It wasn't the water that bugged me. It was the callous certainty that you seemed to display in your defence. "I broke the rules because they were stupid and I KNOW BETTER." The facts that you are simultaneously a visitor to their country and a representative of yours be damned.
Also, the person above you was talking about going into electronics shops while drinking coke..... WAYYY worse than presumably outdoors with water. You on your own wouldn't have irritated me to such a degree.
Explain to me in logical generic terms why hand gestures are more offensive than bottled water. You can't. (If you were wondering, not eating while walking is similar to the idea of saying grace. It shows disrespect to the food/drink you are about to have. It deserves your attention and enjoyment. Rather than serving as a mere requirement to move forwards.)
"Perhaps I think its highly rude for a man to not hold a door for a woman. Should I get pissed at foreigners who don't do this?" Perhaps you misunderstood. It isn't about anger. It isn't about 'have to' or anything enforced. It isn't a requirement to enter a country. It is about how you want to present yourself.
If you go to japan and you drink beer while walking down a street and then litter. That is an option, you could do that. And you wouldn't get ejected from Japan. Service would be just as good and people would be polite to you (the majority). It isn't about what you have to do.
Alternatively you could go to Japan speak the few phrases you picked up. Bow when you are expected. Put money onto the stand rather than into the cashier's hands while purchasing things. Avoid eating or drinking while on the move.
You have both options available to you. And each presents a different kind of person. You choose how you wish to be perceived.
As for the man not holding a door open for a woman? You don't need to be pissed. But it would be better if they had kept the door open wouldn't it? I suppose, if you harbour the hope that men show some degree of chivalry in your country. That you should show some degree of respect in others.
I should say that water is fairly accepted. If you were drinking pop or juice and walking that might be a bit different. BUT, like I said, it isn't the act of carrying a bottle of water that was offensive. It was the pride carried in wilfully disregarding someone's culture while in their land. If you were merely unaware of the etiquette that would be entirely different.
Even so, there is a reason when you buy a laptop from some place like Dell the adaptor isn't under warranty. Because they break constantly! And replacements are around 50 bucks. If the cable were detachable that would lower cost of replacement to ~$5. Or if they were standardized (just the plug) then costs for the whole adaptor would still drop, maybe to $35 or $25.
:S My nerd pedantry went the opposite way with it. I assumed that they meant no external power supply. As in, no brick midway down your laptop cord. And I thought wow, what a prissy bitch. Putting a large heat generator inside the computer when it doesn't have to be is stupid. Just leave the damn thing as part of the power cable and get over it.
Though they need to have the brick-laptop cable be standardized and detachable. They break all the time and you generally have to replace the whole brick to fix it which is a horrific waste. Especially when the brick-wall part of the cord is detachable and never ever breaks. While they are at it make the actual connection to the computer standardized too.
True but vending machines in japan are a bit of a free market. It is still cooler using the 47" touch screen that talks to you than the other machines. So they may hold the market over the other machines in the area for a while.
Why aren't speed cameras everywhere? They can bust enough people to pay for themselves in an afternoon by busting every person over the speed limit. The fact that they aren't there is simply an admission by the government that the law is unfair. And that they have the limit set so low purely to have a tool to hassle people they choose to.
I guess you don't drive or you'd know that the vast vast majority of people speed. At least in Canada... regular traffic moves at 10-15km/hr above the speed limit.
And i understand cops will always be able to hassle you. But they shouldn't be able to effectively END your future. (In the case of something hilariously imbalanced like filesharing.)
1) No no. I hate manditory minimums. Pretty much all stats show that they are bad things. The majority of the unfairness occurs even before it gets to court before a judge. Setting manditory mins wouldn't help. I would perhaps set lawyer limits. Maybe you are only allowed to spend up to 100,000 on a court case or up to 3x your opponent. In a crude attempt to make courts more fair. But I hadn't thought that end of things through. I was just referring to the imbalance available to abuse in crimes that are constantly committed but rarely make it to court.
