Are you refering to the http headers that identify the server version? If so then yes, it is a stupid question since, every webserver which I have ever configured has had an option to turn that off. Not that I ever bothered, if it was so useful, it would be turned off by default.
Fingerprinting doesn't take that long, especially for well known services. Might be of some use if you really to run something obscure. In any case, even if they don't know if you are vulnerable, how long does it take to find out? Little use there.
When you say some feature instituted rules to allow this, you are being a little bit disingenuous. The double up feature payout was supposed to pay a particular amount based on the amount previously bet, and that amount was displayed on screen. Through his method of interrupting that process he exploited a bug to cause the amount to be recalculated based on a higher bet amount, allowing him to increase his winnings 10 fold. It was not an intentional rule, but a programming flaw.
A little bit yes.
The thing is, his method of interrupting is something the game allowed, that is, switching games. Was it the intention that an action in one game (triggering the special bet scenario) could be applied to switched games? Beats me, I bet that wasn't spelled out anywhere specific.
Certainly it wasn't their intention to allow it to apply retroactively. However, it did, and the fact that it shouldn't was likely no more spelled out than whether the special bet was intended to be applied. It is, as they said, something he found through playing the game alot and noticed.
In the end, I look at it this way... he walked up to a machine and played it, he didn't manipulate the machine in any way other than using the intended interface, and he didn't exploit any internal knowledge (like if he had known there was some special debug mode that could be entered with the right sequence).
Since the house makes the rules, and the house is responsible for making sure the machine is in order, any ambiguity in the rules of play, even tenuous ambiguity, really should default to the players favour; if for no other reason than it puts the incentive to fix the problem squarely where it belongs.
Yes but everyone is abnormal in some way, or at least everyone the least bit interesting. In the end its just like any other central lifestyle choice, most people who make it will not be compatible with you, so you just sort through them until you find one who is.
I was recently talking to a friend coming off a medium term relationship where they lived together, said how she constantly complained about him not making the bed.... didn't seem to get that this is a fundamental....if your habbits and hers don't mesh, you can't live together and it doesn't matter how strong you think your "feelings" are (feelings change, I am convinced a person could convince themself that nearly anyone is perfect for them for a good six months to a couple of years until the infatuation dies down).
Poly is another one of those basic ones. My wife and I are poly, have been open since day one. Its not an issue for us, we don't really fight, in fact, our relationship is one of the lower drama ones that I have seen, Poly or otherwise.
> it comes with a magnifying glass (but you end up needing something more like a microscope, actually).
You do maybe. We had this edition when I was in school, printed at 25%. It was small, but I didn't even need the magnifying glass, I could always read it unaided. In fact, after learning this, and that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was on Project Guttenberg, I really annoyed my teacher by reading it online and bringing printed chapters to class, printed in the smallest font I could read off the laser printer in the computer room. She insisted that I shouldn't fool around and there was no way i could rad that.... so I happily demonstrated that I could, indeed read it... which she still didn't like, but didn't have much more to say about.
Hell, I learned it quite well in my first job. I was doing after hours upgrades for a major department store. Since it affected the cash register network, one of the tasks was to get the address from every register before we start....so in a worst case the whole store could be set back up if need be (never happened).
What I noticed, walk up to a cashier and tell them you need to do something with a register, they will balk and want to call a manager. Walk up to a cash register and start pressing buttons, and looking at your clip board, and they don't say anything.
Walk though those back doors into the recieving area all nervous and looking around like you don't belong, and someone will come out of the woodwork to be up your ass in seconds. Push through the doors like you own the place and walk over to the nearest device with your clipboard.... and nobody has anything to say.
I would say its about 60% looking the part, and 40% acting confidently like you belong there.
>In fact casinos rely on people believing that they have a "system" or advantageous style of play when in reality they do not (on the whole).
well that does depend on what you mean by advantageous. There certainly are advantageous strategies in almost every game..... if you are willing to consider them as advantageous in relation to far worst strategies.
