Neil Gaiman writes his novels longhand, with a fountain pen (usually a Lamy Safari) and paper. I believe there is a lot to be said for this approach.
I believe that as text editors go, so long as one is writing in English or at least a language in a latin character set, it's tough to beat the efficiency of VIM. That's certainly what I use, when I have a choice.
But the overall efficiency of a fountain pen is also pretty hard to beat. (For those of you who don't know, a fountain pen requires practically no pressure in order to write, and is held at a very natural angle, and is a quite different experience from writing with a ballpoint. I have serious fatigue problems if I try to write for a long time with a ballpoint pen, these problems go away with a fountain pen.)
Now, can you explain why the debt is strictly a bad thing? If we were not accruing this debt, does that imply that we would be consuming other resources at a similarly dramatic rate? If so, then what resources would those be? Why is it unequivocally "bad" that we have this particular debt? If it is "bad", is it merely bad for the United States, or is it somehow bad in global macroeconomic terms? Is there an alternative solution that could be feasible, and if so, what are its parameters?
You are responding to someone with a right-wing reality assumption that the current administration isn't enforcing immigration laws, when the truth is that the current administration has done significantly more deportations than any other in history, and not only that, the deportations have had a much higher rate of including violent criminals.
>And? What the hell is Mexico (the main offender) going to do
Nationalize all the foreign-owned industrial assets that are operating in their country, and convert them into military production infrastructure, as a first step.
There were games in the early 1980s that I wish I'd had the chance to play, but they tended to be expensive. Starfleet Orion, Temple of Apshai, and the SubLogic Flight Simulator were pretty big purchases for me. On the other hand, those games were *great*, and I got more gameplay out of those and certain others than a lot of later games all put together.
>The fire crew at the scene was ordered to not do anything. They didn't decide whether or not to engage the fire.
They certainly did. They chose to follow an order that I'm not fully convinced was legal.
If someone had died as a result of this decision, they would still be responsible for manslaughter. Maybe it is legal to be an emergency responder at the scene of a fire, equipped to fight the fire, and choose (e.g., if ordered) not to fight the fire, but I'm not at all convinced that it's a total defense for responsibility for the property loss that results. I want to hear from the insurance company on this.
The Nuremberg Defense isn't doing a thing for me.
I know some firefighters. All of them would have done something to control this fire *anyway*, and I expect at least one would give the chief a punch in the nose after the incident.
>It's a university. Like they can't have a scheduled maintenance a 3AM Sunday to disconnect a router at a time and find the server. A >few seconds of disconnection while watching a PC ping for the server isn't going to kill anyone.
The challenge in University IT is finding someone who cares, no matter what the task, to do it. Something like this would just have to be a thorn in the side of some admin who is bored enough to bother with it.
>>They were at the scene with firefighting equipment and actively chose to stand down.
>That is a false statement.
Is it? I've read news reports that made this claim. If it's not the case, then as I have said, the situation is *completely* different.
My whole premise rests on the fact that the fire crew was at the scene and chose not to do anything about the emergency. That's *totally* different from a situation where there was no fire crew involved in the first place.
Take the same property, same owner, same situation of the unpaid bill.
But the owner isn't the resident. It's a rental property. The tenant has no idea that there is an unpaid bill. On the other hand, he does have insurance on the property with a company that aggressively takes action.
Are the firefighters in no way responsible? Exactly how are they indemnified?
You seem "very, very sure". I'm fairly sure you aren't one of the people involved in the incident.
I wish I could get an opinion from the insurance company's lawyers on whether the firefighters are immune from civil or criminal liability here. There are plenty of scenarios where willful negligence is a crime, such as failing to stop and render aid at the scene of an accident, or a peace officer who purposely ignores a violent crime, or a landlord who intentionally chooses not to report his tenant's meth lab. I think this is that kind of scenario.
>So what do you do? Require firemen operate at a loss
Expect emergency first responders to respond to emergencies without any considerations aside from public safety.
I've known quite a few firefighters in my life. I know none who would stand there with a hose and not put out a house fire.
