> Not sure what being around TVs has to do with RF transmission, but hell, if that's your problem, its not like you > HAVE to go to electrical stores?
Actually, he was referring to the high pitched sound that CRT tubes make. It is quite a bit more noticeable when they show a blank screen than when they show a video. The Sound track of most shows blots it out completely, but there is definitely a high pitched whine from TV sets.
We used to have a TV, if someone watched a movie on the VCR (yes this is going back a bit) and turned off the VCR but not the TV, I could tell that the TV was still on, reliably, from about 2 rooms away. (that one was particularly loud)
These sounds rarely bother me (that TV would bug me, because it was so loud), but I could see someone being sensitive to it, especially to a lot of them together.
Course I have never heard this from an LCD or projection TV, which makes sense. However, I am also 31 now, so my days of hearing that pitch at all may be over soon anyway. Its right up in that range of hearing that most people lose as they get older.
Actually, I was less ridiculed, almost not at all, at the catholic school for being an atheist than at public schools. I chaulk that mostly up to age differences... younger kids tend to be more into ridicule.
However, its not just about ridicule, its about the fact that it just has no place there. There is no compelling reason to have prayer in school, unless you accept that there is a god, and a correct religion to be praying within the confines of. Thats a position that no public institution should be taking, nor anyone representing that institution while on the job.
Nobody is going to get a worst education or have a bad time in school because there was no organized prayer. However, it does setup a situation where people may feel alienated by it. Also, school is set to prepare people for the work world, which is often far more restrictive than schools. Wearing your religion on your sleeve when you represent a company is also unprofessional. I would dare say that anything that could be considered as setting up a hostile work environment should also be considered the same in school.
> A memory module does not become loose. There is no reason to expect that is the problem - at least not initially. And > even if the loose module is found right away, only an overworked tech with a don't care attitude would let it leave > the bench without running some kind of diagnostics
Meh, Mostly I would agree but, I have also had issues where simply opening the machine, reseating a few things, and firing it back up was exactly what it needed. OF course, you still have to test.
> As for snooping through files, that's not professional, but even professionals are human. You're sitting there > waiting for an error or problem. Maybe you are stumped. You need a mental break, something catches your attention on > the computer. It happens
It does... can't really blame em for checking out a pic sitting on the desktop or something... but... if its in a foler named private...
I mean, its no tlike you never randomly stumble on anything. I got called to a doctors PC once (when I was a tech at a hospital). He left me to work, and the first thing that I noticed was his drive was nearly full, and there was a few gigs in the trash.
So of course I opened the trash to take a look at what was in there. Simple and fairly standard. It was gigs of porn. I didn't report him of course, but, it was an honest stumbling upon his stuff, and not me searching for it. Another time I ended up in a users email and saw some talk of some naked fun time some people had. Why? Well.... because one of our scripts was failing due to an excessively huge filename in a users dir that looked like a total accidentally created file.... so I investigated (it was breaking our processes)
Again, nothing to report, not snooping, just investigating a problem, it happens. I read a few more lines of the email than I needed to, but, it was in service of seeing what the hell the problem was, and part of my job. Not "ooh I wonder whats going on in this persons life". Its one thing to get slightly caught up for a moment, another to snoop.
Going into folders marked private? Trying to log in to a persons account? That just sickens me. This is why my laptop has an encrypted hard drive and I don't send it out for software issues at all. Of course, I also run Linux and am a Unix admin by trade.
I want to address two points here as they come directly from my experience: > Teachers are stopped from voluntary audible prayer. Short prayers before football games by > coaches have been the subjects of successful lawsuits to silence them.
I went to a Catholic High School by choice. My parents paid for it, I chose to go. Even though I became an athiest at 11 years old, I still chose them over the public schools because the education mattered to me.
As a Christian, these may seem like positive things to you. As a person who chose to go to the school that I did, I chose to be subjected to it. I can tell you, it is NOT a positive experience to be the outsider when everyone else is bowing their heads in prayer.
You may call it "leading voluntary prayer" if you want, but it is an exclusionary practice, and a practice that directly identifies and excludes any outsiders who don't participate in it. I chose that experience, many people don't get that choice. I could not support tax dollars funding and paying for public schools, which is the only option for those who can't afford private schools that engage in this.
It may make christians feel bonded together in the class, or the team, but it makes anyone else feel excluded, because they are. This should be done in private in voluntary groups, not just so called voluntary prayer in a non-voluntary group.
I don't see why or how this has any place in school. You have churches, you have homes. You have plenty of places to pray, worship, and have your little spiritual circle jerks.
We are a secular nation that has a majority of Christians, NOT a Christian nation. Its an important distinction. The whole point of ideals like liberty and freedom are to protect the minority. The majority doesn't need protection. Liberty means nothing unless it means the liberty to be and do that which the majority of people don't approve of without fear of persecution. Being subject to singling out and ridicule for being different (and we are talking about school here, not a place where everyone is mature and grown up) is not really liberty.
Speaking as the atheist who followed everyone in line and had ash smeared on his forehead because he wasn't comfortable admitting he was different freshman year (by the next year I had befriended some of the jews in school and realized I could be different and it wasn't too bad), and who felt alienated and seperated from his own team when his coach lead prayers.... well.... I think I know what I am talking about.
