Seems to me that most any murder-suicide by plane would have a higher body count than even the deadliest murder-suicide by firearms. While we're at it we can compare this to murder-suicide by bombs, cars, poison gas, or whatever else the insane have come up with.
Seems to me that the lesson here is we should be looking to put criminals in prisons and the insane in mental hospitals instead of trying to bubblewrap the world.
If we're comparing murder by firearms to murder by hijacking, bombs, vehicular murder, poison gas or whatever else, I'm assuming we're weighting it for degree of difficulty in obtaining said weapon.
As for cars, we've seen here in the UK first hand just how few bodies that produces, you see cars are designed to stop functioning when damaged, so that limits their effectiveness as a weapon.
Bombs are almost as ineffective as they need to be produced properly. Now that sounds easy but a lot of bombing attempts end up being abject failures because of the bomb makers inexperience with explosives. Most end up little more than mild incidiary devices that cause a little fire damage and maybe one or two cases of smoke inhalation. Same with poison gas except you now have the added problem of dispersion.
Aircraft... There has not been a major hijacking incident in over 15 years because we've locked the cockpit door.
Now firearms, they are something that are designed to maim and kill and are easy to acquire and operate.
Obama already did that one. Now Trump is busy stealing it from Obama. It's been a tradition for at least the last 50 years for each President to steal the reputation of "Worst President Ever" from the previous one, and I don't see Trump as the bottom of the barrel yet.
Who have you got that's worse than Trump? Even Kim Cardassian would be better than Trump.
Just slap some kind of a GMO label on it and move on. If idiots that believe it's evil or unhealthy want to use something else that's probably less healthy for them, that's on them. The idiocy and fear-mongering will be there regardless
And remember, where there is idiocy and fear mongering, there's money to be made.
Anti-vaxxers are a gold mine for those selling snake oil (like David Wolfe).
What do they all have in common? They lack any real competition. In every case the customer has little or no choice of their service provider. With airlines the choice is fly or take the train or drive. In most cases the alternatives are impractical.
Over here in Europe, we have alternatives to air travel like fast trains and excellent motorway networks... European airlines are still shit.
OTOH, we have excellent utilities as these are often working from government mandates rather than a profit motive (meaning their priority is service, not fobbing you off as fast as possible.
The problem you have isn't lack of competition, it's a race to the bottom.
This is another case where the UK's watchdog agency has made things better for the average consumer. Always be cautious of people insisting that "freedom" is always better, when "freedom" often includes the freedom to lie to your customers - albeit with the bonus of being able to make some truly awesome ads that don't fly over there.
Maybe it's because I've always lived in countries that have punished deceptive advertising... but I've never considered "being lied to" a freedom at all, let alone a basic one.
OK. So I'm not the only one noticing this! Accessing the web now is HORRIBLE. Especially on a phone. It's like the web is back to dial up speeds.
When the "web on a phone" first appeared in the form of WAP etc., I thought it would mean the return of clean and simple web design. Mobile connection speeds were worse than dialup to begin with, and some of the display size and input limitations still apply today. But now we have fast connections and CPUs with small displays, so we get Fisher-Price text and image layout with all the advertising and tracking bits, or even less actual content to see. Of course, you get this on the desktop too because many sites only design for mobile now.
Add to this the appification of web, a great step backwards in platform independence and the use of computers as universal tools. For example, posting videos on Instagram needs the app, so you need one real computer to produce the work, and a toy device to distribute it. (I use Android-x86 under a VM, but you get the issue.)
This. WAP and even earlier Android browsers provided a faster, cleaner web because they didn't have all the features of a desktop browser and so didn't load as much as a desktop browser. As browsers have become "feature complete" we're getting all the cruft that is in desktop browsers but without the bandwidth and processing power. So much so that I now consider an adblocker on my phone a must.
Ultimately its down to three things.
1. Lazy coding. CMS's that are just thrown together, re-using bits of code without understanding what they do, needlessly complex design making it ineloquent.
2. Lazy coding. I know this is technically only one point but it's big enough to be worth mentioning twice.
3. Management drive for more "content" (erm... meaning eyeballs on ads). To do this they need to shoehorn in as many ads as possible... and videos, because people looove videos that start playing as soon as the page loads, with sound... and make the video follow the user in case they scroll down to miss it... Ooooh don't forget to track them so we can sell their data (and whinge that the EU is standing up to that bollocks).
