Thomas Cook tourists from England. Drunk, loud, red sunburnt skin, loud, messy, loud, zero manners, loud. An absolute menace at every holiday destination. Almost as bad as rich Russians who think everything is theirs to damage and everybody is there to serve them only.
As somebody who lives in Central Europe (which, to most Brits, is apparently the same thing as Eastern Europe), I can fully attest to your observations. British tourists are incredibly uncultured and rude compared to pretty much all other tourists you see around here. Which is quite funny when you think about how, historically, they tended to portray themselves as more sophisticated than other folk*. Rich Russians are a menace, especially if they're anywhere near a car, but they have a niveau of behavior your average Brit could only dream of.
[*] I once even heard a group of them outright declaring that they're the "best" people in the Universe, and that "we've kicked these guys' arses every time we came here" (never mind that this country has never been at war with Britain). They then proceeded to threaten the nightclub owner (who threw them out of his club, hence the argument) to go to the British embasssy and "you'll see what happens". They were bloody serious too; I wish I could say this was an isolated incident, but these things happen practically all summer, every summer, if you live in a touristy city.
Wow, what a sight to behold. It was pretty hard to stay quiet while watching that streak of light come down with everybody cheering. Probably the first "USA! USA!" chant I've ever heard that was both entirely well-deserved and not even a little bit sarcastic. An historic occasion indeed.:-)
Congratulations SpaceX, this is like that 4th launch where everyone suddenly went from doubt to astonishment.
In the longer term though, when it becomes normal to live right next to your workplace for everyone, you would be much more tied to not losing your job. Imagine how much commuting would suck!
I think that for prepackaged food products, if there's no way to reseal the packaging provided, then the calorie content and other information on the packaging needs to state the total for the entire contents, not for some obtuse 2.5 servings.
That's what you already get in the EU: there is a column for nutritional content per unit mass (100mg, for solids) or volume (100ml, for liquids) as well as a column for content per product. At a glance you can compare different substances using the first column, or read your total energy input if you eat it from the second.
Given how much certain processed food ingredients seem to affect our 'digestive behavior', however, I feel that looking at just the basic nutritional content is only half the story at best.
"people in general are honest".. I think those tests probably did not include lawyers, advertisers, salesmen, corporate CEOs, etc.
You bring up an interesting point: while we do expend some effort doing psychological research to assess the honesty of people (and it's well-accepted that humans have an innate desire for correct information - even if this can be subverted), those same people might make radically different choices when put into inpersonal positions (such as CEO or marketing employee). Their actions are then taken as an extension of the organisation, rather than an expression of personal convictions. Thus it feels more like the company's present situation (and expectations of superiors) is the thing dictating the choices they make, rather than them; this makes any assessment of the person's honesty in normal social circumstances all but irrelevant.
Interestingly, this illusion seems to disappear when people break rules. THEN we see them as acting out of their own interest.
But not Ukraine. It's chaotic, yes, but free and democratic as hell.
LOL. You couldn't be further from the truth. They have a "free market", sure, I'll give you that, but it's a free market in the American sense. Quality of services and products do not matter beyond some bare minimum, as friendships, kickbacks, manipulative marketing practices and sheer piles of money have orders of magnitude more influence than anything else. They have such a free market that you can't even buy proper food in many places, because nutritional content is a rather expensive thing and it's been optimized out where possible. That is perfectly in line with a functioning free market, by the way, and I'm not exaggerating here. The milk you buy in stores is almost entirely made of milk powder (you can increase milk content by paying more, but you can't just *get milk* like you can anywhere just accross the border), and that's just normal. 2-to-3-ton SUVs are the *majority* of traffic (!) in the capital and if you see a Hummer driving down THE SIDEWALK people are just getting out of the way because they are more afraid of the asshole driving it than they are of getting run over. Money just elevates you out of the population without any sort of need for control. You open your mouth against any random asshole, that happens to have a lot of it (and they are all over the place), and you get rammed off the road and beaten to a pulp or simply shot by members of the armed forces. Is that your definition of freedom and democracy?
