Because you GUESSED. He provided EVIDENCE and SOURCES. The fact that you just happened to be correct about a guess has nothing to do with him getting modded up for actually doing some research.
No, not really. There's a reason they call it a "weakness". If you're referring to the two or three illnesses that can produce an excellence in the quality of performing repetitive tasks IF they are JUST severe enough but NOT too severe then you're completely failing to take into account that a job lasts for about 8 hours a day, whereas having a shitty life outside of work takes up everything else.
Sure, some autistic person might be great on an assembly line. But his life is going to suck while he's growing up, before work, after work, on his lunch break, and after retirement. If you call that a strength then I suggest you pick up a dictionary.
Of course, there's also the numerous other debilitating diseases which don't produce any strength in any ability. For example, downs syndrome.
This optimistic attitude of "well a weakness could really be a strength" isn't so much having a good outlook on life as it is just being a moron. It's always great to be optimistic and hope for the best, but ignoring plain as day facts (i.e. the quality of life of people with CERTAIN disabilities) isn't helping anyone.
Until the first hospitals were set up people also thought that leeches were a great cure for everything from the common cold to cancer. This is a perfect case of "correlation does not imply causation". I know it's thrown around a lot, but seriously. The conditions of pretty much anywhere you could conceivably give birth are so much more hygienic than they were back then. Even the back of a taxi is cleaner than most places back then because back then people didn't understand how infections spread and had absolutely no concept of "disinfecting" something.
But it's all hearsay. If this guy has undeniable proof that Boeing or airbus did something illegal then they'd have been convicted of it. More likely someone is doing half-assed investigating of some stupid-but-legal subsidies and trying to get attention by claiming that the companies did something illegal.
You're assuming that any attempt at a cover-up would be completely successful. If that's true then we'd never hear about scandals because they'd all be covered up. The reason people hear about scandals because someone screws up the cover-up.
These emails might have once been deleted... after a backup was run that someone overlooked. Or these emails might have been stored on some hard drives that were boxed up for storage then later removed and destroyed, but no one thought that they might need to go wipe the backup tapes too. Or someone can't destroy data because there's a lot of other data on that same media that needs to remain intact.
Cover-ups need to be sneaky (for obvious reasons), this can lead to doing a less than perfect job. Let's say you have the hard drive from someone's personal computer. Sure, you could format the entire bloody thing and overwrite to ensure no chance of recovery and you know that the emails would be permanently gone... but then you have to explain the sudden disappearance of the master budget sheet and all the other data. So, you have to go into the drive and manually delete the emails and leave everything else alone. You delete the emails but had no way of knowing that the user had "backed up" his email to another directory as well because he was switching email clients or mistakenly thought that "backing up" to the same drive was OK.
Furthermore, an official order of "delete all this email" is... official. Which means there's records of the order being given. Records of orders to do illegal things are generally not a good thing to have during a cover-up.
That, and the fact that a lot of scientific instruments are of the quality needed to do science. Sure, your bathroom scale is $20, but that won't do you any good when you need to measure masses on the order of one tenth of one milligram. Even a 3-place "precision" balance for $200 won't cut it for a lot of work. You need a 4-place analytical balance, which will run you about $4k.
Cheap sensors work great for things like wind speed and the water level of a lake because any small variation in these readings means absolutely nothing.
Now, as for the wiimote being an amazing tool, it's really not. It's being touted as such by scientists who apparently aren't actually examining how this thing works.
The case in the article mentioned using it to measure water level by using the IR camera on the sensor to record an IR beacon on a floaty thing in the water. You can do the same thing with a cheap ass digital camera and the same laptop that reads the data from the wiimote for about $10-15. They also mention putting wiimotes on a collapsing building to gather data. This is because the wiimote contains a chap accelerometer which you can actually buy on sparkfun.com for much cheaper than an entire wiimote.
