Unfortunately, there is no shortage of jackasses who will pull a fire alarm just for the hell of it.
Back then if someone shouted fire, you'd have been well advised to get the hell out as soon as possible - very much more so than if a fire alarm rang today.
I'm going to out on a limb, and argue that by the time someone yelled "fire!" there is generally already some corroborating evidence... people shouting in general; smell of smoke, roaring/sucking/crashing/popping sounds etc.
People don't generally panic and trample eachother to death unless there is more clear and present evidence danger than someone yelling "fire!"
I've been in 3 buildings that have actually caught fire; twice at night; where the powers gone out, and the lights are gone; and you can hear the fire trucks pulling up outside... and the exit was still highly orderly. In one case one could even smell smoke. The crowds were a bit nervous, excited even.
I'll grant you that 100 years ago, that things were different, but I'm skeptical that it was EVER the case that crowds just started trampling people to death merely because someone falsely yelled "fire".
I know there have been a few cases of false alarms leading to deaths; but there are usually extenuating circumstances...
Here's one from 1913. 2 people died. Except it wasn't strictly speaking a false alarm -- there was a sound like a gunshot, smoke, and even flames as the projector did briefly catch fire while changing reels before the projectionist extinguished it. So when someone yelled fire... well... there was a fire.
The building was also WAY over lawful capacity (which was evidently very common in those days; according to the police's own statements).
The upshot though is that to say yelling "Fire!" is what caused the deaths is over simplifying a much more complicated situation.
But even that sidesteps my point; I'm not really asserting that yelling fire! can't be dangerous, it was more to point out that mocking mohammed to provoke a response was not really different. In the right circumstances, sure its dangerous. Just as showing up at a hockey game dressed up like a flaccid penis and mocking the losing home team to the drunkest group super-fans you can find... its reckless and stupid.
Its deliberately provoking a violent response. And there is nothing wrong with recognizing that to be the case. Whether you are yelling fire, mocking drunk hockey fans, or provoking muslim extremists...
Outside of nefarious uses, the information of a dead person is of no pactical value to facebook or its advertising customers. Dead people don't buy anything.
But their shopping habits can still be used to predict what the living will buy.
To me the bigger question is things like the ownership of games on steam, your magic the gathering online card collection, your MMO account, and so forth. These things have value, and the parasitic EULA's claiming you don't have ownership of anything while the main sites flog you to "buy! buy! buy!"notwithstanding its clear that the survivors will often have a very real interest in these things. My kids have characters on my MMO account. My entire family plays my steam games. I never got into MTGO precisely because of the ephemeral nature of the cards... but lots of other people do have valuable collections.
If anything we should have laws to ensure this stuff does get passed to the survivors without hassle.
If you yell Fire, and people flee, they are fleeing because they have a reasonable suspicion that there is a fire, and that there lives are at stake. They can choose not to, but a reasonable person in that situation would flee or check to see if there was a fire.
Except that a mad panic resulting in people trampling eachother to death doesn't happen in practice; simply from some yutz yelling "Fire!". It just doesn't happen.
However, it is UNreasonable for Muslims to attack the US embassy because someone insults their prophet.
Agreed. And at this point most of the evidence points to that being a pre-planned attack taking advantage of 'opportunity' rather than sparked directly by the comment. So it's largely irrelevant to this discussion, isn't it?
People insult Jesus all the time and no one goes on a rampage
Except this isn't about Jesus.
so we cannot say that insulting a religious figure will likely cause a riot...
But we can say insulting Mohammed quite likely will. In fact, I'd bet more on it causing a some sort of violent outburst long than I would on you having any luck causing an outburst yelling "Fire!" somewhere.
Replace it with any scenario that you could think of where immediate danger is real
I can't. Perhaps there isn't one. The "Fire! in a theatre" scenario is the appropriate scenario, because the potential for danger is well understood.
We can imagine that falsely yelling fire would cause a panic, and we can imagine that a panic could lead to violence. That unlikely but easily imaginable outcome has served us for a long time as the canonical example for where we have argued one's right to free speech should be curtailed.
Here we have a situation where again we can easily imagine releasing this video would cause outrage and even violence, and we can even reasonably speculate that this was precisely the desired outcome.
And my point is that the "Fire!" scenario is not nearly the cause for immediate danger some think. To the degree that I argue a rational person would actually find it more likely that publicly releasing a mockery video of Mohammed would lead to violence than falsely yelling fire in a theatre.
Neither is a direct cause for immediate danger; and in both cases individuals can decide for themselves how to act. Yelling fire in a theatre doesn't create violence any more or any less than tweeting a message to kill jews or releasing a video mocking Mohammed does.
You are arguing that they are different because yelling fire falsely is somehow "obviously" more dangerous, and more reckless. It's not.
But if falsely yelling "fire!" in a theatre is the threshold for which we state that "reasonable people should know better and not do it" then that argument applies equally to releasing videos mocking Mohammed too. It was no less reckless and stupid; and like falsely yelling fire, it was done to provoke a mob response.
Actually, odds are it won't. It might. But there's no certainty. I've been in lots of places including places that are dark and crowded where someone has yelled fire to be "clever" or even pulled the fire alarm.
So far the crowd has never once trampled anyone to death or even paniced. Usually they just get a bit more restless as people try to determine if its real, and then either the false alarm is stopped... and in one case to everyone's surprise the fire alarms were in fact real, and people filed out relatively orderly.
Shouting fire in a crowded theatre isn't nearly as "dangerous" or "reckless" as you might think.
Someone who would rather work (payment amount / earnings per hour) number of hours and have fun blowing stuff up for an hour instead of grinding for greater than random_number*(payment amount / earnings per hour) hours to get to the same place that would allow them to blow up stuff for an hour?