This country needed the EU a lot more than the EU needed it; it is run by barbarians, and is still a place where might makes right. The parallels to the USA are hard to ignore but the Ukrainians simply never even experienced what freedom is. In the USA, at least in the past, some people did get that chance, and can now remember what it was like.
(Disclaimer: I just got back from there. The above applies to the - comparatively Western - capital. Everywhere else the divides are hundreds of times worse, and that's before you even consider the conflict.)
Radiation from Fukushima is not a human-extinction-level concern. It's a one-or-two-extra-people-die-of-cancer concern.
No it's not. That's just as blind to the facts as the "oh god NUCULAR WEAPONS" crowd is. Nobody (as far as I can tell) is saying you're going to die (or even be affected) where you live, who knows how far away from Japan. Nobody is saying this single event will cause the end of civilisation. It won't, because the vast majority of the radiation released was injected into a different food chain that we barely know anything about - the ocean. If you really think the pollution released into the air is the biggest problem here, you're ignoring nearly the entire effect of the catastrophe.
Remember, we're talking about reactor fuel meltdown, not a nuclear explosion. Just like Chernobyl, the explosions that did happen were relatively harmless hydrogen gas explosions that would have been incapable of damaging anything outside of the industrial compound. Once containment is breached, however, you are talking about large amounts of radioactive material submersed in a moving liquid/gas environment. The damage is no longer local and is cumulative, and increases with every minute spent dispersing unstable isotopes into the gas/liquid. You don't have to approach a lethal direct dose - anywhere - for it to spread through the entire food chain and alter life at the most basic level (cell and DNA reproduction itself).
This is a problem that you can't debug, or fix, or predict (irradiation effects only become predictable _well_ above random mutation level, where direct effects start happening, but if you get to that point in the environment your only option now is to leave the planet) once atmospheric dilution has begun, and it will start affecting us *long* before we notice any increase in cancer rates, deformed babies or miscarriages (look up the orphanages in Minsk, btw!). Before that starts happening, we will have extinguished or corrupted most of the species that are a lot less radiation-tolerant than we are. Like insects, which plants depend on for reproduction. Which, in turn, nearly everything else depends on.
Now realize that we are ACTUALLY discussing a triple reactor meltdown that *actually happened* right next to one of the largest material-carrying currents that exist in our atmosphere; containment was breached allowing liquid to flow right in and out of the 3 reactors; that contamination has been happening continuously for the past *THREE YEARS*.
I, too am frustrated by sensationalism and fearmongering surrounding nuclear power generation, but I swear since Fukushima happened and the initial scare faded, the "it's completely safe because you need a lot of radiation to kill someone" crowd has been doing more damage than the fear crowd ever did.
Hungary here, I'm getting 120/15 Mbps for less than $30 a month in Budapest. I originally had 240/60 Mbps ($35) but it was not really worth it since most servers (and peers) can rarely deliver more than 90-110 Mbps at a time, even though it actually tested 248 on a [compteting ISP's] speed test.
Microsoft has way more money than whichever company that owns No-ip does. They can't sue and win.
That sentence, combined with the lack of sarcasm or indignation in its presentation, would paint a pretty dystopic picture of any kind of fictional society a paranoid author would want to write about.
I wish this society remained fictional, and I wish I didn't have to live on the same planet.
By the way, do the math. At a walking speed of 4 miles per hour, I would be home before the initial 45 minute wait for the bus. Never mind the crazy quilt route they took.
So now that you've done the math, why don't you just walk?:) That's not that much. Plus you get a better experience than just sitting on a bus.
People like nothing better than to get outraged about sex.
Let's not over-generalize. This only applies to the US. And even there, I'm pretty sure it's not "the people"'s fault - if I grew up in that climate, where intimacy is scary but aggression is not, I would probably think the same way too.
Daily spam (coming from an entity that *already has* your payment details) for the privilege of paying for a domain name? Doesn't sound that nice of a deal to me. You don't even get that with free DynDNS (that you have to re-renew every month).