Examples abound, of course, but, the general rule seems to be that the best odds are from the base bet and addons, while they have higher payouts, have odds which are worst enough to more than compensate for the payouts. From my experience having looked at a few games and a couple of slots, it seems to be the base return on your bets is in the high 90% range, 97-99%. (so, over time they pay back most of the money you bet, and each round only represents an average of a 1-3% loss)
Then they usually pack on extra bets, chances to "double down" or "buy insurance". These typically have far worst payouts over time, often taking an average of 30% or more for the house on those bets.
Which is funny, because all of those add-ons, are usually setup in such a way to make people think they are getting some advantage...when they really are the most pessimal bets you can make.
and this is said from someone who has made a good deal of money from playing poker - the real kind, against other players, not the poker-machine type. If you ask me, they should be totally and utterly, without the slightest hesitation, liable for any mistakes on their part, any badly written gaming machines, or any-and-all dumb-shittery, mental-fuck-up-edness or downright incompetence on their part.
I fully agree here. I read the article to see how this worked, clearly if he was doing something obviously wrong, like flashing roms, or manipulating the device in some way, I would say he is in the wrong...
Instead, he found that some added feature on the game instituted rules which, as it turned out, allowed him to effectively retroactively increase his bets.
I would agree this is cheating if it was being done through almost any other mechanism but, they added this rule into the system, they allowed it to carry between games, and it to be applied to an unclaimed win in another game.
It reminds me of losing a magic game to a rules lawyer based on a technical point that I didn't understand until he explained it. It sucks, but, its the game. Maybe it means the game needs to be fixed, but, its not his fault for finding out that there was a particularly advantageous style of play; and it shouldn't invalidate his prior wins. This is especially true of any casinos which (and its clear they did) continued to leave the feature activated even after becoming aware of it.
Sure but all this has to be underscored by the fact that they know they can't actually use the missiles. Whether the technology even works is entirely secondary to whether it looks plausible. This may be true for your demos as well, but, with them, its true of the entire program.
I would say the exception here is the rule there, but, if you look at some of our own programs internally, I think Kruschev was right when he said "Politicians are the same all over, they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river".
Frankly, when I saw those pictures of the new Deer Leader, sitting in front of plans for an invasion of the US, at that point its hard to take anything they do seriously. Pictures like that are not accidents: they are staged. Why stage something so obviously ridiculous?
The DPRK are little more than the internet trolls of the military industrial world; and their parades are little more than lame "first post" attempts.
Not sure a video is going to give you much of a feel, not like rolling that throttle will. The hard part is getting the hang of the transitions from stop to moving and back to stop again, since the handling of the bike reverses somewhere around 10 mph, and at stop, you actually have to hold it up.
Best advice I have is take the MSF safety course, they have excellent instructors and a good program and you use their bikes for the course. Course you probably have to sign up now to take it in August.
The thing is, if they actually had such missles, then fakes are easy. They just pull out some of the prototypes and show those off. The thing is, the prototypes and mockups would be expected to be largely similar to the real thing, and not so wildly different.
Not only that but, why worry so much about hiding the secrets of the technology when they are playing catch-up? Hide them from... who exactly?
They have to know that such weapons are, actually, useless to them as anything but parade toys, as much, if not more, to put on a good show for their own people, as they are to try and wrangle better negotiating position with the international community.
The only real reason they even have for a missle program is so that the intelligence reported back says they have one.
> so you wonâ(TM)t be getting any safe photographs unless theyâ(TM)re photos of the road
Why do I fear that this will, in fact, be the main thing that comes out of people buying google glass. Suddenly, youtube is awash in commentators about the morning commute. "As you probably remember from last weeks videos, this intersection is one of the worst in the area. I would avoid it if there was any reasonable way around, but that really is why traffic is so bad here isn't it"
"Here we go again, same guy who cut me off last wednsday, if you remember - that is the day I was running a little late for work and really got caught in it...."
No its an example of how naively relying on an uncontracted outside "cloud" service is a really dumb idea.
Now imagine you split your data up into a Set of messages, which can be recovered by any sufficiently large subset of more than N messages? This is what tahoe lafs does, typically using 10 messages, any 6 of which can recover the original.... of course its all encrypted too.
Then all you need is some process which periodically checks the messages and ensures that you always have some threshold (which should really be larger than N, by at least a few).
