I didn't say anything one way or the other about other security measures. The entirety of my comment was about the whole "people will never let a plane be hijacked in this post 9/11 world" mentality.
Hijacking planes is stupid anyway, from a terror causing standpoint. They don't want hostages for leverage - they just want a body count. There are much easier ways to get a high body count.
This slightly restores my faith in humanity. I showed it to a friend of mine last night and she wondered if perhaps they had just recruited some developmentally delayed people to "act" in the commercial. The female client going crazy with the clapping was the thing that made that seem feasible.
I don't think you're wrong - actually, I suspect that much of the point you make is a large part of the reason that terrorist attacks have been, by and large, pretty spectacular but not really devastating. And it still links up with my main point - the terrorists are not, by and large, particularly intelligent or capable of getting anything really big done. The original comment indicated that engineers would be popular recruits for their ability to get things done; I don't believe that it actually takes much in the way of engineering aptitude or intelligence to pull off attacks as they have been OR the kinds of attacks I'm imagining.
In fact, the very fact that I can imagine what would likely be far more devastating attacks demonstrates this nicely - I know nothing about terrorism past what a layperson with a vague interest in it due to current events might have, yet I can easily imagine some pretty scary and simple things; certainly people with training, an actual axe to grind, and the means and will to grind it should be much, much "better" - yet they don't seem to be all that capable.
A trained engineer as a terrorist would be overkill; teenage boys with access to the anarchist's cookbook seem like they'd be sufficiently capable of the kinds of things that have been done now, you know?
You might try being civil. You know, that means not using disparaging terms to attempt to belittle the people you're having discussions with. As it is, whatever point you might believe you're making, however valid it may be, was lost in the noise of your insults and attitude. Mission accomplished, I guess, if your intent was to simply cause someone to ignore you from here on out rather than to attempt a discussion.
The kinds of attacks I'm imagining would also be high profile, they'd just be much less likely to be preventable, much less likely to consume the attackers, and much, much more likely to completely drive people into a frenzy far worse than 9/11. Additionally, they'd be impossible to censor since they'd be happening in more areas, thus having a higher chance of being local.
I guess what I'm saying is that the things they're doing these days - idiot with a shoe bomb, idiots wit "liquid" bombs, idiot setting off a firecracker - are yes, increasing the level of "security theater" and making it more obnoxious, but they're also making people less afraid in general because many are becoming cynical and pushing back against some of the absurdity. I would think that the goal of any terrorist organization would be to make people more afraid and more willing to accept committing to ridiculous reductions in personal freedoms, more willing to accept a government acting monstrously, to kind of prove how bankrupt the US is. This worked at first, but it's gotten to a point now where the pendulum is starting to swing back - that's not good for those organizations' aims, I am sure.
Ultimately, I think they don't "get" us, except in superficial ways, and thus can't really get a handle on what will really be decisively damaging. My father told me about Japanese soldiers during WW2 screaming things about Babe Ruth and otherwise hurling insults, thinking it would demoralize the troops; the kinds of attacks we've seen so far seem to be a slightly more effective version of that, but ultimately backfiring.
Good for us, but really it does not speak well for the intelligence and effectiveness of the terrorist organizations, and that was the comment I was initially responding to.
Except the ones who have pulled them off have been really bad at it. I can think of dozens of types of attacks that would be FAR more lethal, FAR more terrifying, FAR more crippling, FAR less expensive in terms of operatives & materiel, FAR easier to accomplish/less subject to variability than the attacks that have happened.
After 9/11, we responded with the Patriot Act and some ridiculous jingoism. Had the terrorists actually been smart we'd be living in martial law right now with a populace too terrified to leave the house.
Honestly, I think the reason there haven't been any successful US-bound hijackings is because there haven't needed to be any, NOT because USians have somehow been transformed into bad-ass Rambo clones due to 9/11.
The fact of the matter is, despite the fact that the flight deck hasn't been breached in any of these hijackings, passengers didn't get up to stop them. I don't know, but I suspect that during a hijacking there isn't exactly a whole lot of high-quality information being circulated; certainly if there are so many people willing to rush the hijackers, SOMEONE might not be aware that the cockpit hasn't been breached, and certainly on at least one of those flights there would be at least one person who was willing to rush them, if 9/11 was the game changer some people keep on insisting it was.