Diablo style games are a random number generator grind through near infinite swarms of mobs and countless repetitive dungeons. The grind is the game. If you enjoy the endless mindless clickfest with the swathe of corposes and the occasional piece of loot then play on. If not, then play something else.
But paying $60 for diablo 3 so you can pay someone else to play it for you because you don't actually enjoy playing diablo 3 is pretty much the absolute pinnacle of stupid.
The game is not going to be any different with purchased loot. There is no "grind to get somewhere good"... you just grind to get to a new place to grind. Its not an MMO where all the interesting content is at "max level". Its randomly generated dungeons all they way up.
Early criticism of D3 are valid, but those are a thing of the past.
No they aren't.
The core game design is fucking retarded. The gear upgrade path is market based. In some sense its much more efficient to gear up in D3 by playing "auction house trader" than "hack and slash dungeon crawler".
That's fine if you -want- to play a trading game. But if that's what you want, play EVE or something that actually does a good job of it.
D3 is a lousy ARPG.
Its a half decent part time job though.
larger.... trading market than TL2 ever will
Well yeah, that's true, but you say it like its a good thing. I don't crawl dungeons so that I can sell things over the internet, to fund buying other things over the internet so that I can crawl dungeons more efficiently in order to sell even more things over the internet.
I'm happy TL2 will never be that.
Enjoy your part time job.
And the new changes around the corner in 1.05 are a vast step in the right direction.
D3 can't be fixed. They need to start over from scratch.
It depends what you are looking at. You mention 60fps which suggests games, and i agree they work out pretty good.
The web doesn't tend to do nearly as well. Various web-widgets and icons which are low resolution to start with simply don't survive scaling well. Those little shopping carts, and thumbups, and stars, and sites with line art/borders... some of the lines get doubled to 2 pixels which look to thick, even with gray scaling and anti-aliasing etc.
And the web, even today, is still full of gif buttons with and text-as-gif instead of as a font. These still get mangled by scaling.
Applications with toolbar icons, and other little graphical widgets also suffer.
Al that said, don't get me wrong, the retina display is a good screen; and the higher native resolution you have to work with the better the scaling results will be. 30% scaling on 2880x1800 panel is going to be better than 30% scaling on a 1980x1020 panel no matter what.
They chose to build their own hardware specifically so that they don't have to solve unsolvable problems.
They did no such thing. If grandma buys a mid-size imac, can't see it well enough, and scales it 30% it still looks like crap. Apple can't control what the customer is going to do anymore than Microsoft can.
If someone buys a 1080p 13" display designed to show a lot of content in a really small space, then it works great. If the user (or idiot reviewer in this case) decides he wants the text 30% bigger then its going to look like crap.
Your eyes can't quite make out the web on your ipad? Want it 30% bigger? Its going to look like crap.
Doesn't matter what OS it is. If the user steps outside the native resolution, it looks like crap.
Apple's little trick with the retina display is a clumsy hack. If you buy a retina macbook and happen to like it just as it is then your golden... new apps designed for it work, old apps designed for 1/4 the screen are pixel doubled to work as well.
But what if you don't happen to like it exactly as it is. What if you've got good eyesight and bought a retina display to make real use of some of that extra pixel space instead of just having smoother fonts at the same size you had on the old one? Scale it down? 30% to give you some more space... looks like crap.
What if your older and the default on the retina display is too small for you... scale it up 30% to read it better. Looks like crap.
Apple didn't "solve" the problem through hardware. The problem is unsolved and unsolvable. The only difference is that this particular reviewer didn't happen to try scaling things up by 30% on a Mac when he made his "discovery" that scaling off native pixel resolution looks like crap.
iOS and OSX. And that's all. Of course, you get the whole Apple package in which there might be elements you dislike.
Nope. Not at all. OSX and ios suck at it just as bad as windows.
Apple has just been careful to hide the problem by not shipping any hardware that exposes it. Their own high-dpi displays were carefully chosen to be exact multiples of the traditional resolution, so that they could scale things with pixel doubling.
But as soon as you get outside of that little box, and ask OSX to do 125% or 150% scaling of pretty much anything and you get the same mess.
Go ahead, hook up your mac to a 13" 1080p screen and try browsing the web on it... everything that this article complains about with windows 8 is present in osx.
How does one travel if every mode of transportation is a privilege that can be trivially revoked? Is travel then also a privilege?
Is walking "right"? Or is it too a privilege?
You need to abide by the rules of the road as set forth by the governing bodies, or find another way to travel.
Are you alluding to the tired argument of needing a license to drive? And that a drivers license is not a right?
Because I'm fine with that. But I don't need a drivers license to be a passenger in a taxi. I don't need to submit to government checks. I don't need to carry identification.
Is taxi travel a priviledge? Can it be revoked?
How exactly is plane travel different from taxi or bus travel? I enter a privately operated vehicle as a passenger, and I sit there.
Trust me, nobody really wants to ogle your naked outline.
Is you argument that America naturally makes the best beer since it has more people trying to do so,
America doesn't have more people trying to do so. This particular event just has a number of selection biases that skew participation towards Americans. Its advertised more in America, its more convenient for American's to participate, American's don't have to deal with FDA red tape, etc.
The end result is that its mostly Americans. This isn't a bad thing per se, but its misleading to draw any real conclusions about the best beers in the world, when you aren't really looking at a representative set.
or that the winner is chosen basically at random from the entrants so winning is simply a matter of stacking the deck?
To be blunt, yes. I'm not saying it's entirely random; but at the end of the day it is a subjective taste test.
