Cheater! Every single one of those was set on freelech, so that reflects the taste of the mods, not the community. Although the collection on said site *is* very impressive.
Why spend $11 billion to stop a threat that is basically non-existent? Those incidents you pointed out happened in insecure areas, and even then they didn't succeed. The threat to American passenger planes in the US (and really 99% of everywhere else) is so small you probably can't even measure it. This is a boondoggle that will do nothing other than take tax money and put it into the hands of defense contractors. That money could be put towards something far more productive than this, and something that could save far more lives.
Ultimate safety is not possible, and it's not even desirable (IMHO of course). If we spent this much money on protecting every conceivable way for terrorists to attack us, we would go bankrupt. Preventative action is only possible to a certain extent. Take care of the low-hanging fruit, then let the rest of it be handled by law enforcement.
There is validity to the statement that voting rights for blacks were only secured 50 years ago.
When you refer to the laws of the United States as a whole, that means laws at the federal level. So while it would be an accurate statement to say that complete voting rights in each of the states weren't granted to blacks until the 1960's, it's still wildly misleading to say that blacks couldn't vote until then.
The system already works like rating movies. The industry self-publishes ratings and retailers decide how they want to enforce those ratings. No change is necessary.
Sorry, but the aggregate of all of those conditions is probably 0.000001%. Is it a problem? Yes? A major flaw? No. Worth discussing? Hardly.
Sorry, but if an application gives a person with a complete lack of technical ability the ability to read the entire contents of your drive with full access from a remote location, and the only solution is to manually delete something that most users don't even know exists, that's a pretty serious flaw.
Dystopian nightmares is what these sorts of tampering with life gives me, with beings genitally engineered for instance to be obedient and subservant or what have you. It is all deeply unsettling...Again treating life as a computer program and trying to alter and manipulate, program the lives of other beings like a computer program, deeply bothers my sense of ethics and as well seems to be a great threat to freedom.
Sorry, that's part of what we do as humans. If you think that humans haven't been genetically modifying living creatures and imposing our will on nature before this you're crazy.
Try and find a cat that looks anything like your cat Fluffy in the wild. It doesn't exist, house cats have been genetically created by humans. You think your dog Rover is affectionate and obedient towards you because of natural selection? Nope, humans have been breeding dogs that way for millenia. Try to pet a wolf and see how affectionate they are.
This is just another level of sophistication to a process that has been happening since the dawn of civilization (and in fact could be considered the basis of civilization). Not that there aren't potential dangers. But unethical? Hardly.
Ouch. £8 is a lot for the cheapest book you own. Even new paperbacks rarely cost more than $8 here. Hardbacks between $20-30. I definitely couldn't afford books if I bought all of them new and hardback. Most of my books I buy used paperbacks from used bookstores, and I usually pay $2-3 but never more than $10. Other times I buy from good will stores, garage sales, or library sales. I can often pick up 5-10 books for less than $5.
A lot of people don't believe I can read that much, but I've read nearly all of the books I own. I can go through 2-3 books a day if it's generic sci-fi, fantasy, or "mainstream" books and I don't have anything else to do. The intellectual books that actually require me to think while I read usually take a week or two to read if I'm busy. I find it makes life much more enjoyable to spend an hour a day reading, no matter how busy you are.
Someone tagged this rich bastard, but I don't think that's extreme at all. I've kept nearly every book I've ever bought in my life, and I probably have around 800. And I'm only 21 years old (thankfully my parents have an empty garage and I was reading from age 2). Depending on the submitter's age and if he/she is married to another book lover it would be very easy to get to that number.
This is slashdot, right? As in news for nerds. Do nerds no longer enjoy reading?
Actually, Canada and the US have natural growth rates of 0.3% and 0.6% respectively. Both have an overall growth rate of 0.9%. So while immigration is a significant factor in both countries, in the US it doesn't even account for a majority of the population increase. I can't find the numbers but I believe Australia also has a natural population growth.