2) Well that is a worse problem... but it is not one to which I see an obvious solution. Either way it doesn't preclude us from working on the solution I've laid out.
3) Can't believe I'm going biblical on this but "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Are you sure that you have not gotten away with any crimes lately? Do you feel the punishment for those crimes would be just? Have you ever gone 5km/h over the speed limit? Have you pulled out without a seatbelt? Have you downloaded any music? Have you littered? Have you answered your phone while driving? Jaywalked? Biked on a sidewalk instead of the road? Smoked close to a building? Done any drugs? Run a red?..... I'm sure you've broken at least one law in the last week. Now if you seriously pissed off a cop. Or were hispanic/black/gay/... and the cops were bigots. Your chance of getting busted for any of those things just went up 20 fold. Would you have no sympathy then? Would you think 'oh well, crimes were committed'.
My solution is to not have large punishments available for common crimes that are rarely busted. You can approach this 3 ways. 1, lower the punishments. 2, increase the threshold before it is a crime (raise the speed limit, move jaywalking law to major roads only....). 3, massively step up charging, warn people first and then bust far more people than in past (go from charging 2% of people that speed to 80%). Cops are fine, I just don't see why they need the ability to abuse people.
i tl;dr'ed my own post but put it at the top since i doubt anyone would see it at the bottom. I really went over the standard limitations for post length.
tl;dr Laws with huge penalties only applied to a small percentage of the people committing the crime serves ONLY to give a tool to corrupt people in charge to pursue their opponents personal or political.
Laws that cannot be/are not applied to the majority of people committing them should be re-thought.
Speeding is an example of this. On any major road you go on you may notice that the majority of people are breaking the law. And the majority of them are not getting busted. This means the law is wrong or broken. If we believed that it were right we'd bust every single person coming down the road. So what does this make the law? A tool for the corrupt. Cops can follow someone and bust them for speeding even though everyone does it. They can charge and harass anyone they dislike. File-sharing is the same thing. If the government doesn't like someone then check them for file-sharing, it is near certain someone in the family does it and you can ping them for a few hundred grand.
Even ignoring personal motivations it unevenly applies the law. If you steal something then you have a decent shot at getting busted no matter who you steal from. At least it isn't terribly unbalanced. But for file-sharing, if you copy from / anger the wrong person your punishment has a chance to spike incredibly. This is why the MAFIAA title fits so well. Copying from some random person means little, there is little to no chance you will ever get busted, no chance to get charged and if you do the charge will be minimal. But if you take from the MAFIAA and get busted you risk losing your whole future. (Much like taking from the mafia)
DDoS falls into the same category as file-sharing. It happens daily. If you run a web server and ever annoyed anyone it has probably happened to you. It is part of life. The % of people that get busted is what?.001%? BUT because he DDoSed politicians he got hit. This is a horribly uneven application of the law. So it needs to be rethought.
So, if most people that broke the DDoS got busted. What would be a fair punishment? 2.5 years seems really long in that context. Depending on the scale it could range from a small charge to years in jail perhaps (the majority of them under a week or two in jail). But I don't think that the only goal should be 'putting fear into the hearts of the people', otherwise a death sentence would suffice.
You might also want to ask yourself what level of unevenness in the application of the law are you willing to accept? Chances you will get justice on a robbery might be 10% of someone else's. For hit and runs it might be as good as 50%. But for crimes like going 5mi/hr over the speed limit there are people that might have 100x the likelihood of being written up. For DDoSing, depending on who you annoy it could be 10000x as likely. File sharing may be as uneven as 100,000x.
In a just society I would be able to drive around in a car that had 'pigs are fags' painted on the side and not have a higher chance of getting busted. The police shouldn't have the ability to do so, or we should work to minimize it. By supporting these types of rarely applied heavy punishments for common crimes you are handing over tools to abuse the people.
Last time I got summons I put on the forms that my father was a lawyer and it exempted me. The theory is that if you are predisposed to how the law works you are more likely to follow the law's lead (tunnel vision). Or worse, you'd be advising the other jurors. They want you to be going with your gut.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian. But I've heard similar stories from other people. So I assume it is the same in at least some states.