There is also no need for QR codes to be used, thats another example of naive use. It would actually be vastly more efficient to encode the data differently, but, encoding in such ways as to not be easily detected and removed by youtube could be tricky. However, if you could find a way to minimally disguise the data so it just looks like hours of terribly boring video (like, video of your pet fish)....
Shit you could probably just keep re-uploading the same fish video with differently encoded data and new names....nobody is going to examine hours of fish swimming to determine where the loop is or whether the two videos are of the same loop.
However, the staple american beers are still crap piss lagers.
Outside of major cities, you still find many bars where the options are "Bud, Bud Light, and Miller", to quote one bartender that I ran into a few years back (A friedn and I, we walked in to grab a beer and use the bathroom, he saw us on our way to the bathroom first and commented that it was for customers only, we planned to have a drink anyway so we asked what they had, after he answered we looked at eachother and walked out)
There is a reason that you find 4 & 6 packs of good beer, and 30 racks of piss lager. You can find good beer here, but, if you really were going to insist on stereotyping american beer drinking, PBR is closer to a realistic stereotype than craft beers.
I was having fantasies about this about a decade ago.
What I always wanted was to combine this with a game like counterstrike. Multiple electrodes, on various body parts.... you take a hit in the arm, you get your arm shocked, leg is leg etc. Then.... for the coup de grace, when you die, a stun shock (probably not safe to use a real stun gun like I was thinking at the time, but something toned down a bit for safety)
My hypothesis was, the second round after your first death should be the most intense round of counterstrike you ever played. I really wanted to see what would happen if you played a map out where everyone in game was hooked up to one of these. I bet you would see some serious changes in play style from many players.
Well if the universe is expanding in the way its theorized to, it wouldn't matter, because those photons could be too far away to ever reach us, as the space between us could be expanding faster than the speed of light. The upshot being, any observer, anywhere in the universe has an event horizon around him.
Anything that gets too far away, even light, can never come back and ceases to be part of the observable universe.
> So, does that officially make Evangelicals evil cultists? I mean, trying to get an end-of-the-world > prophecy started is usually the domain of villains...
Both of which indicate that Christian fiction and specifically apocalypse fiction is BIG business. "There's close to, if not more than, $1 billion in retail sales of Christian books unaccounted for by these lists."
I don't hold your responsible at all for the overall budget, but thats entirely besides the point, you still chose to work for warmongers who have been instrumental in the radicalization of extremeists around the world.
Whose actions were the Marathon bombers upset about? Certainly wasn't US civilians. Certainly wasn't about domestic policy. It was the direct result of the actions of your employers.
But you are right, I should take my complaints directly to my congresscritters. Afterall, they are the ones who keep throwing good money after bad.
> Let me see. "Neocons" are largely Jewish conservatives.
Huh? No Neocons are largely Evangelical conservatives. I totally understand your confusion here, since their main defining issue is blind, unwavering support for Isreal. It does seem like this would, tend to indicate they are Jews, but, its just not the case.
Simple fact is, jews are a tiny minority. They really don't deserve their status as a major world religion, at least not based on number of adherents. Here in the US, they are a small minority, so small that they barely make a voting block that anybody would care about, if not for the evangelicals.
Problem here is that the Evangelicals have a plan for the Jews. Many of them follow an interpretation of revelations which says that God's plan includes the Jews taking back Israel, and it playing an important role in "the end times" as they like to call it.
While this sounds a lot more insane than the proposition that Jews are neocons, quite simply, there are more evangelicals who subscribe to this here in the US than there are Jews here.
In the end times, Israel will play a vital role in Bible Prophesy. Satan's man (The Beast) will rise out of Rome as the world leader. His ultimate goal will be to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. The Beast will order all armies of the wolrd to converge on Israel and destroy her. When all seems lost, Israel's Messiah will burst through the clouds and save her. He will destroy the invading armies... take over all governments... and judge all nations that opposed Israel!"
> Much more alarming is the pursuit of the LA cop, who they shot out cars of the wrong person and all that. But > that seemed to get less press than other less interesting things.
No shit. That was extremely disturbing on every level, from shooting up the wrong car to the way they surrounded him and burned the cabin down and the speed with which the whole incident got dropped.