> What are you talking about? All Christians are asking for is the same freedoms as everyone else -- the application > of the 1st amendment. Where people are allowed to talk about God in schools, to pray out loud, to bring a Bible into > a school, to have bible-study clubs, and all the other privileges that every other non-Christian school of thought > has.
Would that include the right to have its tennents questioned? To have its absurdities drawn out for people?
First of all A) I am unaware of ANY proscription against a christian brigning a Bible to school. B) If Bible study clubs are to be allowed, then how about Torah and Talmud study clubs? Koran? How about study of the Upinishads? What about a buddhist meditation club? C) Praying out loud during the times when a student may direct his own attentions is not prohibited. Praying out loud at other times is just as much a disruption as anything else. Nobody is stopping students from voluntary prayer. In fact, I would bet quite a lot of prayer goes on just before tests.
Would you support an Altar in classrooms for those whose religious prayer traditions include blood letting?
Sure, I am down with those arguments. Those are all possibilities. Yet, I think it does a real disservice to the people to go around throwing out numbers without context. A raw number or two may make a nice news reel, but it doesn't make a case.
I think we need to bring to political discourse the same standard that we bring to legal discourse in criminal proceedings.... if you know of cases that support your claim you cite them.... if you know of cases that tend to argue against your claim... you are required to cite them too.
This is about letting people make informed decisions based on real risk, not just random numbers that happen to be the ones that "sound good". As far as I can see A) The case hasn't been adequetly made, and B) the insurance companies have a vested interest in argueing for MORE minor traffic infractions since they benefit directly in the form of surcharges.
And yes, this is primarily being pushed by the Insurance lobby. They had a rally here in Boston on this issue recently... even the police announced, it was sponsored by an insurance company.
Yes, and let me tell you something. As one of the people who actually does believe in going on the attack against their beliefs in the most fundamental way.... its a very lonely position. Very very few agree or are willing to stand up and say so.
There have been more important studies done. Studies about how people can be scared by giving them numbers without enough context to actually evaluate the risk that the numbers represent. 1000 fatalities....oooo.
There were 16,000 fatalies from murder in the US in 2007 (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm) . Put that in your texting pipe and smoke it. Suddenly 1000 seems so low...especially when... well... who is worried about being murdered? Its not considered something anyone is at a huge risk for...yet.... there were 16 times as many murders as fatalities from texting.
How many fatalities in auto accidents? 41,000! How many were "Alcohol related"? 15,000! (http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-driving-statistics.html)
No the scary thing is how effective it is to throw out numbers with no context, and have people parrot them.
Those numbers alone are not even close to enough to assess the risk in a country with 300 million people, most of whom, drive at some point, and many who drive quite often. If anything, they sound, to me, quite insignificant.
Also, how exactly do they determine this? Any time an accident happens and someone was composing a text it gets counted? What about if the text had nothing to do with the accident? So if I am texting, going though a green light, and some drunkard blows the light doing 30 MPH and TBones me.... is that "cell phone caused"?
Frankly, these agencies that spew out numbers to justify their budgets just don't have any credibility left with me.
Actually, like many things, it depends entirely on the individual.... and honestly.... 1000 fatalities a year in a country of 300 million people is barely statistically significant. I recently went to look up the number of murders by serial killers in the US in a year, and some numbers put that in the same range.
Given the numbers of people who drive... I think we can call those relatively similar risks.
I have texted while driving. I have seen people do it well, I have seen people do it poorly (I rate myself as somewhere in the middle, but I do try to compensate by trading off taking a lot longer to type in the text by taking my eyes off the screen and back onto the road with every letter.
I hear some people can txt without looking at all... I am not that good.
The same is true for driving while talking... some people are nearly as good at is as they drive normally, others are total retards and will sit for 5 minutes on the inside of a rotary letting traffic entering pass while they yap away (yes, I have seen this)
Frankly, I think that our government has far better things to worry about. This is such a non-issue.
They would help more people if they directed their attention elsewhere.
As an ex-catholic, who left the church before even enrolling in one of their high schools, I tend to appreciate humor about Christians more than I would Muslims. I am sure I could easily work in some sort of colorful Mohamed reference, but the problem is, I wouldn't even find it that funny, I just don't have the context. Plus I don't have to explain zombie jesus... if I have to go into a 10 minute discussion of the meaning of Haram just to explain my own jokes, well, even I am going to be annoyed.
As the Mahareeshi Hashish Yogi once said "Familiarity Breeds Attempt". If I run into a Chritian or a Jew, I can make a pretty good guess as to how to get under his skin and press some buttons. Put a Sikh in front of me and what am I gonna do say "Yah well, Nice hair! I bet you don't even carry a comb"...that might press his buttons... but it also sent half the people reading this to the Wikipedia page to figure out what the hell I am talking about.
But Zombie Jesus, well... everybody in my culture knows Jesus (and almost as many know Jebus), and they all know about zombies too. Combine them and you get one of several pretty clear and pretty funny pictures. Zombie Jesus shambling across the sea of galilee, Turning water into brains....