Apparently these guys have never heard of embedded devices. The arduino, PIC microcontrollers, and NI DAQ devices have been around for years and would perfectly suit the purpose of data collection. As I'm attending an engineering university currently I've noticed something. Engineers seem to be much more up to date and logical about what's PRACTICAL. Sure, you could use a wiimote, but you could get an arduino, a flash drive, and some cheap accelerometers for about $50 and you could use it to collect AND PROCESS five times the amount of data and use it on orders of magnitude more applications.
My HP laptop is starting to crap out after only 1.5 years of light use. The wireless card went out while it was under warranty. I had to spend a good 3 days on the phone for someone to call me back because the call center supervisors don't work on weekends. Then I had to threaten to sue them for a violation of their own policy when they tried to tell me that reformatting the system voided the warranty (a copy of the warranty hosted on HP's website proved otherwise). Now that it's out of warranty, the hard drive, the battery, and the left hinge are all broken/breaking.
As companies realize that they can spend less and less on parts and make crappier and crappier products, they're going to get more and more smart consumers that buy the extended warranty and then make the company pay to fix every little problem caused by their own greed.
This doesn't mean anything. For all we know, your relative is an incompetent moron who's never heard of volume normalization. I'd be willing to bet money that there's a volume normalization algorithm that should be able to do this either live, or ahead of time when the content that the commercial will appear in shows up at the studio.
It has absolutely nothing to do with how much money you stole. If this guy had stolen 20 billion dollars he'd still be going to jail.
It all has to do with HOW you steal it and WHAT you call it. Example: Typical theft/bank fraud: Jail time Experimental accounting strategies and strategic investment and pay-rate schedule (aka bank fraud): Golden parachute and another cushy job
Hell yes it will. Prior to now it's been a pain in the ass to actually scan a book. You either had to shell out big money for a professional model scanner, which no one except large companies does. Or you had to scan in every page with a flatbed, which generally comes out poorly because that crease in the center results in shadows which results in an image that's not appealing to look at and read.
This allows people to generate high-quality scans of books. Especially with the price of high-quality cameras dropping. I see this being amazingly popular with college students. The absurd amount of money publishers charge for books combined with the fact that college students are the group most likely to put up with having no physical document and settle for a pdf version means that a drop in sales is not unlikely. Now, take into consideration that at most college campuses with engineering programs there's generally a few people clever enough to build one of these and all of a sudden you see a business model start to fall.
Are you fucking stupid? They're doing the EXACT SAME THING RIGHT NOW with music, see how that turned out? Let's recap: -Consumers aren't having their rights protected -Some courts are actually ruling in favor of removing customers rights (i.e. every time the RIAA has won some part of a case_ -Legislation to remove rights from consumers is getting more and more popular -The RIAA and other organizations are making bank off of their sue, settle, and drop campaign. (Sue at random, settle for thousands, drop the case if they fight back).
The first time they try to sue someone, it won't fly back in their face. They'll settle out of court because no average person can afford to fight a company, much less a book publisher.
"I'd be thanking my stars I don't live there except everything your country does ours tries to emulate."
Hold the fuck on there just a minute. It is not OUR fault if YOUR country adopts bad policy. You only have YOUR country to blame if they do equally stupid stuff.
"It's not my fault, it's America giving our government these bad ideas" Your country is taking away your freedom and somehow it's our fault. Look, I know my government has done a lot of stupid shit globally, but every little bad thing that happens is not our fault. I know it's nice to use "big bad America" to justify every fucking problem you have, but why don't you take some responsibility for your own country.
OK, this actually makes some sense. Giving a lawful order includes things like "You're speeding, pull over" or "you're under arrest, place your hands behind your back". Allowing citizens to obey the police in situations is fucking stupid. It literally legalizes running from the police and resisting arrest.
Now, commands like "turn off the camera" are complete bullshit and an abuse of authority, obviously.
Yeah, but it's a hell of a lot easier to say "This officer tasered me in clear violation of numerous laws", rather than "This officer approached me in a manner inconsistent with internal regulation 456.b.4.c. His actions were slightly improper".