This isn't about a bombing. I know we have had bombings. We have had bombings, we have had anarchists convicted of crimes they likely didn't commit. However, this incident was really different in that it was an active pursuit of a bomber on the run. Its not like they got a tip he was in watertown and swept the area in a random search.
Lets not forget how this came about, the police became engaged when a person called, saying he had been carjacked at gunpoint, by men claiming to be the Marathon bombers. At some point during the early pursuit, a bomb was thrown from their car at police, and they had a gunfight, before he crashed the car and tried to hide in the residential neighborhood... possibly with explosives and/or a gun. You know of comparable situations? I am sure they will be amusing reads too, but this is rare among the rare.
If they had continued the search much longer without finding him, or tried to expand it to other areas, believe me, I would be right there with you. As it is, I am not happy about the way they closed the whole city when the action was in a few small blocks; and I wasn't a fan of house to house searches. Frankly, I don't see what benefit there is to not just going door to door informing people he might be in the area and asking if they think anyone might be in the house or they are sure there isn't. I could tell you in a few minutes if anybody but a catburgler had come in or tried to get into my house....much quicker than you could search it. I imagine most people could.
Hell I can show you where people failed to get into my house...there are a couple of basement windows somebody definitely tried, and failed, to get into.
If he had had a car stashed or managed to jack another one.... he could have easily been in NYC, or further, I know people who were on the road at that hour, that night, in that area. The roads were clear to the highway if he had a vehicle. So the idea of locking down Boston was just silly; and their methods a bit more hamfisted than really needed.
I am more concerned with their ability to muster such forces on command than the situation they chose to use it in. They really didn't need such overwhelming force, and its unclear why it would ever be needed.... but as far as reasons to use it go.... this one was pretty good.
Well you don't see a lot of them hanging around the smoking zone outside the hospital sucking down butts like the old nurses. Course I was out to diner with a number of doctors when one of them pointed at the fois gras one of them ordered and said "This is what your liver looks like after a good drinking binge" and the entire table shut up and looked shamefully down at their navels.... so yah they aren't that healthy.
I didn't thank you, I said your wasting my money; and I meant it. On every front you are playing whack-a-mole and having every bit as much effect on the mole population. None of this addresses the causes of the problem, which the people actually calling the shots seem to be actively working to make worst. Sorry I am not willing to take your contribution completely out of context.
> What people think they believe in and what they actually believe are two separate things. I remember talking > with my grandparents that they were scared that Obama would put the country under martial law, and then when > Boston basically went under martial law, they praised the police and thought it was great what they were doing!
Agree with your points but, think you picked a terrible example. I am here in Boston and, generally the first one to be a detractor, but, mostly...mostly....I think they did a good job under the circumstances. Lets not forget, this was nearly an unprecedented situation, which involved not just bombings, but an active persuit of a person who had been actively using both guns and bombs, and was believed (if incorrectly) to still be armed.
I do think that they overreacted a bit, and I was not a fan of some of the actions that they took, particularly shooting him since he wasn't armed and thus couldn't have been shooting at them.... or the, at least one, house they did search with explicit non-consent.
That said, I am willing to give a lot of latitude to them when dealing, specifically, with an active persuit of an armed group or individual, in the area where he was last contacted. Though, it is pretty clear that they did overreact greatly in extending this all the way to the other side of boston. Hell, I was closer to the action than many of the places locked down, and we were not under lockdown here.
That said, I think generally the fears of martial law coming are mostly overblown. This government does a fine job of controlling people without barely working for it. Martial law is expensive and a huge and counterproductive undertaking. I am more worried about the effect of policies over time.... follow the track of the drug war and its, just a nasty feedback loop, of ever increasing need for more and more power to go after bigger and badder bad guys, which didn't exist before the market that birthed them was created.
> Yes, and you get to charge them for the cost, face penalties if you don't follow it, and the rules are old and have > been in place for a long time. It's not expensive, and isn't a hidden expense. So what's the problem?
I don't see what the problem is. The law is what it is, and the defined fine of nothing is being given out every time its broken. You can't say the law isn't working if its doing exactly what it was intended to do, do you have any evidence that companies are being fined less than nothing?
