I certainly agree that dolphins should receive some protection (although how much is open to debate), I just think it's silly to call a dolphin a "person".
Yeah, that's fair. The problem is mostly one of semantics, as the word "person" is too closely tied to the word "human", but no other word exists that encapsulates the same concept. I suppose you could use the phrase "sapient being" instead of "person", but that just sounds clunky.
Aside from that:
as far as I'm concerned, "person" and "child" are two different things
Legally, a child is just a person who lacks capacity. If you want another example of a person who lacks capacity, one that might apply to you personally someday, people suffering from senility are in the same boat. Which is a good reason to get a will done up and power of attorney assigned well in advance of needing them, as you can lose the legal capacity to do so if you've gone senile or had a stroke. Totally offtopic, but I bring it up because my knowledge of capacity in the legal sense comes from just such a case. The law (sensibly) does not equate personhood, and all the rights that come with it, with capacity, and the responsibilities that entails.
Except that argument conflates "personhood" with "capacity" (that is, the legal term capacity). The poster you were replying to specifically referred to the former, you responded as if they'd argued about the latter. They aren't the same thing.
A child can't sign a contract, make a will, drink, etc as they lack the legal capacity. They're still "people". The legal restrictions on capacity make that abundantly clear. What they don't have is the ability to fully understand the consequences of their actions. They have rights, but aren't mature enough to have the responsibilities that come with.
I realize this is a nit-picking distinction, but it's relevant. A person is protected under the law, irrespective of capacity. You can't go out and kill a retarded man and argue before a judge that, as the victim lacked capacity, he was not a person, and therefor fair game. Acknowledging dolphins as "persons" in a limited way extends legal protection to them, even if they aren't afforded the same legal status as a mentally sound adult human being.
2. we need to be prepared for the implication of some humans failing at these tests.
3. we need to be prepared for the implication of some software programs succeeding at these tests.
If the test is written such that a healthy adult human being can fail it, then somethings wrong with the test. I can accept that brain damage, senility or other things that impair mental function could make a human being appear to be less than sapient, or that a very young child would not pass a sapience test. After all, in law there's the concept of "capacity" that covers the same ground, i.e. that a child or mentally disabled person isn't fit to make certain decisions due to lack of understanding of what those decisions entail.
But if we're going to set a bar for the ability to think, not genius intelligence but the bare minimum intelligence, then the best way to go about it is to find healthy undamaged adult human beings on the far low end of the bell curve for intelligence/self-awareness and use them as the baseline. People smart enough to be considered legally responsible for their actions, but only just.
Using that baseline for sapience, I fully expect some non-human intelligences to pass the test, dolphins and chimps especially. No software we have today could do it, but maybe in a few decades that will change.
I should probably preface this by stating that I am thoroughly omnivorous, fine with testing on lab rats, can't stand PETA and generally hold that most people's preconceptions about animal rights have far more to do with "cute vs ugly" than they do with "right vs wrong".
So it may sound strange that I'm all for dolphins being recognized as near-human level intelligent life, and accorded legal protection befitting said status. Actually I'd go as far as extending such status to most other cetaceans and all apes.
What is the measure of a human being? I don't believe in souls, nor should religion be invoked in temporal debates. Human genetics are no more complex than any other mammal. Human anatomy, while distinct from other apes in a few areas, is mostly unremarkable from the neck down. We're animals ourselves, vertebrate, tetrapod, primate, ape, hominid. We like to imagine ourselves as special, as evidenced by the way we write our mythologies and philosophy, but that's ego talking, not evidence.
All that distinguishes us from the other apes is brain size to body mass ratio. And even then, the gulf isn't vast. We can safely assume that any mammal with a similarly large brain in relation to body mass has the same range of emotions, capacity for complex thought, self-awareness, creativity, what-have-you. Language and communication isn't uniquely human. Nor is art. Hell, even tool use isn't unique to us.
If the only measure of value is sapience, and it can be demonstrated that a non-human of any stripe shares that characteristic with us, than damn straight we ought to treat them the way we treat humans.
An interesting thing I read a while ago suggested that some of the supposed symptoms of "hauntings" are actually mundane, infrasonic phenomena. To wit, if a location has a source of sound waves not far below the boundary of audible frequency (machinery, pipes, ducts or even just free flowing air through the right structure) people and animals will react to the noise with alarm, even though we can't hear it. This has been suggested as one possible mechanism whereby certain animal species react in advance to seismic phenomena. It's possible a person could enter a room with a sustained infrasonic hum and attribute their instinctive sense of alarm to a malevolent presence.
So I'd suggest that guy who asked slashdot get microphones and recording equipment that can pick up on sound below 20 Hz. I've no idea where or how you'd get this equipment, or whether this would be a viable option for an amateur sceptic on a budget, but it's worth looking into.
