I believe some compensation is in order
$666 ought to cover it.
569 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2011
Shirley the study could also demonstrate a relationship between people who are conservative types who abhor pornography (and therefore won't admit to watching it in a survey/interview) and, being conservative types, abhor gay marriage (and therefore won't support it)?
A more accurate conclusion to the study, I believe, would be "conservative prudes who say they don't watch porn have a tendency to be opposed to gay marriage as well".
Which more or less tells us what we already know. Ultimately though, the study seems fairly broad and nonsensical - conducting a survey about what many perceive to be sensitive personal stuff will only ever produce a result that demonstrates people's refusal to be truthful in such matters - the way the questions are presented will, as always, have a large impact on the result of the study, and people have a tendency to give answers that show them in the light they want to be shown in, rather than how they actually are.
Philip Lew- I mean, Code Monkey, has it ever occurred to you that maybe there are just a lot of people who don't like Stainless Games' products, and prefer those of their competitors?
When people feel the need to defend their beloved Stainless Games by dismissing everyone who doesn't adore them as "Stainless haters", it reminds me of the term "Suppressive Person" used by certain other fanatics.
I know the value that lies in a phone that doesn't try and slide off every surface on which it is placed. I'm fairly certain the Nexus actually levitates a few nanometers off any surface, thus allowing it to slide off a seemingly flat desk when a call is received.
While I hardly think Apple and Android will be too worried at this stage, I think they'll be watching over their shoulder to see how the market reacts - it's be Microsoft who really should be paying attention, since they seem to be a bit more "business oriented" in their marketing, and have the most to lose from business-types going back to Blackberry.
"I don't understand what her three strikes were?
Does this mean you can get three strikes for downloading a single song?"
"Rhianna’s Man Down and Hot Chelle Ray’s Tonight Tonight"
^Those were the first two strikes. The third one was actually feeling the desire to download them.
I was hoping theyd just do a Dick Smith-style piss-taking advertisment, playing on the smuttier aspects of the acronym "RIM":
- I've been waiting years to get RIMmed again!
-My girlfriend is RIMming me for my birthday!
or even just job advertising application - RIMjobs, perhaps?
Back to the phone though, I'd like to see it take a piece of the market, competition is always a good thing, and whilst they're not for everyone (including myself), Blackberry, whilst not good at everything, seem to be focusing on doing a few things well.
If they're being shared between classrooms already occupied with "old, low-powered PC's" then the monitors, keyboards and mice are already there.
True, embedded device excludes usage as PC or media player - but I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard for the school to get their hands on more to replace them - if indeed the students are finding useful applications for them and making use of them as embedded devices then obviously it was a good idea to put them in schools in the first place, and the small additional investment from the school to increase the numbers of Pi's would be a very intelligent one.
Purely from the perspective of letting schools know that there are alternatives to constantly updating PC's in classrooms, having a "sample" of Pi's saves schools money in the long run - if a school decides, as you already have, that they're not suitable, then the school hasn't lost anything. If they decide there's a good use for them, they've got potential savings - since populating the entire school with them would be cheaper than the purchase of a few desktops.
Regarding how many are going to each school, that depends on the implementation - it's entirely possible that they could be going to a small portion of schools in less well off areas, or on a first come first served basis, or distributed evenly - trying to convince yourself that it's pointless and fruitless doesn't necessarily make it so.
I think the advantage over existing computers is
a) kids can be left with them more or less unattended without the hard drive filling up with virii and porn
b) The Pi's can be bricked at little cost to the school
c) Can double as embedded devices, media players, small PC's - generally as a learning tool they offer the flexibility that desktops don't.
d) the pi's can be taken home by students, taken from class to class, don't require large amounts of labour to get them to school classrooms, don't require large amounts of power, don't require an entire classroom to be dedicated to them, don't require setup on the same level as desktops, are less of a target for thieves...
So there's quite a few advantages.
It may be a bit of a token efffort by Google standards, but any donation to a school in the name of education can hardly be frowned upon - and it's more than most other big tech companies are doing.