Please, don't be an asshole, at least not for good reason. Why you would think one particular ancient metaphor in one particular language must be known by all the 7 billion people in all corners of this planet is beyond me.
also, pretty much every human being would make sure to not step on any of those obstacles, mainly because they don't want to trip and fall. Who seriously sees a corridor full of wood and goes "fuck it, i'll just stroll straight over all this"? You don't, you look to make sure you're stepping on solid ground. Sure, there's times when you do have to tread on uneven and unsecured surfaces, but then you take even more care on where you're going. This robot doesn't seem to have the logic to do this, and that's where they're going wrong.
What? That completely misses the point of this entire excercise. The point is to design and test a system that is capable of walking across such obstacles, just like you are, when it does become necessary. Once such a system is implemented, it will still make just as much sense to design the robot to avoid obstacles when it can, except now it can still keep going when it can't.
In other words, these guys are trying to design a better support and locomotion system for future robots, instead of making a robot that knows where not to go.
The fact you fucked up by not using your local uni is your own problem. Most of the planet offers free or near free university level education. Fix your country's system instead of falling for the educational loan scam you 'mericans fall for.
Assuming he is from the USA, your statement isn't really defensible. Higher education in the USA is not available for lower classes (I have a hunch that now includes a large part of the former middle class as well), so his only choices were either "put yourself in debt" or "don't get an education". I can't really see how that is his fault, given that he has no way to influence the system (and no, voting doesn't count). It's easy to say "your fault" for those who grew up in the 1st world (but not in the USA) and so are perfectly used to things like education and healthcare, but in the (present-day) United States the situation is entirely different: one of the major incentives for people to not rock the boat too hard and continue working throughout their entire adult life is to earn the right to higher education for their children. If you don't manage to save up enough for them to go to university, they'll have to become worker drones (or, well, criminals) as well, and this goes on until one generation finally builds their stack high enough to reach the first latch on the poverty trap.
In other words, the topic of higher education in the United States differs significantly from the same topic in relation to most other countries. You can not extrapolate from what you experienced: the cards are stacked heavily against maximizing the number of educated people available (which would normally be the goal).
When will they realize that their entire polygraph system is flawed in principle? It's mumbo jumbo! Might as well be reading tea leaves. It only works if the person being "tested" believes that it works.
They're already well aware of that. Which is precisely why they're taking this so seriously: they cannot allow this knowledge to spread too far and throw the legitimacy of polygraph tests into question.
If it was a demonstrably legitimate way to learn if someone's telling the truth, they wouldn't need public perception to prop it up.
I can't ignore the amount and similarity of these reports. This can't just be some paranoid group of people losing their rationality thanks to the War of Terror, as I had previously thought - reports indicate that these exact same rules are showing up in schools all over America, and they seem to be progressing at the same rate as well. (Remember when they only lost it when an 8-year-old said "I'll kill you all" out of rage? Yeah, now it seems rational in comparison...)
You can't help but wonder how all those millions of children currently being put through elementary in the USA are going to reconcile being shown exceeding amounts of pointless violence all throughout their childhood on TV, with seeing adults go nuts with fear the moment they point a finger at their buddy and go "boom".
At the very least - if you ignore all those who will grow up simply being confused - it's going to create a generation of actual terrorists. What is it that neglected children crave? Anything that is rewarded with an immediate and strong reaction from their surroundings (especially their parents and teachers), just look at teenage vandalism. Now all these children are going to learn how to make adults immediately afraid of them without actually doing anything. They're going to use this knowledge, and once they finally get something actually dangerous in their hands, they will: 1) become intoxicated with power (see: abused kids who buff up during adolescence), 2) not realize their actions will have consequences (as harmless finger-pointing gets the same kind of response as a real gun), and finally, once the threat becomes real, 3) be gunned down mercilessly by over-trained SWAT teams in broad daylight.
And of course this will, in turn, reinforce fear in everyone else and "prove" to the citizens that military population control methods are necessary for their safety.
Slashdot Mirror
Thomas Cook tourists from England. Drunk, loud, red sunburnt skin, loud, messy, loud, zero manners, loud. An absolute menace at every holiday destination. Almost as bad as rich Russians who think everything is theirs to damage and everybody is there to serve them only.