You hold the same contest 100 times, and vary the judges and the order beers are sampled each time, and you are going to get some variance in the results. "Stacking the deck" with beers from one country will inevitably skew the variance towards that country.
Its like the 100 meter dash in the 2012 olympics. 1st place women's time was 10.75 seconds. 5th place was 10.89 seconds. You really think those women are -that- consistent? That their times don't vary a few hundredths of a second each run? If you repeat the event 10 times, maybe 5th place never takes gold but first and 2nd only differed by 3 100ths of a second. You really think these women are that consistent? Given that their times varied by far more than that in the semifinals, practice runs, etc.
So again, yes, who takes gold at the olympics has an element of randomness to it.
(Three of those 5 top women were American by the way.)
A bunch of judges subjectively rating beers are also going to exhibit variance, so if the top entrants are close, there will be some randomness to which one ultimately wins.
Wow, the US can field 2651 individual beers? That is impressive. Thank you for the information, but I'm not sure it is saying what you want it to.
And you think Europe including places like germany can only field a couple hundred?
The point is, yes, of course the USA can produce some truly great beer. But there "world ranking" based on a contest held in San Diego where anyone foreign had to jump through some FDA hoops just to be allowed in, where 2/3rds of entrants were all american... where most countries didn't even field enough varieties to cover the categories, where the US fielded 10x more beers than other top beer nations, and up to 1000x more varieties than smal countries... the USA was almost BOUND to dominate the rankings unless it showed up with nothing but rank swill.
If america fields 2500 of its best, and germany fields 250 of its best... well... odds are pretty good that if both America and Germany are at the top of their games, America is going to dominate; purely on statistics... hell even if half the american entrants are garbage they'll still be holding a huge edge.
Here is the breakdown of countries, and how many different beer each submitted to the competition:
Argentina (9) Australia (49) Austria (24) Belarus (1) Belgium (101) Bolivia (4) Brazil (45) Cambodia (1) Canada (191) Cayman Islands (3) Chile (16) China (6) Colombia (18) Costa Rica (2) Croatia (3) Cyprus (1) Czech Republic (29) Denmark (29) El Salvador (4) France (4) Germany (292) Guatemala (5) Haiti (1) Iceland (5) India (1) Indonesia (1) Ireland (5) Isle Of Man (4) Israel (1) Italy (54) Japan (96) Korea, Republic of (14) Latvia (5) Lithuania (13) Malta (3) Mexico (23) Moldova, Republic (1) Netherlands (15) New Zealand (5) Norway (13) Poland (3) Puerto Rico (3) Romania (4) Russian Federation (11) Singapore (20) Spain (14) Sweden (37) Taiwan (1) Thailand (1) Turkey (2) United Kingdom (71) Uruguay (2) United States (2651) Vietnam (2)
Is it any surprise the US "dominated"? Two out of three beers were American.
I would actually go so far as to say that the American beer is now the best in the world as evidenced by the international competitions where the US beers dominate.
When the majority of the entrants are from one country, is it a surprise the majority of the winners are from the same?
I don't advocate only doing half - I just understand that US laws don't apply to BongaBongaLand and the advertisers based there
But that misses the point. There aren't ads from some company in BongaBongaLand on 80% of the websites you visit. There ARE trackers from Facebook and Google on 80% of the websites you visit. The company in BongaBongaLand isn't able to track you meaningfully because you might hit one of their ads once a week.
BongaBongaLand advertisers can track me all they want, and they'll still get virtually nothing from me because I'll rarely hit their ads.So I'm not overly worried that the law isn't reaching them.
Meanwhile, Google and Facebook can almost track your browsing in realtime anywhere you go.
And while currently most advertisers are based in your jurisdiction, they can easily move out of it.
Google and Facebook could move their HQ out of the US to BongaBongLand, sure, but they'll still be subject to US law as long as they have US branches, and US employees. Or would they move to the UK, where we could have a treaty resulting in them passing essentially the same laws we have here.
Big multinational corporations, which are the ones that are a real threat to privacy, aren't nearly so mobile as you imply.
And small fly by night ones out of bongabongaland don't have the critical mass to be a real threat.
So laws can be very effective.
try something like walking down the road stark bollock naked and trying to claim that someone taking a photo of you is an invasion of your privacy... doesn't work does it?
Someone catching a solitary photo or 2 of me in a public setting doesn't bother me in the least, regardless of what I'm wearing. If I wander down the street naked, then I've accepted the likelihood that others will see me. That's fine.
But someone following me around ALL DAY EVERY DAY with a camera, recording every where I go, however is an entirely different scenario, and it is definitely an invasion of my privacy.
My neighbors see me in public all the time, and I have no issue with that at all. But none of my neighbors are tracking me; if they were then we'd have a problem.
than its completely okay as a Christian for you to judge another for it, even harshly.
"Let he without sin cast the first stone."
or perhaps better expressed as:
"You feeling lucky, punk?"
If there is something you believe is so wrong that you yourself would never ever do it no matter what...
So if I'm a nazi supremacist and would never pair up with a black, asian, or anything but a pure blood white because i felt it was both disgusting and morally wrong.... well... then Jesus said it was ok when I curb stomped you for dating that latino girl.
Trying to stop people taking advantage is so utterly the wrong approach here, its the same as any security related issue - make your end as secure as you possibly can, because the world is a big wide open and very bad place. You cannot control the other end, but you can control what you are leaking.
Of course you can, and should pass laws and attempt to control the other end as best you can. What planet do you come from?
Because down here, we take a two pronged approach to problems like this... to deal with home invasions we invented walls and doors and locks and keys and motion sensors and alarms, and so on. You want to be secure in your home, secure it.
But we didn't stop there, we also made home invasions illegal, tresspassing, break and enter, and so on.