Mind you, I don't disagree that, were a US flight hijacked it's very likely that there would be some resistance - but I really don't think it's as sure a thing as people seem to think and be claiming. Also, while I won't go into details, if someone just wants to destroy a plane in flight, there are quite a few ways to do it without needing to worry about the other passengers. And finally, if someone did want to do LOTS of damage to the US - and I mean truly crippling damage - there are MUCH easier ways to go about doing it than hijacking planes and crashing them into things. Frankly, people just fail to have much imagination, I think. Why hijack when there are easier, more destructive and much more insidious ways to fight?
So there were no US citizens on any of those planes? Or that the ones who were on the planes didn't learn anything from 9/11? Or that of the thousands of people who have been on hijacked planes since 9/11, not one of them thought "Gee, this might end badly, perhaps I should do something?"
There were 2 things about WoW that made it pale for me over time: Finding dungeon groups as a casual player and the massive quality/functionality disparity between vanilla (Azeroth) and expansion (Burning Crusade & Wrath of the Lich King) areas.
This patch makes it likely that my extremely casual self will be able to find a group - I dislike joining guilds because it feels like there's always going to be drama over the whole casual vs. raider mentality. Not only that, but even in a guild, unless it's a really big one, it's still hard to find groups. Here now I'll be able to just join Pick Up Groups and do stuff. Woo!
The expansion that is coming out - from what I've read they are COMPLETELY redoing the original world to make it more integrated with everything else, higher quality, all that stuff. It will be interesting to see how it works out.
Anyway, they just got me to renew for 3 months - I stopped playing a while back - oy.
How would they be able to do that? I'm really interested in the technical challenge of proving that.
Even if they gave you the source code for any software and let you compile it yourself, there's still ROMs etc. inside the thing that could contain the featureset. I don't think there is a practical way to accomplish this, so you're probably going to be wanting to stay with the dead tree editions.
Given how much trust we place in various things nowadays - automatic updates for software (or just trusting that, say, Mozilla won't fuck us over and publish one set of source code while the updates they push contain something nefarious) - and how much we rely on technology for pretty much everything, I'd say you probably have better things to worry about than the Kindle nuking your books. I'd be vastly more worried about pretty much any other gadget I use regularly doing skeevy stuff - phone, ATMs, credit registers, anything with an RFID chip in it, computer.
With my Kindle (got it as a gift, love it) and my iPod, I just strip the DRM off of anything I buy (assuming I can't find a DRM-free version for whatever it is I'm buying). Takes very little time since I mostly have the process automated. I make backups - then if someone wants to put something down the memory hole I can restore it.
One of the biggies in this war is Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) - surviving explosions, surviving shots to the helmet - I wonder if we'll be swapping out a lot of dead soldiers for ones suffering extreme brain injury.
A friend of mine just came back from Germany. He lost both of his legs and has TBI caused mood swings like you wouldn't believe, and pretty much looks like it will wreck his family. Staving off death is one thing (and good); making life after injury worth living is another.
Bitch about results from research being "obvious," as if looking into it doesn't serve a purpose.
See, there's this thing called a "hypothesis" which is a guess (usually pretty well informed) about how something might work. Then - and I know this sounds just totally crazy - but then you *test* that hypothesis by collecting data that's relevant. Insane, right? But that whole process is kind of a big deal as far as the whole "science" thing goes, if you're at all into that.
About the "obviousness" of it... My father thinks it's "obvious" that kids who use technology are sub-literate morons because they send texts like "OMG IDK MY BFF JILL" and don't know how to use proper capitalization and spelling in email due to a reliance on spell-check and a "close enough is good enough" mentality. Gosh, if only there were some way to test one "obvious" idea against another completely opposed "obvious" idea!
This is a site largely frequented by nerds. I would expect a bit more scientific literacy, but "obviously" that's just not the case here. I guess eldavojohn is "obviously" a moron.
You can't do anything about it because you're a sheep, and you're willing to accept whatever the world hands you as the way it is because you don't have the gumption to try and make things better. This guy does.