Unfortunately they're also the type of people who refuse to listen to anything other than their own opinion - until someone misquotes (or worse, confuses with similar-but-different franchises) their favourite series. Then the wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues, and you know it's time to get the popcorn.
Personally I'm looking forward to the adventures of James T. Kirk on the Warship Enterprise, boldly going to infinity and beyond. I just hope they can escape the emperor!
It's a sad reflection of Trekkies' obsession with anal details that for another Star Trek movie to get produced, the director had to turn it into a space-faring version of Primer in order to comply with the sacred, unmodifiable, and now pretty ridiculous "canon" - followed by the inevitable wailing from fans because the new movie failed to take into account the direction in which Captain Kirk farted during a rehearsal for a deleted scene in an episode from the original TV series.
The US's paranoia regarding Huawei's business practices & partners lends a lot of credence to your theory, I think - In some ways a buyout by the Chinese (and all Chinese are the same when it comes to US security it seems, Huawei, or Lenovo, or ZTE or whoever) could be the last nail in the coffin for RIM as their last solid area of the market (gov) moves to something... more "homegrown" (or at least home-friendly).
It's true that they don't just make their own, but it makes business sense to use ones they make where possible - enough to affect the statistics. Also keep in mind that Apple buys chips from Samsung - so for every few chips Apple purchases, Samsung makes a few cents, a fact that the stats don't convey.
And whilst Sammy makes cheap phones (in an extremely packed market, where they have little market share), Apple makes cheap ipods and unlike Samsung, Apple still own a very large chunk of the cheap mp3 player market.
Apple's share price dropping after posting good profits is no less idiotic than it's share price jumping because some chinese factory made a new screen protector.
Ultimately the quarterly statement tells us what has happened, not what is going to happen - that's for the analysts and stock brokers to decide - and the stock market appears to have decided that the sheen is coming off Apple.
Whilst I get along just fine with all (well...most) of my co-workers, none are "connected" to me outside business hours. If we want to catch up outside work, it's organised face to face - as far as I'm concerned, we spend 40 hours a week together, if my co-workers or employer need to tell me anything, there's ample time to do it without disclosing the rest of my personal life through social media.
Also, if a prospective employer wants to see my entire personal life before employing me, they're obviously not that interested in the skills I'm bringing to the job, and if they're not honest enough to come out and simply say that, I'll look elsewhere.
Exactly how many of today's children were offended, or felt violated by this? Presumably none, since the vast majority have no idea who the fuck Jimmy Saville is.
Some people must sit by the telephone, with the Telegraph's number on speed dial (just behind the button for the Daily Mail) waiting with baited breath for an opportunity to be outraged. I feel sorry for "concerned father", who must spend his days rocking back and forth in a dark room worrying about the filth that exists outside his sanitised walls, trying to determine the best way of erasing any memory his children may have of Jimmy Saville from the last 18 months (because before then it Wasn't His Fault (tm) that he exposed his children to Jimmy Saville).
"the anti-gun crowd argue that..." Sorry, who exactly are you arguing with?! Apparently I "fail, fail fail" because you've decided to attack a different argument?! Strawmen don't come any more patently obvious than that.
Switzerland proves that a militia can be an effective *alternative* to an massive armed force - not that people need to keep an AR-15 under the bed in case Obama steals your children. As I said, there's a cultural difference there - the difference means that the average US citizens' "need" for guns is non-existent.
"Who is poised to invade Switzerland" - Hence having a militia, *IN STEAD OF* a massive full time defence force. Your almost schizophrenic use of the word "fail" is becoming woefully ironic.
Your idea is that we should "treat" moody teens - and how exactly? Teens are moody, in no small part, due to hormones. Perhaps we should chemically castrate them all? Get rid of those pesky hormones altogether? Treatment first requires diagnosis - and it's the diagnosis which, around the world, we struggle with. In the wonderful world of internet politics it may be a magic bullet, but in the real world much of the diagnosis you think needs to be implemented simply doesn't exist - it's like claiming that we can stop car accidents if only people would start using flying cars.
