Of course that's not the INTENTION, but that's what it is really...
Who knows... maybe some potential Darwin nominee will read the list (unlikely) or hear someone repeating one of the stories down the pub (more likely), and think twice about his actions.
I think the Darwin awards provide a valuable public service.
As someone who can't have more than a small amount of cheese without feeling quite sick, i'm more than happy if they can find something to replace the milk with. The last time I had any quantity of milk was a small tub of yoghurt just after lunch, and I felt sick for the rest of the day, and bloated and yuck the next day.
I've found a brand of soy milk that I can tolerate the taste of, and actually quite enjoy it on cereal, but it's not something I like on it's own... soy has a particular taste that i'll probably need another 20 years or so to get used to.
Some people have commented that if you consume milk regularly then you get used to it. I know i'm less tolerant to milk since I stopped having it, but up until I stopped having milk, i'd feel violently i'll at about 9:15 every morning after having milk on my breakfast, and that went on for years!
Anyway, I wonder if the same antifreeze would work in non-dairy gelato products... I assume it would.
Why would that be a good solution? Putting more carbon into the air isn't going to make the temperature any cooler!
I think they'd be better off just charging more for electricity (with concessions for those who really need it but can't afford it). If you want AC then you'd better be prepared to pay for it. People lived without it in the past. At the moment, taking steps to save electricity doesn't really save you a noticeable amount of $$$. If the price went up a heap, then people would be more likely to take a look around at what they could turn off. If you could save $50/month just by turning off a few lights, bumping up (or down, as appropriate for your climate and time of year) the thermostat, or paying a bit extra for more efficient appliances then you'd be more likely to do it.
1. If the utility (which charges you for their services) can raise your air conditioning temp by a couple of degrees to ease the load, what prevents them from lowering the thermostat by a degree or two (or, depending on the technology,.45 degrees in order to keep the display showing the same degree you set it at, but increasing usage ever so slightly multiplied by millions of households) to increase their profit at your expense?
They might try this, but they'd get caught (they always do), and there would be a huge class action and they'd never do it again. I don't see a problem.
2. The first time someone dies from heat overexposure, the taxpayer and utility customer will end up footing the bill to cover the liability payout.
How much exactly are they raising the temperature here???
3. It is a slippery slope. What form of control of our daily life will be recommended next {for our own good, of course}?
Oh not the slipperly slope again. Now all we need is someone making a frog in boiling water comparison and the commentry will be complete.
NO WAY. Take Garfield. There was this one time that Garfield tried to get a lasagna, and Jon tried to stop him, and then ODIE got involved. I'm crying here just remembering it. Man it was funny.
Oh yeah! I remember that one. Good times had by all. Reminds me of the one where Charlie Brown says 'Good Grief!'.
If global warming is caused by an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (whether man made or not), then to reverse it we're going to need to get that CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground again. The earth has spent millions of years reducing the CO2 content down to what it is now...
This device would be useful to help stop us introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere, but ultimately we'll probably have to employ something similar but just bury the hydrocarbon output instead of burning it.
For a start, it might be helpful if we buried used paper instead of recycling it, and only make paper from plantation trees. We've still got to find a place to bury it though...
'Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing', a typing tutor program on the Amiga (and possibly other platforms) did exactly this. It claimed it could tell when the users was getting frustrated (which amounted to a whole load of keys being hammered at once) and asked the user if they'd like to take a break.
Whatever Microsoft have come up with appears to just be applying more current technology to bring the above to its obvious conclusion.
Most people are buying laptops these days, and almost all of them have an inbuilt microphone. All you'd have to do is have some speech recognition software that understands a few choice words commonly used in times of frustration, and you'd have the problem solved...
eg "I notice that you just used the words 'stupid', 'bloody', and 'computer' in the same sentence. Here's some relaxing music. ".
I think I read on Slashdot some time ago, an argument that went something like this:
1. At some point in the future it will be possible to create a simulated universe such that its occupants will not be able to tell that they are 'in the box'.
2. At that point there will probably be many simulated universes.
3. If the above is true, then throughout the whole of history there will be many many more simulated universes than real universes, and the chance of 'us' being in the real universe is actually quite small...
Want to send them on-site to fix a customer issue?
Obviously not their element then is it?
If you are going to hire the sort of people that you and the GP are describing then you need a manager/team leader, who knows how their minds work, how to keep them interested, how to keep them focused, and how to keep them out of the way of people who don't understand and have delicate ego's (curiously, some people don't like being told directly that they are wrong:).
It is in situations such as those where a good manager really can make a big difference.
ISO is the global standard, and the format removes ambiguity: 2008-01-18. A small additional benefit is that it makes sorting trivial.
