Compare to the NSA Echelon and Cybersecurity data centers. (Heck, consider on-the-books programs like various planes and ships over recent history.) Our current economic system has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to spend oodles of money on military projects with little long-term-investment economic benefit (beyond the salaries of the people involved), so why should the Empire be less capable, especially if it has a lot more member states (and combinatorically-more interstate commerce!) to tax? Skimming the fractional hundredths off rounding should have paid for the whole thing without anyone ever noticing until it was too late.
If you want to think of REAL tech problems, consider that the Death Star was probably built (like the Gemini 6 Titan II) by the lowest bidder.
This characterization that "the Internet" got it wrong is such a lie.
OTOH It wouldn't be the first time that people jumped to conclusions on incomplete information, and it wouldn't be the first time that the anonymity and distance of the Internet led people to be stupid about their reactions. The internet DOES get it wrong sometimes.
A knife or a baseball bat are slower weapons. Much less likely to kill multiple people in the time you can empty a clip. And since you have to get within arm's length, much more chance that the attacker is in danger, including longer exposure to action by others. Heck, you can hit someone with a barstool, but the odds are you only get one hit on one person before the bartender coshes you. (And I did have some training.) Finally, hand weapons are less likely to kill someone other than their target, like by going through and hitting the person behind, or missing and hitting the person all the way across the room.
Unless EVERYBODY gets training. And I mean EVERYBODY, every single person, male, female, undecided, whatever. In the course of that training, they also get evaluated - HARSHLY. Then the top 1/4 or so get permits if they enlist as deputy peace officers, and the bottom 1/4 are prohibited from EVER getting permits.
My concern is what percentage of those people who "pull out a piece" are the sort of aggressive bullies who also shoot people for an unintended slight at a bar, and who become the sort of vigilantes who themselves have to be hunted down and stopped.
"4 dead". So if someone was shot and first aid got there fast enough that he/she didn't die, it doesn't count? How about permanently crippled, it doesn't count? Or the person was just a lousy shot - or a freakin SADIST - who didn't aim for direct kill shots, it doesn't count?
I lived in NYC during the 1970s, and I consider being *anywhere* near a gang or drug shooting scene to be closer than I want to be ever again. For people living anywhere near such activity - especially any closer than I did - I'd think it terrorizes them. So I would include those cases of drug dealers shooting at drug dealers as part of the problem.
“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”
OTOH Alexi Panshin, "Star Well", pointed out that a bully will be more likely to practice and rehearse for dueling, and more likely to either pick fights or take umbrage for no reason, simply for the entertainment of shooting people.
but could some individuals be particularly susceptible,
No.
There are average humans, and then there are professional athletes, and then there are Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky and Cy Young who set enduring records. Can we test for those exceptional abilities *objectively*, rather than in competition (which introduces a dependency on the quality and nature of the competition)? No. Can we know in advance which individual has those exceptional abilities? Also no. I submit that this is the exact same case, on the other end, of some individuals being particularly susceptible. Maybe some people's neurons just happen to be an exact number of wavelengths long, totally random and totally within the bell curve of "normal variation", and maybe there have been people with the exact same situation throughout the history of the human race - except none of them were living in dense broadcasting on AM and FM and wifi bands. Hell, some people in the same family sunburn faster than their siblings - they're more susceptible to EM radiation in the ultraviolet.