You keep assuming that mental instability is the only issue - that the only reason anyone goes on a shooting spree is because, if we looked hard enough, we'd find a big mark on their forehead that said "TREAT ME". The reality is that a lot of shootings are impulsive - and people act impulsively all the time - but when you add guns in to the mix, impulsive actions become deadly. It's not mental instability - it's the way people are. For example, I'm sure you didn't mean to come off as an arrogant arsehole in your last post, but you thought someone was wrong on the internet, got fired up, and machinegunned away on your keyboard, presumably foaming at the mouth whist the letters F-A-I-L were forced into the PCB, without so much as a pause for thought.
Treatment isn't something that can be implemented quickly - particularly in the US, where the concept of giving help to people who need it is obviously a commie construct designed to steal their precious bodily fluids. Removing guns from the equation immediately eliminates a large part of the threat from people going on a shooting spree, and even if a keyboard warrior gets fired up enough to complain about having his guns "taken away" for 7 pages on an internet forum, well I think thats a small price to pay for the safety of millions of american children.
I keep hearing pro-gun types complain when comparisons are made to other countries and their gun statistics - how quickly things change when one of them thinks they've got a valid argument.
Whilst the Swiss keep a militia, it serves *in stead of* a large military force - it isn't there because people like to play with guns, it's there because, unlike the US, they don't spend over half a trillion each year maintaining a full time army/navy/air force/special forces - the role performed by Swiss militia is to defend the country - not to entertain some type of immature (in colonial terms) fear of a new born country being held hostage by its own government.
Also, whilst there may not be as many "nutters going on sprees" in Switzerland, the suicide rate per 100,000 is 24.8 for men, and 11.4 for women. Compare that to the US (where you claim the nutters are) and that rate is 17.7 for men and 4.5 for women (source: http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide_rates/en/). Whilst not a concrete indicator of mental health, it nonetheless serves as a demonstration of the fact that there's a great deal of mental health issues in Switzerland - but, as you pointed out, they're not going killing each other before they kill themselves.
Mental health by itself isn't necessarily the issue - it's the culture of the US that needs to change, and tightening gun laws are the only way that's going to happen.
Sounds like a fairly backwards and poorly thought out amendment then - something that should have had a corollary added many decades ago. There comes a point when the ability to kill 30 people without reloading or even pausing to cock a hammer is stupidly excessive - If you could go back and show the lawmakers a SAW with a 200 round magazine, or an assault rifle, or even an SMG they'd probably consider making the law a bit more specific.
The idea that current weapons are still "in the spirit" of a law made over 200 years ago requires massive leaps of faith that aren't, by any stretch, able to be made with any merit.
Yup, everyone wants to be a vigilante. And pro-gun advocates seem to believe that if both the "good guy" and the "bad guy" have a gun, then that makes things even and the problem cancels itself out - but there's still the possibility that someone with a gun:
a) Will use it where it's not necessary, which turns them into a "bad guy" according to the nightly news
b) Will freeze up and not use it, in which case the gun hasn't eliminated the perceived threat.
Building on the notion of "taking human life becomes the solution to every imagined problem" is the fact that a gun makes every impulsive action a lethal one. If someone has a gun in the house and catches his wife/girlfriend cheating, it's all too easy to mow down the girl, the lover, the family and finally himself. Whilst he may still act impulsively, and may still kill someone without the gun, it takes a lot more thought - pulling a trigger is in itself removed from the effect of the gun. punching someone to death requires a force equal to the effect - usually people come ot their senses or are at least able to assault someone with varying levels of damage but I've never seen someone "only half shoot" a victim, or vary the level of power in the gun whilst they're killing.
The laws being passed by Obama are explicitly targeting the "give us the big guns" group (and they' not a minority, they've got massive political and financial backing).
Sport shooting is a great idea IMO, I see it as being like any other sport, probably on the same level as motorsport.