The former stands a good chance of getting the officer fired and laws passed to prevent future abuse, it also raises public awareness. The latter serves to do nothing but waste a lot of your time in court and do absolutely nothing to actually prevent officers from being abusive.
"I find it interesting that people simultaneously hold the opinion that nothing justifies a policeman's aggression and yet think nothing of advocating aggression against policemen." No, no, no, absolutely not. No one here is advocating aggression against policemen. Furthermore, even if they were the point is still valid. Policemen are supposed to be BETTER restrained than the ordinary populace. You shouldn't just give any random fuck off the street a gun and badge. Policemen should be better able to restrain themselves, more tolerant of people giving them shit, etc. For fuck's sake, YOU'RE GIVING THEM A BADGE TO ALLOW THEM TO ENFORCE THE LAW AND THE TOOLS TO KILL A MAN. Why the fuck shouldn't they be better than the average person?
"To try to make a political statement to GRUNTS who don't make policy and just want the line to move?" No, but that's not what we're talking about. There's no political statement here. This guy was beaten to within an inch of his life for doing something that shouldn't be a problem. We're not talking about officers that restrained a guy trying to do something illegal to make a statement. We're talking about power hungry abusive assholes beating an innocent man in a customs line.
Yes, it was. If an officer is violating your rights then it is there and then that you should mention it. Sure, don't assault the police officer if they're doing something illegal, but make sure you inform them. Now, you need to sue the shit out of them afterward as well, but not to the exclusion of everything else.
"Yes, because it is often followed by shooting at an officer." Right... Do you care to tell us exactly how many times getting out of a car has resulted in a shooting? I'm willing to bet money that it isn't even half of what you thought it was.
Asking questions to verify truthfulness is alright. Acting like an asshole is not. It's interesting that you equate asking questions like an asshole to asking questions properly. Don't know how on earth you managed that.
"While I can accept that music would be less distracting that office chatter, I simply don't understand the concept that music is better than silence. I can work with music, but if I need to concentrate on something intensely, like a complex coding problem or making decisions based on a large amount of data, I need silence."
Well, you answered your own confusion. YOU are comfortable with silence. OTHER people are not. It's not a big mystery.
Name one thing that has been launched into space without using a fuckload of money. There aren't any. This is because shooting things into space is fucking hard and requires a fuckload of power. This fuckload of power requires a shit-ton of money to buy. The reason for this is because there's no source of power that's cheap, small enough to fit inside a rocket, and can produce enough power to launch the rocket into space.
Assumptions aren't assumptions if they're proven facts. It's been proven repeatedly that it requires X much power to get something of Y mass into space. There's no way around that without breaking the laws of physics... which generally isn't possible.
Yeah, there will be a lot of shit but this is the case with ANY tool for making consumer-generated content. In fact, the harder tools lead to more crap because you have more people that can do something half right, so you end up with a lot of maps that are somewhat alright but generally suck. You end up with maps that have a good layout, but the doors don't work, the ladders don't work, and the stairs take a lot of jumping to climb because someone only made it 1/3 of the way through the manual.
This will allow talented people to make better maps quicker. It will also let idiots make better maps than they would have otherwise, so at least they'll suck less.
Let's not go overboard here. It wouldn't land you in jail.
It might get your house searched if some dipshit kid that found it said "OMG HE'S GONNA SHOOT UP THE SCHOOL". It would land you in mandatory counseling, but there's two solutions here: A) Fuck with the counselor. Waste their time. Now, if the counselor is a trained psychiatrist then it'll take them about 20 minutes to realize you aren't a mentally disturbed child. If it's a counselor then they won't know shit and it's better that you waste their time so that other kids don't have to deal with them. B) Have your parents bitch a fit about it and they'll stop the counseling pretty damn quick.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the solution is simple then. Make a gas powered laptop, just like the lawnmower.