It also accurately reflects, through its absolute silliness, my view on where religion belongs in the public debate. Cast aside, ridiculed, and ignored where it belongs. Very similar to the FSM in that regard really, just more directly derogatory instead of simply mocking. but... I am strangely comfortable with that.
> Your rant reads like that of an angsty 15 year old.
Well that is why they call it a rant. Also, I would point out that neither being 15 nor ranting, nor even being immature actually precludes someone from having a valid point. Just like being a zombie worshiper doesn't stop people from having a point. In fact, they frequently do have a point, but I for one ask that they make it without considering age old stories as proof of anything, and actually defend it with reasonable discourse and not "Its an attack on everything we hold dear!".
I find news of this sort of backsliding triumph of superstition and ridiculousness to be quite a frustrating thing. I hear argument after argument on issues that merely play the "we are under attack" card without actually ever having to explain why or how.
It irks me to no end to see them win with this drivel...anywhere, ever. Oh and since I can't jump down peoples throats about it at work, being able to rant like a 15 year old makes for a nice release.
Its true. They keep saying how religion is under attack... but whats so under attack?
It doesn't matter whether the issue is abortion, same sex marriage, prayer in school, its always the same broken record about how they need to "defend", and they are "under attack". Yet, are never able to actually articulate how other people having choices in life constitutes an attack on them and theirs.
Apparently its an attack on their youth because of their children were to grow up with choices, they might choose not to be boneheaded, zombie worshiping, fucktards, and THEN what would happen to the world?!?
I recently saw a facebook discussion between an old friend who went hardcore muslim and some of her friends about opening a dialog with other "people of the book" but how "we have to be sure they know we see them as wrong and they need to come to the light of allah" and all that bullshit.
All the same bullshit, all the same "we are the victim", "our way of life is under attack". All just sounding like somebody needs to grow the fuck up and realize that its a big world and not everyone is going to be duped into believing in some random set of myths about some god that you can't see, hear, touch, or taste, but assuredly, must exist.... and all the other mythological beings that you also can't see hear, touch, or taste must obviously not exist.
Yet their all powerful god can't protect them from a small number of people who aren't even organized, and couldn't care less what silly crap they waste their time with. Yes, they have a very powerful god indeed.
I like the idea. Also... maybe the robot could stop in front of the body, play a dirge to give it a proper funeral, and then start dissecrting it into bits small enough to fit into its energ... portable cremation unit!
No disrepect of the dead at all, each and every one gets an honorable robotic funeral, and a proper cremation.
course, I doubt it would actually be a great power source, the freshly dead still have a lot of water in them and, I would think, would need to be dessicated well. Plant matter has the same issue but... usually a lot more surface area to volume and theres usually a fair amount of already dead and partially dry plant matter around.
I mean, it sorta makes sense... but then again it also doesn't.
First I would point out that someone who drives 20k miles a year for 5 years drives 100k miles. A person who drives 5 k miles a year only drives 25k miles. So essentially, the 20k miles driver has 75k miles more driving experience than the lower milliage driver....
I would expect that sort of difference to start to really add up.
That said, the point of insurance is to mitigate risk by spreading it over many individuals. While it makes some amount of sense to charge relatively higher risk people more, doesn't it, eventually, start to defeat the purpose when you keep looking for more and more ways to do that?
Of course, it mostly makes sense if you assume the higher prices for the more risky people actually means lower prices for the less risky, when I would bet the reality is that the only way low miliage drivers will "pay less" is that they will "pay less than the new surcharge on the high milliage drivers" and not in any way, "less than what they pay now"
Kind o flike here in MA where the insurance companies are given license to surcharge for "offenses" like "not having the registration paper in the car" (sure its an offence, but its still a valid registration with valid insurance.... how exactly is not having the paper itself in the car... which contains no infomration that a police officer can't look up from his car in under 20 seconds... is a problem for them)
or how they support "traffic safety cameras" which have been shown to increase accidents at intersections. Makes sense.... major accidents cost money. However, the massive number of tickets and minor fender benders those cameras generate are an absolute windfall for the insurance company when they can hit you with YEARS of surcharges.
Reprimanded? I am all about making the police do their job right, and I think the question in question was bullshit, but.... he was absolutely right. In the end, my friend was let go. Mostly because, he had the wherewithall to realize that any admission of guilt in any way is a confession.
of course, police are allowed to lie to get you to say what they want, but you are not supposed to lie to them.... isn't that nice.
Its not like "lieing" is a single category. There are many types of lies a person can tell, and many ways to lie.
I always thought there was something inherently flawed about asking people to lie. If I ask you to lie, you really can't. If I say "lie about your age", you can't, I never asked you to tell your age, I asked you to tell a fake age.
Thats far different from "did you kill her?" "Describe the event of finding her body and what you did next". In that case, well you really have something to hide, you have good reason to remember things, and good reason to not tell what you remembered.
You might have gone over it, looked for plausible changes to make to the story, things that can fit in but maybe can't be proven one way or another etc. Its more complicated and, I doubt that everyone does it the same way. I have long felt, mostly from listening to the statements made by people who claim to be able to tell when a person is lieing.