That's exactly why I point out the difference between a fire crew who is AT THE SCENE who INTENTIONALLY chooses not to act, as opposed to a location that doesn't have the resources in the first place. World of difference between these scenarios, and the people in the article do have some responsibility for property loss, for allowing the public to be be endangered, and possibly for torturing domestic animals.
They were at the scene with firefighting equipment and actively chose to stand down. I'm not convinced that isn't a crime.
The were at the scene with firefighting equipment, and chose to ignore the life- and property-threatening emergency at hand.
If an EMT crew arrived at the scene of the accident and purposely allowed someone to die (apparently for their own entertainment), they would be on the hook for negligent homicide.
Emergency responders are and ought to be held to a higher standard than the general public.
Point of information: Very few of the firefighters who died on 9/11 were on duty or even within the jurisdiction of the WTC. Apparently we are to pick and choose matters of "jurisdiction" as they suit us.
There is a world of difference between "no fire department" and a fire department that showed up and actively chose to let the house burn.
The former is a circumstance of limited resources. The latter is arson. The county cannot claim that there were no resources with which they could fight this fire. The firefighters have the Nuremburg defense. How sure are they that it's legal do do what they did? How sure are they that the fee wasn't paid? How sure are they that the fee issue releases them from liability? How sure were they that no person was in danger? How sure were they that it's legal to let dogs and cats die in a fire?
It looks like they showed up to the scene fully equipped to fight the fire, and then, cruelly for their entertainment, let the house burn.
I hope they are very, very sure that this won't be the thing that puts them behind bars. I'm calling it arson.
I think you would want to be very, very certain that there is absolutely no risk of being exposed to civil or criminal liability if you are in a fire crew that is equipped to deal with a life- and property-threatening emergency and choose not to do so for whatever reason.
How certain were the firefighters that the fire wouldn't get out of control? Or that there was nobody in danger? Or that there is no law against intentionally letting dogs and cats die in a fire (my state has such a law, as a side-effect of dog-fighting laws!) Or that it's legal to stand there with firefighting equipment and not fight the blaze in the first place?
I'd want to be really sure that "following orders" wasn't going to land me in prison for 20 years... Come to think of it, who has ever met a firefighter who even *could* be ordered not to try to fight a house fire if they were already on the scene? We aren't talking about triage or a safety issue. We're talking about a fire crew being ordered to let a house burn -- and I wonder how sure the fire crew is, that they won't be in court explaining themselves to the insurance company, or defending their choices against charges of arson?
"In this case only three dogs and a cat died. What if there were a small child or otherwise helpless person trapped in there?"
The firefighters would be answering questions regarding their contribution to manslaughter as well as arson.
There are already big questions: How did the firefighters on the scene know that there was no risk to anyone's life? How did they know for sure that the fee hadn't been paid? What if they got it wrong?
Because they responded to an emergency but then didn't actually try to fight the fire, they should be really worried about being charged with arson.
There is an insurance company involved, and I wonder if the insurer might take an aggressive stance on this.
Irrelevant because a fire crew did show up at the scene, but chose not to fight the fire for reasons that had nothing to do with the emergency at hand. And for that, they should all be on the hook for arson.
I expect the guy's insurance company will be asking questions from that very point of view. I'm confident that this is exactly the reason the fire department isn't saying a single word about it publicly -- it's doubtless already the subject of civil litigation and a criminal investigation.
"Probably the fire department or the city government will get sued for negligence and endangerment. They won't get away with just standing there."
If I were the insurance company (there is one involved!), I would be pressing a civil case against each firefighter individually, and would be getting individual depositions *today* from each firefighter explaining why he responded to the scene but did not do anything to fight the fire.
I would also be insisting on criminal investigations of arson against everyone involved, including the homeowner and the brother, because there are a lot of things about this story that seem more than a little suspicious.
"This person lived outside of the city fire jurisdiction."
It goes to another level when there was actually a fire crew dispatched to the scene, fully equipped to fight a fire, and then choosing not to fight it.
That's completely different from there not being any resources to fight the fire in the first place. So different that I will say it constitutes arson, and that the "firefighters" should face prison time for this.
It's arson, actually. And they'd better be *extremely* sure they didn't get it wrong, because civil and criminal liabilities could fall on the individual firefighters.