And he's not wrong, though the examples don't really work for me. Why do I think liberal arts are important for CS majors? Because software has to be used by people who don't write software. Musicians need software for creating music. Artists need software for creating art. Writers need software for writing. Programmers who also understand those secondary fields are likely to be better at creating such software than programmers who don't.
Engineering teaches us to think logically, art teaches us to think laterally.
Why is that important, because lateral thinking allows us to develop solutions that logical thinking might never discover. I.E. ideas out of left field, to use an Americanism.
Its not uncommon for highly intelligent people to have a creative streak.
There's a fair bit of empirical evidence to suggest this given how successful many students of a Montessori or Steiner education have been.
Sure it works the first few times... But just like the "make sure you software eject your flash drive before ripping it out" warnings, most people might be hesitant the first few times and then say fuck it and start ripping the life out of computers and ignoring the pleas.
This.
My level of empathy is inversely proportional to my level of annoyance.
Soon the US could be building gas guzzlers nobody outside the US wants to buy.
What do you mean by "soon".
American brands like Cadillac, Chevrolet, et al. barely exist out here and when they do it's usually either failing to sell American cars to other countries or failing to sell Korean cars to other countries. No one wants to buy a Caddy CTS for the same price as Merc E63 AMG when you can get the E63 AMG. Even Ford has separate divisions for Europe producing completely separate cars (a US focus is different to a UK one). American cars are rarely found outside America, the Philippines is a notable exception being a dumping ground for used US cars (same as many South American nations).
This is because American manufacturers do not understand foreign countries. No-one over here wants a huge engine that produces little to no power, we're happy getting no power out of 1.2L engines, a gutless 3.7L V6 is just overkill that just ads weight. Not to mention primitive designs, up until this generation the Mustang had a live rear axle, at least when Chevrolet re-introduced the Camaro they realised they knew nothing about suspension and went overseas to learn about the wonders of "multi link" and "independent rear"... Basically they took a barge made in Australia and called it a Chevy. The Japanese understand how to make and market cars to other nations, even if that understanding is "here is a basic car that is affordable and wont break down" because after all, that is what most people want.
Also killing the manual, a lot of Europeans like their 3rd pedal which is why Porsche and BMW keep making them (my manual M240i is brilliant).
Finally there is a replacement for displacement, it's called a turbocharger. Japanese and European manufacturers have been using them to produce small, reliable, economical, high powered engines for ages now. Americans are finally catching on.
I think 95% or more of calls to my cell are spam. Why would I answer the phone with such odds?
This. Most of my calls are "Hi, this is someone you briefly had an email exchange with 18 months ago, we want to see if we can use you to drum up more business". Usually a recruiter.
Companies I like receiving offers from know that they don't have to cold call.
Add to this the cacophony of non carrier based communications options, I don't think we have fewer people calling each other, we've got fewer people using their minutes to call each other. I recently switched from a main UK provider (E.G. Vodafone, EE, O2) to an MNVO (Plusnet) and chose a cheap plan that reduced my call minutes and SMS in exchange for lots of data (OK, 1.5 GB but I'm only paying £6 a month with no contract). This was a no brainier for me as I hardly call anyone so 100 minutes per month is profligate.
1) The banks suddenly require it
2) Your DMV suddenly requires it
3) Amazon suddenly requires it
4) etc....
And this is over and above the fact that the browser might not work on your platform of choice. So we go from an open web to a proprietary web, just like in the days of IE.... except worse because we somehow expect some company putting out a closed-source binary to be trustworthy.
1. Switch to a competing bank that doesn't. They'll get the message when they're bleeding customers.
2. Pay by post or in person (I highly doubt the DVLA would require this, existing measures are sufficient and if anyone else wants to pay my VED, I'm not going to stop them).
3. Switch to Amazons competitors. They'll get the point when they start bleeding customers.
4. There's always an alternative.
Not even Microsoft in the height of it's power had the capability to force companies to support AND ONLY SUPPORT one browser. Today a some random company has no chance.
If the world is round how come satellite signals are always available? Shouldn't they go in and out of visibility if the world was round? My satellite TV always works as does my so called GPS. Explain that!