There are so many levels here. People making things up on the spot, I would imagine, do it very differently from someome who is deliberate and has had time to think, time to go over his new version of events. I have played with this myself in a few situations (usually things that are just personal details that I don't want to reveal or talk about, or can't due to a promised confidence).
Drawing on a friend of mines recent experience of being told by a police officer "I know your lieing because when you tell me about X and Y you look me right in the eye, but when you say Z, you look away", which isn't far off from skills useful in poker really.
Essentially, if you can teach yourself a story thats very close to reality but with a few tweaks, and learn it well enough that you can recall the story as a story and not as a lie where you have to improvise, its not too hard to do it looking someone right in the eye, and be easily believed.
Thats very different from nervous, on the fly lies.
Clearly it should be modded down, clearly the answer should be in terms of X. Simply defining Y as the number of engineers only sets up the answer, it isn't the answer.
...to fuck with them. The Nigerian scammers can be a real hoot.
I found this out by accident looking for a roomate on cragislist. I knew the game as soon as he told me he was sending a $5000 money order and wanted me to take the first and last months rent, and forward the rest on to someone else. As if!
Anyway, the money orders were fakes (big shock) so I told him they never arrived and he sent another package with more. At which point I decided to change the game, I told him I have seen better fakes, and his were crap.
Boy did that get him hooked. He spent the next month trying to convince me to distribute packages for him, just take letters and money orders, place them in evnvelopes and send them out, he would pay me $500 a package.
Talks broke down when I insisted on payment in real US cash, up front in the package. His fakes and letters would make ok fire starter paper for the next camping trip, and scamming the scammer out of 500 would have been much funnier story.
In any case, the nigerians are great. I HIGHLY recommend fucking with them. Remember, every package of 5k in money orders they send you, is several K in profits they never get back.
> So, in conclusion, it looks like some dumb ass company built this device and decided to market it to whatever sucker > they could find. World keeps on turning.
And, once again, the government are the suckers. There is little incentive for them not to be, it only costs them our money.
I actually emailed the guy working on the "Ferret" the robot to sit in cargo containers and look for drugs/explosives etc.
You know he never had considered the possibility that such a sensitive detector would have a lot of false positives because... packages packaged by drug users are shipped far more often than packages of drugs. But hey, when someone asks you to make a robot to do X, how many engineers will step back and ask "Are you SURE X is what you want to do?"
Ok, but whats the difference between norms and rules?
If the players make the rules, doesn't that then make the players responsible for their enforcement? Sounds like thats exactly what happened here. I actually disagree with those who say this isn't something worth study. In many ways it is.... its humans acting in an environment where there is no higher authority that can help them. Essentially, they have rules and most people follow them... but... what happens when a rule breaker shows up in a world with no police?
In fact, how are the "rules" even determined. I mean, are you expected to modify your bahaviour every time one guy says "hey not fair" or "hey thats not cool"? Two guys? when?
In this case he went into a war zone. A place, defined, as where heros and villans do battle with eachother. Then he... went to battle. Then villans start getting pissed because there is a hero going around killing them in a war zone.
I think he should check out shadowbane if it is still around. The whole world after newb island was a "war zone". Banditry was rampant in that game. In fact, the game was almost setup as a social experiment just like he might find interesting... that is... the world was really dog eat dog with no real rules beyond the game... so players had to band together and form their own little societies.... posses would form to go after bandits etc.
If I could devote more than a couple of weeks to an MMO before deciding I don't need a second job, I would have stayed with that one, I liked it alot because of that social aspect that was created by letting everyone run amok and forcing people to band together for protection.
The aproach on WOW and COV/COH always seemed kind of lame to me. In real life I can do whatever I want, even kill people. However, the consequence is, the police may get called and come after me. It always seemed silly that I am this powerful mage, but... oh, I can't target this dude, or I can't attack anyone without going over there.
I like the "players police the game" setup better, because it makes the social interaction more interesting, and more needed as part of the game rather than just letting it be "our big clubhouse"
A very good point. I mean, the technology isn't bad, and I can understand researching this sort of thing, its only the application that seems particularly hair brained and sounds like some serious mission creep by someone. As someone who spends more time than he should on the TSA blog (talk about mission creep), I tend to assume this sort of concept originates with them.
Overall, its just silly for its intended purpose. Smugglers will just shift tactics. I envision large operations just setting up a couple of clean rooms.... drugs get vacuum sealed in one room, moved to a cleaner room and the bags washed, and then moved to a second clean room to be double packed.
very small cost addition if you are moving kilos of coke or even 10s of lbs of pot... and the amount that would fit even hidden amongst other items in a shipping container is many times those quantities. Same could be done for explosives etc.
And thanks to wiki, apparently elemental mercury wasn't used in hat making either. It was another toxic mercury compound mercuric nitrate. I guess my old chem teachers anecdote about that making was wrong.
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> Not sure what being around TVs has to do with RF transmission, but hell, if that's your problem, its not like you
> HAVE to go to electrical stores?
Actually, he was referring to the high pitched sound that CRT tubes make. It is quite a bit more noticeable when they show a blank screen than when they show a video. The Sound track of most shows blots it out completely, but there is definitely a high pitched whine from TV sets.