There are also hardship exemptions, which enable white collar workers to get out of it if they choose. And generally speaking the more educated/informed you are the more loopholes there are to get out of jury duty.
The only people that remain are activists that went because they wish to. And people that failed at avoiding it.
TLDR: Juries are not a perfect cross-section of citizenry.
In case you weren't aware of this you are ineligible to be a juror if you are a lawyer or related to one. You can also become ineligible if you are a professional in a white collar job. I think the system is designed from the outset to have a jury of people too stupid to get out of jury duty. Why? I have no idea.
She worked as natural resources coordinator for a native tribe of 4,000. I'd be surprised if she made 25k/yr before taxes not to mention rent or other living costs. So even the 1st verdict would be 11 years of wages. Unless she lived like a hobo she would likely never pay that off. Later judgments were 96 years, lowered to 2.5 years. This trial is more like 75 years.
Rape and murder offer lesser time. (I understand that economic slavery is not quite prison)
Thanks for informing me! I still think the guy is dangerous. But not batshit crazy. Hard to keep your head sometimes, though I'm not usually one to get all worked up and swayed by emotions this was one of those times.
Seriously. The article is about games being too easy catering to people that suck at games. And someone suggests multiplayer. And you whine that you can't win? Too funny.
Slashdot Mirror
You could always get your own email address and then feed that through google's.... oh wait. my bad.
It wasn't the water that bugged me. It was the callous certainty that you seemed to display in your defence. "I broke the rules because they were stupid and I KNOW BETTER." The facts that you are simultaneously a visitor to their country and a representative of yours be damned.
Also, the person above you was talking about going into electronics shops while drinking coke..... WAYYY worse than presumably outdoors with water. You on your own wouldn't have irritated me to such a degree.
They wear medical masks when they are sick to protect you from them. How is doing a service for you an insult? (Just curious)
Explain to me in logical generic terms why hand gestures are more offensive than bottled water. You can't. (If you were wondering, not eating while walking is similar to the idea of saying grace. It shows disrespect to the food/drink you are about to have. It deserves your attention and enjoyment. Rather than serving as a mere requirement to move forwards.)
"Perhaps I think its highly rude for a man to not hold a door for a woman. Should I get pissed at foreigners who don't do this?"
Perhaps you misunderstood. It isn't about anger. It isn't about 'have to' or anything enforced. It isn't a requirement to enter a country. It is about how you want to present yourself.
If you go to japan and you drink beer while walking down a street and then litter. That is an option, you could do that. And you wouldn't get ejected from Japan. Service would be just as good and people would be polite to you (the majority). It isn't about what you have to do.
Alternatively you could go to Japan speak the few phrases you picked up. Bow when you are expected. Put money onto the stand rather than into the cashier's hands while purchasing things. Avoid eating or drinking while on the move.
You have both options available to you. And each presents a different kind of person. You choose how you wish to be perceived.
As for the man not holding a door open for a woman? You don't need to be pissed. But it would be better if they had kept the door open wouldn't it? I suppose, if you harbour the hope that men show some degree of chivalry in your country. That you should show some degree of respect in others.
I should say that water is fairly accepted. If you were drinking pop or juice and walking that might be a bit different. BUT, like I said, it isn't the act of carrying a bottle of water that was offensive. It was the pride carried in wilfully disregarding someone's culture while in their land. If you were merely unaware of the etiquette that would be entirely different.
Even so, there is a reason when you buy a laptop from some place like Dell the adaptor isn't under warranty. Because they break constantly! And replacements are around 50 bucks. If the cable were detachable that would lower cost of replacement to ~$5. Or if they were standardized (just the plug) then costs for the whole adaptor would still drop, maybe to $35 or $25.
I think you missed the "$20" fee... preaching to the choir man.
Apple had a soul too. Back when Woz was involved.