Wake up you sheep.
We know the planet is round because FSM created it in the shape of a holy meatball, all hail his noodly appendage.
Exactly, you've never seen a perfectly round meatball, which is why his divine pastaness made the earth an oblate spheroid.
I note that it was 120 Americans killed by deer IN ALL AGE GROUPS. In 2015, 425 Americans in all age groups were killed in mass shootings, over 13,000 died by gunshot wound (I'll admit this figure includes accidents).
Oh, but you wanted us to ignore the person who pointed this out... because it invalidates your theory.
Thus far this year, 40 people have been killed in school shootings. We're not talking about freak accidents involving an elk on the road here (which is how most of them occur, so actual cause of death is MVA), we're talking deliberate and premeditated attacks that dont seem to occur in other countries. Its time to admit that your society's attitude towards firearms is horribly broken and dead kids will keep happening until your society decides to do something about it.
The first problem is, you don't understand (pure) socialism. Everyone is part owner of all resources, and means of production, and everyone's needs are met. The ultimate government form goal for socialism is self-management; one where there is no central government. So, i'm sorry you're such a fucking idiot that you don't understand the words you use... but that's on you.
Communism, on the other hand, has the additional factor of a "revolution" needed to overthrow the previous form of government... as opposed to what someone below wrote about it (as they don't seem to understand what it means either, so you're not alone in your fucking ignorance). A revolution seems to be exactly the same as what the far-right fascists in the US have been espousing for years, although they want to overthrown a democratically elected government and the Constitution (all the while calling themselves patriots because they're too fucking stupid to understand what that word means as well).
Communism (in theory) is pure socialism. Its just that communism in theory doesn't work in practice due to human nature. People are different, trying to meet all their differing needs on a bureaucratic schedule is impossible. So communism becomes authoritarian in enforcing this like Russia and Cuba or it becomes a communism in name only like China.
Revolutions, or at least perversions of democracy are required for any extremist government to gain power, be it left or right wing.
No successful government has ever managed to implement a pure socialist or pure capitalist economy because they simply dont work in reality and are ultimately at odds with any democratic system. Both systems fail for the same reason, people are different, have different needs, wants, requirements, so on and so forth although it should be noted that whilst communism has been tried and failed, a pure capitalism has never even gotten off the ground as it's that much of a horrible idea. As such every successful economy in the world is a mixed economy, mixing both socialist and capitalist policies (technically militaries, police and emergency services are socialist, paid for by all, used by those who need it).
Unions came into being because the "job creators" hoarded the wealth produced by the labor of the workers, and because they would happily see you die in a mine shaft as long as it saved them a nickel.
Now, income inequality is the highest its ever been since the Gilded Age - Jeff Bezos is funding space exploration 'because he doesn't know what to do with his money' while he hires ambulances to sit outside his fulfillment centers. Because it's cheaper to haul the occasional victim of heat stroke to a clinic than it is to use air conditioning.
What was your point again?
Unions came into existence because people were literally dying on jobs for almost no reason. Unions set safety standards and made the death of a worker so expensive that their lives became worth protecting.
The centralisation of wealth (and power) bought about civil unrest and the creation of the middle class. The French revolution, the Russian revolution, even in a large part, the American revolution were about the people rising up against the centralisation of wealth (of course, several revolutions in England dealt with a lot of that before the Americas were even colonised).
He should have run the scam from abroad and used the money to buy residence in a non-extradition country... In all seriousness: he used his own phone and expected not to be caught?
Two more points:
(1) $1 million bail is more than many murderers get. This shows the priorities of the state -- fortunes of tech squillionaires are worth more than human lives.
(2) The phone companies that apparently make SIMs stupidly easy to port-out should share the blame.
As to #1, firstly, bail is mostly based on flight risk, so someone who is not likely to flee or does not have the means to flee is given a lower bail. Secondly, any murderer who is believed likely to re-offend is not granted bail. So for a million bucks bond, the state doesn't have to pay to feed and house this miscreant, seems smart to me.
No doubt the phone companies whose processes were criminally negligent in allowing a person like this to engineer transfer of the number will also be brought to trial and punished.
Ha ha ha. I crack myself up!