Or maybe you just have silly stereotypes about astronauts, and likely coffee.
So you think astronauts are not driven people who would gladly sacrifice their own body and long term health for the sake of the mission and being an astronaut? Do you really think coffee is that bad? I have worked in a major hospital and let me tell you....lots of Doctors and Nurses in that coffee line.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you refering to the http headers that identify the server version? If so then yes, it is a stupid question since, every webserver which I have ever configured has had an option to turn that off. Not that I ever bothered, if it was so useful, it would be turned off by default.
Fingerprinting doesn't take that long, especially for well known services. Might be of some use if you really to run something obscure. In any case, even if they don't know if you are vulnerable, how long does it take to find out? Little use there.
A little bit yes.
The thing is, his method of interrupting is something the game allowed, that is, switching games. Was it the intention that an action in one game (triggering the special bet scenario) could be applied to switched games? Beats me, I bet that wasn't spelled out anywhere specific.
Certainly it wasn't their intention to allow it to apply retroactively. However, it did, and the fact that it shouldn't was likely no more spelled out than whether the special bet was intended to be applied. It is, as they said, something he found through playing the game alot and noticed.
In the end, I look at it this way... he walked up to a machine and played it, he didn't manipulate the machine in any way other than using the intended interface, and he didn't exploit any internal knowledge (like if he had known there was some special debug mode that could be entered with the right sequence).
Since the house makes the rules, and the house is responsible for making sure the machine is in order, any ambiguity in the rules of play, even tenuous ambiguity, really should default to the players favour; if for no other reason than it puts the incentive to fix the problem squarely where it belongs.
Yes but everyone is abnormal in some way, or at least everyone the least bit interesting. In the end its just like any other central lifestyle choice, most people who make it will not be compatible with you, so you just sort through them until you find one who is.
I was recently talking to a friend coming off a medium term relationship where they lived together, said how she constantly complained about him not making the bed.... didn't seem to get that this is a fundamental....if your habbits and hers don't mesh, you can't live together and it doesn't matter how strong you think your "feelings" are (feelings change, I am convinced a person could convince themself that nearly anyone is perfect for them for a good six months to a couple of years until the infatuation dies down).
Poly is another one of those basic ones. My wife and I are poly, have been open since day one. Its not an issue for us, we don't really fight, in fact, our relationship is one of the lower drama ones that I have seen, Poly or otherwise.
> it comes with a magnifying glass (but you end up needing something more like a microscope, actually).
You do maybe. We had this edition when I was in school, printed at 25%. It was small, but I didn't even need the magnifying glass, I could always read it unaided. In fact, after learning this, and that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was on Project Guttenberg, I really annoyed my teacher by reading it online and bringing printed chapters to class, printed in the smallest font I could read off the laser printer in the computer room. She insisted that I shouldn't fool around and there was no way i could rad that.... so I happily demonstrated that I could, indeed read it... which she still didn't like, but didn't have much more to say about.
this knwoledge pre-dates burn notice.
Hell, I learned it quite well in my first job. I was doing after hours upgrades for a major department store. Since it affected the cash register network, one of the tasks was to get the address from every register before we start....so in a worst case the whole store could be set back up if need be (never happened).
What I noticed, walk up to a cashier and tell them you need to do something with a register, they will balk and want to call a manager. Walk up to a cash register and start pressing buttons, and looking at your clip board, and they don't say anything.
Walk though those back doors into the recieving area all nervous and looking around like you don't belong, and someone will come out of the woodwork to be up your ass in seconds. Push through the doors like you own the place and walk over to the nearest device with your clipboard.... and nobody has anything to say.
I would say its about 60% looking the part, and 40% acting confidently like you belong there.
>In fact casinos rely on people believing that they have a "system" or advantageous style of play when in reality they do not (on the whole).
well that does depend on what you mean by advantageous. There certainly are advantageous strategies in almost every game..... if you are willing to consider them as advantageous in relation to far worst strategies.
