Where did those informative mods come from? There certainly is a secret cow level. There was no secret cow level in Diablo 1, despite persistent rumours - the developers added one to D2 as a response. It's a classic example of developers having an in-joke with the players.
I'm surprised nobody has replied with this yet, but:
The only sensible answer I've heard is that police officers should be anonymous to protect themselves and their families from revenge by criminals. This is important when fighting organised crime. Being an ordinary police officer shouldn't prevent you from being an ordinary member of the public when you're off duty.
I could accept the above argument for protecting the identity of key members of the police, where investigations could be stopped by threatening or killing key officers. I wouldn't accept it for ordinary uniformed cops.
As an "America-hating Furriner" I'd like to say that I agree with your sentiment. The problem is that the people you describe already stay in their own country, from whence they make their crappy, far reaching decisions. Americans who choose to travel are the open minded, educated, polite ones who know there's actually something worth seeing outside the states.
Good comment. In the future I hope to see some kind of legally recognised "common carrier" status for sites like MySpace and Google. Make it so that you have to either have an 'open' membership where it's very hard to ban members without them doing something criminal involving the site and the owner is not liable for the actions of members except through a formal complaint system, or a 'closed' membership where the owners can ban at will but can be held accountable for the posts of members.
>>The government's job is to assure that the market actually functions correctly.
>Incorrect... It's job is to keep away from business affairs but set laws to keep the playing field level.
Pish. Under what sensible reading are those two statements not the same thing? Shall we argue about whethr Jesus was a man with a divine soul, or divinity in the vessel of a man next?
I agree with GP, I would have posted the sentiment myself if he hadn't beaten me to it.
One of the key points for successful altruism is that you also have to be a vicious bastard to freeloaders. IIRC this was demonstrated in some of the more advanced prisoner's dilemma scenarios. The altruists all cooperate with each other, and beat up on the freeloaders: altruists win. You might argue that if you're not altruistic to EVERYONE, even freeloaders, then it's not really altruism. You might be right. The term is too loaded - see the other threads debating whether altruism is really selfless if it makes you feel happpy.
...attempts by China to disable U.S. spy sats (ground based laser something or other)...
Are you thinking of China destroying one of their own satellites as a test? I don't blame you if you were, I hate the way any military (or economic, for that matter) advance by other nations is portrayed as an attack on the US. The lesson we should be taking from articles like this is that if the US has a capability, and China has a capability, you'd better expect that pretty soon Europe, Russia and everyone else will have it too. The smart thing to do is to adapt to changing conditions and maintain advantage; crying "Wooo China is Evil and hates our Freedoms" is not smart (just to be clear: complaining about tfa, not you).
You're right about the US government playing different rules with the Big Boys - I wish they wouldn't. It leads to situations like with North Korea and Iran where the best option is for the small country to acquire nuclear weapons just so the US government won't casually dick around with them.
Carbon trading is meant to fix that kind of problem. The idea is that Australia should raise the price of their steel by the cost of some carbon credits from, say, Brazil who is growing trees to soak it up. That way the steel industry can still be carbon neutral even though carbon is released in Aus and sunk in Brazil.
Same thing in Australia also. "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond goes into this... or perhaps it was "Collapse" by the same. Very readable.
As I always say when this discussion comes up: environmentalism isn't about 'saving the earth', we couldn't wipe out life on earth if we tried. The only real danger is that we'll make the earth an extremely unpleasant place for humans to live, which is a great reason to go green if you ask me.
The notable difference between Chinese and English (or most other written languages) is that several English characters combine to form syllables, which combine to form words (i.e., we use an alphabet). In Chinese, each character corresponds directly with a word (each character is a logogram). If you're interested you can look up Alphabet on Wikipedia as a starting point, although I must admit I find the article hard to follow even though I know what it should be saying.
The practical result of this is that English is normally encoded as a long sequence of 0-25 values (a-z), whereas Chinese would be encoded as a shorter sequence of 0-~100,000 values (Wikipedia reports Chinese dictionaries with 85,000 characters). Naturally, there would be fewer Chinese characters required for a message as each character corresponds to an entire word.
I guess that since morse code is rather like binary and English letters can be encoded using 5 bits, Chinese morse codes would need to be... about 20 bits long? It's late at night, brain not work so good. It seems to me that morse codes using 20 dots/dashes would be extremely difficult to learn; but on the other hand it shouldn't be any more difficult than learning Chinese characters in the first place.
I wouldn't be surprised if English morse codes were more robust against poor data, siny Englxsh is stvll reahible even if sew2eral cheracter; are wrong.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about the subject, I'm talking out of my elbow for the sake of discussion.