If EM radiation affected someone like constantly living under brighter sunlight (and burning), or like constantly living with loud random noise (which might affect people's concentration and communication), HOW WOULD WE KNOW? Autism is ridiculously higher than ever in history; are those people all getting constant stimulation directly at the optic or aural nerve endings so they are always disrupted? HOW WOULD WE KNOW FOR SURE? Yes, most of the complaints are nonsense, but if we are engineers and scientists we should measure and test before discarding valid reports with the nonsense. Maybe some people really DO need tinfoil hats.:-)
I don't believe in the wide-scale FUD Luddite-ism here, but . . . It is already conclusively shown that very strong EM fields can affect people's emotions, sway people to tell the truth, or have other mental effects. Multiple reports have been posted here on Slashdot. We assume that weak fields and signals don't bother people; but could some individuals be particularly susceptible, and would we be able to test for this susceptibility? It used to be only big cities with lots of broadcasting that had noticeable EM levels; now every household has multiple radio transmitters, some of them being carried in people's pockets. There was a science fiction story years ago about someone purporting to prove that telepathy is nonsense by making a machine that should block mental interaction effect, and when the machine gets turned on everyone goes nuts because it (presumably) even interfered with their brains talking to themselves. Would we even know if we were doing such a thing at a low level, akin to having loud noises in the background all the time?
What if - I know this sounds crazy, but just work with me here - what if someone really has a problem that only shows up in places that *appear* to be connected to dense EM activity? Do we have ways of testing people for unusual sensitivities? - a rhetorical question, because I know the answer is "no", my wife has an unusual allergy which does not show up in the normal tests and is inferred from reactions to three other tests.
I second the motion. I have always used a home-base-PC native email application as my core email archive (backed up, of course). Used to use Eudora until it folded, and have been using Thunderbird for many years. In fact, we have two separate copies of Thunderbird Portable Edition set up - personal and business, with completely different archive directories so that we don't accidentally cross them. (BTW my 90-year-old father in law is still on an ancient copy of Eudora, because he's used to it, and downloaded mail is something he can understand and work with by analogy to a post-office box. More importantly, a locally-running program is more accepting of his slow typing speed and reading speed than webmail, and was more reliable with his previously slow connection.)
This is yet another example of change for change's sake. It's not an anachronism, any more than a corkscrew is an anachronism. It's a simple machine, but it still does the job it was designed for, and does it well.
One, he's said a lot of what he had to say; two, some of what he had to say was based on his experiences at the time, and some of those experiences are by nature time-limited. Nobody stays the same.
Star Wars endures because of the nostalgia of the generation that saw the original versions when they were released (like me), which has aged into becoming the generation running various toy and merchandising companies. I truly feel sorry for people whose introduction to Star Wars was the hacked videos and the messy "prequels", because they did not experience the crowds leaping to their feet and CHEERING when the Millennium Falcon returns to the Death Star. (Is it still a spoiler if it's 40 years old? I say not.) (OTOH I find the recent discussion that Jar-Jar was supposed to be the secret Sith master, much as Yoda played the fool on first introduction, . . . . disturbing.)
Gun violence is gun violence. Doesn't matter if it's a terrorist or a robbery or a crazy person. The comparison is valid. The question should be, Why is it considered acceptable that so many people die from bullets in the US? If it were a disease, there would be a charity funding research into it.
At my company, totally different type of product, for years the sales and marketing people insisted that our customers were one sort of people who wanted very stable and solid appearances and preferred older-style interfaces . . . . . until they came back from a trade show screaming that WE NEED TOUCH SCREENS RIGHT NOW because half of our competitors have one. So, no, I have little respect for this approach.
If anyone, I'd talk to tech support about what the callers ask about. But that's not recorded, because our old-line engineers' attitude was that if the users couldn't just figure it out or RTFM then they shouldn't be controlling this kind of equipment.
I live in the NYC area, listening to news radio stations out of NYC, so this got equal airplay to the unattributed "security agency" quotes about "going dark". There was also a lot of official amazement at the degree of coordination and planning involved. Somehow it doesn't seem any more complicated than a bunch of friends getting together for a movie, even before the existence of cellphones - certainly not as complex as many flash-mob events. "The attacks were totally synchronized!" - like, ever hear of wearing a watch? All you have to do to avoid online detection is NOT WRITE ONLINE, just converse by phone, and keep the topic general.
