I believe they would be trying to solve the "I want more money" problem. Given the.tel TLD now exists, I'd say their method of solving the problem appears to be working.
Other problems, or problems that come up because of this? Pshaw, nuts to that... that first problem needs more solving!
That sounds more prone to problems (and should the pirates actually still capture it, then you're screwed) than my idea. Much like a Q-ship, you have a ship that looks like it's got good stuff on it. However, it's loaded to the hilt with explosives. Have it radio-controlled, so no actual people are on-board. A few lifelike dummies behind the wheel perhaps. Sail it around where things get hijacked, wait for it to have just that done to it, and push the big red button that says "make pirates go away now". Hell, even just full-speed that ship into Eyl pirate bay and pushing the button when it gets to land. That option probably would be avoided though, since likely people might be concerned that some non-criminals are there, and you can't try them in court with this method, etc, etc.
But a few decoy explody ships here and there to take out the ones actually in the act of pirating the ship, and I'm sure the amount of piracy would decrease significantly.
Why is this article tagged "outbreak of stupidity"? In reality, it should be tagged "same ol', same ol'". An outbreak of stupidity would imply that wasn't already the norm.
I don't care what company you are or what business you're in, managers don't need to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while the rest of the business has to lay off thousands of workers in order to pay them.
And by 'all', I mean both daylight savings AND timezones. I mean seriously... is there some rule that business the world over must open up in the AM and close in the PM? Seriously... it's a very interconnected world we're in, and there's a dozen different "times" one has to look at to connect with someone somewhere else in the world.
I say we scrap all that and just have the entire planet set to GMT. That way, when someone in say... the USA needs to speak with someone in Japan, or even elsewhere in the USA... they can say "I'll call you at 3:00am", and guess what... no confusion, everyone knows exactly when that is.
So our social norms will have to adjust slightly. So I change my clock, and it now says I wake up at 2:00pm and work from 3:00pm to 11:30pm. Boo hoo... doesn't matter, since the stores are open from 1:00am to 1:00pm or whatever. Hell, I'm sure society would adjust in the span of a few months.
So seriously... do we even NEED timezones? I think not.
Ok... I'm done ranting. Now I can go back to knowing that this will never, ever happen.
No, I don't need to kill kids to enjoy a game. However, one could argue the same by taking away pretty much any other singular option and say "You don't need to do that to enjoy the game.
Having the option to do so however is nice, as opposed to the option being arbitrarily removed because we need to 'think of the children'.
Oh yeah, that makes PERFECT sense. You can kill ANY other living creature in the game, EXCEPT kids.
ESRB: Ohhh, you can't release a game that shows killing kids. After all, if someone sees it done in a game, SURELY that must mean that they will follow up with going on a child-slaughtering rampage through the countryside.
Give me a fucking break! If I decide I want to play the game by killing every last person and become the sole survivor, with this new rule, I get to be the sole adult survivor... but of course surrounded by CHILDREN! Oh yeah, that's not FAR creepier than decimating everything.
It's an adult game for adults! If parents do their jobs, then kids won't SEE in-game kids getting killed. Or anyone getting killed.
And TFA's comments about their decision for that. What does killing children add? Oh, I don't know... freedom to do whatever I want in an imaginary universe in which death, decay, and destruction are among the MAIN SUBJECTS!
Couldn't it be done much the same way I have my email posted on my homepage... break the image file containing the captcha into multiple images. For example, my captcha is 'Starve'... inside a.jpg image 128 pixels across. Couldn't that same image be cut into say... 8 or whatever pieces across, maybe a few down as well if you want. Then you just need to write the html code for the page to have the images lined up. Maybe even put them in a table so all of the IMG SRC tags aren't all right beside eachother.
And while we're at it, surely a script can be written to randomize the filenames of the pieces of the image, and insert them into the.html file in a server side include or something.
So is that idea just easily broken, or why is noone doing that?
I can imagine a massive, MASSIVE hole in this whole idea. What's to stop a photoshopped image from being sent to them?
So you just got a picture of a robber leaving a house or whatever. Photoshop someone you don't like's face onto there, and uh-oh... someone damn well better hope they have a better alibi than "alone at home, asleep".
All one has to do is simply use something other than facebook.
And of course convince every single one of your friends, family, relatives, and work associates who's connected to you on facebook to ALSO leave, and all re-congregate at the new site of your choice.
This of course forces them to convince every one of THEIR friends, relatives, coworkers, etc to change to the site of YOUR choice. And so on and so on.
Because you didn't like the fact you can't post "bugmenot.com" specifically.
Yeah, that should be a breeze. Lemme know how that works out for you.