If you find a recurring sound in a location where supposed "hauntings" have occurred, try to locate the source. It might be the problem can be solved by calling a plumber instead of an exorcist.
What really strikes me as profoundly stupid about the whole "warrantless" business is the fact that warrants are not hard to get. If someone's arrested for possession (which is the sort of thing TFA is referring to) it should be trivially easy to get a warrant from a judge to search the individuals home, car, cell, computer, whatever. Making it warrantless means that the cops can go "fishing" for evidence of a crime when the bring someone in on a trivial charge, like traffic violations.
Put another way, if the cops actually have good reasons for pulling data off a cell, the existing legal framework will let them do that easily. And if they don't have good enough reasons to go before a judge, why on earth should they be allowed to proceed?
In the US at least, that's an excellent way to get a case thrown out. The arrested individual has the right to counsel, and can essentially end any interview with the police with the simple phrase "I want a/my lawyer". And the cops are not going to beat the guy up with his lawyer present.
You seem to think that police beatings during interrogation are the routine. They're not. Interrogations are usually monitored and recorded, with the suspects lawyer present. Which is not to say that the police never beat anyone up and then lie through their teeth to cover their own asses about it, that actually happens far more often than any department wants to admit. What isn't common is for a suspect already in custody to get beaten up by the cops; far more often in cases of police brutality, the suspect arrives at the station with injuries sustained from "resisting arrest". Or they beat someone up and then refrain from arresting them, thus avoiding the problematic paperwork associated with injured suspects.
So, no, the cops are not going to lead you into a private room and give you a choice between being tased and giving up your password, and if they do, it's going to look mighty suspicious when your lawyer shows the judge the pictures of the taser burns you sustained while sitting in a jail cell. Crooked cops are a reality, but do not generally act with Hollywood villain levels of stupidity.
I'm pretty sure fraud and impersonation were illegal before this. This new law, like most laws with the word "online" attached to them, is just a redundant addition to already existing regulations. So the "peasants" have less to do with it than idle legislatures trying to justify their existence, or the failure to realize that the magic box with the TV and typewriter attached doesn't require a whole new set of laws to govern it.
I've bought quite a few indie games off of steam and a couple of older titles off of GOG, all of them for less than twenty bucks a pop, and in most cases I feel I got my money's worth. I don't think I'd have bought most of them at triple-A retail prices, not because I'm a cheapskate, but because the games in question aren't valuable enough to me to justify the higher price tag.
I should also point out that most high profile games don't meet my criteria for the higher price tag either. Of the games I've bought this year, I can only think of two that were worth paying sixty at launch. For everything else, I've waited until the price dropped, or it went on sale. I don't think that the average gamer decides what a fair price ought to be based on what the average price is; we balance how many hours of entertainment we're going to get out of a game, and then decide what we think of as a good price for those hours. I've certainly felt ripped off in the past, buying a game at launch only to find it's only good for a few hours of play, hence my current purchasing habits.
Worrying about price erosion seems like looking at the problem backwards. Make a game worth charging sixty bucks for, and you'll sell it for sixty. Make it worth forty, and you might sell copies at sixty, but many gamers will wait for the price to come down before they buy. And the days of a game only being on the store shelves for a month before being taken down are rapidly vanishing, along with the shelves and the brick-and-mortar stores that house them.
I'm not convinced of that. You're correct if the end user is semi-competent, but incorrect if the end user is an idiot. After all, the security system likely has an "off" switch somewhere (physical or otherwise). A security system cannot "do its job despite the actions of the end user" if the action of the end user is to turn them damn thing off, because they can't figure out how to make it work.
I wonder if some company that has a wireless security technology hired this guy to make their product look necessary.
I haven't seen a home wireless router that didn't include WPA in ages. I'm pretty sure there aren't separate "wireless security companies" with nefarious agendas, so much as there are network security specialists working at every major wireless router manufacturer.
The problem isn't the hardware, the problem exists between the chair and the keyboard. Any security system requires the cooperation of the end user to do its job; if they switch security off, or never switch it on in the first place, all the clever engineering in the world won't protect them. Of course, usually what they're being protected from is leeches, instead of asshole neighbours intent on ruining their lives.
I'm pretty sure he pulled that 9/10 out of thin air, but I'm also sure, having worked in retail, that 25% is much, much too low. Where in Norway does that figure come from? And is it a source with good evidence?
From past job experience, in a retail electronics store in a mall with a high rate of shoplifting (or at least a high rate of arrests/accusations of shoplifting), most of the thefts were still employee related.
You would get different figures for value versus quantity of stolen goods; the shoplifters were more likely to snag something small and minimally protected, like a MicroSD card, whereas the crooked employees with access to the storeroom made off with anything up to and including cell phones and cameras (I got my job there after a mass firing caused by rampant theft). In terms of money, a substantial majority of losses to theft were employee related, in part because the shoplifters were hard pressed to make off with anything more valuable than around thirty bucks.