:S My nerd pedantry went the opposite way with it. I assumed that they meant no external power supply. As in, no brick midway down your laptop cord. And I thought wow, what a prissy bitch. Putting a large heat generator inside the computer when it doesn't have to be is stupid. Just leave the damn thing as part of the power cable and get over it.
Though they need to have the brick-laptop cable be standardized and detachable. They break all the time and you generally have to replace the whole brick to fix it which is a horrific waste. Especially when the brick-wall part of the cord is detachable and never ever breaks. While they are at it make the actual connection to the computer standardized too.
True but vending machines in japan are a bit of a free market. It is still cooler using the 47" touch screen that talks to you than the other machines. So they may hold the market over the other machines in the area for a while.
GJ you two. Mighty big of you, visiting other people's countries and wilfully showing poor manners. You seem so proud. Represent your country well.
Why aren't speed cameras everywhere? They can bust enough people to pay for themselves in an afternoon by busting every person over the speed limit. The fact that they aren't there is simply an admission by the government that the law is unfair. And that they have the limit set so low purely to have a tool to hassle people they choose to.
I guess you don't drive or you'd know that the vast vast majority of people speed. At least in Canada... regular traffic moves at 10-15km/hr above the speed limit.
And i understand cops will always be able to hassle you. But they shouldn't be able to effectively END your future. (In the case of something hilariously imbalanced like filesharing.)
1) No no. I hate manditory minimums. Pretty much all stats show that they are bad things. The majority of the unfairness occurs even before it gets to court before a judge. Setting manditory mins wouldn't help. I would perhaps set lawyer limits. Maybe you are only allowed to spend up to 100,000 on a court case or up to 3x your opponent. In a crude attempt to make courts more fair. But I hadn't thought that end of things through. I was just referring to the imbalance available to abuse in crimes that are constantly committed but rarely make it to court.
2) Well that is a worse problem... but it is not one to which I see an obvious solution. Either way it doesn't preclude us from working on the solution I've laid out.
3) Can't believe I'm going biblical on this but "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Are you sure that you have not gotten away with any crimes lately? Do you feel the punishment for those crimes would be just? Have you ever gone 5km/h over the speed limit? Have you pulled out without a seatbelt? Have you downloaded any music? Have you littered? Have you answered your phone while driving? Jaywalked? Biked on a sidewalk instead of the road? Smoked close to a building? Done any drugs? Run a red?..... I'm sure you've broken at least one law in the last week. Now if you seriously pissed off a cop. Or were hispanic/black/gay/... and the cops were bigots. Your chance of getting busted for any of those things just went up 20 fold. Would you have no sympathy then? Would you think 'oh well, crimes were committed'.
My solution is to not have large punishments available for common crimes that are rarely busted. You can approach this 3 ways. 1, lower the punishments. 2, increase the threshold before it is a crime (raise the speed limit, move jaywalking law to major roads only....). 3, massively step up charging, warn people first and then bust far more people than in past (go from charging 2% of people that speed to 80%). Cops are fine, I just don't see why they need the ability to abuse people.
i tl;dr'ed my own post but put it at the top since i doubt anyone would see it at the bottom. I really went over the standard limitations for post length.
tl;dr Laws with huge penalties only applied to a small percentage of the people committing the crime serves ONLY to give a tool to corrupt people in charge to pursue their opponents personal or political.
.001%? BUT because he DDoSed politicians he got hit. This is a horribly uneven application of the law. So it needs to be rethought.
Laws that cannot be/are not applied to the majority of people committing them should be re-thought.
Speeding is an example of this. On any major road you go on you may notice that the majority of people are breaking the law. And the majority of them are not getting busted. This means the law is wrong or broken. If we believed that it were right we'd bust every single person coming down the road. So what does this make the law? A tool for the corrupt. Cops can follow someone and bust them for speeding even though everyone does it. They can charge and harass anyone they dislike. File-sharing is the same thing. If the government doesn't like someone then check them for file-sharing, it is near certain someone in the family does it and you can ping them for a few hundred grand.
