This is a very good point. Both my grandfathers passed away when I was young (i.e. before I took any important exams), whereas both my grandmothers are still alive and kicking.
Interestingly, with each search I'd click through to the user account, search for another of the tweets made by the same account, and find yet more unique fake accounts. I started compiling a list, but gave up when it reached a few hundred.
As much as my personal beliefs align with Aaron's and I am saddened by his passing, I think people are being more than a little disingenuous in their references to the charges he was facing.
I'd understand the indignation if we were talking about an actual sentence, but these were just charges. The maximum possible sentence for those charges might be dizzying, but realistically, Aaeron was never going to be handed the maximum.
> At some level you do have to blame him. No, not for downloading files but rather for making the decision to end his life. Nobody but him made that decision.
At the risk of being branded insensitive, I do have to agree with this sentiment. My view on Aaron's suicide is much the same as that of the nurse Jacintha Saldanha last month [1].
In both cases, these people were subjected to incredible stress and anguish by external forces, but crucially, the reasonable person could not have predicted their response to these pressures would have been to take their own lives.
Aaron wasn't on suicide watch. Nobody foresaw this.
At the same time, I assume a standard like that only applies to people designing drainage systems for sale within the EU.
Presumably if you are a corporation looking to design and sell drainage systems, £720 to gain access to the relevant standards is a relatively small cost in the grand scheme of things.
> [...] the contestant will send me a decompressor and a compressed file, which will together total in size less than the original data file, and which will be able to restore the compressed file to the original state.
Because it is ubiquitous, there is constant demand for it, a consistently high retail price, and there are plenty of retailers willing to fence it in large quantities.
Risk compensation is observed all over, and is often subconscious.
You carry pepper spray, you figure you've got things covered if you happen to be attacked, so you're prepared to accept a slightly increased risk of being attacked as a trade-off for other benefits (e.g. saving money on a taxi home, or time by taking a shortcut down an alleyway)
A few obvious drawbacks without even reading into the subject:
1) The additional sense of security may lead people carrying pepper spray to take more risks, to travel through more dangerous places, etc. (risk compensation, a la bicycle helmets)
2) Few people who carry pepper spray have received appropriate training in its use, and even those who are appropriately trained will take a not-insignificant amount of time to retrieve and effectively deploy it;
3) The person using pepper spray is almost certainly going to fall victim to the pepper spray themselves, hindering their escape from the attacker;
4) The use of pepper spray is likely to anger an attacker, leading to an escalation in violence; even if the attacker has difficulty seeing as a result of the spray, they may still inflict an awful lot of harm on their victim;
5) In the worst case scenario, in fumbling to retrieve and deploy pepper spray, it may be snatched by the attacker and used against the victim.
There was recently a similar issue with the article for the singer Paloma Faith. To cut a long story short, Ms Faith claimed to have been born in 1985, and given that she claimed this fairly consistently, it was reported as fact in a range of publications.
Every official record, however, has her date of birth in 1981. On the talk page for the article, people were producing her record on the births index, on company incorporation documents, there was even someone who went to school with Ms Faith confirming she was born in 1981.
In the last couple of weeks the case went to dispute resolution and the issue has finally been resolved (i.e. her date of birth has been changed to 1981), but I was shocked by how pedantic certain users were being, refusing to correct the issue for technical reasons (the official documents are not accessible free-of-charge so could not be used as references, etc.)
There are a few parallels here with the logo for the London 2012 Olympics. When the brand was announced in 2007, it was slated.
80% of the public gave it the lowest possible rating, people were outraged about the cost, newspapers ran competitions for their readers to create their own logos, and an animated version of the logo was reported to cause epileptic seizures.
The officials in charge stuck to their guns, and five years down the line I think it's fair to say the branding was a huge success. High impact, instantly memorable, and yet hugely versatile.
As the author of this article points out, the logo was just a small part of a much larger branding strategy.
To me, the notion of marriage flies in the face of this basic observation. How can you possibly commit to spending the rest of your life with someone when you know so little about how they will change, intentionally or not?
> The 'think of the children' argument is pretty strong here. We all know the stats: kids from single-parent families tend to grow up in more negative environments, tend towards worse outcomes.
This sounds like selection bias to me.
At present, in Western society at least, members of certain socioeconomic classes are significantly more likely to become single parents, and it is likely the socioeconomic conditions their children grow up in that have the most significant effect on their outcomes.
Conversely, abusive relationships and unhappy marriages also provide negative environments for children to grow up in. A future in which relationships are more fluid could reduce the number of children growing up in these environments.