Why do you advocate only doing half when it comes to the internet?
pathetic hacks like DNT do not work even when backed with legal status - the internet is not one jurisdiction,
So, many of the big advertising firms are based out of this country, or have a physical presence in the country, and many more operate out of countries we have treaties with. Sure that doesn't reach absolutely everyone out there, but the reach is pretty decent. Any particular reason we shouldn't bother at all?
So... why not just return it, and get a different model that DID have the feature you wanted? Seriously, we're talking about a 4-ethernet port / wireless-n router. Not exactly hard to come by these days, I'm sure somebody offers one with link lights if you care to go looking.
For sure. All of them that I've ever seen. Except this one.
I didn't care enough to return it over the lights. I did however want to express that I thought it should have them.
You reported a *problem* to *support*, in which you complain about a "lack of link lights." I'm sure they're well aware that there are only Power & WLAN indicators on the model you purchased
If we assume that the guy did know the product line, and did know that it had no link lights, then he would know that this is unusual EVEN IN THEIR OWN PRODUCT LINE. Now we assume that I accurately described a feature being missing that he knew was missing then no, the first assumption is not that I'm confused.
The fact that my 3rd sentence explicitly asks that the complaint be directed as feedback to product development erases all doubt. It shows I clearly have no expectation of any sort of assistance; and that I am just leaving feedback.
I know lots of people who love to try and throw around jargony computer phrases because they think it'll make them sound smarter. In fact, they often use the terms wrong.
Except I didn't use it wrong. And the sentence was precise and accurate and factually correct.
If someone complains their truck doesn't have a tow 4 wheel drive and it in fact doesn't have 4 wheel drive then the logical interpretation is that the owner knows what he said, and isn't actually just confused about how to put the vehicle in gear to start driving.
The support person might not know what a "link light" is,
I wrote "LAN link lights".
Anyone who does not know what that means should not be offering support on network gear.
What you did was the equivalent of calling up the guy who knows nothing about auto repair
No I sent a message to support. I expected a support technician to respond to it.
, but manages the scheduling of appointments at your local autobody shop, and Expecting HIM to know whether or not a Carrera RS (964) had power windows
Again No. Even if I had asked a question about my windows to the girl at the front who books appointments to look at cars in the showroom...and she in fact had no idea what a power window was or how it worked then I would expect her to refer me to a service technician, not attempt to answer my question with power window troubleshooting steps.
and expecting that he'll be able to give you useful advice over the phone would be rather dumb, wouldn't it?
In SupportLand, saying "there are no link lights" is usually equivalent to saying "there are no link lights illuminated."
That really doesn't change the fact that the support person evidently did not know the product did not have link lights. Nor does it change the fact they they set out to resolve a resolve a problem with a "feature" the product did not have.
Remember this is the official authorized d-link support agent. If I complain to a Porsche mechanic about power windows in a Carrera RS (964) then even if me misunderstands my complaint as "they don't work" vs "they don't exist" its still his job to know to the car doesn't have power windows; rather than send me chasing my tail checking fuses, and ensuring the car is running.
Since the product you purchased (apparently without so much as glancing at it to see that there were no lights on the case
Yes, after using about 100 different models of consumer routers, countless switches, hubs, and so on, and all of them having port link lights somewhere you are right. I didn't check that this one didn't buck the trend.
I also didn't inspect the size of the ethernet ports to confirm they were in fact RJ-45 instead of some different form factor that I would need adapters to use. I guess I got lucky there; really dodged a bullet.
"There is no link light on my Ethernet adapter when I connect it to the LAN port on my router""
If that is the problem they think I'm having, fine, but then the appropriate response is:
"I'm sorry; that product doesn't have link lights."
Because, well, it doesn't. And no amount of plugging it in or changing cables is going to change that.
I do hope you have learned something from this experience and will try to be more clear in your future communications with help desks.
Yes, I learned that they are just as clueless as I generally expect them to be.
You may find that treating them as though they were human beings who are able to assist you instead of as punching bags will often yield surprising results.
While I did use the term idiot in my question; it was directed at the designer of the product, not the guy supporting it. I am always careful not to unload directly on the support desk people.
So you made a suggestion to the people whose job it is to solve customer issues, you were obnoxious and vague..
Guilty as charged.
and you're upset that they didn't understand what you were getting at?
I wrote all of 3 sentences, the first was clear and succinct:
"There are no link lights for the LAN ethernet connections."
The other 2 sentences amount to: I think this is stupid. Please pass it on to product development.
Now you can rightly criticize everything about what I did. But the problem described was not vague at all; it was very specific:
"There are no link lights for the LAN ethernet connections".
A competent technician would know that I'm not getting any LAN link lights on a DIR-835 because as I've said, "There are no link lights for the LAN ehternet connection".
They would not suggest I try changing cables or plugging it into a different electrical outlet, because they would know that would not magically add link lights to a product that does not physically have them.
A competent person attempting to resolve the stated problem would reply:
"Sorry, there are no link lights for the LAN ethernet connections on this product."
Thank you by the way, for linking the correct link to the correct form for feedback - I will send a thoughtful message along.
When I wrote support, I was annoyed and frustrated that I couldn't locate an appropriate feedback channel and I wrote what I wrote because I assumed it was going to go into a black hole anyway... their likely outsourced support was just as likely discard it as know where to forward it. I was mostly just venting annoyance, with some small dim hope that it might get passed to someone who would see what I was annoyed about.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots? Who the hell do you hang out with?
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of jackasses who will pull a fire alarm just for the hell of it.
Back then if someone shouted fire, you'd have been well advised to get the hell out as soon as possible - very much more so than if a fire alarm rang today.