As somebody who lives in Central Europe (which, to most Brits, is apparently the same thing as Eastern Europe), I can fully attest to your observations. British tourists are incredibly uncultured and rude compared to pretty much all other tourists you see around here. Which is quite funny when you think about how, historically, they tended to portray themselves as more sophisticated than other folk*. Rich Russians are a menace, especially if they're anywhere near a car, but they have a niveau of behavior your average Brit could only dream of.
[*] I once even heard a group of them outright declaring that they're the "best" people in the Universe, and that "we've kicked these guys' arses every time we came here" (never mind that this country has never been at war with Britain). They then proceeded to threaten the nightclub owner (who threw them out of his club, hence the argument) to go to the British embasssy and "you'll see what happens". They were bloody serious too; I wish I could say this was an isolated incident, but these things happen practically all summer, every summer, if you live in a touristy city.
those radar waves sure travel far in space lololol
They certainly travel farther than down here, in the air. You might know something we don't, but your chuckling is not very informative.
You live in such a sad, caustic world if you've never had an occasion to celebrate your own kind.
What are you talking about?
Wow, what a sight to behold. It was pretty hard to stay quiet while watching that streak of light come down with everybody cheering. Probably the first "USA! USA!" chant I've ever heard that was both entirely well-deserved and not even a little bit sarcastic. An historic occasion indeed. :-)
Congratulations SpaceX, this is like that 4th launch where everyone suddenly went from doubt to astonishment.
Amen.
(Useless post to undo accidental bad mod.)
Fascinating!
In the longer term though, when it becomes normal to live right next to your workplace for everyone, you would be much more tied to not losing your job. Imagine how much commuting would suck!
I think that for prepackaged food products, if there's no way to reseal the packaging provided, then the calorie content and other information on the packaging needs to state the total for the entire contents, not for some obtuse 2.5 servings.
That's what you already get in the EU: there is a column for nutritional content per unit mass (100mg, for solids) or volume (100ml, for liquids) as well as a column for content per product. At a glance you can compare different substances using the first column, or read your total energy input if you eat it from the second.
Given how much certain processed food ingredients seem to affect our 'digestive behavior', however, I feel that looking at just the basic nutritional content is only half the story at best.
"people in general are honest" .. I think those tests probably did not include lawyers, advertisers, salesmen, corporate CEOs, etc.
You bring up an interesting point: while we do expend some effort doing psychological research to assess the honesty of people (and it's well-accepted that humans have an innate desire for correct information - even if this can be subverted), those same people might make radically different choices when put into inpersonal positions (such as CEO or marketing employee). Their actions are then taken as an extension of the organisation, rather than an expression of personal convictions. Thus it feels more like the company's present situation (and expectations of superiors) is the thing dictating the choices they make, rather than them; this makes any assessment of the person's honesty in normal social circumstances all but irrelevant.
Interestingly, this illusion seems to disappear when people break rules. THEN we see them as acting out of their own interest.
But not Ukraine. It's chaotic, yes, but free and democratic as hell.
LOL. You couldn't be further from the truth. They have a "free market", sure, I'll give you that, but it's a free market in the American sense. Quality of services and products do not matter beyond some bare minimum, as friendships, kickbacks, manipulative marketing practices and sheer piles of money have orders of magnitude more influence than anything else. They have such a free market that you can't even buy proper food in many places, because nutritional content is a rather expensive thing and it's been optimized out where possible. That is perfectly in line with a functioning free market, by the way, and I'm not exaggerating here. The milk you buy in stores is almost entirely made of milk powder (you can increase milk content by paying more, but you can't just *get milk* like you can anywhere just accross the border), and that's just normal. 2-to-3-ton SUVs are the *majority* of traffic (!) in the capital and if you see a Hummer driving down THE SIDEWALK people are just getting out of the way because they are more afraid of the asshole driving it than they are of getting run over. Money just elevates you out of the population without any sort of need for control. You open your mouth against any random asshole, that happens to have a lot of it (and they are all over the place), and you get rammed off the road and beaten to a pulp or simply shot by members of the armed forces. Is that your definition of freedom and democracy?
