Imagine that I go to my neighbor and tells her "I have this great idea for a [insert your own pet project here] 'grand model railroad' and can I use some of your land free of charge for the duration
Sure, she can evict me later, but bulldozing my stuff without warning would probably be so rude and impolite as to be culpable.
Not that this really applies, since notice was given. The question is rather whether that notice was adequate.
I tend to think it was, but I then I failed my reading comprehension test on the second article
The argument that there has to be some sort of socialist laws guarantying free and protected web space to the people is just nuts.
"socialist"? Because you disagree or because you couldn't spell nazi?
Anyone wonder why property investors avoid certain parts of the East Cost US like the plague? It's because they have those laws there that can keep a squatter in a place for 9 months WHILE THEY DON'T PAY A DIME TO THE LANDLORD. Meanwhile, the landlord is paying a mortgage, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc.
Those people are parasites.
Yeah, well, it's still polite to give notice and to let people have some little time to move their stuff.
A year? Sure if bandwidth is really low. (According to TFA they got 15 days, sounds about fair to me.)
A parent who is less sure, say 90% sure, now has to balance the effects and probabilities that on the one hand, that the kid will get the almost-never-lethal-or-disabling measles; and on the other hand a minute chance that the kid will get the disabling malady of autism. It's their kid, so I find it unsurprising that parents are simply skipping the vaccines as long as there's the shadow of a doubt.
The only way to get the parents back on vaccine schedules is to determine the cause of autism.
As a father I've been there, and the fact is that we can say something about the size of that "almost-never" in "almost-never-lethal-or-disabling" as we can about that "minute" chance of autism.
When my oldest had her MMR vaccine as I recall the minute chance of disabling maladies from the vaccine were around 1 in 1,000,000 (but not statistically significant)
The death rate in the traditional epidemics were around 1 in 1,000.
Even though there is a lot of doubt as to the accuracy of that first number, the conclusion is still clear.
I also figured that if any of my daughters turned out to be in the one in a million group disabled by the vaccine, they would also have been in the one in a thousand group killed if not vaccinated. That's jumping to conclusions, yes, but sometimes that's what you have to do.
Don't get me wrong. I like it when they can catch the "bad guys". And I know this story involves countries OTHER than the US.
But, I've been looking around here for a new cell phone, and yes..I'm eyeballing the iPhone. But, one thing I recently found out is, AT&T is requiring you give them your damned SSN to get one activated?!?! What the hell is this?
When I first heard this story I thought that those guys might simply be reselling phones.
If buying a phone in a store becomes too difficult or fraught with unknown (legal) dangers, a black market will appear.
Even if this is not generally the case in India today. (Is it? I certainly wouldn't know.) Sooner or later restrictive legislation will drive a black market.
Yes, I have met people like that. They won't say it out loud that they believe it is some magic force, but they stop just short of it. I have honest to goodness offended people with the statement "Books are not inherently better than TV." I don't mean I've met people who disagree with that statement (which I have, and they are just as religious). I mean that they covered their mouth as it dropped open and said "You can't really mean that." with the same tone of voice they would have used if I said that crushing kitten heads was a great way to spend the holidays. In this area at least (Northern California) it is a down right common.
TV is not nearly as bad inherently as it is actualized.
The easiest (re)producible media of any era, gets (by far) the largest amount of crap content of the era.
Pulp in the early 1900's. "Reality" shows on TV now. Tomorrow Web 3.11
This sort of national irresponsibility needs to stop, right now.
I realise these events happened a little while ago now but nonetheless just what the hell did the USA think it was doing flying nuclear bombs around outside their own borders in the first place, this was, it can now be seen, a completely indefensible and irrepsonsible course of action and one for which the USA should now make a full apology.
Speaking as a Dane. Everything points to the USA having obtained permission from our elected leaders, what more would you want?.
The best course of action now is for the USA to hand over full documentation of the accident to a responsible and trustworthy country, France for example, and let them conduct an investigation to first of all try and find this nuclear timebomb and second of all to assign blame and set up the process for trying those who are guilty and punishing them appropriately.
Why the hell should we allow the French to butt in? We allowed the US a base not France, or are you saying we're not trustworthy because we supported American interests during the cod war?
Between us and the US the locals might also think they have a sufficiency of outsiders interfering already. (The Danish part in the establishment of Thule Airbase is a study in colonial arrogance.)