I wish I lived where you do; around here the subway workers have been trained to ask "do you want X" for every ingredient - including the one's you've listed as extras. It's consumer choice gone mad.
Big deal, every time I look into Firefox I get annoyed and wind up back on Opera.
I like the fact that the developers add features while I'm not looking, and the new features tend not to break shit. Opera runs great for me, and is very customisable. It's free to use, and I am a browser user not a browser developer. I like that people who know better than me are deciding what goes into the browser, they make good choices so I don't have to. (incidentally I also hate Subway; do I really need to specify the exact salad ingredients I want for every sandwich?)
I'm not against choice. But Opera is no choice IMO.
And what is that meant to mean? I'm for freedom of religion, but Atheism isn't a religion IMO? (sorry, getting into a rant there)
I challenge you. I'm taking a coffee making course run by an experienced perfectionist, and I associate regularly with coffee makers. I have always been told that coffee is at its best between three and seven days after roasting. During the first three days the coffee is still degassing, and makes crap, ashy tasting coffee with a frothy crema. I have experienced this myself. Coffee lasts for 20 minutes after it's ground, after which it goes stale. Beware of cafes which keep their grinder full of ground coffee when it's not rush hour.
As a non-USian, the (exaggerated) impression I get of the United States is of a society where common sense is legislated, and people think that anything which isn't specifically illegal is totally fine - social norms seem less important than legalities.
A gross generalisation, of course. Social niceities are no way to run a nation, but it's nice to live in a society where people are civil, just because.
I notice this particularly when discussing the Constitution; most western nations have similar rights to those protected by the constitution, but not usually so clearly framed. Americans say "is this law constitutional? Is this what the founding fathers intended?", other nations say "Do we want this law? Does this law support our way of life?"
Slashdot Mirror
Fish hunting? Isn't that fishing?
Spoken like a man who's never stalked a salmon.
Oh really? I apologise then. I didn't know you could use a code for it; I used wirt's leg and portal tome in the cube.
That's no moon... That's a space station!
Tired jokes aside, I agree with you that it's very cool to see such things with the naked eye.
Where did those informative mods come from? There certainly is a secret cow level. There was no secret cow level in Diablo 1, despite persistent rumours - the developers added one to D2 as a response. It's a classic example of developers having an in-joke with the players.
I'm surprised nobody has replied with this yet, but:
The only sensible answer I've heard is that police officers should be anonymous to protect themselves and their families from revenge by criminals. This is important when fighting organised crime. Being an ordinary police officer shouldn't prevent you from being an ordinary member of the public when you're off duty.
I could accept the above argument for protecting the identity of key members of the police, where investigations could be stopped by threatening or killing key officers. I wouldn't accept it for ordinary uniformed cops.
Hardly a fair comparison since there is only one Matrix movie.
As an "America-hating Furriner" I'd like to say that I agree with your sentiment. The problem is that the people you describe already stay in their own country, from whence they make their crappy, far reaching decisions. Americans who choose to travel are the open minded, educated, polite ones who know there's actually something worth seeing outside the states.
Good comment. In the future I hope to see some kind of legally recognised "common carrier" status for sites like MySpace and Google. Make it so that you have to either have an 'open' membership where it's very hard to ban members without them doing something criminal involving the site and the owner is not liable for the actions of members except through a formal complaint system, or a 'closed' membership where the owners can ban at will but can be held accountable for the posts of members.
>>The government's job is to assure that the market actually functions correctly.
>Incorrect... It's job is to keep away from business affairs but set laws to keep the playing field level.
Pish. Under what sensible reading are those two statements not the same thing? Shall we argue about whethr Jesus was a man with a divine soul, or divinity in the vessel of a man next?
I agree with GP, I would have posted the sentiment myself if he hadn't beaten me to it.
One of the key points for successful altruism is that you also have to be a vicious bastard to freeloaders. IIRC this was demonstrated in some of the more advanced prisoner's dilemma scenarios. The altruists all cooperate with each other, and beat up on the freeloaders: altruists win. You might argue that if you're not altruistic to EVERYONE, even freeloaders, then it's not really altruism. You might be right. The term is too loaded - see the other threads debating whether altruism is really selfless if it makes you feel happpy.
Thanks, I think I missed that one when it came around ;)
...attempts by China to disable U.S. spy sats (ground based laser something or other)...
Are you thinking of China destroying one of their own satellites as a test? I don't blame you if you were, I hate the way any military (or economic, for that matter) advance by other nations is portrayed as an attack on the US. The lesson we should be taking from articles like this is that if the US has a capability, and China has a capability, you'd better expect that pretty soon Europe, Russia and everyone else will have it too. The smart thing to do is to adapt to changing conditions and maintain advantage; crying "Wooo China is Evil and hates our Freedoms" is not smart (just to be clear: complaining about tfa, not you).