But just like motorsport, it's something that should be restricted to a closed, monitored setting. In any case, the issues being discussed in the article aren't talking about banning sports shooting, they're about getting assault rifles out of people's homes. The fact that legislation even has to be passed in order to do such a thing is pretty sad.
One aspect of gun ownership that supporters seem to forget about is the power trip that it appears to give people - Sure, if we take away guns then it would be *possible* for someone to take out other people with a knife, baseball bat, pencil, etc. But Holding a pencil doesn't give the feeling of invincibility that holding a gun does, it doesn't have the intimidation factor, nor the sense of being in the position of power in a given situation. Replace a gunman with a guy holding a knife, or whatever, and suddenly not only the assailant but the prospective victims no longer see him as having the ability to inflict damage the way he would have with a gun.
When someone goes out to mow down civilians with an assault rifle, they're obviously not expecting them to be packing bazookas - the assumption that is made before they even step outside is that they're going to be the ones in control of the situation, and that they're going to be able to control things - replace the gun with something less intimidating and I'm betting that there will be a lot of people who wouldn't have even tried to massacre people in the first place.
I'm sure those lovely people at the MPAA would go out of their way to allow the study to extend to violent movies, or to change ratings to prevent the ability of images of people being shot, stabbed and killed to be shown to minors as long as there's no blood on screen. I've heard such wonderful things about the MPAA, and seen their press releases about how they're interested in protecting their viewers - my only fear is that they won't have enough influence amongst politicians to effect any changes to existing law, and that politicians will ignore their generous campaign contributions and act independently of the wishes of the MPAA.
Said no-one, ever.
To see if someone can manage to blame Sony for this one too...
Seriously though, it's a bit of a catch-22 - you need batteries for electronics, but the more batteries, the increased risk of one of something going wrong/melting down/exploding and destroying the electronics - which, because everything relies on electronics, makes flying the plane difficult/impossible, which prompts the need for more failsafes/backups/redundancies, which requires more electronics, which requires more batteries...
Does anyone know (I'm sure many here do) if they're still required to have analog instrument backups in place? or have they been phased out completely?
The sad fact is that most science fiction neglects to take into account (heh) the existence of accountants. Once you factor them in, 2001: A Space Odyssey becomes a 2 1/2 hour spreadsheet presentation about whether HAL really needs all of those memory banks, and that by downsizing the escape pods (and associated room) the total project cost can be reduced by 0.3%.
I still can't figure out if that website is a parody or not.... Some of the stuff there is more hilarious than the fake reviews on amazon - "These layers are one of the reasons that the cable takes a while to "settle" back in after it has been moved, or unplugged..."
At least I can be safe in the knowledge that my USB cable will have ultra pure CFDCT-UP-OCC-Ag conductors; the ones in my last cable were only 99% CFDCT-UP-OCC-Ag.
Of course! Because those thieves would simply disappear off the streets and become priests and social workers if we "removed" a large chunk of the overall statistics.
Whilst Apple products are (probably) targeted because they're quick movers and have good 2nd hand resale, people aren't stealing them *because* they're Apple products, they're stealing because those products allow thieves to make a quick profit. Remove the apple products and it'd be whatever other product had taken their place as the "in" thing that was being stolen.
What are the odds? senator tell people that the thing everyone loves (guns) actually isn't the problem - it's those terrible, sinful things the bible was talking about that are the issue!
There seems to be a belief that people who perpetrate these murders have a big target above their heads, and creep around in black and white striped outfits waiting to strike... The idea that everyone having guns is a form of "protection" only works as long as you know that no-one with a gun would ever commit a murder.
The reality is that any Freedom Loving American (tm) has the potential to go on a rampage, and whilst the papers and newsstands will proclaim that it was "obvious" that he was going to be a killer, and point to a bunch of meaningless facts that supposedly demonstrate why he was a "bad guy", he obviously seemed normal enough up until the moment he pulled the trigger.
It's the Us and Them mentality that makes people think that guns are the solution, but eventually they'll have to realise that the mass murderers are being recruited from their own ranks of "ordinary decent citizens".