We used to have a TV, if someone watched a movie on the VCR (yes this is going back a bit) and turned off the VCR but not the TV, I could tell that the TV was still on, reliably, from about 2 rooms away. (that one was particularly loud)
These sounds rarely bother me (that TV would bug me, because it was so loud), but I could see someone being sensitive to it, especially to a lot of them together.
Course I have never heard this from an LCD or projection TV, which makes sense. However, I am also 31 now, so my days of hearing that pitch at all may be over soon anyway. Its right up in that range of hearing that most people lose as they get older.
-Steve
Actually, I was less ridiculed, almost not at all, at the catholic school for being an atheist than at public schools. I chaulk that mostly up to age differences... younger kids tend to be more into ridicule.
However, its not just about ridicule, its about the fact that it just has no place there. There is no compelling reason to have prayer in school, unless you accept that there is a god, and a correct religion to be praying within the confines of. Thats a position that no public institution should be taking, nor anyone representing that institution while on the job.
Nobody is going to get a worst education or have a bad time in school because there was no organized prayer. However, it does setup a situation where people may feel alienated by it. Also, school is set to prepare people for the work world, which is often far more restrictive than schools. Wearing your religion on your sleeve when you represent a company is also unprofessional. I would dare say that anything that could be considered as setting up a hostile work environment should also be considered the same in school.
-Steve
> A memory module does not become loose. There is no reason to expect that is the problem - at least not initially. And
> even if the loose module is found right away, only an overworked tech with a don't care attitude would let it leave
> the bench without running some kind of diagnostics
Meh, Mostly I would agree but, I have also had issues where simply opening the machine, reseating a few things, and firing it back up was exactly what it needed. OF course, you still have to test.
> As for snooping through files, that's not professional, but even professionals are human. You're sitting there
> waiting for an error or problem. Maybe you are stumped. You need a mental break, something catches your attention on
> the computer. It happens
It does... can't really blame em for checking out a pic sitting on the desktop or something... but... if its in a foler named private...
I mean, its no tlike you never randomly stumble on anything. I got called to a doctors PC once (when I was a tech at a hospital). He left me to work, and the first thing that I noticed was his drive was nearly full, and there was a few gigs in the trash.
So of course I opened the trash to take a look at what was in there. Simple and fairly standard. It was gigs of porn. I didn't report him of course, but, it was an honest stumbling upon his stuff, and not me searching for it. Another time I ended up in a users email and saw some talk of some naked fun time some people had. Why? Well.... because one of our scripts was failing due to an excessively huge filename in a users dir that looked like a total accidentally created file.... so I investigated (it was breaking our processes)
Again, nothing to report, not snooping, just investigating a problem, it happens. I read a few more lines of the email than I needed to, but, it was in service of seeing what the hell the problem was, and part of my job. Not "ooh I wonder whats going on in this persons life". Its one thing to get slightly caught up for a moment, another to snoop.
Going into folders marked private? Trying to log in to a persons account? That just sickens me. This is why my laptop has an encrypted hard drive and I don't send it out for software issues at all. Of course, I also run Linux and am a Unix admin by trade.
-Steve
I want to address two points here as they come directly from my experience:
> Teachers are stopped from voluntary audible prayer. Short prayers before football games by
> coaches have been the subjects of successful lawsuits to silence them.
I went to a Catholic High School by choice. My parents paid for it, I chose to go. Even though I became an athiest at 11 years old, I still chose them over the public schools because the education mattered to me.
As a Christian, these may seem like positive things to you. As a person who chose to go to the school that I did, I chose to be subjected to it. I can tell you, it is NOT a positive experience to be the outsider when everyone else is bowing their heads in prayer.
You may call it "leading voluntary prayer" if you want, but it is an exclusionary practice, and a practice that directly identifies and excludes any outsiders who don't participate in it. I chose that experience, many people don't get that choice. I could not support tax dollars funding and paying for public schools, which is the only option for those who can't afford private schools that engage in this.
It may make christians feel bonded together in the class, or the team, but it makes anyone else feel excluded, because they are. This should be done in private in voluntary groups, not just so called voluntary prayer in a non-voluntary group.
I don't see why or how this has any place in school. You have churches, you have homes. You have plenty of places to pray, worship, and have your little spiritual circle jerks.
We are a secular nation that has a majority of Christians, NOT a Christian nation. Its an important distinction. The whole point of ideals like liberty and freedom are to protect the minority. The majority doesn't need protection. Liberty means nothing unless it means the liberty to be and do that which the majority of people don't approve of without fear of persecution. Being subject to singling out and ridicule for being different (and we are talking about school here, not a place where everyone is mature and grown up) is not really liberty.
Speaking as the atheist who followed everyone in line and had ash smeared on his forehead because he wasn't comfortable admitting he was different freshman year (by the next year I had befriended some of the jews in school and realized I could be different and it wasn't too bad), and who felt alienated and seperated from his own team when his coach lead prayers.... well.... I think I know what I am talking about.