Examples abound, of course, but, the general rule seems to be that the best odds are from the base bet and addons, while they have higher payouts, have odds which are worst enough to more than compensate for the payouts. From my experience having looked at a few games and a couple of slots, it seems to be the base return on your bets is in the high 90% range, 97-99%. (so, over time they pay back most of the money you bet, and each round only represents an average of a 1-3% loss)
Then they usually pack on extra bets, chances to "double down" or "buy insurance". These typically have far worst payouts over time, often taking an average of 30% or more for the house on those bets.
Which is funny, because all of those add-ons, are usually setup in such a way to make people think they are getting some advantage...when they really are the most pessimal bets you can make.
I fully agree here. I read the article to see how this worked, clearly if he was doing something obviously wrong, like flashing roms, or manipulating the device in some way, I would say he is in the wrong...
Instead, he found that some added feature on the game instituted rules which, as it turned out, allowed him to effectively retroactively increase his bets.
I would agree this is cheating if it was being done through almost any other mechanism but, they added this rule into the system, they allowed it to carry between games, and it to be applied to an unclaimed win in another game.
It reminds me of losing a magic game to a rules lawyer based on a technical point that I didn't understand until he explained it. It sucks, but, its the game. Maybe it means the game needs to be fixed, but, its not his fault for finding out that there was a particularly advantageous style of play; and it shouldn't invalidate his prior wins. This is especially true of any casinos which (and its clear they did) continued to leave the feature activated even after becoming aware of it.
Sure but all this has to be underscored by the fact that they know they can't actually use the missiles. Whether the technology even works is entirely secondary to whether it looks plausible. This may be true for your demos as well, but, with them, its true of the entire program.
I would say the exception here is the rule there, but, if you look at some of our own programs internally, I think Kruschev was right when he said "Politicians are the same all over, they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river".
Frankly, when I saw those pictures of the new Deer Leader, sitting in front of plans for an invasion of the US, at that point its hard to take anything they do seriously. Pictures like that are not accidents: they are staged. Why stage something so obviously ridiculous?
The DPRK are little more than the internet trolls of the military industrial world; and their parades are little more than lame "first post" attempts.
Its nice, I miss it.
Not sure a video is going to give you much of a feel, not like rolling that throttle will. The hard part is getting the hang of the transitions from stop to moving and back to stop again, since the handling of the bike reverses somewhere around 10 mph, and at stop, you actually have to hold it up.
Best advice I have is take the MSF safety course, they have excellent instructors and a good program and you use their bikes for the course. Course you probably have to sign up now to take it in August.
The thing is, if they actually had such missles, then fakes are easy. They just pull out some of the prototypes and show those off. The thing is, the prototypes and mockups would be expected to be largely similar to the real thing, and not so wildly different.
Not only that but, why worry so much about hiding the secrets of the technology when they are playing catch-up? Hide them from... who exactly?
They have to know that such weapons are, actually, useless to them as anything but parade toys, as much, if not more, to put on a good show for their own people, as they are to try and wrangle better negotiating position with the international community.
The only real reason they even have for a missle program is so that the intelligence reported back says they have one.
> so you wonâ(TM)t be getting any safe photographs unless theyâ(TM)re photos of the road
Why do I fear that this will, in fact, be the main thing that comes out of people buying google glass. Suddenly, youtube is awash in commentators about the morning commute. "As you probably remember from last weeks
videos, this intersection is one of the worst in the area. I would avoid it if there was any reasonable way around, but that really is why traffic is so bad here isn't it"
"Here we go again, same guy who cut me off last wednsday, if you remember - that is the day I was running a little late for work and really got caught in it...."
No its an example of how naively relying on an uncontracted outside "cloud" service is a really dumb idea.
Now imagine you split your data up into a Set of messages, which can be recovered by any sufficiently large subset of more than N messages? This is what tahoe lafs does, typically using 10 messages, any 6 of which can recover the original.... of course its all encrypted too.
Then all you need is some process which periodically checks the messages and ensures that you always have some threshold (which should really be larger than N, by at least a few).
There is also no need for QR codes to be used, thats another example of naive use. It would actually be vastly more efficient to encode the data differently, but, encoding in such ways as to not be easily detected and removed by youtube could be tricky. However, if you could find a way to minimally disguise the data so it just looks like hours of terribly boring video (like, video of your pet fish)....