That's why states that are actually sane (thankfully mine) have some sort of leeway with the consent laws. In Colorado, the age of consent is 17. However, if one person is between 15 and 17, it is still legal if the other person is less than ten years older. If one person is less than 15, it is still legal if the other person is less than 4 years older.
Presumably the tower would be located on high land or on top of buildings, putting it and the generators at lower risk of rising floodwaters. And during earthquakes, large amounts of buildings don't usually collapse. A few older buildings and structures collapse and large numbers of buildings receive light to moderate damage. Power failures are caused mostly by ruptured transmission lines, not by knocking out the actual power source.
Industry? Which? Production is outsourced to China.
We are still have the largest manufacturing sector in the world, and are the largest exporter in the world, even larger than China. The only reason we have such a trade imbalance is because consumption and thus demand for products here is significantly higher than elsewhere in the world.
True, they do have violence, but it's not really the same. The most violent Nintendo games (Twilight Princess, Metroid) usually have you fighting aliens or "evil" creatures and would be extremely tame on other systems. They place a lot of emphasis on game mechanics other than combat. A lot of the attacks are brightly-colored flashes of light or some other nonthreatening image. Compare that to Gears of War, Call of Duty, Resistance, etc. where the guns are blazing, explosions are going off all over the place, and there are high levels of carnage. There are hyper-violent games available for Nintendo systems (RE4 comes to mind) but they're not first party. On Nintendo systems, the violent AAA game is the exception, whereas on the PS3 or XBox 360 I can't think of a single high profile game (other than sports titles) that's not hyper-violent, let alone contains no violence.
Sorry for mixing measurements, for some reason I didn't even think of that. My general point was that they're often portrayed as being paid poorly when generally they're paid as well as their education dictates since in most places it's a very easy job to get.
Median income for a master's degree is $52,390. I found this on google, which says that in 1993-94 55% of high school teachers had master's degrees. That's the best I could come up with, but it seems I was off quite a bit. I was thinking maybe 30-40% of HS teachers have master's degrees.
I've seen studies (sorry can't remember the source) however that show student achievement has basically no correlation to the level of education of the teacher. That seems logical to me as everything you teach in high school (even advanced courses) is well below what is taught at a university, so having even more education wouldn't necessarily help.
What I think would work to improve teaching quality would be a general increase in pay (to attract people with better options) along with some sort of performance-based incentive system and the ability to more easily fire underachieving teachers. The problem of course is the difficulty in isolating the effectiveness of the teacher from the surrounding environmental variables. Also, most ways of judging teacher effectiveness use standardized tests, and that just results in teachers teaching to improve student test scores.
Then there are the teacher's unions, which I think are awful. There's no way in hell they would stomach anything other than tiny revisions to the tenure system. And high school administrations/school boards are some of the most inept organizations around. The small school I grew up in was run like a dictatorship, it was ridiculous. Tenure has some (massive) drawbacks, but it does often save good teachers from idiot administrators.
At this point, though, I'm pretty sure nearly any change would be a good one. Our secondary school system is a joke.
The 360 and PS3 are pretty fun too. But the Wii has a few value propositions (I know, I know, I'm sorry) that the PS3 and Xbox don't:
1) It's significantly cheaper.
2) It has a unique control scheme.
3) Many of its games are very simple and intuitive to learn (ie Wii Sports), therefore more people can pick it up and play. This means they have a *much* larger market. It seems a lot of the systems are ending up being played by older people and people otherwise unfamiliar with video games.
4) Nintendo has built a strong image over the years of being kid friendly. Nearly all of Nintendo's AAA titles do not deal with violence, sex, or profanity and combined with the price this makes it a more appealing gift than an XBox 360 or PS3.
Being fun isn't the reason why it's been a runaway success. Every console in recent memory has been fun. The Gamecube and N64 were fun, but they generally got their ass kicked. Even more so for the Dreamcast.
You briefly touched another salient point so I'll expand. Another major reason the Turing test isn't good is because it is a one-sided test. Even if we assume that a machine that could transparently converse with a human could be called intelligent, a machine could still be called intelligent even if it didn't know how to communicate with humans. For example, a person born deaf and dumb most likely can't communicate with people, but that doesn't mean they aren't intelligent.