The bible doesn't include instructions to CONTINUE being pre-medieval forever. Its followers tend to build and develop and invent and move into the future, rather than remaining in the century in which it was written. While you can certainly point to instances in the bible of the clan being given instructions that we would now consider inhumane, the scholars and teachers of the bible uniformly decry those instructions and that behavior, and preach against emulating it. Scripture, and the way that the group's teachers interpret it, create the culture that performs the atrocities; and the groups following that scripture you call "the bible" are not known for atrocities.
I'm inclined to blame the Republicans because they have had a consistent approach of overloading programs until they break, then point at the broken thing and say "Government doesn't work". Since they could neither stop nor kill Social Security, they added more and more beneficiary categories to help it go broke faster; same approach with other social programs, and I expect them to do the same turnaround on Obamacare. From an abstract games-theory standpoint, it's interestingly similar to Microsoft's embrace-and-extend approach to standards ("Oh, yes, we use the standard PLUS a few bonus things we think were helpful ..").
Simple charges of fraud, multiplied by the number of people defrauded (or at least the number of occurrences of extra charges for something supposedly "unlimited"). "Unlimited" is a word, in English, in the normal dictionary, and it has a clearly-defined meaning. It would be nice if some executive actually stood a chance of being punished for approving fraud. (BTW I think this applies even more to the bank debacle, in which companies paid fines but somehow no person was ever even accused of being responsible for any decision whatever.)
I will refrain from going all "Babylon 5" and demanding someone's head on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations . . . but it has its appeal . . .
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." I can't understand anyone who thinks streaming is better than media, because the bit rate is NEVER better - it cannot possibly be.
I like this approach. Punish the guilty, don't burden everyone else, and - the best bit - don't even bother punishing the guilty when it doesn't matter, so it's clearer to EVERYONE that when they're being punished they really deserve it. And, as you say, it emphasizes MANAGEMENT of resources rather than creating artificial scarcity.
It makes perfect sense - for them! - to change an agreement. The problem is that they can change it on you, and you have no leverage to change it on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Compare to the NSA Echelon and Cybersecurity data centers. (Heck, consider on-the-books programs like various planes and ships over recent history.) Our current economic system has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to spend oodles of money on military projects with little long-term-investment economic benefit (beyond the salaries of the people involved), so why should the Empire be less capable, especially if it has a lot more member states (and combinatorically-more interstate commerce!) to tax? Skimming the fractional hundredths off rounding should have paid for the whole thing without anyone ever noticing until it was too late.
If you want to think of REAL tech problems, consider that the Death Star was probably built (like the Gemini 6 Titan II) by the lowest bidder.
This characterization that "the Internet" got it wrong is such a lie.
OTOH It wouldn't be the first time that people jumped to conclusions on incomplete information, and it wouldn't be the first time that the anonymity and distance of the Internet led people to be stupid about their reactions. The internet DOES get it wrong sometimes.
A knife or a baseball bat are slower weapons. Much less likely to kill multiple people in the time you can empty a clip. And since you have to get within arm's length, much more chance that the attacker is in danger, including longer exposure to action by others. Heck, you can hit someone with a barstool, but the odds are you only get one hit on one person before the bartender coshes you. (And I did have some training.) Finally, hand weapons are less likely to kill someone other than their target, like by going through and hitting the person behind, or missing and hitting the person all the way across the room.
Unless EVERYBODY gets training. And I mean EVERYBODY, every single person, male, female, undecided, whatever. In the course of that training, they also get evaluated - HARSHLY. Then the top 1/4 or so get permits if they enlist as deputy peace officers, and the bottom 1/4 are prohibited from EVER getting permits.
My concern is what percentage of those people who "pull out a piece" are the sort of aggressive bullies who also shoot people for an unintended slight at a bar, and who become the sort of vigilantes who themselves have to be hunted down and stopped.
"4 dead". So if someone was shot and first aid got there fast enough that he/she didn't die, it doesn't count? How about permanently crippled, it doesn't count? Or the person was just a lousy shot - or a freakin SADIST - who didn't aim for direct kill shots, it doesn't count?
