Vegas is a great place to get a cheap but good hotel room and has legal weed, they’re moving to more of a resort in the desert with legal weed thing, and with cheap solar energy on the horizon plus Elon’s battery technology they stand poised to use their outsize share of the Colorado river water rights to become a cyberpunk paradise. Please don’t use IEDs on the casino, some of us are just their for the neon aesthetic. (But do feel free to nudge them via legislation to make them nonsmoking IMHO)
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Futility Closet podcast did a fine job telling this story.
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Yeah I’m usually there for a convention. I made a stab at poker but I have allergies so I can’t sit still well from the smoke, might play with sportsbetting, but half the fun is watching the game and again… the smoke.
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A single link to Damn Interesting can lead to hours-long deep dives through the site.
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I am, and as a holder of the Coveted Pendant, I have a license to do so.
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Well, I can guarantee you that their insurance company lost…
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Well, I know from TV and movies that all terrorists and criminals make use of their industry standard color coded wiring, so disabling such things is merely a matter of deciding the correct color of wire to cut - no other information about the device is required. Just cut the correct color and a highly visible countdown timer will stop counting down - some sort of normally closed pause circuit that all terrorist criminal timers have (they must all order them from the same supplier). Easy peasy.
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Nah. If they do it right, it’s nothing to be mad about
If they do it wrong there’s very suddenly nobody to be mad.
So, why worry
Least of all one that’s so fugly.
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“Unique” by definition, after all, means
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I started off reading about this guy who has a family but spends a lot of time at a casino, loses a lot of money (which is pretty inevitable on simple statistics), blames the casino rather than himself, and then involves his family in a complicated plot to get his revenge. At this point my sympathy for him is about zero. And then, as I read abut the bomb itself, and the care and planning that went into it, I found myself rooting for the guy.
This is a general failing of engineers. You can have a decent human being, but add the talent to look for solutions to problems, and the beauty of the solution can become a thing in itself. Oppenheimer understood this. Be careful out there, fellow Boingers, and never lose sight of the big picture.
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what is all the fuss about
My sympathy was zero well before that, from right about the time he drove his wife to a nervous seizure and beat his kids. Involving his family in a revenge plot, who seem to have at least initially participated voluntarily, is small potatoes in comparison.
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If it’s not a badge, I would expect it’s not also a license. And also not a license.
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Nice try.
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I disagree. Unique means one of a kind. However, being one of a kind can come with degrees of how different it is from other things. Every single cheerio is unique. But I would not call them very unique, because each cheerio is substantially similar to every other one. They are not unique in a way that matters to us or that is strikingly differen from other Cheerios, or even from other brands of donut-shaped tasteless cereal. However the Harvey’s bomb, is much more different from other bombs than Cheerios are from each other, so far as I know from the articles posted.
I think you can definitely apply qualifiers to levels of uniqueness.
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I think you’ve pre-debunked yourself. You say unique means one of a kind. You cannot say something is “very one of a kind” or “one of the most one of a kind” or “more one of a kind than some other thing”. A thing is either one of a kind or not. It cannot be just a little bit one of a kind.
I absolutely can and I explained my reasoning. There are degrees of uniqueness. In actual use in writing and conversation uniqueness is not literally whether something is one of a kind, an either or, but rather a continuum. Any item that isn’t atom per atom identical to another is “unique” (which is to say, most everything is unique except individual atoms, molecules or small crystals), and we don’t notice or care (except at a scientific level). It is the degree of uniqueness that matters to us in the practical sense in differentiating objects as “unique”.
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Alas, you are incorrect. It’s like being pregnant-either you are or you aren’t. The amount of time you’ve been pregnant, the size of the bump, the number of fetuses, all are irrelevant to the question of are you pregnant. It’s either yes or no.
And yet you didn’t actually discuss any of my points about the fact that every cheerio is unique, and yet clearly this bomb is more unique, more different from other bombs than Cheerios are from each other. Uniqueness does have qualifiers. The degree of uniqueness is what makes a unique item notable, not merely being technically one of a kind a kind at a minute level.
Nobody goes around pointing to an average cheerio jumping up and down about how it’s unique even though it is, because it’s the degree of uniqueness that makes an item interesting for its uniqueness.