This country needed the EU a lot more than the EU needed it; it is run by barbarians, and is still a place where might makes right. The parallels to the USA are hard to ignore but the Ukrainians simply never even experienced what freedom is. In the USA, at least in the past, some people did get that chance, and can now remember what it was like.
(Disclaimer: I just got back from there. The above applies to the - comparatively Western - capital. Everywhere else the divides are hundreds of times worse, and that's before you even consider the conflict.)
Radiation from Fukushima is not a human-extinction-level concern. It's a one-or-two-extra-people-die-of-cancer concern.
No it's not. That's just as blind to the facts as the "oh god NUCULAR WEAPONS" crowd is. Nobody (as far as I can tell) is saying you're going to die (or even be affected) where you live, who knows how far away from Japan. Nobody is saying this single event will cause the end of civilisation. It won't, because the vast majority of the radiation released was injected into a different food chain that we barely know anything about - the ocean. If you really think the pollution released into the air is the biggest problem here, you're ignoring nearly the entire effect of the catastrophe.
Remember, we're talking about reactor fuel meltdown, not a nuclear explosion. Just like Chernobyl, the explosions that did happen were relatively harmless hydrogen gas explosions that would have been incapable of damaging anything outside of the industrial compound. Once containment is breached, however, you are talking about large amounts of radioactive material submersed in a moving liquid/gas environment. The damage is no longer local and is cumulative, and increases with every minute spent dispersing unstable isotopes into the gas/liquid. You don't have to approach a lethal direct dose - anywhere - for it to spread through the entire food chain and alter life at the most basic level (cell and DNA reproduction itself).
This is a problem that you can't debug, or fix, or predict (irradiation effects only become predictable _well_ above random mutation level, where direct effects start happening, but if you get to that point in the environment your only option now is to leave the planet) once atmospheric dilution has begun, and it will start affecting us *long* before we notice any increase in cancer rates, deformed babies or miscarriages (look up the orphanages in Minsk, btw!). Before that starts happening, we will have extinguished or corrupted most of the species that are a lot less radiation-tolerant than we are. Like insects, which plants depend on for reproduction. Which, in turn, nearly everything else depends on.
Now realize that we are ACTUALLY discussing a triple reactor meltdown that *actually happened* right next to one of the largest material-carrying currents that exist in our atmosphere; containment was breached allowing liquid to flow right in and out of the 3 reactors; that contamination has been happening continuously for the past *THREE YEARS*.
I, too am frustrated by sensationalism and fearmongering surrounding nuclear power generation, but I swear since Fukushima happened and the initial scare faded, the "it's completely safe because you need a lot of radiation to kill someone" crowd has been doing more damage than the fear crowd ever did.
Hungary here, I'm getting 120/15 Mbps for less than $30 a month in Budapest. I originally had 240/60 Mbps ($35) but it was not really worth it since most servers (and peers) can rarely deliver more than 90-110 Mbps at a time, even though it actually tested 248 on a [compteting ISP's] speed test.
Microsoft has way more money than whichever company that owns No-ip does. They can't sue and win.
That sentence, combined with the lack of sarcasm or indignation in its presentation, would paint a pretty dystopic picture of any kind of fictional society a paranoid author would want to write about.
I wish this society remained fictional, and I wish I didn't have to live on the same planet.
By the way, do the math. At a walking speed of 4 miles per hour, I would be home before the initial 45 minute wait for the bus. Never mind the crazy quilt route they took.
So now that you've done the math, why don't you just walk? :)
That's not that much. Plus you get a better experience than just sitting on a bus.
Rather ironic prediction considering the movie the title of the submission is alluding to :-)
People like nothing better than to get outraged about sex.
Let's not over-generalize. This only applies to the US.
And even there, I'm pretty sure it's not "the people"'s fault - if I grew up in that climate, where intimacy is scary but aggression is not, I would probably think the same way too.
Daily spam (coming from an entity that *already has* your payment details) for the privilege of paying for a domain name? Doesn't sound that nice of a deal to me. You don't even get that with free DynDNS (that you have to re-renew every month).
*without good reason, that is. (Feel free to bash me for that one.:])
Nice metaphor
Please don't tell me it's new to you...
Please, don't be an asshole, at least not for good reason.