-Steve
> What are you talking about? All Christians are asking for is the same freedoms as everyone else -- the application
> of the 1st amendment. Where people are allowed to talk about God in schools, to pray out loud, to bring a Bible into
> a school, to have bible-study clubs, and all the other privileges that every other non-Christian school of thought
> has.
Would that include the right to have its tennents questioned? To have its absurdities drawn out for people?
First of all
A) I am unaware of ANY proscription against a christian brigning a Bible to school.
B) If Bible study clubs are to be allowed, then how about Torah and Talmud study clubs? Koran? How about study of the Upinishads? What about a buddhist meditation club?
C) Praying out loud during the times when a student may direct his own attentions is not prohibited. Praying out loud at other times is just as much a disruption as anything else. Nobody is stopping students from voluntary prayer. In fact, I would bet quite a lot of prayer goes on just before tests.
Would you support an Altar in classrooms for those whose religious prayer traditions include blood letting?
-Steve
Sure, I am down with those arguments. Those are all possibilities. Yet, I think it does a real disservice to the people to go around throwing out numbers without context. A raw number or two may make a nice news reel, but it doesn't make a case.
I think we need to bring to political discourse the same standard that we bring to legal discourse in criminal proceedings.... if you know of cases that support your claim you cite them.... if you know of cases that tend to argue against your claim... you are required to cite them too.
This is about letting people make informed decisions based on real risk, not just random numbers that happen to be the ones that "sound good". As far as I can see A) The case hasn't been adequetly made, and B) the insurance companies have a vested interest in argueing for MORE minor traffic infractions since they benefit directly in the form of surcharges.
And yes, this is primarily being pushed by the Insurance lobby. They had a rally here in Boston on this issue recently... even the police announced, it was sponsored by an insurance company.
-Steve
I dunno, its what passes for Score 5: Insightful on slashdot :)
-Steve
Yes, and let me tell you something. As one of the people who actually does believe in going on the attack against their beliefs in the most fundamental way.... its a very lonely position. Very very few agree or are willing to stand up and say so.
-Steve
There have been more important studies done. Studies about how people can be scared by giving them numbers without enough context to actually evaluate the risk that the numbers represent. 1000 fatalities....oooo.
There were 16,000 fatalies from murder in the US in 2007 (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm) . Put that in your texting pipe and smoke it. Suddenly 1000 seems so low...especially when... well... who is worried about being murdered? Its not considered something anyone is at a huge risk for...yet.... there were 16 times as many murders as fatalities from texting.
How many fatalities in auto accidents? 41,000!
How many were "Alcohol related"? 15,000! (http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-driving-statistics.html)
Whoa, the scurge of texting!
-Steve
No the scary thing is how effective it is to throw out numbers with no context, and have people parrot them.
Those numbers alone are not even close to enough to assess the risk in a country with 300 million people, most of whom, drive at some point, and many who drive quite often. If anything, they sound, to me, quite insignificant.
Also, how exactly do they determine this? Any time an accident happens and someone was composing a text it gets counted? What about if the text had nothing to do with the accident? So if I am texting, going though a green light, and some drunkard blows the light doing 30 MPH and TBones me.... is that "cell phone caused"?
Frankly, these agencies that spew out numbers to justify their budgets just don't have any credibility left with me.
-Steve
Actually, like many things, it depends entirely on the individual.... and honestly.... 1000 fatalities a year in a country of 300 million people is barely statistically significant. I recently went to look up the number of murders by serial killers in the US in a year, and some numbers put that in the same range.
Given the numbers of people who drive... I think we can call those relatively similar risks.
I have texted while driving. I have seen people do it well, I have seen people do it poorly (I rate myself as somewhere in the middle, but I do try to compensate by trading off taking a lot longer to type in the text by taking my eyes off the screen and back onto the road with every letter.
I hear some people can txt without looking at all... I am not that good.
The same is true for driving while talking... some people are nearly as good at is as they drive normally, others are total retards and will sit for 5 minutes on the inside of a rotary letting traffic entering pass while they yap away (yes, I have seen this)
Frankly, I think that our government has far better things to worry about. This is such a non-issue.
They would help more people if they directed their attention elsewhere.
-Steve
I do it for one reason only, it makes me giggle.
As an ex-catholic, who left the church before even enrolling in one of their high schools, I tend to appreciate humor about Christians more than I would Muslims. I am sure I could easily work in some sort of colorful Mohamed reference, but the problem is, I wouldn't even find it that funny, I just don't have the context. Plus I don't have to explain zombie jesus... if I have to go into a 10 minute discussion of the meaning of Haram just to explain my own jokes, well, even I am going to be annoyed.
As the Mahareeshi Hashish Yogi once said "Familiarity Breeds Attempt". If I run into a Chritian or a Jew, I can make a pretty good guess as to how to get under his skin and press some buttons. Put a Sikh in front of me and what am I gonna do say "Yah well, Nice hair! I bet you don't even carry a comb"...that might press his buttons... but it also sent half the people reading this to the Wikipedia page to figure out what the hell I am talking about.
But Zombie Jesus, well... everybody in my culture knows Jesus (and almost as many know Jebus), and they all know about zombies too. Combine them and you get one of several pretty clear and pretty funny pictures. Zombie Jesus shambling across the sea of galilee, Turning water into brains....