Now the USA is at least out of the hands of the mad cowboy and we've good reason to hope Obamas administration will behave far more honourably we can hope their will be no repeats of this disaster but nonetheless until we in the rest of the civilised world can be sure of that the EU should impose regular nuclear inspections on the USA just to double check the same terrible mistakes are not being made today.
I'm pro-EU, but I don't think it's a cure-all for mistakes!
... endanger everyone just to stay in buisness and get idiots out of your office is criminal,...
Mod parent up, please.
Giving patients effective medicines, when you can't find anything wrong with them is inviting disaster.
I fear though, that they are just trying to cover themselves. It's propably better to "mistakenly" having given someone the wrong medicine, then to by genuine mistake having given a placebo.
"Better" that is, as in "easier to make a jury sympathize with".
All that is off course disregarding any real world ambiguity: What about people who come to the doctor with something that is propably nothing. Should the doctor then treat the "nothing"? Or the unlikely real problem?
And remember that they are a rather local phenomenon, so metal enrichment of the next generation of stars is patchy.
Indeed, there are stars substantially older than Sol with similar metallicity. They are rarer and they haven't spawned alien civilizations that have prevented us from arising.
Sex offender registry laws should be reserved for the extreme cases---cases of rape in which neither party was intoxicated or under the influence of drugs (or in which the injured party was unknowingly/unwillingly subjected to drugs with intent to rape), cases in which someone over... let's say 21 intentionally and knowingly engages in or attempts to engage in sexual contact with someone under... let's say 12, etc. That gives a wide enough safety margin that it weeds out everyone but the people who truly are a danger to society.
What about perpetrators that knowingly/willingly subjected themselves to drugs with intent to rape.
Or to be more realistic: Do you want to accept these two excuses?
"I only rape drunks."
"I only rape when I'm on drugs."
If you drop the "intoxicated" excuse I do agree with you in principle.
Without such limits, you're just ruining the lives a bunch of otherwise normal people who did stupid things when they were in high school or college. That doesn't make much sense to me (or, frankly, to anyone with half a brain). If anything, this is why laws that don't give judges any leeway in sentencing are universally bad. They create an environment in which a judge is forced to give a punishment even if the circumstances clearly do not warranty that punishment. Unfortunately, without those laws, we get problems on the other side---idiot judges who keep letting out repeat offenders who progressively work their way up to heinous crimes. I don't know what the solution is except perhaps to pass laws that would require all criminal sentencing to occur by a vote of... say seven judges who are all required to read the complete decision of the presiding judge prior to enacting sentencing (with harsh criminal penalties for any judge who regularly fails to read the decisions before voting).
Whatever happened to "twelve good men"? Perhaps some adjustment is needed?
Isn't criminology a science, by the way? Perhaps real answers may exist as to how dangerous these people are.
with games, it's not quite so extreme, but there's still a socialized reluctance to purchase used games. i mean, everyone wants the latest and greatest gaming title. no one even wants to buy a 2-year-old unused game from the bargain bin. except for legacy systems and hardcore gamers, there's very little demand for refurbished games. it's just not even a notion gamers are accustomed to. most people aren't in the habit of shopping for used games the way that people shop for used cars. so in the end, the negative impact this one-time bonus policy might have on resale value won't really make much of an impact on market demand.
I'd add that those of us who are happy to play old games have plenty of free open source options.
I, for one, have been playing entirely too much UFO: Alien Invasin over the weekend
Ohhh, I see. The collective scientific community already decided that they were wrong about Neanderthal intelligence and has quietly moved on to new theories. The "lay media" is only now bringing this to light.
If science is "continually revising itself" how can we trust anything it says?
People who think they may be wrong are certainly right.
People who know they can't be wrong are obviuosly wrong!
I don't think you can pin the blame purely on the press. People working in this field can make it clear when their findings are based partly on assumptions rather than proven science. Getting overexcited and announcing discoveries that turn out to be false can have quite a serious impact on the scientific community's reputation.
Thus ruining all arguments along the line of "we know from science that..."
Is that really so bad?
Who knows, Joe Public might even discover the scientific process.
Non-believers or 'skeptics' as they call themselves (a term I despise since there are many skeptical believers too) also spend their lives living in faith of what they perceive. Faith in their senses not to lie to them.
I know very well that my senses do too lie to me!
Faith in the consistency and research of others,
? We tend to trust people, despite human failabilities. Is that Faith?
faith that the universe around them exhibits behaviours that are testable.
