The United States is a major part of the civilized world, and DOES support capital punishment.
Maybe it shouldn't.
The problem with capital punishment is that you're doing irreversible mistakes every time you judge an innocent. Which does happen, uncomfortably often.
3 standard prefixes (short for junk sites, long for important stuff)
Site-specific suffixes. slashdot could be "Slash", "SD", "Nerdy", "Slack" or anything else. This will stick in memory and can be written down as long as you keep the prefix in a different place.
This will throw any virus off the trail, though I assume you would still be vulnerable for a professional attack directed at you as an individual.
Convenience: Memorizing the 3 strong prefixes allows me to use different passwords everywhere and easily remember 90% without having to look them up.
Value can only be created by consuming resources. Whether that resource is energy, or some natural resource such as coal or iron, or human labor, etc, there is only a finite amount of that resource.
Wrong.
Simplified example: Let us assume you require 2 tons of rock to build a home. Then somebody teach you to build a better home from 1 ton of rock.
Now you have 1 spare ton of rock and a better home. Obviously, we have created value.
Economics is not about measuring the total amount of resources on earth. In the end, it is about efficiency, trading work and resources to always make more efficient use of resources.
Improved efficiency = Satisfying needs of more people with the same amount of resources = value.
Except that the machine would take 3 years of dedicated design time and the cable is likely 50-80 years in the future, to be honest.
And if they had postponed the machine, some people would argue the energy transfer to the machine might be impossible and thus there is no point building a cable.
You do both.
When one project completes, that's one less thing to worry about. Cable research will only benefit from knowing that everything else is proven technology, all that remains is the cable. All the easier to get funding for the "hard" project.
You suspect humour? I suspect that Americans do not understand it at all! I was laughing all the way! But maybe that's because I'm British and I understand that this is really just a complete piss take on the rest of the world.
I'm not British, but I cringe reading the comments here and wonder why on earth this whole story haven't been tagged "Wooosh!" yet.
I'm at a loss for words. Would you have advised that we ignored Pearl Harbor?
1: Pearl Harbor was a real act of war, performed by a nation. WTC was an act terrorism, performed by fanatics.
2: Attacking Iraq after WTC made as much sense as attacking China after Pearl Harbor would have done.
Highlighted for emphasis:
You just sent a message to every nation in the world that your country can be attacked with impunity, and no consequences will come of it.
It was not a nation. USA should have dispatched dispatched crack troops to hunt down Bin Laden. And not too much else.
Hijacking a plane like 9/11 was impossible from the next day, without a single measure taken. People learn, this time they learned to die before surrendering to a hijacker.
Any money spent would have been better spent on a war against traffic deaths, which killed an order of magnitude more people than 9/11. And still does, every year.
The actual reaction was awful and playing right into terrorist hands. Seriously, Bin Laden could not have gotten a better result than a decade-long witch hunt and billions of American dollars flushed into the toilet that is the war in Iraq.
Add the finance crisis as sugar coating on top, increasing US debt even further, and giving any religious fanatics every reason to believe God is on their side.
Comparing the losses in 9/11 with the losses in the aftermath, I am sorry to conclude that USA played straight into terrorist hands. You have unleashed so much more damage upon yourself than the original attack ever did. Partly due to being the Military-industrial complex you are and such self-destructive action benefiting the people in power.
Never in the history on man have a terrorist attack been more efficient, triggering such immense long-term damage.
You just sent a message to every nation in the world that your country can be attacked with impunity, and no consequences will come of it.
And what message did you send? "Terrorism works". Even if you annihilate Bin Laded and co., it will have cost more than it was worth.
Agreed; "Are you not going?" conveys that the asker thinks you're not, and wants to confirm that. He wants to communicate this assumption, rather than just asking "Are you going?", which implies he doesn't know one way or another (he could communicate that he thinks you are going by asking "Are you still going?").
But the way he asks it puts the listener in a bind. Should the listener take it literally, or negate its meaning? Negating its meaning just leads to more unclear cases, ones that I might notice but answer in a way that differs from what the asker is assuming. Often I only realize later that a question I asked was ambiguous, or an answer I gave was ambiguous, and then start to wonder whether the other person is doing what I thought he would.