Because you GUESSED. He provided EVIDENCE and SOURCES. The fact that you just happened to be correct about a guess has nothing to do with him getting modded up for actually doing some research.
No, not really. There's a reason they call it a "weakness". If you're referring to the two or three illnesses that can produce an excellence in the quality of performing repetitive tasks IF they are JUST severe enough but NOT too severe then you're completely failing to take into account that a job lasts for about 8 hours a day, whereas having a shitty life outside of work takes up everything else.
Sure, some autistic person might be great on an assembly line. But his life is going to suck while he's growing up, before work, after work, on his lunch break, and after retirement. If you call that a strength then I suggest you pick up a dictionary.
Of course, there's also the numerous other debilitating diseases which don't produce any strength in any ability. For example, downs syndrome.
This optimistic attitude of "well a weakness could really be a strength" isn't so much having a good outlook on life as it is just being a moron. It's always great to be optimistic and hope for the best, but ignoring plain as day facts (i.e. the quality of life of people with CERTAIN disabilities) isn't helping anyone.
Until the first hospitals were set up people also thought that leeches were a great cure for everything from the common cold to cancer. This is a perfect case of "correlation does not imply causation". I know it's thrown around a lot, but seriously. The conditions of pretty much anywhere you could conceivably give birth are so much more hygienic than they were back then. Even the back of a taxi is cleaner than most places back then because back then people didn't understand how infections spread and had absolutely no concept of "disinfecting" something.
But it's all hearsay. If this guy has undeniable proof that Boeing or airbus did something illegal then they'd have been convicted of it. More likely someone is doing half-assed investigating of some stupid-but-legal subsidies and trying to get attention by claiming that the companies did something illegal.
You're assuming that any attempt at a cover-up would be completely successful. If that's true then we'd never hear about scandals because they'd all be covered up.
The reason people hear about scandals because someone screws up the cover-up.
These emails might have once been deleted... after a backup was run that someone overlooked. Or these emails might have been stored on some hard drives that were boxed up for storage then later removed and destroyed, but no one thought that they might need to go wipe the backup tapes too. Or someone can't destroy data because there's a lot of other data on that same media that needs to remain intact.
Cover-ups need to be sneaky (for obvious reasons), this can lead to doing a less than perfect job. Let's say you have the hard drive from someone's personal computer. Sure, you could format the entire bloody thing and overwrite to ensure no chance of recovery and you know that the emails would be permanently gone... but then you have to explain the sudden disappearance of the master budget sheet and all the other data. So, you have to go into the drive and manually delete the emails and leave everything else alone. You delete the emails but had no way of knowing that the user had "backed up" his email to another directory as well because he was switching email clients or mistakenly thought that "backing up" to the same drive was OK.
Furthermore, an official order of "delete all this email" is... official. Which means there's records of the order being given. Records of orders to do illegal things are generally not a good thing to have during a cover-up.
That, and the fact that a lot of scientific instruments are of the quality needed to do science. Sure, your bathroom scale is $20, but that won't do you any good when you need to measure masses on the order of one tenth of one milligram. Even a 3-place "precision" balance for $200 won't cut it for a lot of work. You need a 4-place analytical balance, which will run you about $4k.
Cheap sensors work great for things like wind speed and the water level of a lake because any small variation in these readings means absolutely nothing.
Now, as for the wiimote being an amazing tool, it's really not. It's being touted as such by scientists who apparently aren't actually examining how this thing works.
The case in the article mentioned using it to measure water level by using the IR camera on the sensor to record an IR beacon on a floaty thing in the water. You can do the same thing with a cheap ass digital camera and the same laptop that reads the data from the wiimote for about $10-15. They also mention putting wiimotes on a collapsing building to gather data. This is because the wiimote contains a chap accelerometer which you can actually buy on sparkfun.com for much cheaper than an entire wiimote.