I lived in NYC during the 1970s, and I consider being *anywhere* near a gang or drug shooting scene to be closer than I want to be ever again. For people living anywhere near such activity - especially any closer than I did - I'd think it terrorizes them. So I would include those cases of drug dealers shooting at drug dealers as part of the problem.
“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” OTOH Alexi Panshin, "Star Well", pointed out that a bully will be more likely to practice and rehearse for dueling, and more likely to either pick fights or take umbrage for no reason, simply for the entertainment of shooting people.
but could some individuals be particularly susceptible,
No.
There are average humans, and then there are professional athletes, and then there are Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky and Cy Young who set enduring records. Can we test for those exceptional abilities *objectively*, rather than in competition (which introduces a dependency on the quality and nature of the competition)? No. Can we know in advance which individual has those exceptional abilities? Also no. I submit that this is the exact same case, on the other end, of some individuals being particularly susceptible. Maybe some people's neurons just happen to be an exact number of wavelengths long, totally random and totally within the bell curve of "normal variation", and maybe there have been people with the exact same situation throughout the history of the human race - except none of them were living in dense broadcasting on AM and FM and wifi bands. Hell, some people in the same family sunburn faster than their siblings - they're more susceptible to EM radiation in the ultraviolet.
:-)
If EM radiation affected someone like constantly living under brighter sunlight (and burning), or like constantly living with loud random noise (which might affect people's concentration and communication), HOW WOULD WE KNOW? Autism is ridiculously higher than ever in history; are those people all getting constant stimulation directly at the optic or aural nerve endings so they are always disrupted? HOW WOULD WE KNOW FOR SURE? Yes, most of the complaints are nonsense, but if we are engineers and scientists we should measure and test before discarding valid reports with the nonsense. Maybe some people really DO need tinfoil hats.
I don't believe in the wide-scale FUD Luddite-ism here, but . . . It is already conclusively shown that very strong EM fields can affect people's emotions, sway people to tell the truth, or have other mental effects. Multiple reports have been posted here on Slashdot. We assume that weak fields and signals don't bother people; but could some individuals be particularly susceptible, and would we be able to test for this susceptibility? It used to be only big cities with lots of broadcasting that had noticeable EM levels; now every household has multiple radio transmitters, some of them being carried in people's pockets. There was a science fiction story years ago about someone purporting to prove that telepathy is nonsense by making a machine that should block mental interaction effect, and when the machine gets turned on everyone goes nuts because it (presumably) even interfered with their brains talking to themselves. Would we even know if we were doing such a thing at a low level, akin to having loud noises in the background all the time?
What if - I know this sounds crazy, but just work with me here - what if someone really has a problem that only shows up in places that *appear* to be connected to dense EM activity? Do we have ways of testing people for unusual sensitivities? - a rhetorical question, because I know the answer is "no", my wife has an unusual allergy which does not show up in the normal tests and is inferred from reactions to three other tests.
I second the motion. I have always used a home-base-PC native email application as my core email archive (backed up, of course). Used to use Eudora until it folded, and have been using Thunderbird for many years. In fact, we have two separate copies of Thunderbird Portable Edition set up - personal and business, with completely different archive directories so that we don't accidentally cross them. (BTW my 90-year-old father in law is still on an ancient copy of Eudora, because he's used to it, and downloaded mail is something he can understand and work with by analogy to a post-office box. More importantly, a locally-running program is more accepting of his slow typing speed and reading speed than webmail, and was more reliable with his previously slow connection.)
This is yet another example of change for change's sake. It's not an anachronism, any more than a corkscrew is an anachronism. It's a simple machine, but it still does the job it was designed for, and does it well.
One, he's said a lot of what he had to say; two, some of what he had to say was based on his experiences at the time, and some of those experiences are by nature time-limited. Nobody stays the same.