And you'd think that a date formatted like NNNN-NN-NN would always be YYYY-MM-DD, as to parse it any other way would just be stupid. Some incantations of date parsing in Microsoft SQL Server, presumably with certain locale options set, actually parse it as YYYY-DD-MM. I got up and went home for the day when I stumbled across that little gem (having 'stumbled' across it after spending all morning trying to figure out wtf was going on!!!)
YYYYMMMDD has always been unambiguous in MSSQL Server in all my years of coding, so I always use that format.
By this I mean anything that forces the user to do something he does not want to like the PUOPs on standard DVDs. You can be forced to watch previews when you start a disk without having the option to skip forward or advance the track. I expect HD and Blu Ray to be worse in this matter.
The kids got a stack of DVD's for Christmas. I'm bordering on _FURIOUS_ that on some of them we have to sit through about 3 minutes of previews and "You wouldn't steal a car... video piracy is stealing" warnings. Honestly... it's crap like that that makes me want to just download instead of purchasing. Why on earth should someone who's actually doing what the recording industry wants and buying instead of stealing be the one who has to sit through the warnings and ads???
Whether or not someone was harmed in the creation of an image has nothing at all to do with whether or not it harms anyone else to view the image.
Maybe, but it has everything to do with if they should be allowed to obtain and view the image.
If that's your argument then we need to ban all forms of journalistic photography and prosecute the producers of every show from Oprah to COPS to Jerry Springer.
If any of these examples harm people, they do so to people who are able to defend themselves in some way.
I'm not aware of anyone that Oprah has harmed and hasn't been sued by, but i've never actually sat down and watched her show so I couldn't be sure. I don't know what COPS is, and I always thought Jerry Springer was completely scripted?
It's not just the oil consumption that's the problem, a two stroke engine has an ignition every single cycle of the engine. This simply doesn't allow enough time for the exhaust gases to vacate the combustion chamber properly, in fact a two stroke engine almost doesn't work at all without a properly tuned exhaust.
How is it false? If your neighbor jacking off in his basement to pictures of 8 year olds really harms you, then so does him jacking off to pictures of women sucking off donkeys, right?
I don't think he said it harms 'him'. (forgive me GP if I have your gender wrong). Just because something doesn't harm you directly doesn't mean you should let it happen.
As for your question about where to draw the line on your 'slippery slope', it's fairly simple to figure out... was a person or animal harmed during the creation of the pictures in question? There is plenty of evidence that sexual abuse of children causes huge problems in them for the rest of their lives, so obviously that's a no-no. In many countries, an animal is by definition not capable of consenting to a sexual act, so obviously bestiality is out too.
I'm sure that if you think about the rest of your questions sensibly you'll come up with answers, and understand why some things should be illegal, even if you 'do them in your own basement'.
But it is going down that road. While (I hope) only the most of extreme libertarians would agree that you should be able to watch kiddie porn, it's still a step down that road, and one step leads to another.
I disagree with what you have said. What you are saying would only be true if they were requiring that the filter was opt-out or mandatory. Having opt-in filtering available is not a step towards opt-out or mandatory filtering any more than having "Lady Goodygood's Content Filter" available on the shelf of your local Try-N-Save is.
I find the 'this is one more step towards 1984' argument pretty stupid really. There has to be a balance between the rights of the individual to live how they want to live, and the rights of the government to make sure everyone plays with each other nicely. It's not as simple as one or the other. The person who said "He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither." probably wasn't talking about a 'freedom' to view images of kids or animals being abused.
Anyway, I do agree that content filtering is a bad idea, but not for the reasons you have mentioned. The problem with content filtering is that it doesn't work. Someone will find a way around it, then everyone will have a way around it, and then your are back where you started except that you've spent millions of dollars which would have been better spent hunting down the people who hurt the kids in the first place.
Everything I know about Quantum physics I learnt from Futurama... isn't there a danger that you are going to change the state of the dot by observing it?
No. There was a project to port Linux to the spoon, but there was a lot of infighting about future directions and major members left, so the project was effectively shelved.
does my dog run linux?
What breed of dog? Seriously, if you want help from the community you have to specify the exact breed of the dog and anything else which might help someone come up with an answer for you...
does my gf run linux?
What's a gf?
is the water linux friendly?
If it's normal H2O then yes, probably. Some people have reported issues with Deuterium and Tritium when used with Linux. ymmv.
will consuming that extra donut will have marginal effect on penetration of linux?
To quote Homer Simpson - "Donuts. Is there nothing they can't do?"
I'm not sure that such laws exist here in Australia (and if anyone knows of any, _please_ enlighten me!). Your contract with your merchant will require certain things of you wrt to what you do with any CC information you have taken by whatever means (phone, physical swipe machine, internet, etc), but I'm not aware of any criminal laws that exist.