Why you would think one particular ancient metaphor in one particular language must be known by all the 7 billion people in all corners of this planet is beyond me.
(You do know you're on the Internet, don't you?)
Lack of familiarity with any specific specialist field has no bearing on intelligence, dumbass.
also, pretty much every human being would make sure to not step on any of those obstacles, mainly because they don't want to trip and fall. Who seriously sees a corridor full of wood and goes "fuck it, i'll just stroll straight over all this"? You don't, you look to make sure you're stepping on solid ground. Sure, there's times when you do have to tread on uneven and unsecured surfaces, but then you take even more care on where you're going. This robot doesn't seem to have the logic to do this, and that's where they're going wrong.
What? That completely misses the point of this entire excercise.
The point is to design and test a system that is capable of walking across such obstacles, just like you are, when it does become necessary. Once such a system is implemented, it will still make just as much sense to design the robot to avoid obstacles when it can, except now it can still keep going when it can't.
In other words, these guys are trying to design a better support and locomotion system for future robots, instead of making a robot that knows where not to go.
I'm surprised I seem to be the first to say,
Noooooooooooooooo! :(
The fact you fucked up by not using your local uni is your own problem. Most of the planet offers free or near free university level education. Fix your country's system instead of falling for the educational loan scam you 'mericans fall for.
Assuming he is from the USA, your statement isn't really defensible. Higher education in the USA is not available for lower classes (I have a hunch that now includes a large part of the former middle class as well), so his only choices were either "put yourself in debt" or "don't get an education". I can't really see how that is his fault, given that he has no way to influence the system (and no, voting doesn't count). It's easy to say "your fault" for those who grew up in the 1st world (but not in the USA) and so are perfectly used to things like education and healthcare, but in the (present-day) United States the situation is entirely different: one of the major incentives for people to not rock the boat too hard and continue working throughout their entire adult life is to earn the right to higher education for their children. If you don't manage to save up enough for them to go to university, they'll have to become worker drones (or, well, criminals) as well, and this goes on until one generation finally builds their stack high enough to reach the first latch on the poverty trap.
In other words, the topic of higher education in the United States differs significantly from the same topic in relation to most other countries. You can not extrapolate from what you experienced: the cards are stacked heavily against maximizing the number of educated people available (which would normally be the goal).
When will they realize that their entire polygraph system is flawed in principle? It's mumbo jumbo! Might as well be reading tea leaves. It only works if the person being "tested" believes that it works.
They're already well aware of that. Which is precisely why they're taking this so seriously: they cannot allow this knowledge to spread too far and throw the legitimacy of polygraph tests into question.
If it was a demonstrably legitimate way to learn if someone's telling the truth, they wouldn't need public perception to prop it up.
I can't ignore the amount and similarity of these reports. This can't just be some paranoid group of people losing their rationality thanks to the War of Terror, as I had previously thought - reports indicate that these exact same rules are showing up in schools all over America, and they seem to be progressing at the same rate as well. (Remember when they only lost it when an 8-year-old said "I'll kill you all" out of rage? Yeah, now it seems rational in comparison...)
You can't help but wonder how all those millions of children currently being put through elementary in the USA are going to reconcile being shown exceeding amounts of pointless violence all throughout their childhood on TV, with seeing adults go nuts with fear the moment they point a finger at their buddy and go "boom".
At the very least - if you ignore all those who will grow up simply being confused - it's going to create a generation of actual terrorists.
What is it that neglected children crave? Anything that is rewarded with an immediate and strong reaction from their surroundings (especially their parents and teachers), just look at teenage vandalism. Now all these children are going to learn how to make adults immediately afraid of them without actually doing anything. They're going to use this knowledge, and once they finally get something actually dangerous in their hands, they will:
1) become intoxicated with power (see: abused kids who buff up during adolescence),
2) not realize their actions will have consequences (as harmless finger-pointing gets the same kind of response as a real gun), and finally, once the threat becomes real,
3) be gunned down mercilessly by over-trained SWAT teams in broad daylight.
And of course this will, in turn, reinforce fear in everyone else and "prove" to the citizens that military population control methods are necessary for their safety.