Back when I was doing tech support for Worldnet dialup internet, we could change people's passwords when requested (and we could also just read off what it's currently set to). I got a call once from someone saying they couldn't log in, and wanted me to read off their password. After the usual verifying security, I gave 'em their password... which was at the moment set to... umm... let's just say another way of saying "homosexual lover", since putting the actual password would likely set off the swear filter. Yeah, THAT was an awkward call.
The system logs the tech's login for any changes made to an account, so it was easy to see what happened. Someone, on their last day of work, changed some people's passwords to either racist, homosexual, or other various types of things.
Because of that incident, they stopped us from being able to either read passwords, or even create them to what someone wanted. If someone forgot a password, we could randomly generate a new one. That's it.
Guess what... Cyclone Nargis changed everything for a lot of people too on May 3rd. Wanna guess what the odds are the world will come to screeching halt next May?
Yes, I'll probably get modded troll or something for this, but it needs saying.
There's many comments in here about "oh, what about Sept. 11... couldn't they pick a better day?" and the like.
NEWS FLASH: The rest of the world does NOT come to a screeching halt every Sept. 11th. All points of business are NOT put on hold on that one day of the year. The rest of the world has moved on, if they even stopped to begin with. GET OVER IT!
LHC isn't even located in the USA for christ sakes.
Yes, the Sept. 11 events were sad, but seriously... stop criticizing all events taking place somewhere on earth on or around that date.
Given I live in Canada, I can deal with that very easily. Our dollar is almost on-par with the USA (on a few occasions here and there sliding above), and anything that is only available in the USA can typically be obtained online. No reason to risk everything I own crossing the border.
So yeah... about the only thing that this type of action will cause is people boycotting either exiting or entering the USA.
Which brings to mind one other aspect about North America that can't possibly be helping the educations system:
The stupid are idolized.
Models? Typically dumb as gravel (see Romancer's linked youtube video), but make a fortune. Sports stars? IQ of tapioca, but they're good at football/baseball/whatever. Let's give them 5 million dollars a year! Actors? A lot lesser so than the above two things, but you can't say that there aren't a ton of actors that have only gotten there because of their looks and not their thoughts. Let's give them millions of dollars to make a movie!
I've definitely seen more people on bikes this summer than the past few. And those Vespa scooter things are getting more and more popular.
So I may not have seen less cars on the road (since to see a noticeable difference, it would have to be a massive change), but I have seen at least twice as many bikes on the road this year as there was about 3 or 4 years ago.
Unfortunately, a lot of jobs require you to have that sheet of paper that says you have a batchelor of X. They don't really care if you have a high-school education but are 10 times more intelligent and qualified than the next guy... if you don't have that certification, they won't even read your resume. Look at an online job-bank sometime. Virtually anything non-fast food, non-sales clerk requires X years experience and X degreee.
So what if Joe Nobody has all the knowledge obtained by experience and good brains, but grew up in a poor family? With gas prices/dorm costs/rent costs/food costs/etc, many people simply don't have the financial ability to get that higher education. They're scraping by on their low-paying job, barely able to afford food, praying to work their way up to a higher wage through sheer seniority. If you can barely afford a few meals a day, the odds of you saving up thousands of dollars for a higher education is slim to nil.
There's student-loans of course, but those over here (and I know from personal experience) cover VERY little... most certainly not enough to pay for an entire degree. So you're stuck halfway through a degree with a metric ton of debt on your shoulders, have a low-paying job because you don't have that little sheet of paper that says you paid for four/five years of college, and have ever-increasing rent/utilities to deal with.
And god help you if after the first few years of college you realize that you despise what the degree you're working towards is becoming, and greatly want to change to something else? Well then you're screwed about a hundred times over.
Which would be where I am right now. YAY, Mr. Noodles for lunch again!
Words can't even describe how true that is. Kids these days are so coddled, they can literally punch, beat, and otherwise abuse their own parents (and many do... watch the loud, obnoxious kids with their parents in a mall sometime), and the parents have virtually no way of retalliating.
I guess it's probably better that I grew up in the country. Growing up, I had never even HEARD of family services. What I DID know was that if I caused trouble in school, my dad would give me a spanking, and I'd be damned before I caused that trouble again.
Except of course for the fact that the cellphone is in your pocket. Going by the theory that cellphones give you cancer, you'll get a nice tumor growing in your leg.
That, or the emissions from the cellphone will have to *gasp* travel another four feet and kill you regardless.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe they would be trying to solve the "I want more money" problem. Given the .tel TLD now exists, I'd say their method of solving the problem appears to be working.
Other problems, or problems that come up because of this? Pshaw, nuts to that... that first problem needs more solving!