It also accurately reflects, through its absolute silliness, my view on where religion belongs in the public debate. Cast aside, ridiculed, and ignored where it belongs. Very similar to the FSM in that regard really, just more directly derogatory instead of simply mocking. but... I am strangely comfortable with that.
-Steve
> Your rant reads like that of an angsty 15 year old.
Well that is why they call it a rant. Also, I would point out that neither being 15 nor ranting, nor even being immature actually precludes someone from having a valid point. Just like being a zombie worshiper doesn't stop people from having a point. In fact, they frequently do have a point, but I for one ask that they make it without considering age old stories as proof of anything, and actually defend it with reasonable discourse and not "Its an attack on everything we hold dear!".
I find news of this sort of backsliding triumph of superstition and ridiculousness to be quite a frustrating thing. I hear argument after argument on issues that merely play the "we are under attack" card without actually ever having to explain why or how.
It irks me to no end to see them win with this drivel...anywhere, ever. Oh and since I can't jump down peoples throats about it at work, being able to rant like a 15 year old makes for a nice release.
-Steve
Its true. They keep saying how religion is under attack... but whats so under attack?
It doesn't matter whether the issue is abortion, same sex marriage, prayer in school, its always the same broken record about how they need to "defend", and they are "under attack". Yet, are never able to actually articulate how other people having choices in life constitutes an attack on them and theirs.
Apparently its an attack on their youth because of their children were to grow up with choices, they might choose not to be boneheaded, zombie worshiping, fucktards, and THEN what would happen to the world?!?
I recently saw a facebook discussion between an old friend who went hardcore muslim and some of her friends about opening a dialog with other "people of the book" but how "we have to be sure they know we see them as wrong and they need to come to the light of allah" and all that bullshit.
All the same bullshit, all the same "we are the victim", "our way of life is under attack". All just sounding like somebody needs to grow the fuck up and realize that its a big world and not everyone is going to be duped into believing in some random set of myths about some god that you can't see, hear, touch, or taste, but assuredly, must exist.... and all the other mythological beings that you also can't see hear, touch, or taste must obviously not exist.
Yet their all powerful god can't protect them from a small number of people who aren't even organized, and couldn't care less what silly crap they waste their time with. Yes, they have a very powerful god indeed.
-Steve
I like the idea. Also... maybe the robot could stop in front of the body, play a dirge to give it a proper funeral, and then start dissecrting it into bits small enough to fit into its energ... portable cremation unit!
No disrepect of the dead at all, each and every one gets an honorable robotic funeral, and a proper cremation.
course, I doubt it would actually be a great power source, the freshly dead still have a lot of water in them and, I would think, would need to be dessicated well. Plant matter has the same issue but... usually a lot more surface area to volume and theres usually a fair amount of already dead and partially dry plant matter around.
-Steve
I mean, it sorta makes sense... but then again it also doesn't.
First I would point out that someone who drives 20k miles a year for 5 years drives 100k miles. A person who drives 5 k miles a year only drives 25k miles. So essentially, the 20k miles driver has 75k miles more driving experience than the lower milliage driver....
I would expect that sort of difference to start to really add up.
That said, the point of insurance is to mitigate risk by spreading it over many individuals. While it makes some amount of sense to charge relatively higher risk people more, doesn't it, eventually, start to defeat the purpose when you keep looking for more and more ways to do that?
Of course, it mostly makes sense if you assume the higher prices for the more risky people actually means lower prices for the less risky, when I would bet the reality is that the only way low miliage drivers will "pay less" is that they will "pay less than the new surcharge on the high milliage drivers" and not in any way, "less than what they pay now"
Kind o flike here in MA where the insurance companies are given license to surcharge for "offenses" like "not having the registration paper in the car" (sure its an offence, but its still a valid registration with valid insurance.... how exactly is not having the paper itself in the car... which contains no infomration that a police officer can't look up from his car in under 20 seconds... is a problem for them)
or how they support "traffic safety cameras" which have been shown to increase accidents at intersections. Makes sense.... major accidents cost money. However, the massive number of tickets and minor fender benders those cameras generate are an absolute windfall for the insurance company when they can hit you with YEARS of surcharges.
-Steve
I don't train dogs to do anything but stay away from me. I am allergic you insensitive clod!
-Steve
Reprimanded? I am all about making the police do their job right, and I think the question in question was bullshit, but.... he was absolutely right. In the end, my friend was let go. Mostly because, he had the wherewithall to realize that any admission of guilt in any way is a confession.
of course, police are allowed to lie to get you to say what they want, but you are not supposed to lie to them.... isn't that nice.
-Steve
Its not like "lieing" is a single category. There are many types of lies a person can tell, and many ways to lie.
I always thought there was something inherently flawed about asking people to lie. If I ask you to lie, you really can't. If I say "lie about your age", you can't, I never asked you to tell your age, I asked you to tell a fake age.
Thats far different from "did you kill her?" "Describe the event of finding her body and what you did next". In that case, well you really have something to hide, you have good reason to remember things, and good reason to not tell what you remembered.