A reasonable person adapts themselves to the world; an unreasonable person adapts the world to themselves; all progress is made by unreasonable people.
Are church congregations usually engaging in clandestine competitive activities?
I think you're trying to push this model past the intent and scope. I didn't get the idea that this is supposed to be some grand unifying theory of group dynamics that can apply to ANY kind of grouping of human beings, but rather that it was being used to explore groups of a fairly specific type.
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely don't think this is epochal in impact on the field or, likely, all that important actually; people put forth models of group dynamics *all* *the* *time* so this isn't anything terribly exciting. My initial response was to point out that this isn't about "Oh, gee, there are dynamics to groups of humans!" but that it was about trying to apply a model that works on one group of a given type to another, unrelated, group with some similar characteristics.
I don't think anyone needs to "legitimize" WoW (or any of those other things) - our recreational habits, as a species, have long been acceptable subjects for academics. I'd say that if "sports medicine" can be a legitimate field of study, then certainly looking at various types of entertainment that consume a LOT of time from millions of people from very different cultures from across the globe is probably pretty legit to look at.
Actually, going totally tangential - why would anyone think WoW isn't worth looking at? It's a business that has over 10 million repeat customers spending god only knows how many hours a month using the product. The customers come from virtually every single country, every single demographic group, every single line of work/school. You have large groups of people gathering to work co-operatively (or not) to achieve somewhat complicated goals, often times without even speaking much of the same language except for a form of pidgin. You also have entire side industries that have sprung up around the game (gold selling/farming, power leveling services, etc.). You have thousands of people developing (usually free!) software add-ons to make the gameplay more efficient. You have tens of thousands of websites dedicated to the game.
I'd say anyone who thinks that examining various angles the phenomenon of WoW is not legitimate is actually not terribly bright. It may seem silly at first, but giving it even a moment's thought reveals some pretty amazing things that are worth trying to understand.
I don't disagree with you about the politicking/showmanship going on, except perhaps in scale.
The clandestine issue - actually, any guild that is trying out a new strategy/trying to come up with something first does go about it clandestinely at first because they don't want to help other guilds by giving them ideas. An acquaintance of mine who was in one of the top WoW guilds shared with me some of the absurd levels of paranoia about strategies that his guild was using and the dire threats given to members of the guild who were found to have violated their promise of secrecy. At one point the GM actually sent out individual emails detailing the strategy (with key points left out of it) and intentionally misspelled different words in each email as a way of possibly keeping tabs on who leaked what, if a leak ever happened.
Once they've achieved their world first, and maybe made it routine, THEN they open up about how they did it to show the world what special people they are. Which, actually, strikes me very much like the behavior of gangsters who've managed to succeed a bit (but not the ones who don't get busted - those guys keep their mouths shut)
Except that exercising the right to "smoke in a public space" can actually cause problems for other people. Marrying whatever consenting adult you want does nothing to anyone. So you see, I'm actually not just being arbitrary here in how I define basic human rights as you seem to imagine.
You might find the world to be a more interesting place if you seek to understand the concept of nuance.
And wow, what a delayed response to this silly thread!
Did you miss the part about how there's a model for the interaction, and that model is valid for both groups (gangs and WoW guilds)?
While this is nowhere near the same in impact as Newton's work, your comment would be akin to someone saying, "Duh, dumbass, we already KNEW things would fall if you drop them!"
In other words, you seem to have missed the whole point - this is about a possible verification of a model for human group dynamics, not about the existence of group dynamics. There is a difference, rather a large one.
You're preaching to the choir, man. Like I said, it's just insane to me that anyone would think that a picture making Michelle Obama look like a monkey is racist, because obviously it's a comment on Michelle Obama, and her race was COMPLETELY unimportant to the person who created it. I'm sure they feel awful at how their attempts at satire might be misconstrued by some as race baiting. The image was most likely an attempt to remark on how, as a girl, Michelle liked climbing trees.