That sounds more prone to problems (and should the pirates actually still capture it, then you're screwed) than my idea. Much like a Q-ship, you have a ship that looks like it's got good stuff on it. However, it's loaded to the hilt with explosives. Have it radio-controlled, so no actual people are on-board. A few lifelike dummies behind the wheel perhaps. Sail it around where things get hijacked, wait for it to have just that done to it, and push the big red button that says "make pirates go away now". Hell, even just full-speed that ship into Eyl pirate bay and pushing the button when it gets to land. That option probably would be avoided though, since likely people might be concerned that some non-criminals are there, and you can't try them in court with this method, etc, etc.
But a few decoy explody ships here and there to take out the ones actually in the act of pirating the ship, and I'm sure the amount of piracy would decrease significantly.
Why is this article tagged "outbreak of stupidity"? In reality, it should be tagged "same ol', same ol'". An outbreak of stupidity would imply that wasn't already the norm.
I don't care what company you are or what business you're in, managers don't need to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while the rest of the business has to lay off thousands of workers in order to pay them.
And by 'all', I mean both daylight savings AND timezones. I mean seriously... is there some rule that business the world over must open up in the AM and close in the PM? Seriously... it's a very interconnected world we're in, and there's a dozen different "times" one has to look at to connect with someone somewhere else in the world.
I say we scrap all that and just have the entire planet set to GMT. That way, when someone in say... the USA needs to speak with someone in Japan, or even elsewhere in the USA... they can say "I'll call you at 3:00am", and guess what... no confusion, everyone knows exactly when that is.
So our social norms will have to adjust slightly. So I change my clock, and it now says I wake up at 2:00pm and work from 3:00pm to 11:30pm. Boo hoo... doesn't matter, since the stores are open from 1:00am to 1:00pm or whatever. Hell, I'm sure society would adjust in the span of a few months.
So seriously... do we even NEED timezones? I think not.
Ok... I'm done ranting. Now I can go back to knowing that this will never, ever happen.
No, I don't need to kill kids to enjoy a game. However, one could argue the same by taking away pretty much any other singular option and say "You don't need to do that to enjoy the game.
Having the option to do so however is nice, as opposed to the option being arbitrarily removed because we need to 'think of the children'.
Oh yeah, that makes PERFECT sense. You can kill ANY other living creature in the game, EXCEPT kids.
ESRB: Ohhh, you can't release a game that shows killing kids. After all, if someone sees it done in a game, SURELY that must mean that they will follow up with going on a child-slaughtering rampage through the countryside.
Give me a fucking break! If I decide I want to play the game by killing every last person and become the sole survivor, with this new rule, I get to be the sole adult survivor... but of course surrounded by CHILDREN! Oh yeah, that's not FAR creepier than decimating everything.
It's an adult game for adults! If parents do their jobs, then kids won't SEE in-game kids getting killed. Or anyone getting killed.
And TFA's comments about their decision for that. What does killing children add? Oh, I don't know... freedom to do whatever I want in an imaginary universe in which death, decay, and destruction are among the MAIN SUBJECTS!
Couldn't it be done much the same way I have my email posted on my homepage... break the image file containing the captcha into multiple images. For example, my captcha is 'Starve'... inside a .jpg image 128 pixels across. Couldn't that same image be cut into say... 8 or whatever pieces across, maybe a few down as well if you want. Then you just need to write the html code for the page to have the images lined up. Maybe even put them in a table so all of the IMG SRC tags aren't all right beside eachother.
And while we're at it, surely a script can be written to randomize the filenames of the pieces of the image, and insert them into the .html file in a server side include or something.
So is that idea just easily broken, or why is noone doing that?
Perhaps Microsoft should stop hiring yes-men for those committees :P.
I can imagine a massive, MASSIVE hole in this whole idea. What's to stop a photoshopped image from being sent to them?
So you just got a picture of a robber leaving a house or whatever. Photoshop someone you don't like's face onto there, and uh-oh... someone damn well better hope they have a better alibi than "alone at home, asleep".
Why have prices increased so much in the past few years?
Simple... because people will pay that much.
Which is exactly the reason it will continue going up.
All one has to do is simply use something other than facebook.
And of course convince every single one of your friends, family, relatives, and work associates who's connected to you on facebook to ALSO leave, and all re-congregate at the new site of your choice.
This of course forces them to convince every one of THEIR friends, relatives, coworkers, etc to change to the site of YOUR choice. And so on and so on.
Because you didn't like the fact you can't post "bugmenot.com" specifically.
Yeah, that should be a breeze. Lemme know how that works out for you.