You might have gone over it, looked for plausible changes to make to the story, things that can fit in but maybe can't be proven one way or another etc. Its more complicated and, I doubt that everyone does it the same way. I have long felt, mostly from listening to the statements made by people who claim to be able to tell when a person is lieing.
There are so many levels here. People making things up on the spot, I would imagine, do it very differently from someome who is deliberate and has had time to think, time to go over his new version of events. I have played with this myself in a few situations (usually things that are just personal details that I don't want to reveal or talk about, or can't due to a promised confidence).
Drawing on a friend of mines recent experience of being told by a police officer "I know your lieing because when you tell me about X and Y you look me right in the eye, but when you say Z, you look away", which isn't far off from skills useful in poker really.
Essentially, if you can teach yourself a story thats very close to reality but with a few tweaks, and learn it well enough that you can recall the story as a story and not as a lie where you have to improvise, its not too hard to do it looking someone right in the eye, and be easily believed.
Thats very different from nervous, on the fly lies.
-Steve
Clearly it should be modded down, clearly the answer should be in terms of X.
Simply defining Y as the number of engineers only sets up the answer, it isn't the answer.
-Steve
...to fuck with them. The Nigerian scammers can be a real hoot.
I found this out by accident looking for a roomate on cragislist. I knew the game as soon as he told me he was sending a $5000 money order and wanted me to take the first and last months rent, and forward the rest on to someone else. As if!
Anyway, the money orders were fakes (big shock) so I told him they never arrived and he sent another package with more. At which point I decided to change the game, I told him I have seen better fakes, and his were crap.
Boy did that get him hooked. He spent the next month trying to convince me to distribute packages for him, just take letters and money orders, place them in evnvelopes and send them out, he would pay me $500 a package.
Talks broke down when I insisted on payment in real US cash, up front in the package. His fakes and letters would make ok fire starter paper for the next camping trip, and scamming the scammer out of 500 would have been much funnier story.
In any case, the nigerians are great. I HIGHLY recommend fucking with them. Remember, every package of 5k in money orders they send you, is several K in profits they never get back.
-Steve
> So, in conclusion, it looks like some dumb ass company built this device and decided to market it to whatever sucker
> they could find. World keeps on turning.
And, once again, the government are the suckers. There is little incentive for them not to be, it only costs them our money.
I actually emailed the guy working on the "Ferret" the robot to sit in cargo containers and look for drugs/explosives etc.
You know he never had considered the possibility that such a sensitive detector would have a lot of false positives because... packages packaged by drug users are shipped far more often than packages of drugs. But hey, when someone asks you to make a robot to do X, how many engineers will step back and ask "Are you SURE X is what you want to do?"
-Steve
Ok, but whats the difference between norms and rules?
If the players make the rules, doesn't that then make the players responsible for their enforcement?
Sounds like thats exactly what happened here. I actually disagree with those who say this isn't something worth study. In many ways it is.... its humans acting in an environment where there is no higher authority that can help them. Essentially, they have rules and most people follow them... but... what happens when a rule breaker shows up in a world with no police?
In fact, how are the "rules" even determined. I mean, are you expected to modify your bahaviour every time one guy says "hey not fair" or "hey thats not cool"? Two guys? when?
In this case he went into a war zone. A place, defined, as where heros and villans do battle with eachother. Then he... went to battle. Then villans start getting pissed because there is a hero going around killing them in a war zone.
I think he should check out shadowbane if it is still around. The whole world after newb island was a "war zone". Banditry was rampant in that game. In fact, the game was almost setup as a social experiment just like he might find interesting... that is... the world was really dog eat dog with no real rules beyond the game... so players had to band together and form their own little societies.... posses would form to go after bandits etc.
If I could devote more than a couple of weeks to an MMO before deciding I don't need a second job, I would have stayed with that one, I liked it alot because of that social aspect that was created by letting everyone run amok and forcing people to band together for protection.
The aproach on WOW and COV/COH always seemed kind of lame to me. In real life I can do whatever I want, even kill people. However, the consequence is, the police may get called and come after me. It always seemed silly that I am this powerful mage, but... oh, I can't target this dude, or I can't attack anyone without going over there.
I like the "players police the game" setup better, because it makes the social interaction more interesting, and more needed as part of the game rather than just letting it be "our big clubhouse"
-Steve
A very good point. I mean, the technology isn't bad, and I can understand researching this sort of thing, its only the application that seems particularly hair brained and sounds like some serious mission creep by someone. As someone who spends more time than he should on the TSA blog (talk about mission creep), I tend to assume this sort of concept originates with them.
Overall, its just silly for its intended purpose. Smugglers will just shift tactics. I envision large operations just setting up a couple of clean rooms.... drugs get vacuum sealed in one room, moved to a cleaner room and the bags washed, and then moved to a second clean room to be double packed.
very small cost addition if you are moving kilos of coke or even 10s of lbs of pot... and the amount that would fit even hidden amongst other items in a shipping container is many times those quantities. Same could be done for explosives etc.
In short, its just not going to work.
-Steve
And thanks to wiki, apparently elemental mercury wasn't used in hat making either. It was another toxic mercury compound mercuric nitrate. I guess my old chem teachers anecdote about that making was wrong.
-Steve