You're right about the US government playing different rules with the Big Boys - I wish they wouldn't. It leads to situations like with North Korea and Iran where the best option is for the small country to acquire nuclear weapons just so the US government won't casually dick around with them.
OMGPONIES!!!
I was casually reading the comments without r'ing tfa as usual but... phlogiston and aether!?! That's awesome!
Carbon trading is meant to fix that kind of problem. The idea is that Australia should raise the price of their steel by the cost of some carbon credits from, say, Brazil who is growing trees to soak it up. That way the steel industry can still be carbon neutral even though carbon is released in Aus and sunk in Brazil.
+1, Burn!
Same thing in Australia also. "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond goes into this... or perhaps it was "Collapse" by the same. Very readable.
As I always say when this discussion comes up: environmentalism isn't about 'saving the earth', we couldn't wipe out life on earth if we tried. The only real danger is that we'll make the earth an extremely unpleasant place for humans to live, which is a great reason to go green if you ask me.
Thanks, that was a very useful reply. It's always nice to feel that I'm less stupid than I was at the start of the day ;)
So a realistic vibrator is forbidden while a "soothing massage wand" that is 7" long and 1.5" thick is okay.
So you can only sell a vibrator if it's much smaller than the real thing?
The notable difference between Chinese and English (or most other written languages) is that several English characters combine to form syllables, which combine to form words (i.e., we use an alphabet). In Chinese, each character corresponds directly with a word (each character is a logogram). If you're interested you can look up Alphabet on Wikipedia as a starting point, although I must admit I find the article hard to follow even though I know what it should be saying.
The practical result of this is that English is normally encoded as a long sequence of 0-25 values (a-z), whereas Chinese would be encoded as a shorter sequence of 0-~100,000 values (Wikipedia reports Chinese dictionaries with 85,000 characters). Naturally, there would be fewer Chinese characters required for a message as each character corresponds to an entire word.
I guess that since morse code is rather like binary and English letters can be encoded using 5 bits, Chinese morse codes would need to be... about 20 bits long? It's late at night, brain not work so good. It seems to me that morse codes using 20 dots/dashes would be extremely difficult to learn; but on the other hand it shouldn't be any more difficult than learning Chinese characters in the first place.
I wouldn't be surprised if English morse codes were more robust against poor data, siny Englxsh is stvll reahible even if sew2eral cheracter; are wrong.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about the subject, I'm talking out of my elbow for the sake of discussion.
Hey, I'm fine with that. They just need to clear it with their boss, like any other self employed worker does ;)
I wish I lived where you do; around here the subway workers have been trained to ask "do you want X" for every ingredient - including the one's you've listed as extras. It's consumer choice gone mad.
Big deal, every time I look into Firefox I get annoyed and wind up back on Opera.
I like the fact that the developers add features while I'm not looking, and the new features tend not to break shit. Opera runs great for me, and is very customisable. It's free to use, and I am a browser user not a browser developer. I like that people who know better than me are deciding what goes into the browser, they make good choices so I don't have to. (incidentally I also hate Subway; do I really need to specify the exact salad ingredients I want for every sandwich?)
I'm not against choice. But Opera is no choice IMO.
And what is that meant to mean? I'm for freedom of religion, but Atheism isn't a religion IMO? (sorry, getting into a rant there)
Thanks, I think I'm in a light-roasting region, so that explains a lot.
I challenge you. I'm taking a coffee making course run by an experienced perfectionist, and I associate regularly with coffee makers. I have always been told that coffee is at its best between three and seven days after roasting. During the first three days the coffee is still degassing, and makes crap, ashy tasting coffee with a frothy crema. I have experienced this myself. Coffee lasts for 20 minutes after it's ground, after which it goes stale. Beware of cafes which keep their grinder full of ground coffee when it's not rush hour.
As a non-USian, the (exaggerated) impression I get of the United States is of a society where common sense is legislated, and people think that anything which isn't specifically illegal is totally fine - social norms seem less important than legalities.
A gross generalisation, of course. Social niceities are no way to run a nation, but it's nice to live in a society where people are civil, just because.
I notice this particularly when discussing the Constitution; most western nations have similar rights to those protected by the constitution, but not usually so clearly framed. Americans say "is this law constitutional? Is this what the founding fathers intended?", other nations say "Do we want this law? Does this law support our way of life?"
Make it illegal to have sexual relations with anyone who is, or has ever been, a minor ;)