Shit you could probably just keep re-uploading the same fish video with differently encoded data and new names....nobody is going to examine hours of fish swimming to determine where the loop is or whether the two videos are of the same loop.
However, the staple american beers are still crap piss lagers.
Outside of major cities, you still find many bars where the options are "Bud, Bud Light, and Miller", to quote one bartender that I ran into a few years back (A friedn and I, we walked in to grab a beer and use the bathroom, he saw us on our way to the bathroom first and commented that it was for customers only, we planned to have a drink anyway so we asked what they had, after he answered we looked at eachother and walked out)
There is a reason that you find 4 & 6 packs of good beer, and 30 racks of piss lager. You can find good beer here, but, if you really were going to insist on stereotyping american beer drinking, PBR is closer to a realistic stereotype than craft beers.
I was having fantasies about this about a decade ago.
What I always wanted was to combine this with a game like counterstrike. Multiple electrodes, on various body parts.... you take a hit in the arm, you get your arm shocked, leg is leg etc. Then.... for the coup de grace, when you die, a stun shock (probably not safe to use a real stun gun like I was thinking at the time, but something toned down a bit for safety)
My hypothesis was, the second round after your first death should be the most intense round of counterstrike you ever played. I really wanted to see what would happen if you played a map out where everyone in game was hooked up to one of these. I bet you would see some serious changes in play style from many players.
Well if the universe is expanding in the way its theorized to, it wouldn't matter, because those photons could be too far away to ever reach us, as the space between us could be expanding faster than the speed of light. The upshot being, any observer, anywhere in the universe has an event horizon around him.
Anything that gets too far away, even light, can never come back and ceases to be part of the observable universe.
> So, does that officially make Evangelicals evil cultists? I mean, trying to get an end-of-the-world
> prophecy started is usually the domain of villains...
well, is it ALL evangelicals who think this way? Probably not. On the other hand, I saw some scary statistics about the Christian book market: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/20/christian-rapture-fiction-sf-apocalypse
and
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/2689-jesus-and-the-bestseller-list.html
Both of which indicate that Christian fiction and specifically apocalypse fiction is BIG business. "There's close to, if not more than, $1 billion in retail sales of Christian books unaccounted for by these lists."
That is a lot of books, and kind of frightening.
I don't hold your responsible at all for the overall budget, but thats entirely besides the point, you still chose to work for warmongers who have been instrumental in the radicalization of extremeists around the world.
Whose actions were the Marathon bombers upset about? Certainly wasn't US civilians. Certainly wasn't about domestic policy. It was the direct result of the actions of your employers.
But you are right, I should take my complaints directly to my congresscritters. Afterall, they are the ones who keep throwing good money after bad.
> Let me see. "Neocons" are largely Jewish conservatives.
Huh? No Neocons are largely Evangelical conservatives. I totally understand your confusion here, since their main defining issue is blind, unwavering support for Isreal. It does seem like this would, tend to indicate they are Jews, but, its just not the case.
Simple fact is, jews are a tiny minority. They really don't deserve their status as a major world religion, at least not based on number of adherents. Here in the US, they are a small minority, so small that they barely make a voting block that anybody would care about, if not for the evangelicals.
Problem here is that the Evangelicals have a plan for the Jews. Many of them follow an interpretation of revelations which says that God's plan includes the Jews taking back Israel, and it playing an important role in "the end times" as they like to call it.
While this sounds a lot more insane than the proposition that Jews are neocons, quite simply, there are more evangelicals who subscribe to this here in the US than there are Jews here.
For reference see: http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1000/1000_01.asp
Jack Chick is no Jew.
> Much more alarming is the pursuit of the LA cop, who they shot out cars of the wrong person and all that. But
> that seemed to get less press than other less interesting things.
No shit. That was extremely disturbing on every level, from shooting up the wrong car to the way they surrounded him and burned the cabin down and the speed with which the whole incident got dropped.
This isn't about a bombing. I know we have had bombings. We have had bombings, we have had anarchists convicted of crimes they likely didn't commit. However, this incident was really different in that it was an active pursuit of a bomber on the run. Its not like they got a tip he was in watertown and swept the area in a random search.
