Abandoned Forum

[nil]

So the police in Boston thought the "Mooninites" were terrorists and they shut the bridges and blew up some of their icons and arrested two terrorists suspects

Here's a link to the news:
http://testpattern.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/01/31/46757.aspx

and here's a similar news regarding to "Mario Brothers terrorizing a small town in Ohio":
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/04/02/tiny-ohio-town-freaked-out-by-mario-prank/

Question is: Are you afraid of the Mooninites (Ignignokt and Err in the TV show Aqua teens)? Do you think they are terrorists? Also, are you afraid of the Mario Brothers? Do you think they are dangerous and possessed a threat to national security?

[hamster]

I think that in this day and age, when real and terrifying threats do exist, any half-brained six year old ought to know better than to pull off such a stunt.

And we can't blame it on the cartoon characters, just their goofball handlers.

I sometimes think abject stupidity must actually be produced by a bacterium, like ulcers, and its spreading into a pandemic.

[Pimienta]

did you know there were some put out in portland, Or and the coffee shops just brought them inside and named them

no thought of terrorist threat here

[hamster]

That's pretty foolish.

Don't they realize what liability they're risking, if those weird things turned out to be bombs or if they were canisters for some noxious gas?

Hey, it may sound far-fetched, but remember the cult people who sprayed germs into a salad bar a few years ago?

Seems to me some Trojans found a strange wooden horse outside their city a while back and thought it would be cool to bring it inside, too.

[nil]

When we are too cautious about things that need not to be cautious on, we often missed those things which desperately need to be cautious of.

Undiscriminated cautiousness is as dangerous as incautiousness.

Here's an example:
We have 2 Smoke Alarms:
A) Alarm A goes off 50% of the time when there is smoke, but 0% of the time when there is no smoke.
B) Alarm B goes off 100% of the time when there is smoke, but also goes off 5% of the time when there is no smoke.

Obviously, alarm B is more "cautious" than alarm A. But which alarm do you think is safer? Alarm A? or Alarm B?

[hamster]

Good grief, B is a much better alarm!

I want something in my house that responds every time there is smoke, even if that means sometimes it will beep when no smoke is present. I don't want to be in my bed asleep during the 50 percent of the time when it decides not to go off and my house happens to be on fire.

You voided your own point.

When we are too cautious about things that need not to be cautious on, we often missed those things which desperately need to be cautious of.

Undiscriminated cautiousness is as dangerous as incautiousness.

Here's an example:
We have 2 Smoke Alarms:
A) Alarm A goes off 50% of the time when there is smoke, but 0% of the time when there is no smoke.
B) Alarm B goes off 100% of the time when there is smoke, but also goes off 5% of the time when there is no smoke.

Obviously, alarm B is more "cautious" than alarm A. But which alarm do you think is safer? Alarm A? or Alarm B?

[nowhere man]

Sigh, I wish people could lighten up.
They weren;t trying to make a bomb threat or anything, they placed those advertisment in other cities, some cities got rid of some of them, some cities even said they saw no threat in them, and that they were perfectly harmless. This tells me that boston is full of a bunch of scardey cat tightwads.

[nil]

The reason that alarm B is an useless alarm is as following:

Suppose you are very unlucky, your house burnt down once every ten years. So out of 10 years, 365x10-1=3649 days, you don't have a fire.

Since Alarm B has 5% of false positive, so it will go off 3649 days x 5%=182 days (or 182/2650=4.99% of the time). In a 24 hours day, it will go off 1.1976 hours every day... in other words, your alarm will go off every 20 minutes....

In other words, one or more of the following will happen:
1) your neighbour will kill you (who won't want to kill a neighbour whose alarm goes off every 20 minutes ).
2) you will kill your self
3) you will buy a big hammer and kill the alarm
4) you will go insane
5) you will ignore the alarm (assume you didn't go insane)
6) you will be deprived of sleep (since the alarm wake you up every 20 minutes), and too exhausted to run when the fire finally comes....

In the best scenario, you will be killed by the fire anyway and more often you will be killed way before the fire kill you...

If that isn't enough imagine this: no girl will ever date you (who will date a guy whose alarm goes off every 20 minutes? ).

* the above example is call "Bayesian reasoning", in a survey 85% of doctors got the wrong answer to a modified form of the above example. I'll start a thread about that later.




Good grief, B is a much better alarm!

I want something in my house that responds every time there is smoke, even if that means sometimes it will beep when no smoke is present. I don't want to be in my bed asleep during the 50 percent of the time when it decides not to go off and my house happens to be on fire.

You voided your own point.



When we are too cautious about things that need not to be cautious on, we often missed those things which desperately need to be cautious of.

Undiscriminated cautiousness is as dangerous as incautiousness.

Here's an example:
We have 2 Smoke Alarms:
A) Alarm A goes off 50% of the time when there is smoke, but 0% of the time when there is no smoke.
B) Alarm B goes off 100% of the time when there is smoke, but also goes off 5% of the time when there is no smoke.

Obviously, alarm B is more "cautious" than alarm A. But which alarm do you think is safer? Alarm A? or Alarm B?

[Nobody]

Thats the problem with this terrorism stuff. You scare the hell out of the people enough and keep telling everyone that the next one is coming and you create a terrified populace.

The government couldn't have had a present better than 9/11.

And another thing, everyone tosses the word terrorism around like they know what it means. Nobody knows what it means.

Its fearmongering at its worst.

The most active terrorist organizations in America, according to the FBI , are the animal rights activists. For some reason, you never see terrorism "experts" talking about animal-rights activists.

This war on terror has been fraudulent from the get-go. You can't wage war on a tactic, and since there is no conceivable circumstance where all the terrorists in the world would collect in one convenient killing ground, you will never eliminate terrorists by military means.

Terrorism is a product of politics and of injustice, real or perceived. Since human beings have no choice but to act on their perceptions, whether the injustice is real or perceived doesn't matter.

Until we deal with the politics that created the "terrorism", it will never be defeated. Which I'm sure will do just fine for our rulers.

[Pimienta]

I've been wondering about how we would get rid of all the terrorrists too

and who decides whether a group is a bunch of terrorrist or a group of opressed civilians trying to make a change

I think that it was a step to make a perpetual war (almost like the one in 1984) because war time economy is great for the most part

[nowhere man]

So far, the iraq war was made the economy worse, not better.

[Pimienta]

yeah that's what I was thinking but in the past, almost every war has boosted it

whether or not there is a national debt is another matter completely though

[nowhere man]

every war? What abou veitnam? did that end with a finaancial gain.
My geuss is no

[Pimienta]

that's why I said almost

during both world wars, the economy was booming
although when the first one ended there was a bit of overspeculation
and there are other wars too but I'd need a history book to list them