of research into a single/. post, but very basically, people's characters, thoughts and actions are almost completely governed by other people's thoughts and actions. We're not sure about the remainder - probably random chance, but we cannot discount the possibility there may be a will or soul after all. At any rate, its influence is quite small. Take ten kids from poor criminal backgrounds with racist parents and it is practically certain a couple of them will commit serious hate crimes. Sure you can hold them responsible, but that is to ignore much of the science we have about such people.
Within psychology, there are many who hold the notion that since this has been proven, we should start to act upon those findings and replace jails with therapeutic centers, for example. But that doesn't happen, because our judicial system, as well as democracy, depend on the outdated idea of free will.
So the real story here is that only 40% of the people playing are addicted. This indicates to me that
1) Blizz isn't doing their job correctly if they are capturing under half the population in this way
2) These docs need a new yaht
3) The study is bogus and was carried out incorrectly, invalidating the results. 4) Your definition of addiction is less strict than the medical one.
A "proper" addiction means you get physiological signs of stress during withdrawal (nausea, loss of cognitive functions, sweating, 'twitchy' movement and the like) besides the complaining. It is on par with a disease, albeit a treatable one. The condensed message of this article is that WoW doesn't only make people pale and fat (an idea most here seem rather accustomed to), but adds a heavy psychological problem.
From all we know about addiction, WoW may well cause suicides. The social cost incurred by this - as well as failed exams, divorces, firings etc. - may well exceed Blizzard's positive contribution to society through the taxes it is paying.
You'll need a new alarm system, because your laptop may experience certain compatibility problems.
Seriously, can anyone of you physics geeks make a rough estimate of how deadly this would be to hardware? I imagine the field would have to be very strong in order to lift person, frame, bedclothes, upper set of magnets, teddy bears and hooker.
I don't plan to spend 1,2 megadollars, but the idea is fairly basic and should be easily/cheaply copied.
I gave up on game reviews when I worked at a game company and my boss explained his frustration with the review industry to me. He hated having to use dishonest means to catch the reviewers' attention - in particular, photoshopped preview game stills - but he said this was the only way to compete for those exceedingly rare "Game of the Month" etc. spots. He showed me a six page "exclusive preview" by a competitor and explained the only reason it was that big (as opposed to a small paragraph somewhere) was that the competitor had moved the preview session to Florida and paid the expenses of half a dozen editors for an extended weekend. How much sense does Florida make, when you're a European software developer and neither the game not the magazine are released in the English language? Now editors don't need to allow these tactics to work, but they evidently did. And worst of all, the magazine was the most respected (perceived fair) one in that market. Others were way more blatant about their corruption and deception of readers. The one that eventually made ours Game of the Month did so because we'd agreed to give considerable amounts of merchandise to readers who participated in a lottery.
When I want opinion on a game, I turn to a friend with a good taste in games, a fat pipe, and lots of time.
It is also a clear explanation of why RIAA legal tactics are grossly unfair, awill hopefully draw some attention to this fact. Do you honestly believe the target audience of this is just the couple of people who get sued?
Slashdot Mirror
The various flavors aren't that different from each other, especially in the areas that (should) matter to students. As long as they all run OOo and Firefox, are free of spyware and WoW clients, and can talk to each other, little more will be required. A heterogenous Linux environment isn't the end of the world, nor an administration nightmare. This has the same reason as the switch in the first place: the OS matters less and less. (Of course it'd be all different with proprietary business software or groupware, but these aren't needed here.)
Don't forget the whole accusation is based on Pakistani intelligence interrogations - yes they do have an interested in reporting there are terrorist attacks planned, yes they do torture, and yes that does sparkle the imagination of the tortured. There is, from what little information there was in the press releases, the serious possibility this whole panic is based on nothing but rumor and the ideas of someone who saw Die Hard With A Vengeance and learned there are liquids that become explosive when you mix them.