I want to avoid this from the start, so I disambiguate a question with my answer. The asker can still convey his assumption in this case by asking "Are you staying?". If he can't eliminate the negation, he can still ask something like "Is it correct that you're not going?"
So I don't think it's a simple thing like you describe. If you're going to fault people like me, it must be for thinking of the larger picture and the overall effect of ambiguous questions, the king of thinking that programmers do when deciding on coding styles with regard to defect rates.
Study more languages!
The interesting part is when you realize that for example English and Japanese have opposite rules for answering negated questions. Japanese focuses on the person asking (assuming you are not coming) and English answers the topic at hand (if you're going to the party or not)
Scandinavian languages have three words for "yes" and "no", the last one only when replying to negated sentences. (Which makes it translate to "Yes" in English and "Iie" ("No") in Japanese). I have no idea why there is no 4th word to handle the opposite answer.
And this is why everyone should learn more languages. To realize that words are not a 1:1 mapping of the world, but that the way the human mind relates to things and defines your place in the world is strongly linked to which languages you operate with.
(I had a few drinks. I'll go to bed before I come up with long arguments about language being the OS for the brain. Sorry about the typos;)
So true, yet... People in these kind of game want to be in the top 10.
Cynical or not, that is exactly why some games are built to make people spend their way to the top. Somebody want to be a top X player in a game where you can purchase power? Seriously: Duh.
Alternatives exist. Battlefield Heroes is free to play and spending cash give you nothing more than lots of fancy clothes with zero impact on gameplay. Or optionally a fixed and small XP boost that you can enjoy the game perfectly without.
So there goes "We all live in the countryside" and "We're more spread out."
Americans should hate that argument. It's the last resort of wussies, clamoring "It's not our fault! Nature is to blame!"
One could have said the exact same thing when cars were new the technology last century. Except Americans those days didn't whine, they built roads. Lots of roads.
The world is not fair. Holding happy hands and saying it's ok for a nation to start lagging behind technologically because it's "someone else's fault" is a dangerous attitude.
The above is a fact, and a deleted scene from Michael Moore's Sicko.
It's some time ago so I didn't verify the video clips. Google "sicko norway chainsaw", I think it is this one but didn't watch it to check for the specific scene:
It's not just that either - I go on holiday to various places around the planet. Sometimes I go into a music or games shop whilst I'm there and buy one or two things to take home.
Why should I not be able to play them when I get home?
I have lived in Japan, US and now reside in Europe. The idea that I should be required to have separate consoles (or DVD players) to play games for the different periods is utterly ridiculous.
What will happen on the demand side of electricity when electric cars become common? Could it be that demand will quickly outgrow supply? What, oh what, will a KWH cost then? DIE, ELECTRIC CAR, DIE
I don't think you understand how utterly inefficient a car engine is at converting gasoline into movement.
Basically, you could build gasoline power plant and run electric cars off the output. You'd power more cars and reduce kWh cost.
BTW: Oil is non-renewable, which means demand is guaranteed to outgrow supply.
Why exactly should an online store be forced to carry merchandise that they don't want to, for whatever reason. That would be like legislating that brick-and-mortar stores are required by law to carry anybody's goods. A merchant and that includes Apple, doesn't have to give a reason to anybody why they will or will not not carry a particular item.
Because the App Store dictates what programs a normal user is allowed to run on his phone.
It is not a brick-and-mortar store. It is a marketplace for developers to sell their applications to iPhone owners. And unless you jailbreak your phone, it is the only marketplace you are allowed to browse.
You can pass WGA validation without installing the WGA notification service update.
You can also avoid installing or validating using WGA ever, as long as you only use automatic updates to pull critical updates.
You won't be able to go to the windowsupdate site manually, or download WGA-protected downloads without doing a WGA validation, however
You also cannot click "custom" without getting an error message about having to install WGA. This makes it very hard to know if you have an "optional" but very useful and much wanted hardware driver update or not.
About 8 years ago, I warned industry types that the end result of their activities would be the destruction of copyright...
Que copyright standardized quote - Thomas Macaulay in Parliament in 1841:
I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
Only now are people beginning to realize something that should have been apparent right from the start: one single, massive economic system is inherently bad. It's like a monopoly. There's no backup.