This story has been reported in as many ways as there are biases. The first time I read it, I was led to believe that firefighters did respond to the fire, and despite being there and fully equipped to fight the fire, chose not to. That would actually constitute arson.
But there's a difference between a fire crew responding and not fighting a fire, versus there being no fire crew to respond in the first place.
There is an insurance company involved so rest assured that there are going to be really hard questions asked, probably in depositions. The fire crew can't be allowed to make this kind of decision -- if they get it wrong and someone dies, they are on the hook for manslaughter. If they get it wrong and cause the fire to get out of control, they are on the hook for property damage and disaster recovery.
But it's hard to get a straight account of what actually happened, because most reports are using the story as a political jab at Tea Party principles, and because the fire company is obviously finding itself on the hot seat, both in terms of the huge public exposure this incident has gotten, and because they are doubtless the subject of some pending litigation.
But as I said, there is a world of difference between a fire crew responding to a fire and then choosing not to fight it (for any reason other than public safety), and a rural location that is not served by a fire department in the first place.
Re:We may never know? We DO know!
on
Stuxnet Worms On
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I had a friend who would respond to the knee-jerk attacks about Iran by showing his vacation pictures. My favorites were from the ski resort outside Tehran. It's really amusing, because nobody expects to see *really good alpine skiing* in Iran, let alone pictures of Iranian ski bunnies. This stuff isn't supposed to exist, in their world where all of the Middle East is a barren wasteland...
You'd have to convince the cops that there is reasonable suspicion that the contents of the drives is illegal (which will involve telling them how you know). That's the necessary element that people are disregarding.
In my ethos, it is incumbent on you to avoid being in a situation where you have attracted the attention of authorities. You've failed in your mission at that point, and if you are one of my own minions, you will be liquidated in the field before those authorities get the opportunity to start asking questions anyway.
Ok, so I've been writing a spy novel, but still, don't get caught is the first and only commandment.
Slashdot Mirror
I use an inkwell (and a fountain pen), and very good (Clairefontaine) paper (not parchment.)
Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.
Neil Gaiman writes his novels longhand, with a fountain pen (usually a Lamy Safari) and paper. I believe there is a lot to be said for this approach.
I believe that as text editors go, so long as one is writing in English or at least a language in a latin character set, it's tough to beat the efficiency of VIM. That's certainly what I use, when I have a choice.
But the overall efficiency of a fountain pen is also pretty hard to beat. (For those of you who don't know, a fountain pen requires practically no pressure in order to write, and is held at a very natural angle, and is a quite different experience from writing with a ballpoint. I have serious fatigue problems if I try to write for a long time with a ballpoint pen, these problems go away with a fountain pen.)
Now, can you explain why the debt is strictly a bad thing?
If we were not accruing this debt, does that imply that we would be consuming other resources at a similarly dramatic rate? If so, then what resources would those be? Why is it unequivocally "bad" that we have this particular debt? If it is "bad", is it merely bad for the United States, or is it somehow bad in global macroeconomic terms? Is there an alternative solution that could be feasible, and if so, what are its parameters?
You are responding to someone with a right-wing reality assumption that the current administration isn't enforcing immigration laws, when the truth is that the current administration has done significantly more deportations than any other in history, and not only that, the deportations have had a much higher rate of including violent criminals.
>And? What the hell is Mexico (the main offender) going to do
Nationalize all the foreign-owned industrial assets that are operating in their country, and convert them into military production infrastructure, as a first step.
That's what I would do.
There were games in the early 1980s that I wish I'd had the chance to play, but they tended to be expensive.
Starfleet Orion, Temple of Apshai, and the SubLogic Flight Simulator were pretty big purchases for me.
On the other hand, those games were *great*, and I got more gameplay out of those and certain others than a lot of later games all put together.
>Cartridge (ROM) based games are more expensive to manufacture than CD/DVDs. Perhaps a comparison of like for like would be better.
Ok, but what about the billions and billions of dollars they don't lose to piracy? Doesn't that factor into the pricing somehow?
>The fire crew at the scene was ordered to not do anything. They didn't decide whether or not to engage the fire.
They certainly did. They chose to follow an order that I'm not fully convinced was legal.
If someone had died as a result of this decision, they would still be responsible for manslaughter.