We effectively turned away a client who wanted to host their web site on our server because it obviously kept credit card information in a database. We just didn't want to be involved in a case where a fraud investigation might become an issue.
The issue with this particular site was that the client wanted to be able to take orders over the internet, but not necessarily bill them straight away (eg if they had to order the part in they didn't want to bill their customer until they had sent the part on it's way). The merchant we normally use for online CC transactions (using the redirect-browser-to-merchant model) doesn't have the concept of authorize now, bill later, so we were caught between a rock and a hard place... We put forward an alternate solution to the client but they elected to take their business elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Who knows... maybe some potential Darwin nominee will read the list (unlikely) or hear someone repeating one of the stories down the pub (more likely), and think twice about his actions.
I think the Darwin awards provide a valuable public service.
As someone who can't have more than a small amount of cheese without feeling quite sick, i'm more than happy if they can find something to replace the milk with. The last time I had any quantity of milk was a small tub of yoghurt just after lunch, and I felt sick for the rest of the day, and bloated and yuck the next day.
I've found a brand of soy milk that I can tolerate the taste of, and actually quite enjoy it on cereal, but it's not something I like on it's own... soy has a particular taste that i'll probably need another 20 years or so to get used to.
Some people have commented that if you consume milk regularly then you get used to it. I know i'm less tolerant to milk since I stopped having it, but up until I stopped having milk, i'd feel violently i'll at about 9:15 every morning after having milk on my breakfast, and that went on for years!
Anyway, I wonder if the same antifreeze would work in non-dairy gelato products... I assume it would.
Why would that be a good solution? Putting more carbon into the air isn't going to make the temperature any cooler!
I think they'd be better off just charging more for electricity (with concessions for those who really need it but can't afford it). If you want AC then you'd better be prepared to pay for it. People lived without it in the past. At the moment, taking steps to save electricity doesn't really save you a noticeable amount of $$$. If the price went up a heap, then people would be more likely to take a look around at what they could turn off. If you could save $50/month just by turning off a few lights, bumping up (or down, as appropriate for your climate and time of year) the thermostat, or paying a bit extra for more efficient appliances then you'd be more likely to do it.
You just passed up a golden opportunity to post a goatse link... the universe will never forgive you!
Oh yeah! I remember that one. Good times had by all. Reminds me of the one where Charlie Brown says 'Good Grief!'.
Metric and Imperial units in the same post! What were you thinking???
If global warming is caused by an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (whether man made or not), then to reverse it we're going to need to get that CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground again. The earth has spent millions of years reducing the CO2 content down to what it is now...
This device would be useful to help stop us introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere, but ultimately we'll probably have to employ something similar but just bury the hydrocarbon output instead of burning it.
For a start, it might be helpful if we buried used paper instead of recycling it, and only make paper from plantation trees. We've still got to find a place to bury it though...
'Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing', a typing tutor program on the Amiga (and possibly other platforms) did exactly this. It claimed it could tell when the users was getting frustrated (which amounted to a whole load of keys being hammered at once) and asked the user if they'd like to take a break.
Whatever Microsoft have come up with appears to just be applying more current technology to bring the above to its obvious conclusion.
Most people are buying laptops these days, and almost all of them have an inbuilt microphone. All you'd have to do is have some speech recognition software that understands a few choice words commonly used in times of frustration, and you'd have the problem solved...
eg "I notice that you just used the words 'stupid', 'bloody', and 'computer' in the same sentence. Here's some relaxing music. ".
I think I read on Slashdot some time ago, an argument that went something like this:
1. At some point in the future it will be possible to create a simulated universe such that its occupants will not be able to tell that they are 'in the box'.
2. At that point there will probably be many simulated universes.
3. If the above is true, then throughout the whole of history there will be many many more simulated universes than real universes, and the chance of 'us' being in the real universe is actually quite small...
Obviously not their element then is it?
If you are going to hire the sort of people that you and the GP are describing then you need a manager/team leader, who knows how their minds work, how to keep them interested, how to keep them focused, and how to keep them out of the way of people who don't understand and have delicate ego's (curiously, some people don't like being told directly that they are wrong
It is in situations such as those where a good manager really can make a big difference.
And you'd think that a date formatted like NNNN-NN-NN would always be YYYY-MM-DD, as to parse it any other way would just be stupid. Some incantations of date parsing in Microsoft SQL Server, presumably with certain locale options set, actually parse it as YYYY-DD-MM. I got up and went home for the day when I stumbled across that little gem (having 'stumbled' across it after spending all morning trying to figure out wtf was going on!!!)