Apparently these guys have never heard of embedded devices. The arduino, PIC microcontrollers, and NI DAQ devices have been around for years and would perfectly suit the purpose of data collection. As I'm attending an engineering university currently I've noticed something. Engineers seem to be much more up to date and logical about what's PRACTICAL. Sure, you could use a wiimote, but you could get an arduino, a flash drive, and some cheap accelerometers for about $50 and you could use it to collect AND PROCESS five times the amount of data and use it on orders of magnitude more applications.
Or products are getting shittier.
My HP laptop is starting to crap out after only 1.5 years of light use. The wireless card went out while it was under warranty. I had to spend a good 3 days on the phone for someone to call me back because the call center supervisors don't work on weekends. Then I had to threaten to sue them for a violation of their own policy when they tried to tell me that reformatting the system voided the warranty (a copy of the warranty hosted on HP's website proved otherwise). Now that it's out of warranty, the hard drive, the battery, and the left hinge are all broken/breaking.
As companies realize that they can spend less and less on parts and make crappier and crappier products, they're going to get more and more smart consumers that buy the extended warranty and then make the company pay to fix every little problem caused by their own greed.
This doesn't mean anything. For all we know, your relative is an incompetent moron who's never heard of volume normalization.
I'd be willing to bet money that there's a volume normalization algorithm that should be able to do this either live, or ahead of time when the content that the commercial will appear in shows up at the studio.
Broadcasting will go out of business.....
Well that's odd. I thought my monthly cable bill was for paying for cable.
It has absolutely nothing to do with how much money you stole. If this guy had stolen 20 billion dollars he'd still be going to jail.
It all has to do with HOW you steal it and WHAT you call it. Example:
Typical theft/bank fraud: Jail time
Experimental accounting strategies and strategic investment and pay-rate schedule (aka bank fraud): Golden parachute and another cushy job
Hell yes it will. Prior to now it's been a pain in the ass to actually scan a book. You either had to shell out big money for a professional model scanner, which no one except large companies does. Or you had to scan in every page with a flatbed, which generally comes out poorly because that crease in the center results in shadows which results in an image that's not appealing to look at and read.
This allows people to generate high-quality scans of books. Especially with the price of high-quality cameras dropping.
I see this being amazingly popular with college students. The absurd amount of money publishers charge for books combined with the fact that college students are the group most likely to put up with having no physical document and settle for a pdf version means that a drop in sales is not unlikely. Now, take into consideration that at most college campuses with engineering programs there's generally a few people clever enough to build one of these and all of a sudden you see a business model start to fall.
As for the liberal arts universities... well...
Are you fucking stupid? They're doing the EXACT SAME THING RIGHT NOW with music, see how that turned out?
Let's recap:
-Consumers aren't having their rights protected
-Some courts are actually ruling in favor of removing customers rights (i.e. every time the RIAA has won some part of a case_
-Legislation to remove rights from consumers is getting more and more popular
-The RIAA and other organizations are making bank off of their sue, settle, and drop campaign. (Sue at random, settle for thousands, drop the case if they fight back).
The first time they try to sue someone, it won't fly back in their face. They'll settle out of court because no average person can afford to fight a company, much less a book publisher.
"I'd be thanking my stars I don't live there except everything your country does ours tries to emulate."
Hold the fuck on there just a minute. It is not OUR fault if YOUR country adopts bad policy. You only have YOUR country to blame if they do equally stupid stuff.
"It's not my fault, it's America giving our government these bad ideas" Your country is taking away your freedom and somehow it's our fault. Look, I know my government has done a lot of stupid shit globally, but every little bad thing that happens is not our fault. I know it's nice to use "big bad America" to justify every fucking problem you have, but why don't you take some responsibility for your own country.
OK, this actually makes some sense. Giving a lawful order includes things like "You're speeding, pull over" or "you're under arrest, place your hands behind your back". Allowing citizens to obey the police in situations is fucking stupid. It literally legalizes running from the police and resisting arrest.
Now, commands like "turn off the camera" are complete bullshit and an abuse of authority, obviously.