Star Wars endures because of the nostalgia of the generation that saw the original versions when they were released (like me), which has aged into becoming the generation running various toy and merchandising companies. I truly feel sorry for people whose introduction to Star Wars was the hacked videos and the messy "prequels", because they did not experience the crowds leaping to their feet and CHEERING when the Millennium Falcon returns to the Death Star. (Is it still a spoiler if it's 40 years old? I say not.) (OTOH I find the recent discussion that Jar-Jar was supposed to be the secret Sith master, much as Yoda played the fool on first introduction, . . . . disturbing.)
Gun violence is gun violence. Doesn't matter if it's a terrorist or a robbery or a crazy person. The comparison is valid. The question should be, Why is it considered acceptable that so many people die from bullets in the US? If it were a disease, there would be a charity funding research into it.
At my company, totally different type of product, for years the sales and marketing people insisted that our customers were one sort of people who wanted very stable and solid appearances and preferred older-style interfaces . . . . . until they came back from a trade show screaming that WE NEED TOUCH SCREENS RIGHT NOW because half of our competitors have one. So, no, I have little respect for this approach.
If anyone, I'd talk to tech support about what the callers ask about. But that's not recorded, because our old-line engineers' attitude was that if the users couldn't just figure it out or RTFM then they shouldn't be controlling this kind of equipment.
I live in the NYC area, listening to news radio stations out of NYC, so this got equal airplay to the unattributed "security agency" quotes about "going dark". There was also a lot of official amazement at the degree of coordination and planning involved. Somehow it doesn't seem any more complicated than a bunch of friends getting together for a movie, even before the existence of cellphones - certainly not as complex as many flash-mob events. "The attacks were totally synchronized!" - like, ever hear of wearing a watch? All you have to do to avoid online detection is NOT WRITE ONLINE, just converse by phone, and keep the topic general.
The bible doesn't include instructions to CONTINUE being pre-medieval forever. Its followers tend to build and develop and invent and move into the future, rather than remaining in the century in which it was written. While you can certainly point to instances in the bible of the clan being given instructions that we would now consider inhumane, the scholars and teachers of the bible uniformly decry those instructions and that behavior, and preach against emulating it. Scripture, and the way that the group's teachers interpret it, create the culture that performs the atrocities; and the groups following that scripture you call "the bible" are not known for atrocities.
Oops. My memory played tricks on me - it's twelve edge OUT, not twelve edge first. My apologies.
That should be TWELVE edge first. Nine edge was for the old card sorters.
I'm inclined to blame the Republicans because they have had a consistent approach of overloading programs until they break, then point at the broken thing and say "Government doesn't work". Since they could neither stop nor kill Social Security, they added more and more beneficiary categories to help it go broke faster; same approach with other social programs, and I expect them to do the same turnaround on Obamacare. From an abstract games-theory standpoint, it's interestingly similar to Microsoft's embrace-and-extend approach to standards ("Oh, yes, we use the standard PLUS a few bonus things we think were helpful . .").
Simple charges of fraud, multiplied by the number of people defrauded (or at least the number of occurrences of extra charges for something supposedly "unlimited"). "Unlimited" is a word, in English, in the normal dictionary, and it has a clearly-defined meaning. It would be nice if some executive actually stood a chance of being punished for approving fraud. (BTW I think this applies even more to the bank debacle, in which companies paid fines but somehow no person was ever even accused of being responsible for any decision whatever.)
I will refrain from going all "Babylon 5" and demanding someone's head on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations . . . but it has its appeal . . .
Hey, I was wondering where the goatse went. And the alt.sex.hamsters.ducttape.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." I can't understand anyone who thinks streaming is better than media, because the bit rate is NEVER better - it cannot possibly be.
I like this approach. Punish the guilty, don't burden everyone else, and - the best bit - don't even bother punishing the guilty when it doesn't matter, so it's clearer to EVERYONE that when they're being punished they really deserve it. And, as you say, it emphasizes MANAGEMENT of resources rather than creating artificial scarcity.
It makes perfect sense - for them! - to change an agreement. The problem is that they can change it on you, and you have no leverage to change it on them.