I'm going to out on a limb, and argue that by the time someone yelled "fire!" there is generally already some corroborating evidence... people shouting in general; smell of smoke, roaring/sucking/crashing/popping sounds etc.
People don't generally panic and trample eachother to death unless there is more clear and present evidence danger than someone yelling "fire!"
I've been in 3 buildings that have actually caught fire; twice at night; where the powers gone out, and the lights are gone; and you can hear the fire trucks pulling up outside... and the exit was still highly orderly. In one case one could even smell smoke. The crowds were a bit nervous, excited even.
I'll grant you that 100 years ago, that things were different, but I'm skeptical that it was EVER the case that crowds just started trampling people to death merely because someone falsely yelled "fire".
I know there have been a few cases of false alarms leading to deaths; but there are usually extenuating circumstances...
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F10A12F9355E13738DDDAA0894DA405B838DF1D3
Here's one from 1913. 2 people died. Except it wasn't strictly speaking a false alarm -- there was a sound like a gunshot, smoke, and even flames as the projector did briefly catch fire while changing reels before the projectionist extinguished it. So when someone yelled fire... well... there was a fire.
The building was also WAY over lawful capacity (which was evidently very common in those days; according to the police's own statements).
The upshot though is that to say yelling "Fire!" is what caused the deaths is over simplifying a much more complicated situation.
But even that sidesteps my point; I'm not really asserting that yelling fire! can't be dangerous, it was more to point out that mocking mohammed to provoke a response was not really different. In the right circumstances, sure its dangerous. Just as showing up at a hockey game dressed up like a flaccid penis and mocking the losing home team to the drunkest group super-fans you can find ... its reckless and stupid.
Its deliberately provoking a violent response. And there is nothing wrong with recognizing that to be the case. Whether you are yelling fire, mocking drunk hockey fans, or provoking muslim extremists...
Outside of nefarious uses, the information of a dead person is of no pactical value to facebook or its advertising customers. Dead people don't buy anything.
But their shopping habits can still be used to predict what the living will buy.
To me the bigger question is things like the ownership of games on steam, your magic the gathering online card collection, your MMO account, and so forth. These things have value, and the parasitic EULA's claiming you don't have ownership of anything while the main sites flog you to "buy! buy! buy!"notwithstanding its clear that the survivors will often have a very real interest in these things. My kids have characters on my MMO account. My entire family plays my steam games. I never got into MTGO precisely because of the ephemeral nature of the cards... but lots of other people do have valuable collections.
If anything we should have laws to ensure this stuff does get passed to the survivors without hassle.
If you yell Fire, and people flee, they are fleeing because they have a reasonable suspicion that there is a fire, and that there lives are at stake. They can choose not to, but a reasonable person in that situation would flee or check to see if there was a fire.
Except that a mad panic resulting in people trampling eachother to death doesn't happen in practice; simply from some yutz yelling "Fire!". It just doesn't happen.
However, it is UNreasonable for Muslims to attack the US embassy because someone insults their prophet.
Agreed. And at this point most of the evidence points to that being a pre-planned attack taking advantage of 'opportunity' rather than sparked directly by the comment. So it's largely irrelevant to this discussion, isn't it?
People insult Jesus all the time and no one goes on a rampage
Except this isn't about Jesus.
so we cannot say that insulting a religious figure will likely cause a riot...
But we can say insulting Mohammed quite likely will. In fact, I'd bet more on it causing a some sort of violent outburst long than I would on you having any luck causing an outburst yelling "Fire!" somewhere.
Replace it with any scenario that you could think of where immediate danger is real
I can't. Perhaps there isn't one. The "Fire! in a theatre" scenario is the appropriate scenario, because the potential for danger is well understood.
We can imagine that falsely yelling fire would cause a panic, and we can imagine that a panic could lead to violence. That unlikely but easily imaginable outcome has served us for a long time as the canonical example for where we have argued one's right to free speech should be curtailed.
Here we have a situation where again we can easily imagine releasing this video would cause outrage and even violence, and we can even reasonably speculate that this was precisely the desired outcome.
And my point is that the "Fire!" scenario is not nearly the cause for immediate danger some think. To the degree that I argue a rational person would actually find it more likely that publicly releasing a mockery video of Mohammed would lead to violence than falsely yelling fire in a theatre.
Neither is a direct cause for immediate danger; and in both cases individuals can decide for themselves how to act. Yelling fire in a theatre doesn't create violence any more or any less than tweeting a message to kill jews or releasing a video mocking Mohammed does.
You are arguing that they are different because yelling fire falsely is somehow "obviously" more dangerous, and more reckless. It's not.
But if falsely yelling "fire!" in a theatre is the threshold for which we state that "reasonable people should know better and not do it" then that argument applies equally to releasing videos mocking Mohammed too. It was no less reckless and stupid; and like falsely yelling fire, it was done to provoke a mob response.
It is not unreasonable to treat it the same way.
Yelling fire will induce panick.
Actually, odds are it won't. It might. But there's no certainty. I've been in lots of places including places that are dark and crowded where someone has yelled fire to be "clever" or even pulled the fire alarm.
So far the crowd has never once trampled anyone to death or even paniced. Usually they just get a bit more restless as people try to determine if its real, and then either the false alarm is stopped... and in one case to everyone's surprise the fire alarms were in fact real, and people filed out relatively orderly.
Shouting fire in a crowded theatre isn't nearly as "dangerous" or "reckless" as you might think.
Someone who would rather work (payment amount / earnings per hour) number of hours and have fun blowing stuff up for an hour instead of grinding for greater than random_number*(payment amount / earnings per hour) hours to get to the same place that would allow them to blow up stuff for an hour?