Now, in contrast, when I worked in a supermarket, the only goods reported stolen were things that had been shoplifted. I don't doubt there was some employee theft, but it wasn't on the same scale. Employee theft prevention was all about the cash, not the goods, and cash is much easier to monitor.
"Dead hand" is not what's being discussed. The GP was talking about a doomsday device situated on home soil set to contaminate the atmosphere with radioactive cobalt if a war broke out. Dead Hand was a fail deadly launch system for normal ICBMs. These are two different things, though I'll grant that Dead Hand is similar in concept and purpose.
If you want to know about the doomsday deterrent idea try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_device Scroll down to the bit with the "doomsday machine" proposed in the 1950s in the US, which in turn was the basis for the same idea that appeared in "Doctor Strangelove".
Nope. The US has a very strong "no first use" policy regarding nuclear weapons. Granted, they're the only country to ever actually use them in warfare, but in point of fact the destruction caused at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a significant factor in shaping that policy.
As far as that goes, every other major nuclear power, past and present, has the same policy for the same reasons. By "major nuclear power" I mean the US, Britain, France, Russia and China; Iran and NK don't count (yet) and Israel won't admit to having the bomb.
If the Korean war restarts in earnest, it will be a conventional war right up until either North Korea nukes something deliberately, or somebody makes a mistake (which is always possible). Neither the US or China will risk escalation on their own. Nobody wants to be the one responsible for a nuclear war.
You don't do nuclear retaliation out of revenge or spite.
What you do instead is make it clear that, if fired upon with nuclear weapons, you will retaliate in kind. And in order for this to be an effective deterrent, the opposing force has to actually care about their own civilians. I'm not at all sure that ol' Kimmy is at all motivated by the welfare of his subjects.
What would be far more effective is letting North Korea know that if they nuke Seoul or Tokyo, we will nuke every bunker their leadership might hide in. Maybe release satellite photos of said bunkers showing that we know where they'll be hiding if the bombs start flying, and intimating that those safe havens will not be safe for very long in a nuclear war. Make it a personal threat instead, such that self-preservation becomes a major factor.
That isn't a legend, it's an idea that was seriously proposed. And no, nobody ever built it. To begin with, by the middle of the cold war it wasn't necessary.
"Second strike" capability, that is the ability to launch a devastating counter attack when all of your airfields and missile silos are replaced with glowing craters, made destruction mutually assured, and therefor made the war unwinnable. A single SSBN with a payload of twenty MIRVed missiles has enough firepower to level several opposing cities, more than enough to be a deterrent, and the oceans offer a huge range of hiding places. You don't need a doomsday device to ensure an enemy will not be able to win with a preemptive strike when you have boomers.
8 seconds is too short a time frame. The delivery systems for nuclear weapons take longer than that to reach their targets. An ICBM launch from the continental US to what used to be the USSR or vice versa takes at least twenty to thirty minutes of flight time (though a launch from bases in Europe or a ballistic missile sub near the coast would obviously be faster than that). This doesn't factor in the time it takes to authorize a launch.
And making the entire world uninhabitable is pushing it. During the cold war, most of the targets for those missiles would have been in the northern hemisphere (North America and Eurasia); there would be survivors elsewhere in the world. This doesn't even get into the fact that fallout is not universally lethal, meaning that just because a given region has been contaminated it does not automatically follow that everyone there is doomed.
In a worst case scenario a full scale nuclear war could mean total human genocide, thought most of the deaths would occur weeks or months after the bombs fell due to radiation poisoning and starvation. A more likely scenario is a massive die-off and the complete collapse of civilization on a global level, as well as regional human extinction in the participating countries.
This is still terrifying obviously, but it's nowhere near the fictional Armageddon that many people associate with the words "nuclear war".
We could build, right now, with modern technology, roads that could go decades or longer between repaving or other maintenance. No self-healing wonderplastic required; modern engineering and existing materials are up to the task. Wouldn't last forever, but if you only need to make repairs every eighty odd years, that's more than good enough. It might even been economical in the very, very long run.
The reason we don't do this is money. Simple asphalt and gravel, with sporadic repairs and repaving every decade or so is "good enough". Long term savings that would take most of a human lifespan to pay off aren't attractive to anybody in a position to implement them, for obvious reasons.
Trolls are in it for the pleasure they get from pissing people off. This guy was in it for the money. Everything he (allegedly) did was motivated by greed.
Which is why he gets the metaphorical book thrown at him and 4chan does not. The scumbag sold counterfeit goods and made threatening phone calls to people who complained or disputed the charges; he generated a paper trail in the form of credit card charges, phone records, etc. Finding him would be trivial for the courts.
