I lived for a while in a place where car theft was legal - if you happened to own an impound lot. My car was stolen by such a lot owner from my reserved, paid, contract parking spot and the city wouldn't do shit to help me. I tried to report my car as stolen but the police would hear nothing of it. I had to pay a ransom to the thieves to get my car back, and the towing inspector refused to help as well. Being as the thieves had plenty of experience (and assistance) in the court system you can imagine how well that went as well...
Basically I would have much rather had a ticket. A ticket doesn't do front end damage to my car or force me to go through hell trying to pursue some semblance of justice. I've fought unjust traffic tickets before (and won) but the city wouldn't help me when my car was stolen by crooked bastards.
I don't know if anyone else saw this but on April 1 of this year one of my email addresses faced a constant deluge of identical offers for a free 24 hour membership to pornhub. IIRC the one address that was getting hit by it saw over 100 identical emails of that offer in one day.
Obviously they would only be concerned with facebook's business once they have already resolved all the other more pressing matters that face our country. It's great to see this new level of productivity from our congress.
We really haven't had a lot of advancement in consumer PCs for consumers to get excited about. It was easy to get consumers to want to upgrade in years past but what do they need now? They have the monitor they want, they have enough storage, and their applications all run well. We were able to previously sell them on "new is better" but now the best we can do is sell them on "replace instead of repair". We used to be selling PCs to people who want to run the latest game or the newest office suite. Now most PC time is spent on facebook, which doesn't require much more than the fanciest version of solitaire.
Every religion wants to preach peace. Most religions are pretty effective at it, most of the time. However every religion has been hijacked by various maniacs throughout its existence and used to further campaigns of violence and hatred. There is no religion that has no blood on its hands in this regard.
Actually, in the case of x (as a variable), there is reason to support a hypothesis for its origin as being similar to what was described above. I recommend listening to this TED talk (which I referenced in another comment in this thread as well) which includes a talk someone gave on where x actually came from (ie, why x, not y or z or w or any other letter). The talk does seem to pin it on a translation from the Arabic.
Indeed, it is. I remember hearing it mentioned decades ago in middle school when I first started taking Algebra (although the notion of what Arabic was likely was more abstract to me at the time). There was a good "TED radio hour" that talked about that (and other related topics) as well:
We enabled and exacerbated the problem, but what created the problem is the extremist ideology itself, Wahhabism and Salafism. We were a catalyst, but if not for us, it likely it would have found another outlet eventually.
An outlet, likely. The same one, and to the same extent, I'm not sure. For example, Afghanistan was already an extremist shithole before we invaded it. I distinctly remember reading about The Taliban destroying two giant stone Buddhas in 2001 several months before 9/11. I think the big question is whether or not the extremism of ISIS would have come up in the middle east had we never invaded Iraq. Certainly we stoked the embers of anger when we did that.
People like to beleive Islam was always peaceful up until the last 20 years, and except during the Crusades, but there have always been wars, conquests and infighting in it's history.
There is no religion you cannot say that about. We've had Buddhist monks taking up arms for their faith at various times. The Christians have been anything but peaceful. Hindus, Shintos, Jews, etc... they've all gotten into it at some point to spread their faith. The difference is that now we know about it a lot sooner thanks to the internet and the 24x7 news cycle. We have also gotten a lot better at killing appalling numbers of people quickly in the past couple centuries.
There is a solid argument for letting it run itself out and telling the world to fuck off. However, there is also the fact that our actions created ISIS; particularly our invasion of Iraq but other shitty foreign policy decisions in that part of the world as well. So really, it is our mess. Maybe we can make an argument against cleaning it up, but I'm not convinced.
People who watch the news believe ISIS is one of the most important issues in the world, even though it will never affect them.
I will say it is important to distinguish between important and fear-worthy. I am vastly more afraid of Donald Trump than I am of ISIS. However both are important world issues, yet only one can legitimately have a significant impact on my life - and it isn't ISIS. Although they have very different ideologies, I would put ISIS and North Korea on roughly equal footing in terms of important world issues. Similarly neither has much of any ability to directly impact my life.