Diablo style games are a random number generator grind through near infinite swarms of mobs and countless repetitive dungeons. The grind is the game. If you enjoy the endless mindless clickfest with the swathe of corposes and the occasional piece of loot then play on. If not, then play something else.
But paying $60 for diablo 3 so you can pay someone else to play it for you because you don't actually enjoy playing diablo 3 is pretty much the absolute pinnacle of stupid.
The game is not going to be any different with purchased loot. There is no "grind to get somewhere good"... you just grind to get to a new place to grind. Its not an MMO where all the interesting content is at "max level". Its randomly generated dungeons all they way up.
Early criticism of D3 are valid, but those are a thing of the past.
No they aren't.
The core game design is fucking retarded. The gear upgrade path is market based. In some sense its much more efficient to gear up in D3 by playing "auction house trader" than "hack and slash dungeon crawler".
That's fine if you -want- to play a trading game. But if that's what you want, play EVE or something that actually does a good job of it.
D3 is a lousy ARPG.
Its a half decent part time job though.
larger .... trading market than TL2 ever will
Well yeah, that's true, but you say it like its a good thing. I don't crawl dungeons so that I can sell things over the internet, to fund buying other things over the internet so that I can crawl dungeons more efficiently in order to sell even more things over the internet.
I'm happy TL2 will never be that.
Enjoy your part time job.
And the new changes around the corner in 1.05 are a vast step in the right direction.
D3 can't be fixed. They need to start over from scratch.
Lol, touche
(stupid slashdot can't even handle touché properly)
It depends what you are looking at. You mention 60fps which suggests games, and i agree they work out pretty good.
The web doesn't tend to do nearly as well. Various web-widgets and icons which are low resolution to start with simply don't survive scaling well. Those little shopping carts, and thumbups, and stars, and sites with line art/borders... some of the lines get doubled to 2 pixels which look to thick, even with gray scaling and anti-aliasing etc.
And the web, even today, is still full of gif buttons with and text-as-gif instead of as a font. These still get mangled by scaling.
Applications with toolbar icons, and other little graphical widgets also suffer.
Al that said, don't get me wrong, the retina display is a good screen; and the higher native resolution you have to work with the better the scaling results will be. 30% scaling on 2880x1800 panel is going to be better than 30% scaling on a 1980x1020 panel no matter what.
They chose to build their own hardware specifically so that they don't have to solve unsolvable problems.
They did no such thing. If grandma buys a mid-size imac, can't see it well enough, and scales it 30% it still looks like crap. Apple can't control what the customer is going to do anymore than Microsoft can.
If someone buys a 1080p 13" display designed to show a lot of content in a really small space, then it works great. If the user (or idiot reviewer in this case) decides he wants the text 30% bigger then its going to look like crap.
Your eyes can't quite make out the web on your ipad? Want it 30% bigger? Its going to look like crap.
Doesn't matter what OS it is. If the user steps outside the native resolution, it looks like crap.
Apple's little trick with the retina display is a clumsy hack. If you buy a retina macbook and happen to like it just as it is then your golden... new apps designed for it work, old apps designed for 1/4 the screen are pixel doubled to work as well.
But what if you don't happen to like it exactly as it is. What if you've got good eyesight and bought a retina display to make real use of some of that extra pixel space instead of just having smoother fonts at the same size you had on the old one? Scale it down? 30% to give you some more space... looks like crap.
What if your older and the default on the retina display is too small for you... scale it up 30% to read it better. Looks like crap.
Apple didn't "solve" the problem through hardware. The problem is unsolved and unsolvable. The only difference is that this particular reviewer didn't happen to try scaling things up by 30% on a Mac when he made his "discovery" that scaling off native pixel resolution looks like crap.
iOS and OSX. And that's all. Of course, you get the whole Apple package in which there might be elements you dislike.
Nope. Not at all. OSX and ios suck at it just as bad as windows.
Apple has just been careful to hide the problem by not shipping any hardware that exposes it. Their own high-dpi displays were carefully chosen to be exact multiples of the traditional resolution, so that they could scale things with pixel doubling.
But as soon as you get outside of that little box, and ask OSX to do 125% or 150% scaling of pretty much anything and you get the same mess.
Go ahead, hook up your mac to a 13" 1080p screen and try browsing the web on it... everything that this article complains about with windows 8 is present in osx.
Flying is a privilege, not a right.
Please clarify. What does that even mean?
How does one travel if every mode of transportation is a privilege that can be trivially revoked? Is travel then also a privilege?
Is walking "right"? Or is it too a privilege?
You need to abide by the rules of the road as set forth by the governing bodies, or find another way to travel.
Are you alluding to the tired argument of needing a license to drive? And that a drivers license is not a right?
Because I'm fine with that. But I don't need a drivers license to be a passenger in a taxi. I don't need to submit to government checks. I don't need to carry identification.
Is taxi travel a priviledge? Can it be revoked?
How exactly is plane travel different from taxi or bus travel? I enter a privately operated vehicle as a passenger, and I sit there.
Trust me, nobody really wants to ogle your naked outline.
What about my daughter's?
Is you argument that America naturally makes the best beer since it has more people trying to do so,
America doesn't have more people trying to do so. This particular event just has a number of selection biases that skew participation towards Americans. Its advertised more in America, its more convenient for American's to participate, American's don't have to deal with FDA red tape, etc.
The end result is that its mostly Americans. This isn't a bad thing per se, but its misleading to draw any real conclusions about the best beers in the world, when you aren't really looking at a representative set.
or that the winner is chosen basically at random from the entrants so winning is simply a matter of stacking the deck?
To be blunt, yes. I'm not saying it's entirely random; but at the end of the day it is a subjective taste test.