Many of you will probably already know that the timing of the "bust" was carefully planned between Bush and Blair to coincide with a vote of no confidence planned against Blair on the same day.
In a very similar way, Syrian intelligence has been known to produce extremely convenient intelligence. They were the guys who said Al-Zarqawi was in the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq - and sole proof of the Saddam-Terrorism connection - in the beginning of 2003, when Al-Zarqawi was neither a leader, nor an Al-Qaeda member, nor in Iraq.
The above is not off topic, but means there is no reason to be surprised when the whole story is implausible. It also means there is no reason to be surprised that Scotland Yard and all involved intelligence services, despite the knowledge of their weapon experts, fail to announce the plan was nonsensical.
So they will have a subscriber model and need people to connect to their servers to make money. But, crucially, they neither have hardware lock-in to make sure no-one sets up an alternative server to connect to, nor the resources to survive a dragged-out court battle if someone does. I want to be the guy who wrote the server code, has a copy of it all somewhere far away, and walks up to the boss demanding ten times the pay for not doing anything.
Keep adding to this.
Automatic encryption of calls.
Powerful scripting: at [date], call [number], playback [message1], record [message2]...
Lots of games.
It does run Linux!
Israeli airlines and airports have the reputation for being the safest in the world.
They also have the reputation for being blatantly racist. Security checks of Arab-looking and Caucasian-looking people aren't even remotely comparable.
Can't say I blame them, though.
I can see it now: MySpace user sent to Guantanamo for having the wrong guy on his friendlist.
His job basically amounts to representative/propaganda roles because he doesn't have any significant executive powers. And he's certainly more competent at it than a couple of other politicians. Try his letter to Bush for a preview of what he's going to write there.
You may even consider starting a card/miniature trading deal in your shop where you buy things from your customers and sell them back.
Or at least have a pinboard somewhere for people to put up notes about stuff they want to sell. You won't make money from the deals directly, but if you become a known trading hub, people will get used to dropping by for new deals. Add another pinboard for people looking for groups to play with, and a third for convention dates and the like. Information brings in people, and too many make the simple mistake of cramming it all on one pinboard.
So annually,
162 million people, or four per cent of the world's adult population, use cannabis
and
thousands of people seek medical attention for problems related to their cannabis use.
Thousands, they say? They do not say "tens of thousands" (and they certainly would have if they could), so lets assume they meant 10,000 people. So there is 1 in 12600 cannabis users for who this caused a known medical problem. Almost 0,008 percent. This is not evidence for
serious mental health consequences associated with cannabis
by any stretch of the imagination. Of course, if "thousands" doesn't stand for 10,000 but 2,000, that would happen to also be the approximate annual number of people struck by lightning. Let's outlaw walking outside in thunderstorms.
Electrical light is "needed" because there are certain optimum numbers of hours of lighting for best growth, and they vary with the maturity of the plants. This is why there are identifiable patterns in the electricity use of growers. A simple fourier transform of the daily power use in a household (all the data is available to the supplier) will produce telltale marks that give away stupid growers with a lamp configuration above, say, 400 watts. For the same reason, you do not need to continuously put load on the stairwell lighting circuit - you will need a few hours at most.
Netherlands taxation is average for Europe: corporate income tax 29.60%, individual income tax 0-52%, VAT 19%. And the homeless are largely coming from Eastern Europe because begging in the 16th greatest economy in the world (with just 16.3 million people) pays a lot better than it does in Romania.
The experiment with drug politics has turned out to be quite successful. Or at least it showed that controlled sale of marijuana doesn't trigger the end of the world. Other parts of Europe (especially Belgium and Switzerland) have already taken steps into the same direction.
Basically, you take the electricity from somewhere else where noone is likely to examine the bill too closely. Staircase or cellar lighting of apartment buildings are typical. More rarely, people take electricity from street lamps.
I guess lighting with solar power and batteries will be the next step.