Frankly, I'm astounded at how willing people are to think that some critics of the Obamas are based on race. Why, I still remember the incredibly sensitive question asked at the Republica National Convention - "Will we still be able to call it the 'White House'?" Obviously, those fine people were simply worried the Obamas might not feel at home! And the pictures where he's shown eating Watermelon, fried chicken, and smoking Kools - it was really just a comment on what a laid back, casual guy he is. Certainly the "Go Back To Africa" posters at some tea parties are really just concerned Americans who want Obama to pay attention to the tragedy in Darfur and the plight of many in that country. And the people who want to see his birth certificate, that's just because it's really important to them to make sure that all the i's are dotted and t's crossed so there won't be an asterisk next to his presidency. There is absolutely no racism involved in any of these things.
In fact, people should be ashamed of themselves for even thinking that a picture of Michelle Obama - who *happens* to be black - that is made to look like a monkey has anything to do with race. If you think it might be racist, why, that just makes them racist for even thinking such thoughts! Only when we are free to use imagery that has traditionally been used to dehumanize blacks in this country will we truly be a color blind nation!
Well, to be fair, in the US our Left and Right are really more like "Center-Right and TOTALLY FUCKING INSANE" when translated to most Metric/European political models.
I have less of a problem with well meaning meddlers attempting to protect their precious snowflakes from porn, violence and unhealthy dietary habits than I do with people attempting to change the constitution to deny rights to others.
Show me where people on the left are attempting to pass legislation that codifies the explicit removal of basic human rights and I'll definitely agree Left and Right are equally bad in their efforts to "protect" people. And by "basic human rights" I don't mean things like "smoking in a bar" I mean "marrying the consenting adult of your choice" and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say anything one way or the other about other security measures. The entirety of my comment was about the whole "people will never let a plane be hijacked in this post 9/11 world" mentality.
Hijacking planes is stupid anyway, from a terror causing standpoint. They don't want hostages for leverage - they just want a body count. There are much easier ways to get a high body count.
This slightly restores my faith in humanity. I showed it to a friend of mine last night and she wondered if perhaps they had just recruited some developmentally delayed people to "act" in the commercial. The female client going crazy with the clapping was the thing that made that seem feasible.
I don't think you're wrong - actually, I suspect that much of the point you make is a large part of the reason that terrorist attacks have been, by and large, pretty spectacular but not really devastating. And it still links up with my main point - the terrorists are not, by and large, particularly intelligent or capable of getting anything really big done. The original comment indicated that engineers would be popular recruits for their ability to get things done; I don't believe that it actually takes much in the way of engineering aptitude or intelligence to pull off attacks as they have been OR the kinds of attacks I'm imagining.
In fact, the very fact that I can imagine what would likely be far more devastating attacks demonstrates this nicely - I know nothing about terrorism past what a layperson with a vague interest in it due to current events might have, yet I can easily imagine some pretty scary and simple things; certainly people with training, an actual axe to grind, and the means and will to grind it should be much, much "better" - yet they don't seem to be all that capable.
A trained engineer as a terrorist would be overkill; teenage boys with access to the anarchist's cookbook seem like they'd be sufficiently capable of the kinds of things that have been done now, you know?
You might try being civil. You know, that means not using disparaging terms to attempt to belittle the people you're having discussions with. As it is, whatever point you might believe you're making, however valid it may be, was lost in the noise of your insults and attitude. Mission accomplished, I guess, if your intent was to simply cause someone to ignore you from here on out rather than to attempt a discussion.
The kinds of attacks I'm imagining would also be high profile, they'd just be much less likely to be preventable, much less likely to consume the attackers, and much, much more likely to completely drive people into a frenzy far worse than 9/11. Additionally, they'd be impossible to censor since they'd be happening in more areas, thus having a higher chance of being local.
I guess what I'm saying is that the things they're doing these days - idiot with a shoe bomb, idiots wit "liquid" bombs, idiot setting off a firecracker - are yes, increasing the level of "security theater" and making it more obnoxious, but they're also making people less afraid in general because many are becoming cynical and pushing back against some of the absurdity. I would think that the goal of any terrorist organization would be to make people more afraid and more willing to accept committing to ridiculous reductions in personal freedoms, more willing to accept a government acting monstrously, to kind of prove how bankrupt the US is. This worked at first, but it's gotten to a point now where the pendulum is starting to swing back - that's not good for those organizations' aims, I am sure.