All he could do once the matter came to light was cut and run, which he didn't do (might be overconfidence, ignorance or stupidity).
Just about everyone I know my own age (late 20s to early 30s) has a tough time making the bills but also has a nice big flat screen tv, lot's of DVDs and multiple gaming systems. Cry me a river...
I'm (as of this writing) 27.
No TV, flatscreen or otherwise. I own a handful of DVDs, which I watch on my computer. Said computer is not a top of the line model; I do use it for gaming, but generally lag behind technologically (i.e. play games released a while ago, and don't upgrade often). I own no other game systems. I don't own a car. No cell phone. My mp3 player was state of the art about half a decade back.
And most of what I just said applies to the other people I know my own age - some own cars, or have gaming systems or TVs, but they aren't sitting on a fortune in consumer goods, and tend to have items that aren't state of the art.
I generally don't have much trouble paying the bills, but I also have a family that's helped me through the tough times where I've been short. Had I been completely self-sufficient during those times, I would have had trouble making ends meet, despite living frugally. And during the times when money was tight, I had no room to tighten my belt, as there was nothing in my budget I could part with easily.
Know what this means? Anecdotal evidence doesn't prove shit. My anecdotal evidence contradicts your anecdotal evidence, and neither of us has actual data to support the assumption that our way of life is "the norm". In future, do not make unsupported generalizations based solely on your own experiences.
You don't think most of the people at the top aren't sociopaths?
At the very top? Hell yes. I'd go so far as to say all but an handful are.
My proposed solution was more a prevention than a cure. Those currently at the top will all eventually die or retire, leaving their posts open to new executives. Screen the ones on their way up to weed out those without empathy or ethics, and the problem is prevented. It won't fix much in the short term, but would work in the long term, provided loopholes were removed (most sociopaths are excellent loophole exploiters).
I'm beginning to wonder if the best solution might be a law mandating that certain jobs require a psych evaluation before hiring. Confidential, of course. The specific criteria being conditions likely to lead to abuse of power, like antisocial personality disorder (aka psychopathy or sociopathy, two terms now out of use).
Put another way, "sociopaths" assume leadership positions in business precisely they aren't held back by conventional barriers, like empathy or ethics. They can out-compete regular folks by lying, cheating, and generally screwing over their fellow man, giving them an edge over any competition that won't stoop to their level. Screening them out would level the playing field for people who aren't complete and utter bastards.
Jobs that might benefit from such screening include corporate executives, senior government bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, law enforcement officers, lawyers and possibly others I've overlooked.
Road and rail systems are also fixed, undefended infrastructure, yet they aren't terrorist magnets, nor does damaging them "kill trade". Terrorists do occasionally hit the rail system, though they prefer passenger rail (subways being the really obvious example).
I think you need to re-examine the word "terrorist". A terrorist does not seek to blow stuff up for shits and giggles, he seeks to kill or terrorize people, usually people the terrorist has some beef with (politically, religiously, racially, whatever). The damage to infrastructure is incidental. If you give a terrorist a bomb and free reign to choose a target, they'll choose somewhere crowded with whatever group they want to hurt.
Deliberate infrastructure damage is more a military way of thinking, i.e. crippling supply lines. A spy or saboteur working for an enemy power in wartime would target fixed infrastructure in the hopes of damaging the war effort. And, in fact, that does happen; railways were one such target once upon a time. The solution in the past was redundancy and not over-relying on single points of failure. An internet-like transport system would actually be a step forward for redundancy.
You're assuming he meant something like sex-ed, where it's an optional side-course that gets taught to kids once, and never brought up again. Whereas I read "add to curriculum" to mean something more akin to basic coursework, i.e. you're taught it more than once and in more detail. And yes, that stuff does stick, albeit only if you find ways to use it in life.
Frankly, the school system could use a "life skills" branch in addition to the basic language/math/science/history you're compelled to take. Not just finances, but also really simple, useful stuff that most people otherwise end up learning in their twenties on their own, like how to do basic domestic repairs, how to interpret nutritional data, how to administer basic first aid, etc. Stuff everyone needs to know.
Also, re: fixing violence, grammar and health. The first example is actually counterproductive to your argument, given that the rate of youth violence has been dropping for decades. I doubt this has anything to do with the school system, but the notion that violence is worse today than it was in an earlier era is pure nostalgic fiction. Grammar I'm not even going to bother with. Health, however, I think you've got a valid point.
Which will, of course, be picked up be the media as "NASA finds extraterrestrials!" instead of the more accurate "NASA finds preliminary evidence of microbial life." And then stupid people will feel betrayed when it's explained to them that, no, this does not mean little grey men with probes.
Why people continue to fall for sensationalist reporting is beyond me, it's getting really really predictable. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly agree that dolphins should receive some protection (although how much is open to debate), I just think it's silly to call a dolphin a "person".