We act on our suspicion that gravity exists. You can call that Faith if you like.
This faith may not be unfounded, but to call it anything else is silliness since no one person could ever claim to have lived their lives thoroughly testing every belief they live by.
To me it seems as if a lot of people don't just have faith. They go all the way to Faith, i.e. the belief that nothing they really believe can be wrong.
This belief, however, is obviously not reasonable.
I am descended from a long line of animals that were succesful reproducers, among other reasons because they by their inborn nature did not kill, unless certain trigger conditions were met.
People have commited awful atrocities when the trigger conditions were met. Even religious people.
Now, none of my ancestors were Nazis, I contribute this to sheer luck. (Living in the wrong country!) However, there were other incidents, earlier, after all when people say "Don't pay the Dane" it's not because they want to cheat us.
For what it's worth I don't believe the claim that religion has caused all that many atrocities through the ages, rather people who had no idea why they were doing such thing used religion for post-factum rationalization of their desire to commit said atrocities.
Ideally everybody would have their own education tailor-made to them by the exact sort of people that can best teach them. But...we can't. It's ridiculously impractical.
But we already do that. Or rather I try to teach my children some things, but I suspect many other parents do too.
There are things I can't teach them (Quantum Physics, Future Car Repair,...), but that's only a small part of their education. Walking, talking, and not using their fists[1] are far more important.
[1] If it's important enough to get into a fist fight over; use a rifle!
Slashdot Mirror
I get less than 1%, and with a growth rate of only around 40% over the last two years there's really nothing to be afraid of?
God, all the way at the bottom of 223 (at this time) comments is the one defending the idea of freedom of speech!
And it's modded "troll".
Drink some coffee guys, wake up, and get your brains in gear.
I hope they do teach the strengths and weaknesses of Newton's theory of gravity. It is after all:
Imagine that I go to my neighbor and tells her "I have this great idea for a [insert your own pet project here] 'grand model railroad' and can I use some of your land free of charge for the duration
Sure, she can evict me later, but bulldozing my stuff without warning would probably be so rude and impolite as to be culpable.
Not that this really applies, since notice was given. The question is rather whether that notice was adequate.
I tend to think it was, but I then I failed my reading comprehension test on the second article
The argument that there has to be some sort of socialist laws guarantying free and protected web space to the people is just nuts.
"socialist"? Because you disagree or because you couldn't spell nazi?
Anyone wonder why property investors avoid certain parts of the East Cost US like the plague? It's because they have those laws there that can keep a squatter in a place for 9 months WHILE THEY DON'T PAY A DIME TO THE LANDLORD. Meanwhile, the landlord is paying a mortgage, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc.
Those people are parasites.
Yeah, well, it's still polite to give notice and to let people have some little time to move their stuff.
A year? Sure if bandwidth is really low. (According to TFA they got 15 days, sounds about fair to me.)
"
A parent who is less sure, say 90% sure, now has to balance the effects and probabilities that on the one hand, that the kid will get the almost-never-lethal-or-disabling measles; and on the other hand a minute chance that the kid will get the disabling malady of autism. It's their kid, so I find it unsurprising that parents are simply skipping the vaccines as long as there's the shadow of a doubt.
The only way to get the parents back on vaccine schedules is to determine the cause of autism.
As a father I've been there, and the fact is that we can say something about the size of that "almost-never" in "almost-never-lethal-or-disabling" as we can about that "minute" chance of autism.
When my oldest had her MMR vaccine as I recall the minute chance of disabling maladies from the vaccine were around 1 in 1,000,000 (but not statistically significant)
The death rate in the traditional epidemics were around 1 in 1,000.
Even though there is a lot of doubt as to the accuracy of that first number, the conclusion is still clear.
I also figured that if any of my daughters turned out to be in the one in a million group disabled by the vaccine, they would also have been in the one in a thousand group killed if not vaccinated. That's jumping to conclusions, yes, but sometimes that's what you have to do.
Don't get me wrong. I like it when they can catch the "bad guys". And I know this story involves countries OTHER than the US.
But, I've been looking around here for a new cell phone, and yes..I'm eyeballing the iPhone. But, one thing I recently found out is, AT&T is requiring you give them your damned SSN to get one activated?!?! What the hell is this?
When I first heard this story I thought that those guys might simply be reselling phones.
If buying a phone in a store becomes too difficult or fraught with unknown (legal) dangers, a black market will appear.