That said if each candidate for POTUS announced detailed plans tomorrow for countering ISIS, those plans likely would not change my voting in November unless one specifically called for me to be sent out personally to fight them. I'll say that sounds highly unlikely as I am well above the maximum age selected in the Vietnam draft and I don't have any useful combat experience.
Seriously, who holds ISIS as their top fear? The overwhelming majority of Americans will literally never be within a couple thousand miles of ISIS at any time in their lives. Yeah, ISIS is really really awful but their ability to actually harm people here in the states is so very close to zero that they might as well not exist. American citizens are more likely to be harmed by a chicken sandwich in most cases.
Medical errors leading to death is just another line item to our insurance industry. Being as it doesn't cost the industry anything for you to die (in fact they come out even further ahead at that point), there is no reason for them to do anything to prevent it. The insurance industry, far more than anyone else, dictates how much work a hospital or clinic needs to do in order to keep the lights on; they could bring down medical errors by lowering that threshold. Doing so would of course eat in to profits so they'll keep it right where it is.
Well, based on your UID you've been here quite a while, so I'll guess instead you've been away for some time. This site was overrun by a decidedly conservative voice some time ago. This article is here because it will draw eyeballs from the main page into discussion and hopefully get some beneficial traffic from as well.
If Bernie had dropped out, the article would have either been celebratory or non-existent. This article is here in sympathy and solidarity. Tomorrow we will see slashdot users starting to tell us how much they love Trump and always have.
Now each time he says something, it seems to be less about righting a wrong and more about publicizing himself and the situation he brought himself into. I agree that the NSA should not have been doing what it was doing (even though it likely is still doing it). I agree that his chances at a truly fair trial here aren't real great. However he seemed a bit self-righteous in his actions from the beginning, as if he were doing it as much to bring attention to himself as to see something wrong made right. Now we get these little press releases from him where that seems even more so to be the case.
"Let's teach the black kids how to be like Mark Zuckerberg"
So, thugs?
I figured it meant teach them how to make huge piles of imaginary money while pushing the productivity of this nation off a cliff and convincing people that they should give up for free private information that companies will make money off of.
Are they buying wholesale? I have seen no indication of that. If they are really just running around with large fuel tanks in the backs of pickup trucks, I wouldn't expect that wholesalers would be willing to deal with them (unless you are thinking of places like Sam's Club and Costco as "wholesale", which they are in terms of retail goods but really are not in terms of fuel).
A new crop of startups are trying to make gas stations obsolete.
Where then are they getting the gas from? If we're talking about pickup truck beds full of (large containers of) gasoline I would expect they are still filling them at gas stations. They are then just up-charging the people who are paying for it for their own cars. The gas stations are still selling just as much gas, and in fact might do better as this process could involve more consumption.
All three of us? That's about the full population of slashdot liberals remaining, myself included. I won't speak for the other two but I don't care enough about the identity of the Bitcoin founder to boycott this site over it.
I do not support a government burden to do any of these things. And I absolutely despise people that attempt to burden gun ownership through cumulative regulation.
I'm not looking for government mandates to prevent stupidity. We know that usually doesn't work anyways; you can put the safe in their house but you can't force them to use it. I just want irresponsible gun owners held responsible when their guns are used by other people. If your gun is taken and used to kill someone and it was done because you were gratuitously negligent in your responsibilities to secure it, you should be held to the same level of responsibility as you would if your finger was on the trigger.
Keep your guns secure and you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
Why some gun owners are so vehemently opposed to personal responsibility is beyond me.
In most cases I'd say that they aren't prosecuted because the courts find it that their wounded kid is punishment enough
The courts don't have jack shit to do with it in most cases. The overwhelming majority of these never see any criminal charges pressed at all, regardless of the final outcome of the result of the irresponsible idiot who left his or her gun laying around.
and that punishing the adult responsible will actually result in more damage to the kid
That is some tortured logic, there. Most of the time the dead one is the kid. How much more can you possibly damage a dead child?
I mean, imagine that you're a kid who got hurt playing with your dad's gun. Your family has the resulting medical bills and such. Is it going to help you, the victim, if your dad loses his job and goes to prison over it? Suddenly you don't have your dad. You're looking at losing your house(medical bills + loss of income), etc...