You hold the same contest 100 times, and vary the judges and the order beers are sampled each time, and you are going to get some variance in the results. "Stacking the deck" with beers from one country will inevitably skew the variance towards that country.
Its like the 100 meter dash in the 2012 olympics. 1st place women's time was 10.75 seconds. 5th place was 10.89 seconds. You really think those women are -that- consistent? That their times don't vary a few hundredths of a second each run? If you repeat the event 10 times, maybe 5th place never takes gold but first and 2nd only differed by 3 100ths of a second. You really think these women are that consistent? Given that their times varied by far more than that in the semifinals, practice runs, etc.
So again, yes, who takes gold at the olympics has an element of randomness to it.
(Three of those 5 top women were American by the way.)
A bunch of judges subjectively rating beers are also going to exhibit variance, so if the top entrants are close, there will be some randomness to which one ultimately wins.
Wow, the US can field 2651 individual beers? That is impressive. Thank you for the information, but I'm not sure it is saying what you want it to.
And you think Europe including places like germany can only field a couple hundred?
The point is, yes, of course the USA can produce some truly great beer. But there "world ranking" based on a contest held in San Diego where anyone foreign had to jump through some FDA hoops just to be allowed in, where 2/3rds of entrants were all american... where most countries didn't even field enough varieties to cover the categories, where the US fielded 10x more beers than other top beer nations, and up to 1000x more varieties than smal countries... the USA was almost BOUND to dominate the rankings unless it showed up with nothing but rank swill.
If america fields 2500 of its best, and germany fields 250 of its best... well... odds are pretty good that if both America and Germany are at the top of their games, America is going to dominate; purely on statistics... hell even if half the american entrants are garbage they'll still be holding a huge edge.
Here is the breakdown of countries, and how many different beer each submitted to the competition:
Argentina (9)
Australia (49)
Austria (24)
Belarus (1)
Belgium (101)
Bolivia (4)
Brazil (45)
Cambodia (1)
Canada (191)
Cayman Islands (3)
Chile (16)
China (6)
Colombia (18)
Costa Rica (2)
Croatia (3)
Cyprus (1)
Czech Republic (29)
Denmark (29)
El Salvador (4)
France (4)
Germany (292)
Guatemala (5)
Haiti (1)
Iceland (5)
India (1)
Indonesia (1)
Ireland (5)
Isle Of Man (4)
Israel (1)
Italy (54)
Japan (96)
Korea, Republic of (14)
Latvia (5)
Lithuania (13)
Malta (3)
Mexico (23)
Moldova, Republic (1)
Netherlands (15)
New Zealand (5)
Norway (13)
Poland (3)
Puerto Rico (3)
Romania (4)
Russian Federation (11)
Singapore (20)
Spain (14)
Sweden (37)
Taiwan (1)
Thailand (1)
Turkey (2)
United Kingdom (71)
Uruguay (2)
United States (2651)
Vietnam (2)
Is it any surprise the US "dominated"?
Two out of three beers were American.
I would actually go so far as to say that the American beer is now the best in the world as evidenced by the international competitions where the US beers dominate.
When the majority of the entrants are from one country, is it a surprise the majority of the winners are from the same?
I don't advocate only doing half - I just understand that US laws don't apply to BongaBongaLand and the advertisers based there
But that misses the point. There aren't ads from some company in BongaBongaLand on 80% of the websites you visit. There ARE trackers from Facebook and Google on 80% of the websites you visit. The company in BongaBongaLand isn't able to track you meaningfully because you might hit one of their ads once a week.
BongaBongaLand advertisers can track me all they want, and they'll still get virtually nothing from me because I'll rarely hit their ads.So I'm not overly worried that the law isn't reaching them.
Meanwhile, Google and Facebook can almost track your browsing in realtime anywhere you go.
And while currently most advertisers are based in your jurisdiction, they can easily move out of it.
Google and Facebook could move their HQ out of the US to BongaBongLand, sure, but they'll still be subject to US law as long as they have US branches, and US employees. Or would they move to the UK, where we could have a treaty resulting in them passing essentially the same laws we have here.
Big multinational corporations, which are the ones that are a real threat to privacy, aren't nearly so mobile as you imply.
And small fly by night ones out of bongabongaland don't have the critical mass to be a real threat.
So laws can be very effective.
try something like walking down the road stark bollock naked and trying to claim that someone taking a photo of you is an invasion of your privacy... doesn't work does it?
Someone catching a solitary photo or 2 of me in a public setting doesn't bother me in the least, regardless of what I'm wearing. If I wander down the street naked, then I've accepted the likelihood that others will see me. That's fine.
But someone following me around ALL DAY EVERY DAY with a camera, recording every where I go, however is an entirely different scenario, and it is definitely an invasion of my privacy.
My neighbors see me in public all the time, and I have no issue with that at all. But none of my neighbors are tracking me; if they were then we'd have a problem.
Its really not that complicated.
than its completely okay as a Christian for you to judge another for it, even harshly.
"Let he without sin cast the first stone."
or perhaps better expressed as:
"You feeling lucky, punk?"
If there is something you believe is so wrong that you yourself would never ever do it no matter what...
So if I'm a nazi supremacist and would never pair up with a black, asian, or anything but a pure blood white because i felt it was both disgusting and morally wrong.... well... then Jesus said it was ok when I curb stomped you for dating that latino girl.
Class act.
Your browser is leaking your info - fix that.
Good idea.
Trying to stop people taking advantage is so utterly the wrong approach here, its the same as any security related issue - make your end as secure as you possibly can, because the world is a big wide open and very bad place. You cannot control the other end, but you can control what you are leaking.
Of course you can, and should pass laws and attempt to control the other end as best you can. What planet do you come from?