Yeah, that's fair. The problem is mostly one of semantics, as the word "person" is too closely tied to the word "human", but no other word exists that encapsulates the same concept. I suppose you could use the phrase "sapient being" instead of "person", but that just sounds clunky.
Aside from that:
as far as I'm concerned, "person" and "child" are two different things
Legally, a child is just a person who lacks capacity. If you want another example of a person who lacks capacity, one that might apply to you personally someday, people suffering from senility are in the same boat. Which is a good reason to get a will done up and power of attorney assigned well in advance of needing them, as you can lose the legal capacity to do so if you've gone senile or had a stroke. Totally offtopic, but I bring it up because my knowledge of capacity in the legal sense comes from just such a case. The law (sensibly) does not equate personhood, and all the rights that come with it, with capacity, and the responsibilities that entails.
Except that argument conflates "personhood" with "capacity" (that is, the legal term capacity). The poster you were replying to specifically referred to the former, you responded as if they'd argued about the latter. They aren't the same thing.
A child can't sign a contract, make a will, drink, etc as they lack the legal capacity. They're still "people". The legal restrictions on capacity make that abundantly clear. What they don't have is the ability to fully understand the consequences of their actions. They have rights, but aren't mature enough to have the responsibilities that come with.
I realize this is a nit-picking distinction, but it's relevant. A person is protected under the law, irrespective of capacity. You can't go out and kill a retarded man and argue before a judge that, as the victim lacked capacity, he was not a person, and therefor fair game. Acknowledging dolphins as "persons" in a limited way extends legal protection to them, even if they aren't afforded the same legal status as a mentally sound adult human being.
1. we really need a test for that.
2. we need to be prepared for the implication of some humans failing at these tests.
3. we need to be prepared for the implication of some software programs succeeding at these tests.
If the test is written such that a healthy adult human being can fail it, then somethings wrong with the test. I can accept that brain damage, senility or other things that impair mental function could make a human being appear to be less than sapient, or that a very young child would not pass a sapience test. After all, in law there's the concept of "capacity" that covers the same ground, i.e. that a child or mentally disabled person isn't fit to make certain decisions due to lack of understanding of what those decisions entail.
But if we're going to set a bar for the ability to think, not genius intelligence but the bare minimum intelligence, then the best way to go about it is to find healthy undamaged adult human beings on the far low end of the bell curve for intelligence/self-awareness and use them as the baseline. People smart enough to be considered legally responsible for their actions, but only just.
Using that baseline for sapience, I fully expect some non-human intelligences to pass the test, dolphins and chimps especially. No software we have today could do it, but maybe in a few decades that will change.
I should probably preface this by stating that I am thoroughly omnivorous, fine with testing on lab rats, can't stand PETA and generally hold that most people's preconceptions about animal rights have far more to do with "cute vs ugly" than they do with "right vs wrong".
So it may sound strange that I'm all for dolphins being recognized as near-human level intelligent life, and accorded legal protection befitting said status. Actually I'd go as far as extending such status to most other cetaceans and all apes.
What is the measure of a human being? I don't believe in souls, nor should religion be invoked in temporal debates. Human genetics are no more complex than any other mammal. Human anatomy, while distinct from other apes in a few areas, is mostly unremarkable from the neck down. We're animals ourselves, vertebrate, tetrapod, primate, ape, hominid. We like to imagine ourselves as special, as evidenced by the way we write our mythologies and philosophy, but that's ego talking, not evidence.
All that distinguishes us from the other apes is brain size to body mass ratio. And even then, the gulf isn't vast. We can safely assume that any mammal with a similarly large brain in relation to body mass has the same range of emotions, capacity for complex thought, self-awareness, creativity, what-have-you. Language and communication isn't uniquely human. Nor is art. Hell, even tool use isn't unique to us.
If the only measure of value is sapience, and it can be demonstrated that a non-human of any stripe shares that characteristic with us, than damn straight we ought to treat them the way we treat humans.
An interesting thing I read a while ago suggested that some of the supposed symptoms of "hauntings" are actually mundane, infrasonic phenomena. To wit, if a location has a source of sound waves not far below the boundary of audible frequency (machinery, pipes, ducts or even just free flowing air through the right structure) people and animals will react to the noise with alarm, even though we can't hear it. This has been suggested as one possible mechanism whereby certain animal species react in advance to seismic phenomena. It's possible a person could enter a room with a sustained infrasonic hum and attribute their instinctive sense of alarm to a malevolent presence.
So I'd suggest that guy who asked slashdot get microphones and recording equipment that can pick up on sound below 20 Hz. I've no idea where or how you'd get this equipment, or whether this would be a viable option for an amateur sceptic on a budget, but it's worth looking into.