Good one... The next thing you'll be expecting is for phone companies to put in methods to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future like an ID requirement for picking up SIM cards, a callback to the previous number to confirm or a MFA system.
I don't mean the bank - I mean that headline. "Company saves money by replacing people with a machine."
You're going to see variations on that headline over and over from here on out.
This.
I've been saying this for ages. Whilst wide eyed morons have been salivating over the idea of driverless cars which are decades away from public consumption (if they're ever ready) I've been saying that we're only a short way away from having a great number of professional jobs automated by weak AI. Jobs that are based on applying rules to data like banking, accounting, law, administration, so on and so forth are prime candidates because the one thing weak AI is exceptional at is applying rules to data.
The robot car is ages away, however the robot lawyer or robot accountant are just around the corner, there are already bots on the internet designed to help you appeal (and get out of) parking tickets. When applying for a Credit Card I'm fairly certain human intervention is minimal (every application I've done in the last 10 years has been entirely online). I'm also pretty sure the only reason I spoke to a person at BMW Financial Services for my 2er is because she was a salesperson and humans respond better to sales pitches in person. None of the actual work couldn't have been done online, in fact I'm certain like the car sales person did, all she did was enter the information I gave her into their system.
It is going to be a bit of a shake up in society because these aren't just menial blue collar jobs being replaced, however society will adjust and adapt.
The jury is still out on the long-term consequences of those reforms.
Which jury? Where? Not around here (Europe) is it.
The long term consequences are known. Questions about the GDPR that everyone is waiting for include
Are these laws effective or will they need reinforced in some ways?
What other unintendedconsequences will occur?
How long will it take some countries (like the US) to catch up?
Certainly the GDPR has made additional work for people, including me. It has not brought out the orchestrated hostility I see from the USA. I have not seen anything in the press here against it. Perhaps our government and its tabloid press controllers don't want us to think too much about it so that they can water it down in a couple of years. That sort of thing is less successful than it used to be. Corporate foul ups with security will keep people aware of it.
This cannot be overstated. GDPR has thus far been a good thing but several sites in the US have completely lost their shit over it. Their loss I suppose, all they're doing is ensuring that people from Europe are switching off. I can only surmise that the sites which are outright blocking EU countries are doing something well and truly illegal with our data.
However I've considered an adblocker to be mandatory for web browsing for years and recently added a script blocker to that.
I prefer the sign !$ for funny money.
Australian telco's had (probably still have) a "funny money" system for determining your quotas. Instead of saying $20 gets you X minutes and Y texts, they'd say $20 gets you $200 of calls, $500 of texts. Of course there'd be no relationship between the actual dollar value and the imaginary dollar value.
I'm confused. You said "Forget wall street, it benefits fascists". Who do you think is going to freeze the accounts? And do you think they'll only do it when the government asks, or also when it benefits them?
Banks are primarily in it to make money, they don't care if your business is legal, grey, black, white, mauve or involves selling the ground hopes and dreams of orphaned children as long as they get a piece of the action. As long as they're getting a cut of your spending, they don't care what you did to get the money. If it were up to the banks, they'd happily hold the money from drug dealers or any other type of crook... In fact many of them do. Banks only restrict accounts when governments force them to and moan about it constantly (even when said restrictions are in place to prevent a self inflicted crisis).
OK... Where can I find the open source MRI scanner.
I've been in the exact situation described in the summary, except it was about 8 years ago and it was an MRI scanner with software designed to run on Windows XP that couldn't be updated to Windows 7. Before VM's were as robust and ubiquitous as they were today. The solution was simple, an air gap.
The machine had no network connection and no WiFi (yes youngsters, there was a time where most desktop machines didn't have WiFi built in). We put silicon in all the USB ports including siliconing in the KB and mouse to the ports. The machine had a stack of DVD-R's next to it so files could be transferred.
I'm a big fan of FOSS, but out here in the real world you're going to encounter scenarios like the one above where you have to think practically.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation needed.
Seems to me that most any murder-suicide by plane would have a higher body count than even the deadliest murder-suicide by firearms. While we're at it we can compare this to murder-suicide by bombs, cars, poison gas, or whatever else the insane have come up with.