I would be completely, perfectly fine with companies having to choose whether they do business in China, or the U.S., and not both. That is, having laws that make companies serving China's government incompatible with business in the U.S is ok by me.
The only thing that would produce would be extreme isolationism and poverty for the US. If we essentially ended all trade with nations that have oppressive governments, we would cut off most of the world (including most of our oil suppliers, among other things). Even places like India or Brazil which are generally supportive of liberty do some terrible things and deprive people of human rights.
Could you imagine, on the other side, countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Indonesia refusing to trade with us because we are not Muslim? Or Latin American countries refusing to trade with us because we are not Catholic? Or Europe refusing to trade with us because we don't have national health care? That entire idea is ludicrous. It's a very naive and idealistic position to take that your views are correct and all other must adopt them or be shunned. The world doesn't work that way, nor should it.
It's necessary to trade with other nations, and most other nations are going to do things people from the US find objectionable. You just have to live with the fact that other people have different views than ours. If the Chinese people wanted complete liberty, they would overthrow the government. It's not our responsibility to force our ideas on those that don't want them.
You're correct about laws and regulations being the only way to influence the behavior of corporations, but how far are you willing to take that? China is a sovereign country. The US government has absolutely no right to determine how companies act under a separate, sovereign state's law. Yahoo, while working in China, is a Chinese company and must obey Chinese laws. I think it would be dangerous to set a precedent where corporations would be exerting the influence of their home government.
Would you be fine with Chinese companies pushing their beliefs on us? If not, then it's is supremely hypocritical for us to expect US companies to do the same. Free trade cuts both ways, you have to take the bad with the good.
As for your second point, there are multiple, valid reasons why corporations are no longer require to serve "the greater good". One of course is the assumption that the "invisible hand" will ensure that corporations, while obeying the laws, will always serve the greater good. Another, and IMHO the most important, is that "the greater good" is unbelievably subjective. Morality isn't an absolute. There's no way legislature or some sort of government entity could objectively determine what is for "the greater good". By China's laws and AFAIK the opinion of most Chinese, Yahoo et. al *are* being moral companies, and contributing to the greater good.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheater! Every single one of those was set on freelech, so that reflects the taste of the mods, not the community. Although the collection on said site *is* very impressive.
Why spend $11 billion to stop a threat that is basically non-existent? Those incidents you pointed out happened in insecure areas, and even then they didn't succeed. The threat to American passenger planes in the US (and really 99% of everywhere else) is so small you probably can't even measure it. This is a boondoggle that will do nothing other than take tax money and put it into the hands of defense contractors. That money could be put towards something far more productive than this, and something that could save far more lives.
Ultimate safety is not possible, and it's not even desirable (IMHO of course). If we spent this much money on protecting every conceivable way for terrorists to attack us, we would go bankrupt. Preventative action is only possible to a certain extent. Take care of the low-hanging fruit, then let the rest of it be handled by law enforcement.
When you refer to the laws of the United States as a whole, that means laws at the federal level. So while it would be an accurate statement to say that complete voting rights in each of the states weren't granted to blacks until the 1960's, it's still wildly misleading to say that blacks couldn't vote until then.
The system already works like rating movies. The industry self-publishes ratings and retailers decide how they want to enforce those ratings. No change is necessary.
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there.
(No caps for lameness filter.)
Don't forget Altria, formerly known as Phillip Morris. They changed their name after all the smoking lawsuits were settled in 2003.
Sorry, but if an application gives a person with a complete lack of technical ability the ability to read the entire contents of your drive with full access from a remote location, and the only solution is to manually delete something that most users don't even know exists, that's a pretty serious flaw.
Or when you wake up in two feet of snow.
Sorry, that's part of what we do as humans. If you think that humans haven't been genetically modifying living creatures and imposing our will on nature before this you're crazy.
Try and find a cat that looks anything like your cat Fluffy in the wild. It doesn't exist, house cats have been genetically created by humans. You think your dog Rover is affectionate and obedient towards you because of natural selection? Nope, humans have been breeding dogs that way for millenia. Try to pet a wolf and see how affectionate they are.