Since Scotland Yard says the death toll would have been greater than 9/11, there would have to have been over 3000 people on those planes. Hence, the terrorists could only have targeted the ones capable of carying at least 350. How could they believe more planes of this type would be in the air after the first two waves of them were destroyed?
According to the current BBC article, there doesn't yet seem to be proof of an organization behind this which might profit off the uproar. (Although the informal "let's scare those infidels" movement surely does.)
In fact, it is way too early to be very excited about this success. Police don't appear to have found actual explosives yet, just plans, and there have been previous cases where "terrorist plans" turned out to be sketches of a fictional airbase, a map of the sights of York, or a tourist video. (See The Power of Nightmares, pt. III.) In each case, a big capture was announced before the case was quietly discontinued. Godspeed to Scotland Yard, but I'm not cheering along just yet.
> No, the unifying aspect is that they're wrong. And so are you.
Hypnotists have been counted among the quacks. Autogenous Training has been regarded a sectarian ploy. NLP was accused of thinly disguised esotericism. These are three cases where the "they're all wrong" hypothesis has failed to predict the data.
You are right about Randi of course, and I am amused that you appear to believe I wasn't aware of that. But I wasn't (exclusively) talking about the part of fringe groups that claims paranormal phenomena. Obviously, there is nothing paranormal about not going to the moon, or about (most) UFO theories. The Ganzfeld experiments, which I linked to and which I called strong proof for telepathy, could not be replicated under Randi's conditions, because the effect observed is so small it requires hundreds of subjects and extensive preparations to achieve statistical significance.
> Thank you for playing, loser.
Thanks for the reply, uninformed person moderated to +5 insightful by other uninformed persons.
Again, I don't say we didn't go to the moon. I'm just saying the world is not as simple as you think it is.
> No, the unifying aspect is that they're wrong. And so are you. Hypnotists have been counted among the quacks. Autogenous Training has been regarded a sectarian ploy. NLP was accused of thinly disguised esotericism. These are three cases where the "they're all wrong" hypothesis has failed to predict the data. You are right about Randi of course, and I am amused that you appear to believe I wasn't aware of that. But I wasn't (exclusively) talking about the part of fringe groups that claims paranormal phenomena. Obviously, there is nothing paranormal about not going to the moon, or about (most) UFO theories. The Ganzfeld experiments, which I linked to and which I called strong proof for telepathy, could not be replicated under Randi's conditions, because the effect observed is so small it requires hundreds of subjects and extensive preparations to achieve statistical significance. > Thank you for playing, loser. Thanks for the reply, uninformed person moderated to +5 insightful by other uninformed persons.
"And I say that with zero emotional attachment. Not believing that we went to the moon doesn't give me a membership in a tinfoil-hat brigade."
/.) didn't lead to us misestimating those guys. Many times before, some of those fringe groups have turned out to be right (those promoting hypnosis, for example) and people who flatly counted those among the "club of crazies" or whatever have suffered from their premature judgement. (In this case, by denying themselves and others access to a useful form of therapy.)
Maybe not a tinfoil hat wearer (signifying paranoia, really) but you're a card-carrying member of the club of crazies like Erich Von Daniken, scientologists, Richard Hoagland, and creationists.
This "club of crazies" thinking is so typical and so wrong. These people are so vastly different from each other that literally their only unifying characteristic is that they're not mainstream.
Now that would be a moot point if the generalization you display (and seems typical on
Of course a solid prejudice against "club of crazies" types makes everything easier and dramatically reduces need of attention. But that doesn't make it right, so it can also hardly justify the usual insultive behaviour that "club of crazies members" experience. Your inability to explain why some people think what they think (and "willful stupidity" isn't an explanation, but an assumption) should tell your something about the presuppositions you are making your judgement from.
Now I don't think the moon landing was faked, but I do so because I've seen the proof against that idea. I guess you have, too. However, to give summary judgement on fringe ideas does you a disservice because it distorts your model of the world. For example, there now is very solid empirical evidence for both UFO sightings and telepathy. The common "it's all bogus" meme leads people to dismiss this data without even looking at it. This very plainly limits everyone's understanding of our world.