Seems to me that the lesson here is we should be looking to put criminals in prisons and the insane in mental hospitals instead of trying to bubblewrap the world.
If we're comparing murder by firearms to murder by hijacking, bombs, vehicular murder, poison gas or whatever else, I'm assuming we're weighting it for degree of difficulty in obtaining said weapon.
As for cars, we've seen here in the UK first hand just how few bodies that produces, you see cars are designed to stop functioning when damaged, so that limits their effectiveness as a weapon.
Bombs are almost as ineffective as they need to be produced properly. Now that sounds easy but a lot of bombing attempts end up being abject failures because of the bomb makers inexperience with explosives. Most end up little more than mild incidiary devices that cause a little fire damage and maybe one or two cases of smoke inhalation. Same with poison gas except you now have the added problem of dispersion.
Aircraft... There has not been a major hijacking incident in over 15 years because we've locked the cockpit door.
Now firearms, they are something that are designed to maim and kill and are easy to acquire and operate.
Obama already did that one. Now Trump is busy stealing it from Obama. It's been a tradition for at least the last 50 years for each President to steal the reputation of "Worst President Ever" from the previous one, and I don't see Trump as the bottom of the barrel yet.
Who have you got that's worse than Trump? Even Kim Cardassian would be better than Trump.
Just slap some kind of a GMO label on it and move on. If idiots that believe it's evil or unhealthy want to use something else that's probably less healthy for them, that's on them. The idiocy and fear-mongering will be there regardless
And remember, where there is idiocy and fear mongering, there's money to be made.
Anti-vaxxers are a gold mine for those selling snake oil (like David Wolfe).
Think of all the industries with shitty customer service ratings:
1) Cable
2) Cellphones
3) Utilities
4) Airlines
5) Car dealers
What do they all have in common? They lack any real competition. In every case the customer has little or no choice of their service provider. With airlines the choice is fly or take the train or drive. In most cases the alternatives are impractical.
Over here in Europe, we have alternatives to air travel like fast trains and excellent motorway networks... European airlines are still shit.
OTOH, we have excellent utilities as these are often working from government mandates rather than a profit motive (meaning their priority is service, not fobbing you off as fast as possible.
The problem you have isn't lack of competition, it's a race to the bottom.
54.5 cents per mile + NY MINWAGE + full insurance will hurt them big time.
Which is why the Taxi Companies pushed so hard for this.
How dare they push for a level playing field... The nerve.
This is another case where the UK's watchdog agency has made things better for the average consumer. Always be cautious of people insisting that "freedom" is always better, when "freedom" often includes the freedom to lie to your customers - albeit with the bonus of being able to make some truly awesome ads that don't fly over there.
Maybe it's because I've always lived in countries that have punished deceptive advertising... but I've never considered "being lied to" a freedom at all, let alone a basic one.
OK. So I'm not the only one noticing this! Accessing the web now is HORRIBLE. Especially on a phone. It's like the web is back to dial up speeds.
When the "web on a phone" first appeared in the form of WAP etc., I thought it would mean the return of clean and simple web design. Mobile connection speeds were worse than dialup to begin with, and some of the display size and input limitations still apply today. But now we have fast connections and CPUs with small displays, so we get Fisher-Price text and image layout with all the advertising and tracking bits, or even less actual content to see. Of course, you get this on the desktop too because many sites only design for mobile now.
Add to this the appification of web, a great step backwards in platform independence and the use of computers as universal tools. For example, posting videos on Instagram needs the app, so you need one real computer to produce the work, and a toy device to distribute it. (I use Android-x86 under a VM, but you get the issue.)
This. WAP and even earlier Android browsers provided a faster, cleaner web because they didn't have all the features of a desktop browser and so didn't load as much as a desktop browser. As browsers have become "feature complete" we're getting all the cruft that is in desktop browsers but without the bandwidth and processing power. So much so that I now consider an adblocker on my phone a must.
Ultimately its down to three things.
1. Lazy coding. CMS's that are just thrown together, re-using bits of code without understanding what they do, needlessly complex design making it ineloquent.
2. Lazy coding. I know this is technically only one point but it's big enough to be worth mentioning twice.
3. Management drive for more "content" (erm... meaning eyeballs on ads). To do this they need to shoehorn in as many ads as possible... and videos, because people looove videos that start playing as soon as the page loads, with sound... and make the video follow the user in case they scroll down to miss it... Ooooh don't forget to track them so we can sell their data (and whinge that the EU is standing up to that bollocks).