Ultimately, I think they don't "get" us, except in superficial ways, and thus can't really get a handle on what will really be decisively damaging. My father told me about Japanese soldiers during WW2 screaming things about Babe Ruth and otherwise hurling insults, thinking it would demoralize the troops; the kinds of attacks we've seen so far seem to be a slightly more effective version of that, but ultimately backfiring.
Good for us, but really it does not speak well for the intelligence and effectiveness of the terrorist organizations, and that was the comment I was initially responding to.
Except the ones who have pulled them off have been really bad at it. I can think of dozens of types of attacks that would be FAR more lethal, FAR more terrifying, FAR more crippling, FAR less expensive in terms of operatives & materiel, FAR easier to accomplish/less subject to variability than the attacks that have happened.
After 9/11, we responded with the Patriot Act and some ridiculous jingoism. Had the terrorists actually been smart we'd be living in martial law right now with a populace too terrified to leave the house.
I had never seen that before. My god. My god. It's... how? Who thought that was a good idea?
Can't sleep... Songsmith will eat me...
My MacBook can run iPhone apps. I guess it must be running a version of OS X that's identical to the iPhone version too, eh?
Honestly, I think the reason there haven't been any successful US-bound hijackings is because there haven't needed to be any, NOT because USians have somehow been transformed into bad-ass Rambo clones due to 9/11.
The fact of the matter is, despite the fact that the flight deck hasn't been breached in any of these hijackings, passengers didn't get up to stop them. I don't know, but I suspect that during a hijacking there isn't exactly a whole lot of high-quality information being circulated; certainly if there are so many people willing to rush the hijackers, SOMEONE might not be aware that the cockpit hasn't been breached, and certainly on at least one of those flights there would be at least one person who was willing to rush them, if 9/11 was the game changer some people keep on insisting it was.
Mind you, I don't disagree that, were a US flight hijacked it's very likely that there would be some resistance - but I really don't think it's as sure a thing as people seem to think and be claiming. Also, while I won't go into details, if someone just wants to destroy a plane in flight, there are quite a few ways to do it without needing to worry about the other passengers. And finally, if someone did want to do LOTS of damage to the US - and I mean truly crippling damage - there are MUCH easier ways to go about doing it than hijacking planes and crashing them into things. Frankly, people just fail to have much imagination, I think. Why hijack when there are easier, more destructive and much more insidious ways to fight?
So there were no US citizens on any of those planes? Or that the ones who were on the planes didn't learn anything from 9/11? Or that of the thousands of people who have been on hijacked planes since 9/11, not one of them thought "Gee, this might end badly, perhaps I should do something?"
I find that to be pretty improbable.
If 9/11 changed the rules as you say, then why have there been several successful (read: control of the plane was taken) hijackings since then?
People like to say the rules have changed, but the fact that successful hijackings have occurred since then demonstrates that is just plain wrong.
... they pull me back in.
There were 2 things about WoW that made it pale for me over time: Finding dungeon groups as a casual player and the massive quality/functionality disparity between vanilla (Azeroth) and expansion (Burning Crusade & Wrath of the Lich King) areas.
This patch makes it likely that my extremely casual self will be able to find a group - I dislike joining guilds because it feels like there's always going to be drama over the whole casual vs. raider mentality. Not only that, but even in a guild, unless it's a really big one, it's still hard to find groups. Here now I'll be able to just join Pick Up Groups and do stuff. Woo!
The expansion that is coming out - from what I've read they are COMPLETELY redoing the original world to make it more integrated with everything else, higher quality, all that stuff. It will be interesting to see how it works out.
Anyway, they just got me to renew for 3 months - I stopped playing a while back - oy.
How would they be able to do that? I'm really interested in the technical challenge of proving that.
Even if they gave you the source code for any software and let you compile it yourself, there's still ROMs etc. inside the thing that could contain the featureset. I don't think there is a practical way to accomplish this, so you're probably going to be wanting to stay with the dead tree editions.