Cocaine withdrawal does have physiological effects. Namely, it causes imbalances in the brain's neurochemistry which (outside a full medical checkup) are most visible in various depression-related symptoms like fatigue, nightmares, insomnia, irritability etc. This only happens after chronic abuse so yes, infrequent use means you very probably are not addicted. Period. Which means you don't suffer from compulsive behaviour, don't have an incentive to commit crmes to support an addiction, and generally aren't a problem socially. It is still illegal, and from a medical/psychological viewpoint, there is little reason for that.
What ever happened to people being responsible for their own actions?
/. post, but very basically, people's characters, thoughts and actions are almost completely governed by other people's thoughts and actions. We're not sure about the remainder - probably random chance, but we cannot discount the possibility there may be a will or soul after all. At any rate, its influence is quite small. Take ten kids from poor criminal backgrounds with racist parents and it is practically certain a couple of them will commit serious hate crimes. Sure you can hold them responsible, but that is to ignore much of the science we have about such people.
Psychology happened. It is impossible to condense a century of research into a single
Within psychology, there are many who hold the notion that since this has been proven, we should start to act upon those findings and replace jails with therapeutic centers, for example. But that doesn't happen, because our judicial system, as well as democracy, depend on the outdated idea of free will.
So the real story here is that only 40% of the people playing are addicted. This indicates to me that
1) Blizz isn't doing their job correctly if they are capturing under half the population in this way
2) These docs need a new yaht
3) The study is bogus and was carried out incorrectly, invalidating the results.
4) Your definition of addiction is less strict than the medical one.
A "proper" addiction means you get physiological signs of stress during withdrawal (nausea, loss of cognitive functions, sweating, 'twitchy' movement and the like) besides the complaining. It is on par with a disease, albeit a treatable one. The condensed message of this article is that WoW doesn't only make people pale and fat (an idea most here seem rather accustomed to), but adds a heavy psychological problem.
From all we know about addiction, WoW may well cause suicides. The social cost incurred by this - as well as failed exams, divorces, firings etc. - may well exceed Blizzard's positive contribution to society through the taxes it is paying.
You'll need a new alarm system, because your laptop may experience certain compatibility problems.
Seriously, can anyone of you physics geeks make a rough estimate of how deadly this would be to hardware? I imagine the field would have to be very strong in order to lift person, frame, bedclothes, upper set of magnets, teddy bears and hooker.
I don't plan to spend 1,2 megadollars, but the idea is fairly basic and should be easily/cheaply copied.
I gave up on game reviews when I worked at a game company and my boss explained his frustration with the review industry to me. He hated having to use dishonest means to catch the reviewers' attention - in particular, photoshopped preview game stills - but he said this was the only way to compete for those exceedingly rare "Game of the Month" etc. spots. He showed me a six page "exclusive preview" by a competitor and explained the only reason it was that big (as opposed to a small paragraph somewhere) was that the competitor had moved the preview session to Florida and paid the expenses of half a dozen editors for an extended weekend. How much sense does Florida make, when you're a European software developer and neither the game not the magazine are released in the English language? Now editors don't need to allow these tactics to work, but they evidently did. And worst of all, the magazine was the most respected (perceived fair) one in that market. Others were way more blatant about their corruption and deception of readers. The one that eventually made ours Game of the Month did so because we'd agreed to give considerable amounts of merchandise to readers who participated in a lottery.
When I want opinion on a game, I turn to a friend with a good taste in games, a fat pipe, and lots of time.
It is also a clear explanation of why RIAA legal tactics are grossly unfair, awill hopefully draw some attention to this fact. Do you honestly believe the target audience of this is just the couple of people who get sued?
Anyway those hitchers should NOT make it to wherever they're going. For one thing, they can't duck.
Worse, it is legal to just keep them.
Gmail has ads? Whoa. Those Firefox plugins really make you forget things.