If your dad had been holding the gun with his finger on the trigger when it went off, pointing it at the kid who is now dead, and then said "oops, I'm a total idiot who didn't mean to do that" you'd be OK with him not facing any charges at all? That is what you are essentially endorsing here.
ONE woman gets shot by her kid from the backseat, that incident generates dozens of news stories, then we get bugs2squash at least seeming to thing that they were multiple incidents, meaning that 1 incident has been expanded to a crisis in people's minds.
Quite the opposite, really. Yeah for some reason this case got a lot of attention, like the WalMart shooting some time ago where a lady was killed by her toddler because her (licensed) handgun was loaded and easily accessible in her purse, but there are far far more cases that never get national attention. People who try to compile this can easily support the conclusion that in our country on average one child dies per day as the direct result of someone leaving their loaded unlocked weapons in an insecure place where a child can get them. Tragically most of the time the bullet ends up killing the innocent child, instead of the idiot gun owner.
You mentioned 'Once a day'. That's ~365 kids a year, not all of whom are shot(some manage to shoot the irresponsible adult), much less killed.
Allow me to be extra clear here, I was referring to the death / serious injury rate. The rate at which the accidental shootings happen is much, much, higher. The number of people who call the cops after their guns mysteriously "go off while cleaning" or "go off after being dropped", amongst other such situations, is far higher. Thankfully those random bullet holes do not often lead straight to children.
*looks at my safe* - yeah, I'd have liked some assistance with that.;)
I'm glad you have one. Use it properly and you have not a thing to fear from my position. My guns are in a safe as well.
You've given me your opinion of gunfail, now I challenge you to go read it. You claim that these events are overreported, gunfail supports my claim of them being underreported. Go look at what they have there, these are stories taken from local news sources, many of which ended with people dead or seriously injured. How many of them make the national news? Very, very, few. That is underreporting there. If so many national news sources were as
anti-Second Amendment
as you claim, wouldn't they jump all over every single one of these?
We had one woman in Milwaukee killed by her boyfriend's gun and it made national news. There have been over 100 accidental deaths involving young children and guns already in this country and how many of them made the national news?
My suspicion is that the Gun Fail blog reports every story which is reported to them without making any effort to corroborate those stories (which will result in a significant portion of their stories being, for all intents and purposes, false).
Not. Even. Remotely. Close. Every single story on GunFail has at least one link to a local news outlet or official police report to support it. You could hardly be further from reality on that matter if you tried.
As to gun safety being taught in school, I do indeed remember gun safety being taught.
I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying it's never been a part of any public education of any person I have ever met.
And I recall one aspect of that training being to make sure that those who were too young to know how to handle a gun would be unable to do so (by storing the gun out of their reach, or otherwise so that they could not get to it, and by making sure that you did not leave the gun unattended while it was out of storage)
Which is exactly what I want people to do. I want to prevent the preventable deaths. These kids are dying of 100% preventable accidents. I want people to take gun safety seriously again or face the consequences of their irresponsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
I lived for a while in a place where car theft was legal - if you happened to own an impound lot. My car was stolen by such a lot owner from my reserved, paid, contract parking spot and the city wouldn't do shit to help me. I tried to report my car as stolen but the police would hear nothing of it. I had to pay a ransom to the thieves to get my car back, and the towing inspector refused to help as well. Being as the thieves had plenty of experience (and assistance) in the court system you can imagine how well that went as well...
Basically I would have much rather had a ticket. A ticket doesn't do front end damage to my car or force me to go through hell trying to pursue some semblance of justice. I've fought unjust traffic tickets before (and won) but the city wouldn't help me when my car was stolen by crooked bastards.
You could have made a better joke of it than that, couldn't you?
I don't know if anyone else saw this but on April 1 of this year one of my email addresses faced a constant deluge of identical offers for a free 24 hour membership to pornhub. IIRC the one address that was getting hit by it saw over 100 identical emails of that offer in one day.
Look out, /. editors; you're next.
That would require people to read slashdot, for anyone to notice the problems.
Your statement would also require slashdot to have editors, and we all know that to not be true.
Obviously they would only be concerned with facebook's business once they have already resolved all the other more pressing matters that face our country. It's great to see this new level of productivity from our congress.