Even if this is not generally the case in India today. (Is it? I certainly wouldn't know.) Sooner or later restrictive legislation will drive a black market.
Undoing mod!
Do you really need to ask why people try to teach others love and generosity?
Teach them love and they might give you a gun.
Teach them hate and they might give you a bullet.
Yes, I have met people like that. They won't say it out loud that they believe it is some magic force, but they stop just short of it. I have honest to goodness offended people with the statement "Books are not inherently better than TV." I don't mean I've met people who disagree with that statement (which I have, and they are just as religious). I mean that they covered their mouth as it dropped open and said "You can't really mean that." with the same tone of voice they would have used if I said that crushing kitten heads was a great way to spend the holidays. In this area at least (Northern California) it is a down right common.
TV is not nearly as bad inherently as it is actualized.
The easiest (re)producible media of any era, gets (by far) the largest amount of crap content of the era.
Pulp in the early 1900's. "Reality" shows on TV now. Tomorrow Web 3.11
Presumably top officials knew. Certainly they helped cover up what happened
They may, however, have accepted being lied to as a necessary part of the cold war.
At least that is my impression from the various times this has come up in Danish media.
This sort of national irresponsibility needs to stop, right now.
I realise these events happened a little while ago now but nonetheless just what the hell did the USA think it was doing flying nuclear bombs around outside their own borders in the first place, this was, it can now be seen, a completely indefensible and irrepsonsible course of action and one for which the USA should now make a full apology.
Speaking as a Dane. Everything points to the USA having obtained permission from our elected leaders, what more would you want?.
The best course of action now is for the USA to hand over full documentation of the accident to a responsible and trustworthy country, France for example, and let them conduct an investigation to first of all try and find this nuclear timebomb and second of all to assign blame and set up the process for trying those who are guilty and punishing them appropriately.
Why the hell should we allow the French to butt in? We allowed the US a base not France, or are you saying we're not trustworthy because we supported American interests during the cod war?
Between us and the US the locals might also think they have a sufficiency of outsiders interfering already. (The Danish part in the establishment of Thule Airbase is a study in colonial arrogance.)
Now the USA is at least out of the hands of the mad cowboy and we've good reason to hope Obamas administration will behave far more honourably we can hope their will be no repeats of this disaster but nonetheless until we in the rest of the civilised world can be sure of that the EU should impose regular nuclear inspections on the USA just to double check the same terrible mistakes are not being made today.
I'm pro-EU, but I don't think it's a cure-all for mistakes!
Like it was laughable that France and Germany should ever be friends
This is the original purpose of the EU: To achieve lasting peace through application of the three e's. Embrace, Extend, Empower.
So, are you saying we should seek peace only with our enemies, not with our friends? Or am I using the wrong three e's?
... endanger everyone just to stay in buisness and get idiots out of your office is criminal, ...
Mod parent up, please.
Giving patients effective medicines, when you can't find anything wrong with them is inviting disaster.
I fear though, that they are just trying to cover themselves. It's propably better to "mistakenly" having given someone the wrong medicine, then to by genuine mistake having given a placebo.
"Better" that is, as in "easier to make a jury sympathize with".
All that is off course disregarding any real world ambiguity: What about people who come to the doctor with something that is propably nothing. Should the doctor then treat the "nothing"? Or the unlikely real problem?
It's super novas, not old-burned out stars.
And remember that they are a rather local phenomenon, so metal enrichment of the next generation of stars is patchy.
Indeed, there are stars substantially older than Sol with similar metallicity. They are rarer and they haven't spawned alien civilizations that have prevented us from arising.
Why not? No-one knows.
Sex offender registry laws should be reserved for the extreme cases---cases of rape in which neither party was intoxicated or under the influence of drugs (or in which the injured party was unknowingly/unwillingly subjected to drugs with intent to rape), cases in which someone over... let's say 21 intentionally and knowingly engages in or attempts to engage in sexual contact with someone under... let's say 12, etc. That gives a wide enough safety margin that it weeds out everyone but the people who truly are a danger to society.
What about perpetrators that knowingly/willingly subjected themselves to drugs with intent to rape.
Or to be more realistic: Do you want to accept these two excuses?
"I only rape drunks."
"I only rape when I'm on drugs."
If you drop the "intoxicated" excuse I do agree with you in principle.