If you find a recurring sound in a location where supposed "hauntings" have occurred, try to locate the source. It might be the problem can be solved by calling a plumber instead of an exorcist.
What really strikes me as profoundly stupid about the whole "warrantless" business is the fact that warrants are not hard to get. If someone's arrested for possession (which is the sort of thing TFA is referring to) it should be trivially easy to get a warrant from a judge to search the individuals home, car, cell, computer, whatever. Making it warrantless means that the cops can go "fishing" for evidence of a crime when the bring someone in on a trivial charge, like traffic violations.
Put another way, if the cops actually have good reasons for pulling data off a cell, the existing legal framework will let them do that easily. And if they don't have good enough reasons to go before a judge, why on earth should they be allowed to proceed?
In the US at least, that's an excellent way to get a case thrown out. The arrested individual has the right to counsel, and can essentially end any interview with the police with the simple phrase "I want a/my lawyer". And the cops are not going to beat the guy up with his lawyer present.
You seem to think that police beatings during interrogation are the routine. They're not. Interrogations are usually monitored and recorded, with the suspects lawyer present. Which is not to say that the police never beat anyone up and then lie through their teeth to cover their own asses about it, that actually happens far more often than any department wants to admit. What isn't common is for a suspect already in custody to get beaten up by the cops; far more often in cases of police brutality, the suspect arrives at the station with injuries sustained from "resisting arrest". Or they beat someone up and then refrain from arresting them, thus avoiding the problematic paperwork associated with injured suspects.
So, no, the cops are not going to lead you into a private room and give you a choice between being tased and giving up your password, and if they do, it's going to look mighty suspicious when your lawyer shows the judge the pictures of the taser burns you sustained while sitting in a jail cell. Crooked cops are a reality, but do not generally act with Hollywood villain levels of stupidity.
I'm pretty sure fraud and impersonation were illegal before this. This new law, like most laws with the word "online" attached to them, is just a redundant addition to already existing regulations. So the "peasants" have less to do with it than idle legislatures trying to justify their existence, or the failure to realize that the magic box with the TV and typewriter attached doesn't require a whole new set of laws to govern it.
I've bought quite a few indie games off of steam and a couple of older titles off of GOG, all of them for less than twenty bucks a pop, and in most cases I feel I got my money's worth. I don't think I'd have bought most of them at triple-A retail prices, not because I'm a cheapskate, but because the games in question aren't valuable enough to me to justify the higher price tag.
I should also point out that most high profile games don't meet my criteria for the higher price tag either. Of the games I've bought this year, I can only think of two that were worth paying sixty at launch. For everything else, I've waited until the price dropped, or it went on sale. I don't think that the average gamer decides what a fair price ought to be based on what the average price is; we balance how many hours of entertainment we're going to get out of a game, and then decide what we think of as a good price for those hours. I've certainly felt ripped off in the past, buying a game at launch only to find it's only good for a few hours of play, hence my current purchasing habits.
Worrying about price erosion seems like looking at the problem backwards. Make a game worth charging sixty bucks for, and you'll sell it for sixty. Make it worth forty, and you might sell copies at sixty, but many gamers will wait for the price to come down before they buy. And the days of a game only being on the store shelves for a month before being taken down are rapidly vanishing, along with the shelves and the brick-and-mortar stores that house them.
I'm not convinced of that. You're correct if the end user is semi-competent, but incorrect if the end user is an idiot. After all, the security system likely has an "off" switch somewhere (physical or otherwise). A security system cannot "do its job despite the actions of the end user" if the action of the end user is to turn them damn thing off, because they can't figure out how to make it work.
I wonder if some company that has a wireless security technology hired this guy to make their product look necessary.
I haven't seen a home wireless router that didn't include WPA in ages. I'm pretty sure there aren't separate "wireless security companies" with nefarious agendas, so much as there are network security specialists working at every major wireless router manufacturer.
The problem isn't the hardware, the problem exists between the chair and the keyboard. Any security system requires the cooperation of the end user to do its job; if they switch security off, or never switch it on in the first place, all the clever engineering in the world won't protect them. Of course, usually what they're being protected from is leeches, instead of asshole neighbours intent on ruining their lives.
I'm pretty sure he pulled that 9/10 out of thin air, but I'm also sure, having worked in retail, that 25% is much, much too low. Where in Norway does that figure come from? And is it a source with good evidence?
From past job experience, in a retail electronics store in a mall with a high rate of shoplifting (or at least a high rate of arrests/accusations of shoplifting), most of the thefts were still employee related.
You would get different figures for value versus quantity of stolen goods; the shoplifters were more likely to snag something small and minimally protected, like a MicroSD card, whereas the crooked employees with access to the storeroom made off with anything up to and including cell phones and cameras (I got my job there after a mass firing caused by rampant theft). In terms of money, a substantial majority of losses to theft were employee related, in part because the shoplifters were hard pressed to make off with anything more valuable than around thirty bucks.