This is just another level of sophistication to a process that has been happening since the dawn of civilization (and in fact could be considered the basis of civilization). Not that there aren't potential dangers. But unethical? Hardly.
You make the game so it's not all about twitch. Counter-Strike sucked on a console. Half Life 2, however, was excellent.
Ouch. £8 is a lot for the cheapest book you own. Even new paperbacks rarely cost more than $8 here. Hardbacks between $20-30. I definitely couldn't afford books if I bought all of them new and hardback. Most of my books I buy used paperbacks from used bookstores, and I usually pay $2-3 but never more than $10. Other times I buy from good will stores, garage sales, or library sales. I can often pick up 5-10 books for less than $5.
A lot of people don't believe I can read that much, but I've read nearly all of the books I own. I can go through 2-3 books a day if it's generic sci-fi, fantasy, or "mainstream" books and I don't have anything else to do. The intellectual books that actually require me to think while I read usually take a week or two to read if I'm busy. I find it makes life much more enjoyable to spend an hour a day reading, no matter how busy you are.
Someone tagged this rich bastard, but I don't think that's extreme at all. I've kept nearly every book I've ever bought in my life, and I probably have around 800. And I'm only 21 years old (thankfully my parents have an empty garage and I was reading from age 2). Depending on the submitter's age and if he/she is married to another book lover it would be very easy to get to that number.
This is slashdot, right? As in news for nerds. Do nerds no longer enjoy reading?
Actually, Canada and the US have natural growth rates of 0.3% and 0.6% respectively. Both have an overall growth rate of 0.9%. So while immigration is a significant factor in both countries, in the US it doesn't even account for a majority of the population increase. I can't find the numbers but I believe Australia also has a natural population growth.
Sorry, I meant to put this in the other post. Citation
That's why states that are actually sane (thankfully mine) have some sort of leeway with the consent laws. In Colorado, the age of consent is 17. However, if one person is between 15 and 17, it is still legal if the other person is less than ten years older. If one person is less than 15, it is still legal if the other person is less than 4 years older.
The building absorbs more energy I would think.
Presumably the tower would be located on high land or on top of buildings, putting it and the generators at lower risk of rising floodwaters. And during earthquakes, large amounts of buildings don't usually collapse. A few older buildings and structures collapse and large numbers of buildings receive light to moderate damage. Power failures are caused mostly by ruptured transmission lines, not by knocking out the actual power source.
We are still have the largest manufacturing sector in the world, and are the largest exporter in the world, even larger than China. The only reason we have such a trade imbalance is because consumption and thus demand for products here is significantly higher than elsewhere in the world.
True, they do have violence, but it's not really the same. The most violent Nintendo games (Twilight Princess, Metroid) usually have you fighting aliens or "evil" creatures and would be extremely tame on other systems. They place a lot of emphasis on game mechanics other than combat. A lot of the attacks are brightly-colored flashes of light or some other nonthreatening image. Compare that to Gears of War, Call of Duty, Resistance, etc. where the guns are blazing, explosions are going off all over the place, and there are high levels of carnage. There are hyper-violent games available for Nintendo systems (RE4 comes to mind) but they're not first party. On Nintendo systems, the violent AAA game is the exception, whereas on the PS3 or XBox 360 I can't think of a single high profile game (other than sports titles) that's not hyper-violent, let alone contains no violence.
Sorry for mixing measurements, for some reason I didn't even think of that. My general point was that they're often portrayed as being paid poorly when generally they're paid as well as their education dictates since in most places it's a very easy job to get.
Median income for a master's degree is $52,390. I found this on google, which says that in 1993-94 55% of high school teachers had master's degrees. That's the best I could come up with, but it seems I was off quite a bit. I was thinking maybe 30-40% of HS teachers have master's degrees.
I've seen studies (sorry can't remember the source) however that show student achievement has basically no correlation to the level of education of the teacher. That seems logical to me as everything you teach in high school (even advanced courses) is well below what is taught at a university, so having even more education wouldn't necessarily help.