Even ignoring personal motivations it unevenly applies the law. If you steal something then you have a decent shot at getting busted no matter who you steal from. At least it isn't terribly unbalanced. But for file-sharing, if you copy from / anger the wrong person your punishment has a chance to spike incredibly. This is why the MAFIAA title fits so well. Copying from some random person means little, there is little to no chance you will ever get busted, no chance to get charged and if you do the charge will be minimal. But if you take from the MAFIAA and get busted you risk losing your whole future. (Much like taking from the mafia)
DDoS falls into the same category as file-sharing. It happens daily. If you run a web server and ever annoyed anyone it has probably happened to you. It is part of life. The % of people that get busted is what?
So, if most people that broke the DDoS got busted. What would be a fair punishment? 2.5 years seems really long in that context. Depending on the scale it could range from a small charge to years in jail perhaps (the majority of them under a week or two in jail). But I don't think that the only goal should be 'putting fear into the hearts of the people', otherwise a death sentence would suffice.
You might also want to ask yourself what level of unevenness in the application of the law are you willing to accept? Chances you will get justice on a robbery might be 10% of someone else's. For hit and runs it might be as good as 50%. But for crimes like going 5mi/hr over the speed limit there are people that might have 100x the likelihood of being written up. For DDoSing, depending on who you annoy it could be 10000x as likely. File sharing may be as uneven as 100,000x.
In a just society I would be able to drive around in a car that had 'pigs are fags' painted on the side and not have a higher chance of getting busted. The police shouldn't have the ability to do so, or we should work to minimize it. By supporting these types of rarely applied heavy punishments for common crimes you are handing over tools to abuse the people.
TL;DR:
Google is just as bad. Some of the people using their service have bad policy. And Apple is retarded.
How is this Google's fault exactly?
I don't believe the post you replied to was a real person...
"Now people are raving about the Kinect while their Wii's gather dust."
Last time I got summons I put on the forms that my father was a lawyer and it exempted me. The theory is that if you are predisposed to how the law works you are more likely to follow the law's lead (tunnel vision). Or worse, you'd be advising the other jurors. They want you to be going with your gut.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian. But I've heard similar stories from other people. So I assume it is the same in at least some states.
There are also hardship exemptions, which enable white collar workers to get out of it if they choose. And generally speaking the more educated/informed you are the more loopholes there are to get out of jury duty.
The only people that remain are activists that went because they wish to. And people that failed at avoiding it.
TLDR: Juries are not a perfect cross-section of citizenry.
In case you weren't aware of this you are ineligible to be a juror if you are a lawyer or related to one. You can also become ineligible if you are a professional in a white collar job. I think the system is designed from the outset to have a jury of people too stupid to get out of jury duty. Why? I have no idea.
She worked as natural resources coordinator for a native tribe of 4,000. I'd be surprised if she made 25k/yr before taxes not to mention rent or other living costs. So even the 1st verdict would be 11 years of wages. Unless she lived like a hobo she would likely never pay that off. Later judgments were 96 years, lowered to 2.5 years. This trial is more like 75 years.
Rape and murder offer lesser time. (I understand that economic slavery is not quite prison)
I read "A Robot In Every Korean Kindergartener By 2013? " Wayyyy scarier.
Explain to me the logical fallacy. In fact link me to an explanation of the specific fallacy to which you refer.
Thanks for informing me! I still think the guy is dangerous. But not batshit crazy. Hard to keep your head sometimes, though I'm not usually one to get all worked up and swayed by emotions this was one of those times.
My stove has a button to 'STOP TIME'! Top that!
OK, Rand Paul was witness to his supporters holding down and stomping on a woman. He did not stop it nor denounce it after being pressed on it.
It doesn't matter if the doe thing is defensible. He has a lot of stupid and terrifying things he supports to choose from.
Says a NOOB.
Seriously. The article is about games being too easy catering to people that suck at games. And someone suggests multiplayer. And you whine that you can't win? Too funny.