Back when I was doing tech support for Worldnet dialup internet, we could change people's passwords when requested (and we could also just read off what it's currently set to). I got a call once from someone saying they couldn't log in, and wanted me to read off their password. After the usual verifying security, I gave 'em their password... which was at the moment set to... umm... let's just say another way of saying "homosexual lover", since putting the actual password would likely set off the swear filter. Yeah, THAT was an awkward call.
The system logs the tech's login for any changes made to an account, so it was easy to see what happened. Someone, on their last day of work, changed some people's passwords to either racist, homosexual, or other various types of things.
Because of that incident, they stopped us from being able to either read passwords, or even create them to what someone wanted. If someone forgot a password, we could randomly generate a new one. That's it.
And HOW much technology was around when people started searching for artifacts in Egypt?
Oh, that's right... a helluva lot less than would be required to read this chip.
Tell that to the hundreds of people who have lost luggage because it was on some other random flight :P.
And therein lies the problem.
Guess what... Cyclone Nargis changed everything for a lot of people too on May 3rd. Wanna guess what the odds are the world will come to screeching halt next May?
Yes, I'll probably get modded troll or something for this, but it needs saying.
There's many comments in here about "oh, what about Sept. 11... couldn't they pick a better day?" and the like.
NEWS FLASH: The rest of the world does NOT come to a screeching halt every Sept. 11th. All points of business are NOT put on hold on that one day of the year. The rest of the world has moved on, if they even stopped to begin with. GET OVER IT!
LHC isn't even located in the USA for christ sakes.
Yes, the Sept. 11 events were sad, but seriously... stop criticizing all events taking place somewhere on earth on or around that date.
I had a dentist called 'Dr. Blight'. He even joked about it himself, saying that it sounded like a supervillain.
Ok, so mental note... never visit the USA ever.
Given I live in Canada, I can deal with that very easily. Our dollar is almost on-par with the USA (on a few occasions here and there sliding above), and anything that is only available in the USA can typically be obtained online. No reason to risk everything I own crossing the border.
So yeah... about the only thing that this type of action will cause is people boycotting either exiting or entering the USA.
Which brings to mind one other aspect about North America that can't possibly be helping the educations system:
The stupid are idolized.
Models? Typically dumb as gravel (see Romancer's linked youtube video), but make a fortune.
Sports stars? IQ of tapioca, but they're good at football/baseball/whatever. Let's give them 5 million dollars a year!
Actors? A lot lesser so than the above two things, but you can't say that there aren't a ton of actors that have only gotten there because of their looks and not their thoughts. Let's give them millions of dollars to make a movie!
No need. The smart and talented would just leave the country.
I've definitely seen more people on bikes this summer than the past few. And those Vespa scooter things are getting more and more popular.
So I may not have seen less cars on the road (since to see a noticeable difference, it would have to be a massive change), but I have seen at least twice as many bikes on the road this year as there was about 3 or 4 years ago.
Unfortunately, a lot of jobs require you to have that sheet of paper that says you have a batchelor of X. They don't really care if you have a high-school education but are 10 times more intelligent and qualified than the next guy... if you don't have that certification, they won't even read your resume. Look at an online job-bank sometime. Virtually anything non-fast food, non-sales clerk requires X years experience and X degreee.
So what if Joe Nobody has all the knowledge obtained by experience and good brains, but grew up in a poor family? With gas prices/dorm costs/rent costs/food costs/etc, many people simply don't have the financial ability to get that higher education. They're scraping by on their low-paying job, barely able to afford food, praying to work their way up to a higher wage through sheer seniority. If you can barely afford a few meals a day, the odds of you saving up thousands of dollars for a higher education is slim to nil.
There's student-loans of course, but those over here (and I know from personal experience) cover VERY little... most certainly not enough to pay for an entire degree. So you're stuck halfway through a degree with a metric ton of debt on your shoulders, have a low-paying job because you don't have that little sheet of paper that says you paid for four/five years of college, and have ever-increasing rent/utilities to deal with.
And god help you if after the first few years of college you realize that you despise what the degree you're working towards is becoming, and greatly want to change to something else? Well then you're screwed about a hundred times over.
Which would be where I am right now. YAY, Mr. Noodles for lunch again!
Words can't even describe how true that is. Kids these days are so coddled, they can literally punch, beat, and otherwise abuse their own parents (and many do... watch the loud, obnoxious kids with their parents in a mall sometime), and the parents have virtually no way of retalliating.
I guess it's probably better that I grew up in the country. Growing up, I had never even HEARD of family services. What I DID know was that if I caused trouble in school, my dad would give me a spanking, and I'd be damned before I caused that trouble again.
Except of course for the fact that the cellphone is in your pocket. Going by the theory that cellphones give you cancer, you'll get a nice tumor growing in your leg.
That, or the emissions from the cellphone will have to *gasp* travel another four feet and kill you regardless.