Indeed. More people should be aware of this. It's basically the same issues as agricultural monoculture. More efficient, faster, better - and a downside of the occasional catastrophic failure.
The issue at hand is that everyone only things about the "efficiency" part, where removing redundancy is always a good thing. But this optimistic approach to efficiency is actually extremely fragile.
Redundancy is required at some points, or you are setting yourself up for an eventual collapse.
Globalization is cultural monoculture. A civilization will fail, sooner or later. Making earth a single civilization paves the road for an eventual catastrophic failure.
I searched this article specifically to find a discussion about dreaming.
Thanks for the link. I have been pondering this myself and concluded that dreaming have to be mental "what-if" simulations allowing faster reactions when situations arise in real life.
It is not only attractive women. What you are saying here is actually known as a social disease. Urban centers, overpopulation etc will have the effect of making woman want to have less kids.
It's not a social disease. You explain it yourself: overpopulation.
Be grateful that modern humans for some reason have cut down the breeding rate. If we were still having as many babies as 100 years ago, we'd have massive population in industrialized countries, not enough resources for everyone, and way more than 2 world wars.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems nobody else is getting this. Sad to see that nobody made this comment already, and sadder still to see you only at +3.
Good comments documents WHY.
The United States is a major part of the civilized world, and DOES support capital punishment.
Maybe it shouldn't.
The problem with capital punishment is that you're doing irreversible mistakes every time you judge an innocent. Which does happen, uncomfortably often.
I agree with the common + site-specific approach.
3 standard prefixes (short for junk sites, long for important stuff)
Site-specific suffixes. slashdot could be "Slash", "SD", "Nerdy", "Slack" or anything else. This will stick in memory and can be written down as long as you keep the prefix in a different place.
This will throw any virus off the trail, though I assume you would still be vulnerable for a professional attack directed at you as an individual.
Convenience: Memorizing the 3 strong prefixes allows me to use different passwords everywhere and easily remember 90% without having to look them up.
Value can only be created by consuming resources. Whether that resource is energy, or some natural resource such as coal or iron, or human labor, etc, there is only a finite amount of that resource.
Wrong.
Simplified example: Let us assume you require 2 tons of rock to build a home. Then somebody teach you to build a better home from 1 ton of rock.
Now you have 1 spare ton of rock and a better home. Obviously, we have created value.
Economics is not about measuring the total amount of resources on earth. In the end, it is about efficiency, trading work and resources to always make more efficient use of resources.
Improved efficiency = Satisfying needs of more people with the same amount of resources = value.
Except that the machine would take 3 years of dedicated design time and the cable is likely 50-80 years in the future, to be honest.
And if they had postponed the machine, some people would argue the energy transfer to the machine might be impossible and thus there is no point building a cable.
You do both.
When one project completes, that's one less thing to worry about. Cable research will only benefit from knowing that everything else is proven technology, all that remains is the cable. All the easier to get funding for the "hard" project.
You suspect humour? I suspect that Americans do not understand it at all! I was laughing all the way! But maybe that's because I'm British and I understand that this is really just a complete piss take on the rest of the world.
I'm not British, but I cringe reading the comments here and wonder why on earth this whole story haven't been tagged "Wooosh!" yet.
Seems irony is becoming a lost art...
I'm at a loss for words. Would you have advised that we ignored Pearl Harbor?
1: Pearl Harbor was a real act of war, performed by a nation. WTC was an act terrorism, performed by fanatics.
2: Attacking Iraq after WTC made as much sense as attacking China after Pearl Harbor would have done.
Highlighted for emphasis:
You just sent a message to every nation in the world that your country can be attacked with impunity, and no consequences will come of it.
It was not a nation. USA should have dispatched dispatched crack troops to hunt down Bin Laden. And not too much else.
Hijacking a plane like 9/11 was impossible from the next day, without a single measure taken. People learn, this time they learned to die before surrendering to a hijacker.
Any money spent would have been better spent on a war against traffic deaths, which killed an order of magnitude more people than 9/11. And still does, every year.