Maybe it is legal to be an emergency responder at the scene of a fire, equipped to fight the fire, and choose (e.g., if ordered) not to fight the fire, but I'm not at all convinced that it's a total defense for responsibility for the property loss that results.
I want to hear from the insurance company on this.
The Nuremberg Defense isn't doing a thing for me.
I know some firefighters. All of them would have done something to control this fire *anyway*, and I expect at least one would give the chief a punch in the nose after the incident.
>It's a university. Like they can't have a scheduled maintenance a 3AM Sunday to disconnect a router at a time and find the server. A
>few seconds of disconnection while watching a PC ping for the server isn't going to kill anyone.
The challenge in University IT is finding someone who cares, no matter what the task, to do it. Something like this would just have to be a thorn in the side of some admin who is bored enough to bother with it.
>>They were at the scene with firefighting equipment and actively chose to stand down.
>That is a false statement.
Is it? I've read news reports that made this claim. If it's not the case, then as I have said, the situation is *completely* different.
My whole premise rests on the fact that the fire crew was at the scene and chose not to do anything about the emergency. That's *totally* different from a situation where there was no fire crew involved in the first place.
Take the same property, same owner, same situation of the unpaid bill.
But the owner isn't the resident. It's a rental property. The tenant has no idea that there is an unpaid bill. On the other hand, he does have insurance on the property with a company that aggressively takes action.
Are the firefighters in no way responsible? Exactly how are they indemnified?
You seem "very, very sure". I'm fairly sure you aren't one of the people involved in the incident.
I wish I could get an opinion from the insurance company's lawyers on whether the firefighters are immune from civil or criminal liability here. There are plenty of scenarios where willful negligence is a crime, such as failing to stop and render aid at the scene of an accident, or a peace officer who purposely ignores a violent crime, or a landlord who intentionally chooses not to report his tenant's meth lab. I think this is that kind of scenario.
>So what do you do? Require firemen operate at a loss
Expect emergency first responders to respond to emergencies without any considerations aside from public safety.
I've known quite a few firefighters in my life. I know none who would stand there with a hose and not put out a house fire.
That's exactly why I point out the difference between a fire crew who is AT THE SCENE who INTENTIONALLY chooses not to act, as opposed to a location that doesn't have the resources in the first place. World of difference between these scenarios, and the people in the article do have some responsibility for property loss, for allowing the public to be be endangered, and possibly for torturing domestic animals.
They were at the scene with firefighting equipment and actively chose to stand down. I'm not convinced that isn't a crime.
The were at the scene with firefighting equipment, and chose to ignore the life- and property-threatening emergency at hand.
If an EMT crew arrived at the scene of the accident and purposely allowed someone to die (apparently for their own entertainment), they would be on the hook for negligent homicide.
Emergency responders are and ought to be held to a higher standard than the general public.
Point of information: Very few of the firefighters who died on 9/11 were on duty or even within the jurisdiction of the WTC. Apparently we are to pick and choose matters of "jurisdiction" as they suit us.
There is a world of difference between "no fire department" and a fire department that showed up and actively chose to let the house burn.
The former is a circumstance of limited resources. The latter is arson. The county cannot claim that there were no resources with which they could fight this fire. The firefighters have the Nuremburg defense. How sure are they that it's legal do do what they did? How sure are they that the fee wasn't paid? How sure are they that the fee issue releases them from liability? How sure were they that no person was in danger? How sure were they that it's legal to let dogs and cats die in a fire?
It looks like they showed up to the scene fully equipped to fight the fire, and then, cruelly for their entertainment, let the house burn.
I hope they are very, very sure that this won't be the thing that puts them behind bars. I'm calling it arson.
I think you would want to be very, very certain that there is absolutely no risk of being exposed to civil or criminal liability if you are in a fire crew that is equipped to deal with a life- and property-threatening emergency and choose not to do so for whatever reason.
How certain were the firefighters that the fire wouldn't get out of control? Or that there was nobody in danger? Or that there is no law against intentionally letting dogs and cats die in a fire (my state has such a law, as a side-effect of dog-fighting laws!) Or that it's legal to stand there with firefighting equipment and not fight the blaze in the first place?