YYYYMMMDD has always been unambiguous in MSSQL Server in all my years of coding, so I always use that format.
The kids got a stack of DVD's for Christmas. I'm bordering on _FURIOUS_ that on some of them we have to sit through about 3 minutes of previews and "You wouldn't steal a car... video piracy is stealing" warnings. Honestly... it's crap like that that makes me want to just download instead of purchasing. Why on earth should someone who's actually doing what the recording industry wants and buying instead of stealing be the one who has to sit through the warnings and ads???
Maybe, but it has everything to do with if they should be allowed to obtain and view the image.
If any of these examples harm people, they do so to people who are able to defend themselves in some way.
I'm not aware of anyone that Oprah has harmed and hasn't been sued by, but i've never actually sat down and watched her show so I couldn't be sure. I don't know what COPS is, and I always thought Jerry Springer was completely scripted?
It's not just the oil consumption that's the problem, a two stroke engine has an ignition every single cycle of the engine. This simply doesn't allow enough time for the exhaust gases to vacate the combustion chamber properly, in fact a two stroke engine almost doesn't work at all without a properly tuned exhaust.
I don't think he said it harms 'him'. (forgive me GP if I have your gender wrong). Just because something doesn't harm you directly doesn't mean you should let it happen.
As for your question about where to draw the line on your 'slippery slope', it's fairly simple to figure out... was a person or animal harmed during the creation of the pictures in question? There is plenty of evidence that sexual abuse of children causes huge problems in them for the rest of their lives, so obviously that's a no-no. In many countries, an animal is by definition not capable of consenting to a sexual act, so obviously bestiality is out too.
I'm sure that if you think about the rest of your questions sensibly you'll come up with answers, and understand why some things should be illegal, even if you 'do them in your own basement'.
I disagree with what you have said. What you are saying would only be true if they were requiring that the filter was opt-out or mandatory. Having opt-in filtering available is not a step towards opt-out or mandatory filtering any more than having "Lady Goodygood's Content Filter" available on the shelf of your local Try-N-Save is.
I find the 'this is one more step towards 1984' argument pretty stupid really. There has to be a balance between the rights of the individual to live how they want to live, and the rights of the government to make sure everyone plays with each other nicely. It's not as simple as one or the other. The person who said "He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither." probably wasn't talking about a 'freedom' to view images of kids or animals being abused.
Anyway, I do agree that content filtering is a bad idea, but not for the reasons you have mentioned. The problem with content filtering is that it doesn't work. Someone will find a way around it, then everyone will have a way around it, and then your are back where you started except that you've spent millions of dollars which would have been better spent hunting down the people who hurt the kids in the first place.
I think every generation has to have at least one period in their past that they can look back on and say "wtf were we thinking???"
For me (born 1975) I have my own personal periods in my past that I think that about, but nothing yet I can share with the bulk of my generation...
Grey. Haven't you seen _any_ sci fi movies???
Because most of us probably couldn't afford a 108" display, and probably wouldn't have anywhere to put it!
Everything I know about Quantum physics I learnt from Futurama... isn't there a danger that you are going to change the state of the dot by observing it?
does my spoon run linux?
No. There was a project to port Linux to the spoon, but there was a lot of infighting about future directions and major members left, so the project was effectively shelved.
does my dog run linux?
What breed of dog? Seriously, if you want help from the community you have to specify the exact breed of the dog and anything else which might help someone come up with an answer for you...
does my gf run linux?
What's a gf?
is the water linux friendly?
If it's normal H2O then yes, probably. Some people have reported issues with Deuterium and Tritium when used with Linux. ymmv.
will consuming that extra donut will have marginal effect on penetration of linux?
To quote Homer Simpson - "Donuts. Is there nothing they can't do?"
I'm not sure that such laws exist here in Australia (and if anyone knows of any, _please_ enlighten me!). Your contract with your merchant will require certain things of you wrt to what you do with any CC information you have taken by whatever means (phone, physical swipe machine, internet, etc), but I'm not aware of any criminal laws that exist.
We effectively turned away a client who wanted to host their web site on our server because it obviously kept credit card information in a database. We just didn't want to be involved in a case where a fraud investigation might become an issue.
The issue with this particular site was that the client wanted to be able to take orders over the internet, but not necessarily bill them straight away (eg if they had to order the part in they didn't want to bill their customer until they had sent the part on it's way). The merchant we normally use for online CC transactions (using the redirect-browser-to-merchant model) doesn't have the concept of authorize now, bill later, so we were caught between a rock and a hard place... We put forward an alternate solution to the client but they elected to take their business elsewhere.
You just can't educate some people.
Or maybe it means family health reasons... it's always hard to tell.