The actual reaction was awful and playing right into terrorist hands. Seriously, Bin Laden could not have gotten a better result than a decade-long witch hunt and billions of American dollars flushed into the toilet that is the war in Iraq.
Add the finance crisis as sugar coating on top, increasing US debt even further, and giving any religious fanatics every reason to believe God is on their side.
Comparing the losses in 9/11 with the losses in the aftermath, I am sorry to conclude that USA played straight into terrorist hands. You have unleashed so much more damage upon yourself than the original attack ever did. Partly due to being the Military-industrial complex you are and such self-destructive action benefiting the people in power.
Never in the history on man have a terrorist attack been more efficient, triggering such immense long-term damage.
You just sent a message to every nation in the world that your country can be attacked with impunity, and no consequences will come of it.
And what message did you send? "Terrorism works". Even if you annihilate Bin Laded and co., it will have cost more than it was worth.
Under this view, keeping my cousins avatar is an expression of sentiment akin to keeping photographs. AND THAT IS OK.
We are defined by the impressions/memories other people have of us. Death is the point in time where you no longer can influence those memories.
Keeping his Mii helps you remember him. Just like photos / urns.
(Don't be to persistent about transferring your dead cousin's Mii to friends that have no relation to him, though.)
Agreed; "Are you not going?" conveys that the asker thinks you're not, and wants to confirm that. He wants to communicate this assumption, rather than just asking "Are you going?", which implies he doesn't know one way or another (he could communicate that he thinks you are going by asking "Are you still going?").
But the way he asks it puts the listener in a bind. Should the listener take it literally, or negate its meaning? Negating its meaning just leads to more unclear cases, ones that I might notice but answer in a way that differs from what the asker is assuming. Often I only realize later that a question I asked was ambiguous, or an answer I gave was ambiguous, and then start to wonder whether the other person is doing what I thought he would.
I want to avoid this from the start, so I disambiguate a question with my answer. The asker can still convey his assumption in this case by asking "Are you staying?". If he can't eliminate the negation, he can still ask something like "Is it correct that you're not going?"
So I don't think it's a simple thing like you describe. If you're going to fault people like me, it must be for thinking of the larger picture and the overall effect of ambiguous questions, the king of thinking that programmers do when deciding on coding styles with regard to defect rates.
Study more languages!
The interesting part is when you realize that for example English and Japanese have opposite rules for answering negated questions. Japanese focuses on the person asking (assuming you are not coming) and English answers the topic at hand (if you're going to the party or not)
Scandinavian languages have three words for "yes" and "no", the last one only when replying to negated sentences. (Which makes it translate to "Yes" in English and "Iie" ("No") in Japanese). I have no idea why there is no 4th word to handle the opposite answer.
And this is why everyone should learn more languages. To realize that words are not a 1:1 mapping of the world, but that the way the human mind relates to things and defines your place in the world is strongly linked to which languages you operate with.
(I had a few drinks. I'll go to bed before I come up with long arguments about language being the OS for the brain. Sorry about the typos ;)
So true, yet... People in these kind of game want to be in the top 10.
Cynical or not, that is exactly why some games are built to make people spend their way to the top. Somebody want to be a top X player in a game where you can purchase power? Seriously: Duh.
Alternatives exist. Battlefield Heroes is free to play and spending cash give you nothing more than lots of fancy clothes with zero impact on gameplay. Or optionally a fixed and small XP boost that you can enjoy the game perfectly without.
So there goes "We all live in the countryside" and "We're more spread out."
Americans should hate that argument. It's the last resort of wussies, clamoring "It's not our fault! Nature is to blame!"
One could have said the exact same thing when cars were new the technology last century. Except Americans those days didn't whine, they built roads. Lots of roads.
The world is not fair. Holding happy hands and saying it's ok for a nation to start lagging behind technologically because it's "someone else's fault" is a dangerous attitude.
The above is a fact, and a deleted scene from Michael Moore's Sicko.
It's some time ago so I didn't verify the video clips. Google "sicko norway chainsaw", I think it is this one but didn't watch it to check for the specific scene:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/11/22/norway-a-deleted-scene-from-michael-moores-sicko/
It depends on the case if this would be genius or madness to do.