And he's not wrong, though the examples don't really work for me. Why do I think liberal arts are important for CS majors? Because software has to be used by people who don't write software. Musicians need software for creating music. Artists need software for creating art. Writers need software for writing. Programmers who also understand those secondary fields are likely to be better at creating such software than programmers who don't.
Engineering teaches us to think logically, art teaches us to think laterally.
Why is that important, because lateral thinking allows us to develop solutions that logical thinking might never discover. I.E. ideas out of left field, to use an Americanism.
Its not uncommon for highly intelligent people to have a creative streak.
There's a fair bit of empirical evidence to suggest this given how successful many students of a Montessori or Steiner education have been.
Sure it works the first few times... But just like the "make sure you software eject your flash drive before ripping it out" warnings, most people might be hesitant the first few times and then say fuck it and start ripping the life out of computers and ignoring the pleas.
This.
My level of empathy is inversely proportional to my level of annoyance.
Soon the US could be building gas guzzlers nobody outside the US wants to buy.
What do you mean by "soon".
American brands like Cadillac, Chevrolet, et al. barely exist out here and when they do it's usually either failing to sell American cars to other countries or failing to sell Korean cars to other countries. No one wants to buy a Caddy CTS for the same price as Merc E63 AMG when you can get the E63 AMG. Even Ford has separate divisions for Europe producing completely separate cars (a US focus is different to a UK one). American cars are rarely found outside America, the Philippines is a notable exception being a dumping ground for used US cars (same as many South American nations).
This is because American manufacturers do not understand foreign countries. No-one over here wants a huge engine that produces little to no power, we're happy getting no power out of 1.2L engines, a gutless 3.7L V6 is just overkill that just ads weight. Not to mention primitive designs, up until this generation the Mustang had a live rear axle, at least when Chevrolet re-introduced the Camaro they realised they knew nothing about suspension and went overseas to learn about the wonders of "multi link" and "independent rear"... Basically they took a barge made in Australia and called it a Chevy. The Japanese understand how to make and market cars to other nations, even if that understanding is "here is a basic car that is affordable and wont break down" because after all, that is what most people want.
Also killing the manual, a lot of Europeans like their 3rd pedal which is why Porsche and BMW keep making them (my manual M240i is brilliant).
Finally there is a replacement for displacement, it's called a turbocharger. Japanese and European manufacturers have been using them to produce small, reliable, economical, high powered engines for ages now. Americans are finally catching on.
I think 95% or more of calls to my cell are spam. Why would I answer the phone with such odds?
This. Most of my calls are "Hi, this is someone you briefly had an email exchange with 18 months ago, we want to see if we can use you to drum up more business". Usually a recruiter.
Companies I like receiving offers from know that they don't have to cold call.
Add to this the cacophony of non carrier based communications options, I don't think we have fewer people calling each other, we've got fewer people using their minutes to call each other. I recently switched from a main UK provider (E.G. Vodafone, EE, O2) to an MNVO (Plusnet) and chose a cheap plan that reduced my call minutes and SMS in exchange for lots of data (OK, 1.5 GB but I'm only paying £6 a month with no contract). This was a no brainier for me as I hardly call anyone so 100 minutes per month is profligate.
>"Well then don't use the stupid browser."
Easy to say until:
1) The banks suddenly require it
2) Your DMV suddenly requires it
3) Amazon suddenly requires it
4) etc....
And this is over and above the fact that the browser might not work on your platform of choice. So we go from an open web to a proprietary web, just like in the days of IE.... except worse because we somehow expect some company putting out a closed-source binary to be trustworthy.
1. Switch to a competing bank that doesn't. They'll get the message when they're bleeding customers.
2. Pay by post or in person (I highly doubt the DVLA would require this, existing measures are sufficient and if anyone else wants to pay my VED, I'm not going to stop them).
3. Switch to Amazons competitors. They'll get the point when they start bleeding customers.
4. There's always an alternative.
Not even Microsoft in the height of it's power had the capability to force companies to support AND ONLY SUPPORT one browser. Today a some random company has no chance.