Without such limits, you're just ruining the lives a bunch of otherwise normal people who did stupid things when they were in high school or college. That doesn't make much sense to me (or, frankly, to anyone with half a brain). If anything, this is why laws that don't give judges any leeway in sentencing are universally bad. They create an environment in which a judge is forced to give a punishment even if the circumstances clearly do not warranty that punishment. Unfortunately, without those laws, we get problems on the other side---idiot judges who keep letting out repeat offenders who progressively work their way up to heinous crimes. I don't know what the solution is except perhaps to pass laws that would require all criminal sentencing to occur by a vote of... say seven judges who are all required to read the complete decision of the presiding judge prior to enacting sentencing (with harsh criminal penalties for any judge who regularly fails to read the decisions before voting).
Whatever happened to "twelve good men"? Perhaps some adjustment is needed?
Isn't criminology a science, by the way? Perhaps real answers may exist as to how dangerous these people are.
Unclear answers I'd guess, but real.
So maybe there was a surplus, but in what? Real dollars?
Real dollars? What's "Real" dollars?
with games, it's not quite so extreme, but there's still a socialized reluctance to purchase used games. i mean, everyone wants the latest and greatest gaming title. no one even wants to buy a 2-year-old unused game from the bargain bin. except for legacy systems and hardcore gamers, there's very little demand for refurbished games. it's just not even a notion gamers are accustomed to. most people aren't in the habit of shopping for used games the way that people shop for used cars. so in the end, the negative impact this one-time bonus policy might have on resale value won't really make much of an impact on market demand.
I'd add that those of us who are happy to play old games have plenty of free open source options.
I, for one, have been playing entirely too much UFO: Alien Invasin over the weekend
Man, I think Paris Hilton had a better oil policy than that.
Now you're rubbing it in.
Ohhh, I see. The collective scientific community already decided that they were wrong about Neanderthal intelligence and has quietly moved on to new theories. The "lay media" is only now bringing this to light.
If science is "continually revising itself" how can we trust anything it says?
People who think they may be wrong are certainly right.
People who know they can't be wrong are obviuosly wrong!
I don't think you can pin the blame purely on the press. People working in this field can make it clear when their findings are based partly on assumptions rather than proven science. Getting overexcited and announcing discoveries that turn out to be false can have quite a serious impact on the scientific community's reputation.
Thus ruining all arguments along the line of "we know from science that ..."
Is that really so bad?
Who knows, Joe Public might even discover the scientific process.
Non-believers or 'skeptics' as they call themselves (a term I despise since there are many skeptical believers too) also spend their lives living in faith of what they perceive. Faith in their senses not to lie to them.
I know very well that my senses do too lie to me!
Faith in the consistency and research of others,
? We tend to trust people, despite human failabilities. Is that Faith?
faith that the universe around them exhibits behaviours that are testable.
We act on our suspicion that gravity exists. You can call that Faith if you like.
This faith may not be unfounded, but to call it anything else is silliness since no one person could ever claim to have lived their lives thoroughly testing every belief they live by.
To me it seems as if a lot of people don't just have faith. They go all the way to Faith, i.e. the belief that nothing they really believe can be wrong.
This belief, however, is obviously not reasonable.
>
I'm sure there are other reasons. What's yours?
I am descended from a long line of animals that were succesful reproducers, among other reasons because they by their inborn nature did not kill, unless certain trigger conditions were met.
People have commited awful atrocities when the trigger conditions were met. Even religious people.
Now, none of my ancestors were Nazis, I contribute this to sheer luck. (Living in the wrong country!) However, there were other incidents, earlier, after all when people say "Don't pay the Dane" it's not because they want to cheat us.
For what it's worth I don't believe the claim that religion has caused all that many atrocities through the ages, rather people who had no idea why they were doing such thing used religion for post-factum rationalization of their desire to commit said atrocities.
Ideally everybody would have their own education tailor-made to them by the exact sort of people that can best teach them. But...we can't. It's ridiculously impractical.
But we already do that. Or rather I try to teach my children some things, but I suspect many other parents do too.
There are things I can't teach them (Quantum Physics, Future Car Repair, ...), but that's only a small part of their education. Walking, talking, and not using their fists[1] are far more important.
[1] If it's important enough to get into a fist fight over; use a rifle!
Do you have to talk that loud?
Do you really think it is fair to shout at a poor handicapped geek with no sense of humour?
"No sense of humour" is a mental disability worth -10 points,that's quite serious for especially for a geek.