It's not just that either - I go on holiday to various places around the planet. Sometimes I go into a music or games shop whilst I'm there and buy one or two things to take home.
Why should I not be able to play them when I get home?
I have lived in Japan, US and now reside in Europe. The idea that I should be required to have separate consoles (or DVD players) to play games for the different periods is utterly ridiculous.
What will happen on the demand side of electricity when electric cars become common? Could it be that demand will quickly outgrow supply? What, oh what, will a KWH cost then? DIE, ELECTRIC CAR, DIE
I don't think you understand how utterly inefficient a car engine is at converting gasoline into movement.
Basically, you could build gasoline power plant and run electric cars off the output. You'd power more cars and reduce kWh cost.
BTW: Oil is non-renewable, which means demand is guaranteed to outgrow supply.
Why exactly should an online store be forced to carry merchandise that they don't want to, for whatever reason. That would be like legislating that brick-and-mortar stores are required by law to carry anybody's goods. A merchant and that includes Apple, doesn't have to give a reason to anybody why they will or will not not carry a particular item.
Because the App Store dictates what programs a normal user is allowed to run on his phone.
It is not a brick-and-mortar store. It is a marketplace for developers to sell their applications to iPhone owners. And unless you jailbreak your phone, it is the only marketplace you are allowed to browse.
I'm still puzzled as to why it isn't universally acknowledged that corporate political campaign donations are the purest form of bribery.
You're asking the politicians to pass a law that would prevent them from getting those donations...
You can pass WGA validation without installing the WGA notification service update.
You can also avoid installing or validating using WGA ever, as long as you only use automatic updates to pull critical updates.
You won't be able to go to the windowsupdate site manually, or download WGA-protected downloads without doing a WGA validation, however
You also cannot click "custom" without getting an error message about having to install WGA. This makes it very hard to know if you have an "optional" but very useful and much wanted hardware driver update or not.
You drive one car 9 miles in 9 minutes, but if you drive nine cars you'll drive 9 miles in one minute....simple
Agh! You guys are driving (no pun intended) me crazy by not stating the proper car analogy explicitly!
It takes 1 hour to drive from San Fran to San Jose. Having 60 cars will not get you there in a minute.
About 8 years ago, I warned industry types that the end result of their activities would be the destruction of copyright...
Que copyright standardized quote - Thomas Macaulay in Parliament in 1841:
I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
Guns are not for personal defense. They're for fighting the government if they become too corrupted and must be removed from power.
Just ask any founding father.
Only now are people beginning to realize something that should have
been apparent right from the start: one single, massive economic system
is inherently bad. It's like a monopoly. There's no backup.
Indeed. More people should be aware of this. It's basically the same issues as agricultural monoculture. More efficient, faster, better - and a downside of the occasional catastrophic failure.
The issue at hand is that everyone only things about the "efficiency" part, where removing redundancy is always a good thing. But this optimistic approach to efficiency is actually extremely fragile.
Redundancy is required at some points, or you are setting yourself up for an eventual collapse.
Globalization is cultural monoculture. A civilization will fail, sooner or later. Making earth a single civilization paves the road for an eventual catastrophic failure.
I searched this article specifically to find a discussion about dreaming.
Thanks for the link. I have been pondering this myself and concluded that dreaming have to be mental "what-if" simulations allowing faster reactions when situations arise in real life.
(Americans, this may blow your mind...)
In Norway, your income, personal wealth and tax paid is public information.
Example:
http://www.skattelister.no/?do=alfalist&fy=03&k=0301&postnr=0571&firstletter=b
(in Norwegian)
Click on one of the names if you like. I'm in that list, as well as every other Norwegian. (Coworkers, managers, the prime minister.)
It is not only attractive women. What you are saying here is actually known as a social disease. Urban centers, overpopulation etc will have the effect of making woman want to have less kids.
It's not a social disease. You explain it yourself: overpopulation.
Be grateful that modern humans for some reason have cut down the breeding rate. If we were still having as many babies as 100 years ago, we'd have massive population in industrialized countries, not enough resources for everyone, and way more than 2 world wars.
Are they talking all men or just some men? I would be fairly shocked if they weren't already smarter than at least some people.
Smarter than the men who built the machine.