Given how much trust we place in various things nowadays - automatic updates for software (or just trusting that, say, Mozilla won't fuck us over and publish one set of source code while the updates they push contain something nefarious) - and how much we rely on technology for pretty much everything, I'd say you probably have better things to worry about than the Kindle nuking your books. I'd be vastly more worried about pretty much any other gadget I use regularly doing skeevy stuff - phone, ATMs, credit registers, anything with an RFID chip in it, computer.
With my Kindle (got it as a gift, love it) and my iPod, I just strip the DRM off of anything I buy (assuming I can't find a DRM-free version for whatever it is I'm buying). Takes very little time since I mostly have the process automated. I make backups - then if someone wants to put something down the memory hole I can restore it.
They have socialized medicine over there; the wait time is a bitch!
(For government health care, but I couldn't pass up the joke even so)
One of the biggies in this war is Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) - surviving explosions, surviving shots to the helmet - I wonder if we'll be swapping out a lot of dead soldiers for ones suffering extreme brain injury.
A friend of mine just came back from Germany. He lost both of his legs and has TBI caused mood swings like you wouldn't believe, and pretty much looks like it will wreck his family. Staving off death is one thing (and good); making life after injury worth living is another.
Bitch about results from research being "obvious," as if looking into it doesn't serve a purpose.
See, there's this thing called a "hypothesis" which is a guess (usually pretty well informed) about how something might work. Then - and I know this sounds just totally crazy - but then you *test* that hypothesis by collecting data that's relevant. Insane, right? But that whole process is kind of a big deal as far as the whole "science" thing goes, if you're at all into that.
About the "obviousness" of it... My father thinks it's "obvious" that kids who use technology are sub-literate morons because they send texts like "OMG IDK MY BFF JILL" and don't know how to use proper capitalization and spelling in email due to a reliance on spell-check and a "close enough is good enough" mentality. Gosh, if only there were some way to test one "obvious" idea against another completely opposed "obvious" idea!
This is a site largely frequented by nerds. I would expect a bit more scientific literacy, but "obviously" that's just not the case here. I guess eldavojohn is "obviously" a moron.
It's very sad that you're essentially handicapping yourself by being so meek and accepting.
And a one-legged man has in fact, climbed Mount Everest.
http://www.distant.ca/UselessFacts/fact.asp?ID=129
Here's a double-amputee who did it:
http://www.brighthub.com/education/special/reviews/38900.aspx
Even when we try and fail, we at least tried. You don't even care to do that. I feel nothing but pity for you.
You can't do anything about it because you're a sheep, and you're willing to accept whatever the world hands you as the way it is because you don't have the gumption to try and make things better. This guy does.
A reasonable person adapts themselves to the world; an unreasonable person adapts the world to themselves; all progress is made by unreasonable people.
Are church congregations usually engaging in clandestine competitive activities?
I think you're trying to push this model past the intent and scope. I didn't get the idea that this is supposed to be some grand unifying theory of group dynamics that can apply to ANY kind of grouping of human beings, but rather that it was being used to explore groups of a fairly specific type.
Don't get me wrong - I absolutely don't think this is epochal in impact on the field or, likely, all that important actually; people put forth models of group dynamics *all* *the* *time* so this isn't anything terribly exciting. My initial response was to point out that this isn't about "Oh, gee, there are dynamics to groups of humans!" but that it was about trying to apply a model that works on one group of a given type to another, unrelated, group with some similar characteristics.
I don't think anyone needs to "legitimize" WoW (or any of those other things) - our recreational habits, as a species, have long been acceptable subjects for academics. I'd say that if "sports medicine" can be a legitimate field of study, then certainly looking at various types of entertainment that consume a LOT of time from millions of people from very different cultures from across the globe is probably pretty legit to look at.
Actually, going totally tangential - why would anyone think WoW isn't worth looking at? It's a business that has over 10 million repeat customers spending god only knows how many hours a month using the product. The customers come from virtually every single country, every single demographic group, every single line of work/school. You have large groups of people gathering to work co-operatively (or not) to achieve somewhat complicated goals, often times without even speaking much of the same language except for a form of pidgin. You also have entire side industries that have sprung up around the game (gold selling/farming, power leveling services, etc.). You have thousands of people developing (usually free!) software add-ons to make the gameplay more efficient. You have tens of thousands of websites dedicated to the game.