Because down here, we take a two pronged approach to problems like this... to deal with home invasions we invented walls and doors and locks and keys and motion sensors and alarms, and so on. You want to be secure in your home, secure it.
But we didn't stop there, we also made home invasions illegal, tresspassing, break and enter, and so on.
Why do you advocate only doing half when it comes to the internet?
pathetic hacks like DNT do not work even when backed with legal status - the internet is not one jurisdiction,
So, many of the big advertising firms are based out of this country, or have a physical presence in the country, and many more operate out of countries we have treaties with. Sure that doesn't reach absolutely everyone out there, but the reach is pretty decent. Any particular reason we shouldn't bother at all?
So... why not just return it, and get a different model that DID have the feature you wanted? Seriously, we're talking about a 4-ethernet port / wireless-n router. Not exactly hard to come by these days, I'm sure somebody offers one with link lights if you care to go looking.
For sure. All of them that I've ever seen. Except this one.
I didn't care enough to return it over the lights. I did however want to express that I thought it should have them.
You reported a *problem* to *support*, in which you complain about a "lack of link lights." I'm sure they're well aware that there are only Power & WLAN indicators on the model you purchased
If we assume that the guy did know the product line, and did know that it had no link lights, then he would know that this is unusual EVEN IN THEIR OWN PRODUCT LINE. Now we assume that I accurately described a feature being missing that he knew was missing then no, the first assumption is not that I'm confused.
The fact that my 3rd sentence explicitly asks that the complaint be directed as feedback to product development erases all doubt. It shows I clearly have no expectation of any sort of assistance; and that I am just leaving feedback.
I know lots of people who love to try and throw around jargony computer phrases because they think it'll make them sound smarter. In fact, they often use the terms wrong.
Except I didn't use it wrong. And the sentence was precise and accurate and factually correct.
If someone complains their truck doesn't have a tow 4 wheel drive and it in fact doesn't have 4 wheel drive then the logical interpretation is that the owner knows what he said, and isn't actually just confused about how to put the vehicle in gear to start driving.
The support person might not know what a "link light" is,
I wrote "LAN link lights".
Anyone who does not know what that means should not be offering support on network gear.
What you did was the equivalent of calling up the guy who knows nothing about auto repair
No I sent a message to support. I expected a support technician to respond to it.
, but manages the scheduling of appointments at your local autobody shop, and Expecting HIM to know whether or not a Carrera RS (964) had power windows
Again No. Even if I had asked a question about my windows to the girl at the front who books appointments to look at cars in the showroom...and she in fact had no idea what a power window was or how it worked then I would expect her to refer me to a service technician, not attempt to answer my question with power window troubleshooting steps.
and expecting that he'll be able to give you useful advice over the phone would be rather dumb, wouldn't it?
In SupportLand, saying "there are no link lights" is usually equivalent to saying "there are no link lights illuminated."
That really doesn't change the fact that the support person evidently did not know the product did not have link lights.
Nor does it change the fact they they set out to resolve a resolve a problem with a "feature" the product did not have.
Remember this is the official authorized d-link support agent. If I complain to a Porsche mechanic about power windows in a Carrera RS (964) then even if me misunderstands my complaint as "they don't work" vs "they don't exist" its still his job to know to the car doesn't have power windows; rather than send me chasing my tail checking fuses, and ensuring the car is running.
Since the product you purchased (apparently without so much as glancing at it to see that there were no lights on the case
Yes, after using about 100 different models of consumer routers, countless switches, hubs, and so on, and all of them having port link lights somewhere you are right. I didn't check that this one didn't buck the trend.
I also didn't inspect the size of the ethernet ports to confirm they were in fact RJ-45 instead of some different form factor that I would need adapters to use. I guess I got lucky there; really dodged a bullet.
"There is no link light on my Ethernet adapter when I connect it to the LAN port on my router""
If that is the problem they think I'm having, fine, but then the appropriate response is:
"I'm sorry; that product doesn't have link lights."
Because, well, it doesn't. And no amount of plugging it in or changing cables is going to change that.
I do hope you have learned something from this experience and will try to be more clear in your future communications with help desks.
Yes, I learned that they are just as clueless as I generally expect them to be.
You may find that treating them as though they were human beings who are able to assist you instead of as punching bags will often yield surprising results.
While I did use the term idiot in my question; it was directed at the designer of the product, not the guy supporting it. I am always careful not to unload directly on the support desk people.
So you made a suggestion to the people whose job it is to solve customer issues, you were obnoxious and vague..
Guilty as charged.
and you're upset that they didn't understand what you were getting at?
I wrote all of 3 sentences, the first was clear and succinct:
"There are no link lights for the LAN ethernet connections."
The other 2 sentences amount to: I think this is stupid. Please pass it on to product development.
Now you can rightly criticize everything about what I did. But the problem described was not vague at all; it was very specific:
"There are no link lights for the LAN ethernet connections".
A competent technician would know that I'm not getting any LAN link lights on a DIR-835 because as I've said, "There are no link lights for the LAN ehternet connection".
They would not suggest I try changing cables or plugging it into a different electrical outlet, because they would know that would not magically add link lights to a product that does not physically have them.
A competent person attempting to resolve the stated problem would reply:
"Sorry, there are no link lights for the LAN ethernet connections on this product."
Thank you by the way, for linking the correct link to the correct form for feedback - I will send a thoughtful message along.
When I wrote support, I was annoyed and frustrated that I couldn't locate an appropriate feedback channel and I wrote what I wrote because I assumed it was going to go into a black hole anyway... their likely outsourced support was just as likely discard it as know where to forward it. I was mostly just venting annoyance, with some small dim hope that it might get passed to someone who would see what I was annoyed about.