We really haven't had a lot of advancement in consumer PCs for consumers to get excited about. It was easy to get consumers to want to upgrade in years past but what do they need now? They have the monitor they want, they have enough storage, and their applications all run well. We were able to previously sell them on "new is better" but now the best we can do is sell them on "replace instead of repair". We used to be selling PCs to people who want to run the latest game or the newest office suite. Now most PC time is spent on facebook, which doesn't require much more than the fanciest version of solitaire.
Every religion wants to preach peace. Most religions are pretty effective at it, most of the time. However every religion has been hijacked by various maniacs throughout its existence and used to further campaigns of violence and hatred. There is no religion that has no blood on its hands in this regard.
Actually, in the case of x (as a variable), there is reason to support a hypothesis for its origin as being similar to what was described above. I recommend listening to this TED talk (which I referenced in another comment in this thread as well) which includes a talk someone gave on where x actually came from (ie, why x, not y or z or w or any other letter). The talk does seem to pin it on a translation from the Arabic.
Indeed, it is. I remember hearing it mentioned decades ago in middle school when I first started taking Algebra (although the notion of what Arabic was likely was more abstract to me at the time). There was a good "TED radio hour" that talked about that (and other related topics) as well:
Solve for X
... I hear the passengers thought he was with the Al-Gebra network - and he was holding potential weapons of math instruction.
We enabled and exacerbated the problem, but what created the problem is the extremist ideology itself, Wahhabism and Salafism. We were a catalyst, but if not for us, it likely it would have found another outlet eventually.
An outlet, likely. The same one, and to the same extent, I'm not sure. For example, Afghanistan was already an extremist shithole before we invaded it. I distinctly remember reading about The Taliban destroying two giant stone Buddhas in 2001 several months before 9/11. I think the big question is whether or not the extremism of ISIS would have come up in the middle east had we never invaded Iraq. Certainly we stoked the embers of anger when we did that.
People like to beleive Islam was always peaceful up until the last 20 years, and except during the Crusades, but there have always been wars, conquests and infighting in it's history.
There is no religion you cannot say that about. We've had Buddhist monks taking up arms for their faith at various times. The Christians have been anything but peaceful. Hindus, Shintos, Jews, etc... they've all gotten into it at some point to spread their faith. The difference is that now we know about it a lot sooner thanks to the internet and the 24x7 news cycle. We have also gotten a lot better at killing appalling numbers of people quickly in the past couple centuries.
There is a solid argument for letting it run itself out and telling the world to fuck off. However, there is also the fact that our actions created ISIS; particularly our invasion of Iraq but other shitty foreign policy decisions in that part of the world as well. So really, it is our mess. Maybe we can make an argument against cleaning it up, but I'm not convinced.
People who watch the news believe ISIS is one of the most important issues in the world, even though it will never affect them.
I will say it is important to distinguish between important and fear-worthy. I am vastly more afraid of Donald Trump than I am of ISIS. However both are important world issues, yet only one can legitimately have a significant impact on my life - and it isn't ISIS. Although they have very different ideologies, I would put ISIS and North Korea on roughly equal footing in terms of important world issues. Similarly neither has much of any ability to directly impact my life.
That said if each candidate for POTUS announced detailed plans tomorrow for countering ISIS, those plans likely would not change my voting in November unless one specifically called for me to be sent out personally to fight them. I'll say that sounds highly unlikely as I am well above the maximum age selected in the Vietnam draft and I don't have any useful combat experience.
Seriously, who holds ISIS as their top fear? The overwhelming majority of Americans will literally never be within a couple thousand miles of ISIS at any time in their lives. Yeah, ISIS is really really awful but their ability to actually harm people here in the states is so very close to zero that they might as well not exist. American citizens are more likely to be harmed by a chicken sandwich in most cases.
Puh-leeze. We have slashdot members who have been living in virtual reality for years.
Medical errors leading to death is just another line item to our insurance industry. Being as it doesn't cost the industry anything for you to die (in fact they come out even further ahead at that point), there is no reason for them to do anything to prevent it. The insurance industry, far more than anyone else, dictates how much work a hospital or clinic needs to do in order to keep the lights on; they could bring down medical errors by lowering that threshold. Doing so would of course eat in to profits so they'll keep it right where it is.
You must be new here.