Yeah, but it's a hell of a lot easier to say "This officer tasered me in clear violation of numerous laws", rather than "This officer approached me in a manner inconsistent with internal regulation 456.b.4.c. His actions were slightly improper".
The former stands a good chance of getting the officer fired and laws passed to prevent future abuse, it also raises public awareness. The latter serves to do nothing but waste a lot of your time in court and do absolutely nothing to actually prevent officers from being abusive.
"I find it interesting that people simultaneously hold the opinion that nothing justifies a policeman's aggression and yet think nothing of advocating aggression against policemen."
No, no, no, absolutely not. No one here is advocating aggression against policemen.
Furthermore, even if they were the point is still valid. Policemen are supposed to be BETTER restrained than the ordinary populace. You shouldn't just give any random fuck off the street a gun and badge. Policemen should be better able to restrain themselves, more tolerant of people giving them shit, etc. For fuck's sake, YOU'RE GIVING THEM A BADGE TO ALLOW THEM TO ENFORCE THE LAW AND THE TOOLS TO KILL A MAN. Why the fuck shouldn't they be better than the average person?
"To try to make a political statement to GRUNTS who don't make policy and just want the line to move?"
No, but that's not what we're talking about. There's no political statement here. This guy was beaten to within an inch of his life for doing something that shouldn't be a problem. We're not talking about officers that restrained a guy trying to do something illegal to make a statement. We're talking about power hungry abusive assholes beating an innocent man in a customs line.
Yes, it was. If an officer is violating your rights then it is there and then that you should mention it. Sure, don't assault the police officer if they're doing something illegal, but make sure you inform them.
Now, you need to sue the shit out of them afterward as well, but not to the exclusion of everything else.
"Yes, because it is often followed by shooting at an officer."
Right...
Do you care to tell us exactly how many times getting out of a car has resulted in a shooting? I'm willing to bet money that it isn't even half of what you thought it was.
Asking questions to verify truthfulness is alright. Acting like an asshole is not. It's interesting that you equate asking questions like an asshole to asking questions properly. Don't know how on earth you managed that.
"While I can accept that music would be less distracting that office chatter, I simply don't understand the concept that music is better than silence. I can work with music, but if I need to concentrate on something intensely, like a complex coding problem or making decisions based on a large amount of data, I need silence."
Well, you answered your own confusion. YOU are comfortable with silence. OTHER people are not. It's not a big mystery.
Name one thing that has been launched into space without using a fuckload of money. There aren't any. This is because shooting things into space is fucking hard and requires a fuckload of power. This fuckload of power requires a shit-ton of money to buy. The reason for this is because there's no source of power that's cheap, small enough to fit inside a rocket, and can produce enough power to launch the rocket into space.
Assumptions aren't assumptions if they're proven facts. It's been proven repeatedly that it requires X much power to get something of Y mass into space. There's no way around that without breaking the laws of physics... which generally isn't possible.
Yeah, there will be a lot of shit but this is the case with ANY tool for making consumer-generated content. In fact, the harder tools lead to more crap because you have more people that can do something half right, so you end up with a lot of maps that are somewhat alright but generally suck. You end up with maps that have a good layout, but the doors don't work, the ladders don't work, and the stairs take a lot of jumping to climb because someone only made it 1/3 of the way through the manual.
This will allow talented people to make better maps quicker. It will also let idiots make better maps than they would have otherwise, so at least they'll suck less.
Let's not go overboard here. It wouldn't land you in jail.
It might get your house searched if some dipshit kid that found it said "OMG HE'S GONNA SHOOT UP THE SCHOOL".
It would land you in mandatory counseling, but there's two solutions here:
A) Fuck with the counselor. Waste their time. Now, if the counselor is a trained psychiatrist then it'll take them about 20 minutes to realize you aren't a mentally disturbed child. If it's a counselor then they won't know shit and it's better that you waste their time so that other kids don't have to deal with them.
B) Have your parents bitch a fit about it and they'll stop the counseling pretty damn quick.