What I think would work to improve teaching quality would be a general increase in pay (to attract people with better options) along with some sort of performance-based incentive system and the ability to more easily fire underachieving teachers. The problem of course is the difficulty in isolating the effectiveness of the teacher from the surrounding environmental variables. Also, most ways of judging teacher effectiveness use standardized tests, and that just results in teachers teaching to improve student test scores.
Then there are the teacher's unions, which I think are awful. There's no way in hell they would stomach anything other than tiny revisions to the tenure system. And high school administrations/school boards are some of the most inept organizations around. The small school I grew up in was run like a dictatorship, it was ridiculous. Tenure has some (massive) drawbacks, but it does often save good teachers from idiot administrators.
At this point, though, I'm pretty sure nearly any change would be a good one. Our secondary school system is a joke.
Sorry, I did not intend to post anonymously. Parent post was made by me.
The 360 and PS3 are pretty fun too. But the Wii has a few value propositions (I know, I know, I'm sorry) that the PS3 and Xbox don't:
1) It's significantly cheaper.
2) It has a unique control scheme.
3) Many of its games are very simple and intuitive to learn (ie Wii Sports), therefore more people can pick it up and play. This means they have a *much* larger market. It seems a lot of the systems are ending up being played by older people and people otherwise unfamiliar with video games.
4) Nintendo has built a strong image over the years of being kid friendly. Nearly all of Nintendo's AAA titles do not deal with violence, sex, or profanity and combined with the price this makes it a more appealing gift than an XBox 360 or PS3.
Being fun isn't the reason why it's been a runaway success. Every console in recent memory has been fun. The Gamecube and N64 were fun, but they generally got their ass kicked. Even more so for the Dreamcast.
You briefly touched another salient point so I'll expand. Another major reason the Turing test isn't good is because it is a one-sided test. Even if we assume that a machine that could transparently converse with a human could be called intelligent, a machine could still be called intelligent even if it didn't know how to communicate with humans. For example, a person born deaf and dumb most likely can't communicate with people, but that doesn't mean they aren't intelligent.
The only thing that would produce would be extreme isolationism and poverty for the US. If we essentially ended all trade with nations that have oppressive governments, we would cut off most of the world (including most of our oil suppliers, among other things). Even places like India or Brazil which are generally supportive of liberty do some terrible things and deprive people of human rights.
Could you imagine, on the other side, countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Indonesia refusing to trade with us because we are not Muslim? Or Latin American countries refusing to trade with us because we are not Catholic? Or Europe refusing to trade with us because we don't have national health care? That entire idea is ludicrous. It's a very naive and idealistic position to take that your views are correct and all other must adopt them or be shunned. The world doesn't work that way, nor should it.
It's necessary to trade with other nations, and most other nations are going to do things people from the US find objectionable. You just have to live with the fact that other people have different views than ours. If the Chinese people wanted complete liberty, they would overthrow the government. It's not our responsibility to force our ideas on those that don't want them.
You're correct about laws and regulations being the only way to influence the behavior of corporations, but how far are you willing to take that? China is a sovereign country. The US government has absolutely no right to determine how companies act under a separate, sovereign state's law. Yahoo, while working in China, is a Chinese company and must obey Chinese laws. I think it would be dangerous to set a precedent where corporations would be exerting the influence of their home government.
Would you be fine with Chinese companies pushing their beliefs on us? If not, then it's is supremely hypocritical for us to expect US companies to do the same. Free trade cuts both ways, you have to take the bad with the good.
As for your second point, there are multiple, valid reasons why corporations are no longer require to serve "the greater good". One of course is the assumption that the "invisible hand" will ensure that corporations, while obeying the laws, will always serve the greater good. Another, and IMHO the most important, is that "the greater good" is unbelievably subjective. Morality isn't an absolute. There's no way legislature or some sort of government entity could objectively determine what is for "the greater good". By China's laws and AFAIK the opinion of most Chinese, Yahoo et. al *are* being moral companies, and contributing to the greater good.