Lets not forget how this came about, the police became engaged when a person called, saying he had been carjacked at gunpoint, by men claiming to be the Marathon bombers. At some point during the early pursuit, a bomb was thrown from their car at police, and they had a gunfight, before he crashed the car and tried to hide in the residential neighborhood... possibly with explosives and/or a gun. You know of comparable situations? I am sure they will be amusing reads too, but this is rare among the rare.
If they had continued the search much longer without finding him, or tried to expand it to other areas, believe me, I would be right there with you. As it is, I am not happy about the way they closed the whole city when the action was in a few small blocks; and I wasn't a fan of house to house searches. Frankly, I don't see what benefit there is to not just going door to door informing people he might be in the area and asking if they think anyone might be in the house or they are sure there isn't. I could tell you in a few minutes if anybody but a catburgler had come in or tried to get into my house....much quicker than you could search it. I imagine most people could.
Hell I can show you where people failed to get into my house...there are a couple of basement windows somebody definitely tried, and failed, to get into.
If he had had a car stashed or managed to jack another one.... he could have easily been in NYC, or further, I know people who were on the road at that hour, that night, in that area. The roads were clear to the highway if he had a vehicle. So the idea of locking down Boston was just silly; and their methods a bit more hamfisted than really needed.
I am more concerned with their ability to muster such forces on command than the situation they chose to use it in. They really didn't need such overwhelming force, and its unclear why it would ever be needed.... but as far as reasons to use it go.... this one was pretty good.
Well you don't see a lot of them hanging around the smoking zone outside the hospital sucking down butts like the old nurses. Course I was out to diner with a number of doctors when one of them pointed at the fois gras one of them ordered and said "This is what your liver looks like after a good drinking binge" and the entire table shut up and looked shamefully down at their navels.... so yah they aren't that healthy.
I didn't thank you, I said your wasting my money; and I meant it. On every front you are playing whack-a-mole and having every bit as much effect on the mole population. None of this addresses the causes of the problem, which the people actually calling the shots seem to be actively working to make worst. Sorry I am not willing to take your contribution completely out of context.
> What people think they believe in and what they actually believe are two separate things. I remember talking
> with my grandparents that they were scared that Obama would put the country under martial law, and then when
> Boston basically went under martial law, they praised the police and thought it was great what they were doing!
Agree with your points but, think you picked a terrible example. I am here in Boston and, generally the first one to be a detractor, but, mostly...mostly....I think they did a good job under the circumstances. Lets not forget, this was nearly an unprecedented situation, which involved not just bombings, but an active persuit of a person who had been actively using both guns and bombs, and was believed (if incorrectly) to still be armed.
I do think that they overreacted a bit, and I was not a fan of some of the actions that they took, particularly shooting him since he wasn't armed and thus couldn't have been shooting at them.... or the, at least one, house they did search with explicit non-consent.
That said, I am willing to give a lot of latitude to them when dealing, specifically, with an active persuit of an armed group or individual, in the area where he was last contacted. Though, it is pretty clear that they did overreact greatly in extending this all the way to the other side of boston. Hell, I was closer to the action than many of the places locked down, and we were not under lockdown here.
That said, I think generally the fears of martial law coming are mostly overblown. This government does a fine job of controlling people without barely working for it. Martial law is expensive and a huge and counterproductive undertaking. I am more worried about the effect of policies over time.... follow the track of the drug war and its, just a nasty feedback loop, of ever increasing need for more and more power to go after bigger and badder bad guys, which didn't exist before the market that birthed them was created.
> Yes, and you get to charge them for the cost, face penalties if you don't follow it, and the rules are old and have
> been in place for a long time. It's not expensive, and isn't a hidden expense. So what's the problem?
I don't see what the problem is. The law is what it is, and the defined fine of nothing is being given out every time its broken. You can't say the law isn't working if its doing exactly what it was intended to do, do you have any evidence that companies are being fined less than nothing?
Or maybe you just have silly stereotypes about astronauts, and likely coffee.
So you think astronauts are not driven people who would gladly sacrifice their own body and long term health for the sake of the mission and being an astronaut? Do you really think coffee is that bad? I have worked in a major hospital and let me tell you....lots of Doctors and Nurses in that coffee line.