If the world is round how come satellite signals are always available? Shouldn't they go in and out of visibility if the world was round? My satellite TV always works as does my so called GPS. Explain that!
Wake up you sheep.
We know the planet is round because FSM created it in the shape of a holy meatball, all hail his noodly appendage.
Exactly, you've never seen a perfectly round meatball, which is why his divine pastaness made the earth an oblate spheroid.
Ahhh, lying by statistics I see.
I note that it was 120 Americans killed by deer IN ALL AGE GROUPS. In 2015, 425 Americans in all age groups were killed in mass shootings, over 13,000 died by gunshot wound (I'll admit this figure includes accidents).
Oh, but you wanted us to ignore the person who pointed this out... because it invalidates your theory.
Thus far this year, 40 people have been killed in school shootings. We're not talking about freak accidents involving an elk on the road here (which is how most of them occur, so actual cause of death is MVA), we're talking deliberate and premeditated attacks that dont seem to occur in other countries. Its time to admit that your society's attitude towards firearms is horribly broken and dead kids will keep happening until your society decides to do something about it.
The first problem is, you don't understand (pure) socialism. Everyone is part owner of all resources, and means of production, and everyone's needs are met. The ultimate government form goal for socialism is self-management; one where there is no central government. So, i'm sorry you're such a fucking idiot that you don't understand the words you use... but that's on you.
Communism, on the other hand, has the additional factor of a "revolution" needed to overthrow the previous form of government... as opposed to what someone below wrote about it (as they don't seem to understand what it means either, so you're not alone in your fucking ignorance). A revolution seems to be exactly the same as what the far-right fascists in the US have been espousing for years, although they want to overthrown a democratically elected government and the Constitution (all the while calling themselves patriots because they're too fucking stupid to understand what that word means as well).
Communism (in theory) is pure socialism. Its just that communism in theory doesn't work in practice due to human nature. People are different, trying to meet all their differing needs on a bureaucratic schedule is impossible. So communism becomes authoritarian in enforcing this like Russia and Cuba or it becomes a communism in name only like China.
Revolutions, or at least perversions of democracy are required for any extremist government to gain power, be it left or right wing.
No successful government has ever managed to implement a pure socialist or pure capitalist economy because they simply dont work in reality and are ultimately at odds with any democratic system. Both systems fail for the same reason, people are different, have different needs, wants, requirements, so on and so forth although it should be noted that whilst communism has been tried and failed, a pure capitalism has never even gotten off the ground as it's that much of a horrible idea. As such every successful economy in the world is a mixed economy, mixing both socialist and capitalist policies (technically militaries, police and emergency services are socialist, paid for by all, used by those who need it).
Unions came into being because the "job creators" hoarded the wealth produced by the labor of the workers, and because they would happily see you die in a mine shaft as long as it saved them a nickel.
Now, income inequality is the highest its ever been since the Gilded Age - Jeff Bezos is funding space exploration 'because he doesn't know what to do with his money' while he hires ambulances to sit outside his fulfillment centers. Because it's cheaper to haul the occasional victim of heat stroke to a clinic than it is to use air conditioning.
What was your point again?
Unions came into existence because people were literally dying on jobs for almost no reason. Unions set safety standards and made the death of a worker so expensive that their lives became worth protecting.
The centralisation of wealth (and power) bought about civil unrest and the creation of the middle class. The French revolution, the Russian revolution, even in a large part, the American revolution were about the people rising up against the centralisation of wealth (of course, several revolutions in England dealt with a lot of that before the Americas were even colonised).
He should have run the scam from abroad and used the money to buy residence in a non-extradition country... In all seriousness: he used his own phone and expected not to be caught?
Two more points:
(1) $1 million bail is more than many murderers get. This shows the priorities of the state -- fortunes of tech squillionaires are worth more than human lives.
(2) The phone companies that apparently make SIMs stupidly easy to port-out should share the blame.
As to #1, firstly, bail is mostly based on flight risk, so someone who is not likely to flee or does not have the means to flee is given a lower bail. Secondly, any murderer who is believed likely to re-offend is not granted bail. So for a million bucks bond, the state doesn't have to pay to feed and house this miscreant, seems smart to me.