I'd want to be really sure that "following orders" wasn't going to land me in prison for 20 years... Come to think of it, who has ever met a firefighter who even *could* be ordered not to try to fight a house fire if they were already on the scene? We aren't talking about triage or a safety issue. We're talking about a fire crew being ordered to let a house burn -- and I wonder how sure the fire crew is, that they won't be in court explaining themselves to the insurance company, or defending their choices against charges of arson?
"In this case only three dogs and a cat died. What if there were a small child or otherwise helpless person trapped in there?"
The firefighters would be answering questions regarding their contribution to manslaughter as well as arson.
There are already big questions: How did the firefighters on the scene know that there was no risk to anyone's life? How did they know for sure that the fee hadn't been paid? What if they got it wrong?
Because they responded to an emergency but then didn't actually try to fight the fire, they should be really worried about being charged with arson.
There is an insurance company involved, and I wonder if the insurer might take an aggressive stance on this.
"His county HAS NO FIRE DEPT."
Irrelevant because a fire crew did show up at the scene, but chose not to fight the fire for reasons that had nothing to do with the emergency at hand. And for that, they should all be on the hook for arson.
I expect the guy's insurance company will be asking questions from that very point of view. I'm confident that this is exactly the reason the fire department isn't saying a single word about it publicly -- it's doubtless already the subject of civil litigation and a criminal investigation.
"Probably the fire department or the city government will get sued for negligence and endangerment. They won't get away with just standing there."
If I were the insurance company (there is one involved!), I would be pressing a civil case against each firefighter individually, and would be getting individual depositions *today* from each firefighter explaining why he responded to the scene but did not do anything to fight the fire.
I would also be insisting on criminal investigations of arson against everyone involved, including the homeowner and the brother, because there are a lot of things about this story that seem more than a little suspicious.
"This person lived outside of the city fire jurisdiction."
It goes to another level when there was actually a fire crew dispatched to the scene, fully equipped to fight a fire, and then choosing not to fight it.
That's completely different from there not being any resources to fight the fire in the first place. So different that I will say it constitutes arson, and that the "firefighters" should face prison time for this.
It's arson, actually. And they'd better be *extremely* sure they didn't get it wrong, because civil and criminal liabilities could fall on the individual firefighters.
This story has been reported in as many ways as there are biases. The first time I read it, I was led to believe that firefighters did respond to the fire, and despite being there and fully equipped to fight the fire, chose not to. That would actually constitute arson.
But there's a difference between a fire crew responding and not fighting a fire, versus there being no fire crew to respond in the first place.
There is an insurance company involved so rest assured that there are going to be really hard questions asked, probably in depositions. The fire crew can't be allowed to make this kind of decision -- if they get it wrong and someone dies, they are on the hook for manslaughter. If they get it wrong and cause the fire to get out of control, they are on the hook for property damage and disaster recovery.
But it's hard to get a straight account of what actually happened, because most reports are using the story as a political jab at Tea Party principles, and because the fire company is obviously finding itself on the hot seat, both in terms of the huge public exposure this incident has gotten, and because they are doubtless the subject of some pending litigation.
But as I said, there is a world of difference between a fire crew responding to a fire and then choosing not to fight it (for any reason other than public safety), and a rural location that is not served by a fire department in the first place.
>Where did this obsession with Widescreen come from anyways?
Architects in the ancient world?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
I had a friend who would respond to the knee-jerk attacks about Iran by showing his vacation pictures. My favorites were from the ski resort outside Tehran. It's really amusing, because nobody expects to see *really good alpine skiing* in Iran, let alone pictures of Iranian ski bunnies. This stuff isn't supposed to exist, in their world where all of the Middle East is a barren wasteland...
You'd have to convince the cops that there is reasonable suspicion that the contents of the drives is illegal (which will involve telling them how you know). That's the necessary element that people are disregarding.
In my ethos, it is incumbent on you to avoid being in a situation where you have attracted the attention of authorities. You've failed in your mission at that point, and if you are one of my own minions, you will be liquidated in the field before those authorities get the opportunity to start asking questions anyway.
Ok, so I've been writing a spy novel, but still, don't get caught is the first and only commandment.