Now, in contrast, when I worked in a supermarket, the only goods reported stolen were things that had been shoplifted. I don't doubt there was some employee theft, but it wasn't on the same scale. Employee theft prevention was all about the cash, not the goods, and cash is much easier to monitor.
"Dead hand" is not what's being discussed. The GP was talking about a doomsday device situated on home soil set to contaminate the atmosphere with radioactive cobalt if a war broke out. Dead Hand was a fail deadly launch system for normal ICBMs. These are two different things, though I'll grant that Dead Hand is similar in concept and purpose.
If you want to know about the doomsday deterrent idea try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_device
Scroll down to the bit with the "doomsday machine" proposed in the 1950s in the US, which in turn was the basis for the same idea that appeared in "Doctor Strangelove".
Nope. The US has a very strong "no first use" policy regarding nuclear weapons. Granted, they're the only country to ever actually use them in warfare, but in point of fact the destruction caused at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a significant factor in shaping that policy.
As far as that goes, every other major nuclear power, past and present, has the same policy for the same reasons. By "major nuclear power" I mean the US, Britain, France, Russia and China; Iran and NK don't count (yet) and Israel won't admit to having the bomb.
If the Korean war restarts in earnest, it will be a conventional war right up until either North Korea nukes something deliberately, or somebody makes a mistake (which is always possible). Neither the US or China will risk escalation on their own. Nobody wants to be the one responsible for a nuclear war.
You don't do nuclear retaliation out of revenge or spite.
What you do instead is make it clear that, if fired upon with nuclear weapons, you will retaliate in kind. And in order for this to be an effective deterrent, the opposing force has to actually care about their own civilians. I'm not at all sure that ol' Kimmy is at all motivated by the welfare of his subjects.
What would be far more effective is letting North Korea know that if they nuke Seoul or Tokyo, we will nuke every bunker their leadership might hide in. Maybe release satellite photos of said bunkers showing that we know where they'll be hiding if the bombs start flying, and intimating that those safe havens will not be safe for very long in a nuclear war. Make it a personal threat instead, such that self-preservation becomes a major factor.
That isn't a legend, it's an idea that was seriously proposed. And no, nobody ever built it. To begin with, by the middle of the cold war it wasn't necessary.
"Second strike" capability, that is the ability to launch a devastating counter attack when all of your airfields and missile silos are replaced with glowing craters, made destruction mutually assured, and therefor made the war unwinnable. A single SSBN with a payload of twenty MIRVed missiles has enough firepower to level several opposing cities, more than enough to be a deterrent, and the oceans offer a huge range of hiding places. You don't need a doomsday device to ensure an enemy will not be able to win with a preemptive strike when you have boomers.
Not really.
8 seconds is too short a time frame. The delivery systems for nuclear weapons take longer than that to reach their targets. An ICBM launch from the continental US to what used to be the USSR or vice versa takes at least twenty to thirty minutes of flight time (though a launch from bases in Europe or a ballistic missile sub near the coast would obviously be faster than that). This doesn't factor in the time it takes to authorize a launch.
And making the entire world uninhabitable is pushing it. During the cold war, most of the targets for those missiles would have been in the northern hemisphere (North America and Eurasia); there would be survivors elsewhere in the world. This doesn't even get into the fact that fallout is not universally lethal, meaning that just because a given region has been contaminated it does not automatically follow that everyone there is doomed.
In a worst case scenario a full scale nuclear war could mean total human genocide, thought most of the deaths would occur weeks or months after the bombs fell due to radiation poisoning and starvation. A more likely scenario is a massive die-off and the complete collapse of civilization on a global level, as well as regional human extinction in the participating countries.
This is still terrifying obviously, but it's nowhere near the fictional Armageddon that many people associate with the words "nuclear war".
Also, a fair bit of the issue is cost per mile.
We could build, right now, with modern technology, roads that could go decades or longer between repaving or other maintenance. No self-healing wonderplastic required; modern engineering and existing materials are up to the task. Wouldn't last forever, but if you only need to make repairs every eighty odd years, that's more than good enough. It might even been economical in the very, very long run.
The reason we don't do this is money. Simple asphalt and gravel, with sporadic repairs and repaving every decade or so is "good enough". Long term savings that would take most of a human lifespan to pay off aren't attractive to anybody in a position to implement them, for obvious reasons.
This guy wasn't trolling.
Trolls are in it for the pleasure they get from pissing people off. This guy was in it for the money. Everything he (allegedly) did was motivated by greed.
Which is why he gets the metaphorical book thrown at him and 4chan does not. The scumbag sold counterfeit goods and made threatening phone calls to people who complained or disputed the charges; he generated a paper trail in the form of credit card charges, phone records, etc. Finding him would be trivial for the courts.