I'd say anyone who thinks that examining various angles the phenomenon of WoW is not legitimate is actually not terribly bright. It may seem silly at first, but giving it even a moment's thought reveals some pretty amazing things that are worth trying to understand.
I don't disagree with you about the politicking/showmanship going on, except perhaps in scale.
The clandestine issue - actually, any guild that is trying out a new strategy/trying to come up with something first does go about it clandestinely at first because they don't want to help other guilds by giving them ideas. An acquaintance of mine who was in one of the top WoW guilds shared with me some of the absurd levels of paranoia about strategies that his guild was using and the dire threats given to members of the guild who were found to have violated their promise of secrecy. At one point the GM actually sent out individual emails detailing the strategy (with key points left out of it) and intentionally misspelled different words in each email as a way of possibly keeping tabs on who leaked what, if a leak ever happened.
Once they've achieved their world first, and maybe made it routine, THEN they open up about how they did it to show the world what special people they are. Which, actually, strikes me very much like the behavior of gangsters who've managed to succeed a bit (but not the ones who don't get busted - those guys keep their mouths shut)
Except that exercising the right to "smoke in a public space" can actually cause problems for other people. Marrying whatever consenting adult you want does nothing to anyone. So you see, I'm actually not just being arbitrary here in how I define basic human rights as you seem to imagine.
You might find the world to be a more interesting place if you seek to understand the concept of nuance.
And wow, what a delayed response to this silly thread!
Did you miss the part about how there's a model for the interaction, and that model is valid for both groups (gangs and WoW guilds)?
While this is nowhere near the same in impact as Newton's work, your comment would be akin to someone saying, "Duh, dumbass, we already KNEW things would fall if you drop them!"
In other words, you seem to have missed the whole point - this is about a possible verification of a model for human group dynamics, not about the existence of group dynamics. There is a difference, rather a large one.
You're preaching to the choir, man. Like I said, it's just insane to me that anyone would think that a picture making Michelle Obama look like a monkey is racist, because obviously it's a comment on Michelle Obama, and her race was COMPLETELY unimportant to the person who created it. I'm sure they feel awful at how their attempts at satire might be misconstrued by some as race baiting. The image was most likely an attempt to remark on how, as a girl, Michelle liked climbing trees.
Frankly, I'm astounded at how willing people are to think that some critics of the Obamas are based on race. Why, I still remember the incredibly sensitive question asked at the Republica National Convention - "Will we still be able to call it the 'White House'?" Obviously, those fine people were simply worried the Obamas might not feel at home! And the pictures where he's shown eating Watermelon, fried chicken, and smoking Kools - it was really just a comment on what a laid back, casual guy he is. Certainly the "Go Back To Africa" posters at some tea parties are really just concerned Americans who want Obama to pay attention to the tragedy in Darfur and the plight of many in that country. And the people who want to see his birth certificate, that's just because it's really important to them to make sure that all the i's are dotted and t's crossed so there won't be an asterisk next to his presidency. There is absolutely no racism involved in any of these things.
In fact, people should be ashamed of themselves for even thinking that a picture of Michelle Obama - who *happens* to be black - that is made to look like a monkey has anything to do with race. If you think it might be racist, why, that just makes them racist for even thinking such thoughts! Only when we are free to use imagery that has traditionally been used to dehumanize blacks in this country will we truly be a color blind nation!
Well, to be fair, in the US our Left and Right are really more like "Center-Right and TOTALLY FUCKING INSANE" when translated to most Metric/European political models.
Not all nannyism is the same, however.
I have less of a problem with well meaning meddlers attempting to protect their precious snowflakes from porn, violence and unhealthy dietary habits than I do with people attempting to change the constitution to deny rights to others.
Show me where people on the left are attempting to pass legislation that codifies the explicit removal of basic human rights and I'll definitely agree Left and Right are equally bad in their efforts to "protect" people. And by "basic human rights" I don't mean things like "smoking in a bar" I mean "marrying the consenting adult of your choice" and the like.