No doubt the phone companies whose processes were criminally negligent in allowing a person like this to engineer transfer of the number will also be brought to trial and punished.
Ha ha ha. I crack myself up!
Good one... The next thing you'll be expecting is for phone companies to put in methods to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future like an ID requirement for picking up SIM cards, a callback to the previous number to confirm or a MFA system.
Erm... like they use in the ROTW.
I don't mean the bank - I mean that headline. "Company saves money by replacing people with a machine."
You're going to see variations on that headline over and over from here on out.
This.
I've been saying this for ages. Whilst wide eyed morons have been salivating over the idea of driverless cars which are decades away from public consumption (if they're ever ready) I've been saying that we're only a short way away from having a great number of professional jobs automated by weak AI. Jobs that are based on applying rules to data like banking, accounting, law, administration, so on and so forth are prime candidates because the one thing weak AI is exceptional at is applying rules to data.
The robot car is ages away, however the robot lawyer or robot accountant are just around the corner, there are already bots on the internet designed to help you appeal (and get out of) parking tickets. When applying for a Credit Card I'm fairly certain human intervention is minimal (every application I've done in the last 10 years has been entirely online). I'm also pretty sure the only reason I spoke to a person at BMW Financial Services for my 2er is because she was a salesperson and humans respond better to sales pitches in person. None of the actual work couldn't have been done online, in fact I'm certain like the car sales person did, all she did was enter the information I gave her into their system.
It is going to be a bit of a shake up in society because these aren't just menial blue collar jobs being replaced, however society will adjust and adapt.
Heliograf gets sued by Miley Cyrus. Should be fun.
Other way around. Miley Cyrius "performs" the songs made by Heliograf.
The jury is still out on the long-term consequences of those reforms.
Which jury? Where? Not around here (Europe) is it.
The long term consequences are known. Questions about the GDPR that everyone is waiting for include
Certainly the GDPR has made additional work for people, including me. It has not brought out the orchestrated hostility I see from the USA. I have not seen anything in the press here against it. Perhaps our government and its tabloid press controllers don't want us to think too much about it so that they can water it down in a couple of years. That sort of thing is less successful than it used to be. Corporate foul ups with security will keep people aware of it.
This cannot be overstated. GDPR has thus far been a good thing but several sites in the US have completely lost their shit over it. Their loss I suppose, all they're doing is ensuring that people from Europe are switching off. I can only surmise that the sites which are outright blocking EU countries are doing something well and truly illegal with our data.
However I've considered an adblocker to be mandatory for web browsing for years and recently added a script blocker to that.
I prefer the sign !$ for funny money. Australian telco's had (probably still have) a "funny money" system for determining your quotas. Instead of saying $20 gets you X minutes and Y texts, they'd say $20 gets you $200 of calls, $500 of texts. Of course there'd be no relationship between the actual dollar value and the imaginary dollar value.
I'm confused. You said "Forget wall street, it benefits fascists". Who do you think is going to freeze the accounts? And do you think they'll only do it when the government asks, or also when it benefits them?
Banks are primarily in it to make money, they don't care if your business is legal, grey, black, white, mauve or involves selling the ground hopes and dreams of orphaned children as long as they get a piece of the action. As long as they're getting a cut of your spending, they don't care what you did to get the money. If it were up to the banks, they'd happily hold the money from drug dealers or any other type of crook... In fact many of them do. Banks only restrict accounts when governments force them to and moan about it constantly (even when said restrictions are in place to prevent a self inflicted crisis).
When your computer crashes, it doesn't involve a school bus full of children.
Mine does... I like to live dangerously.
....don't buy it.
OK... Where can I find the open source MRI scanner.
I've been in the exact situation described in the summary, except it was about 8 years ago and it was an MRI scanner with software designed to run on Windows XP that couldn't be updated to Windows 7. Before VM's were as robust and ubiquitous as they were today. The solution was simple, an air gap.
The machine had no network connection and no WiFi (yes youngsters, there was a time where most desktop machines didn't have WiFi built in). We put silicon in all the USB ports including siliconing in the KB and mouse to the ports. The machine had a stack of DVD-R's next to it so files could be transferred.
I'm a big fan of FOSS, but out here in the real world you're going to encounter scenarios like the one above where you have to think practically.