All he could do once the matter came to light was cut and run, which he didn't do (might be overconfidence, ignorance or stupidity).
Just about everyone I know my own age (late 20s to early 30s) has a tough time making the bills but also has a nice big flat screen tv, lot's of DVDs and multiple gaming systems. Cry me a river...
I'm (as of this writing) 27.
No TV, flatscreen or otherwise. I own a handful of DVDs, which I watch on my computer. Said computer is not a top of the line model; I do use it for gaming, but generally lag behind technologically (i.e. play games released a while ago, and don't upgrade often). I own no other game systems. I don't own a car. No cell phone. My mp3 player was state of the art about half a decade back.
And most of what I just said applies to the other people I know my own age - some own cars, or have gaming systems or TVs, but they aren't sitting on a fortune in consumer goods, and tend to have items that aren't state of the art.
I generally don't have much trouble paying the bills, but I also have a family that's helped me through the tough times where I've been short. Had I been completely self-sufficient during those times, I would have had trouble making ends meet, despite living frugally. And during the times when money was tight, I had no room to tighten my belt, as there was nothing in my budget I could part with easily.
Know what this means? Anecdotal evidence doesn't prove shit. My anecdotal evidence contradicts your anecdotal evidence, and neither of us has actual data to support the assumption that our way of life is "the norm". In future, do not make unsupported generalizations based solely on your own experiences.
You don't think most of the people at the top aren't sociopaths?
At the very top? Hell yes. I'd go so far as to say all but an handful are.
My proposed solution was more a prevention than a cure. Those currently at the top will all eventually die or retire, leaving their posts open to new executives. Screen the ones on their way up to weed out those without empathy or ethics, and the problem is prevented. It won't fix much in the short term, but would work in the long term, provided loopholes were removed (most sociopaths are excellent loophole exploiters).
These corporate sociopath CEO's...
I'm beginning to wonder if the best solution might be a law mandating that certain jobs require a psych evaluation before hiring. Confidential, of course. The specific criteria being conditions likely to lead to abuse of power, like antisocial personality disorder (aka psychopathy or sociopathy, two terms now out of use).
Put another way, "sociopaths" assume leadership positions in business precisely they aren't held back by conventional barriers, like empathy or ethics. They can out-compete regular folks by lying, cheating, and generally screwing over their fellow man, giving them an edge over any competition that won't stoop to their level. Screening them out would level the playing field for people who aren't complete and utter bastards.
Jobs that might benefit from such screening include corporate executives, senior government bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, law enforcement officers, lawyers and possibly others I've overlooked.
Road and rail systems are also fixed, undefended infrastructure, yet they aren't terrorist magnets, nor does damaging them "kill trade". Terrorists do occasionally hit the rail system, though they prefer passenger rail (subways being the really obvious example).
I think you need to re-examine the word "terrorist". A terrorist does not seek to blow stuff up for shits and giggles, he seeks to kill or terrorize people, usually people the terrorist has some beef with (politically, religiously, racially, whatever). The damage to infrastructure is incidental. If you give a terrorist a bomb and free reign to choose a target, they'll choose somewhere crowded with whatever group they want to hurt.
Deliberate infrastructure damage is more a military way of thinking, i.e. crippling supply lines. A spy or saboteur working for an enemy power in wartime would target fixed infrastructure in the hopes of damaging the war effort. And, in fact, that does happen; railways were one such target once upon a time. The solution in the past was redundancy and not over-relying on single points of failure. An internet-like transport system would actually be a step forward for redundancy.
You're assuming he meant something like sex-ed, where it's an optional side-course that gets taught to kids once, and never brought up again. Whereas I read "add to curriculum" to mean something more akin to basic coursework, i.e. you're taught it more than once and in more detail. And yes, that stuff does stick, albeit only if you find ways to use it in life.
Frankly, the school system could use a "life skills" branch in addition to the basic language/math/science/history you're compelled to take. Not just finances, but also really simple, useful stuff that most people otherwise end up learning in their twenties on their own, like how to do basic domestic repairs, how to interpret nutritional data, how to administer basic first aid, etc. Stuff everyone needs to know.
Also, re: fixing violence, grammar and health. The first example is actually counterproductive to your argument, given that the rate of youth violence has been dropping for decades. I doubt this has anything to do with the school system, but the notion that violence is worse today than it was in an earlier era is pure nostalgic fiction. Grammar I'm not even going to bother with. Health, however, I think you've got a valid point.
Which will, of course, be picked up be the media as "NASA finds extraterrestrials!" instead of the more accurate "NASA finds preliminary evidence of microbial life." And then stupid people will feel betrayed when it's explained to them that, no, this does not mean little grey men with probes.
Why people continue to fall for sensationalist reporting is beyond me, it's getting really really predictable. Or maybe I'm just getting old.