Well, based on your UID you've been here quite a while, so I'll guess instead you've been away for some time. This site was overrun by a decidedly conservative voice some time ago. This article is here because it will draw eyeballs from the main page into discussion and hopefully get some beneficial traffic from as well.
If Bernie had dropped out, the article would have either been celebratory or non-existent. This article is here in sympathy and solidarity. Tomorrow we will see slashdot users starting to tell us how much they love Trump and always have.
Now each time he says something, it seems to be less about righting a wrong and more about publicizing himself and the situation he brought himself into. I agree that the NSA should not have been doing what it was doing (even though it likely is still doing it). I agree that his chances at a truly fair trial here aren't real great. However he seemed a bit self-righteous in his actions from the beginning, as if he were doing it as much to bring attention to himself as to see something wrong made right. Now we get these little press releases from him where that seems even more so to be the case.
"Let's teach the black kids how to be like Mark Zuckerberg"
So, thugs?
I figured it meant teach them how to make huge piles of imaginary money while pushing the productivity of this nation off a cliff and convincing people that they should give up for free private information that companies will make money off of.
They are buying wholesale
Are they buying wholesale? I have seen no indication of that. If they are really just running around with large fuel tanks in the backs of pickup trucks, I wouldn't expect that wholesalers would be willing to deal with them (unless you are thinking of places like Sam's Club and Costco as "wholesale", which they are in terms of retail goods but really are not in terms of fuel).
A new crop of startups are trying to make gas stations obsolete.
Where then are they getting the gas from? If we're talking about pickup truck beds full of (large containers of) gasoline I would expect they are still filling them at gas stations. They are then just up-charging the people who are paying for it for their own cars. The gas stations are still selling just as much gas, and in fact might do better as this process could involve more consumption.
All three of us? That's about the full population of slashdot liberals remaining, myself included. I won't speak for the other two but I don't care enough about the identity of the Bitcoin founder to boycott this site over it.
I do not support a government burden to do any of these things. And I absolutely despise people that attempt to burden gun ownership through cumulative regulation.
I'm not looking for government mandates to prevent stupidity. We know that usually doesn't work anyways; you can put the safe in their house but you can't force them to use it. I just want irresponsible gun owners held responsible when their guns are used by other people. If your gun is taken and used to kill someone and it was done because you were gratuitously negligent in your responsibilities to secure it, you should be held to the same level of responsibility as you would if your finger was on the trigger.
Keep your guns secure and you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
Why some gun owners are so vehemently opposed to personal responsibility is beyond me.
In most cases I'd say that they aren't prosecuted because the courts find it that their wounded kid is punishment enough
The courts don't have jack shit to do with it in most cases. The overwhelming majority of these never see any criminal charges pressed at all, regardless of the final outcome of the result of the irresponsible idiot who left his or her gun laying around.
and that punishing the adult responsible will actually result in more damage to the kid
That is some tortured logic, there. Most of the time the dead one is the kid. How much more can you possibly damage a dead child?
I mean, imagine that you're a kid who got hurt playing with your dad's gun. Your family has the resulting medical bills and such. Is it going to help you, the victim, if your dad loses his job and goes to prison over it? Suddenly you don't have your dad. You're looking at losing your house(medical bills + loss of income), etc...
If your dad had been holding the gun with his finger on the trigger when it went off, pointing it at the kid who is now dead, and then said "oops, I'm a total idiot who didn't mean to do that" you'd be OK with him not facing any charges at all? That is what you are essentially endorsing here.
ONE woman gets shot by her kid from the backseat, that incident generates dozens of news stories, then we get bugs2squash at least seeming to thing that they were multiple incidents, meaning that 1 incident has been expanded to a crisis in people's minds.
Quite the opposite, really. Yeah for some reason this case got a lot of attention, like the WalMart shooting some time ago where a lady was killed by her toddler because her (licensed) handgun was loaded and easily accessible in her purse, but there are far far more cases that never get national attention. People who try to compile this can easily support the conclusion that in our country on average one child dies per day as the direct result of someone leaving their loaded unlocked weapons in an insecure place where a child can get them. Tragically most of the time the bullet ends up killing the innocent child, instead of the idiot gun owner.
You mentioned 'Once a day'. That's ~365 kids a year, not all of whom are shot(some manage to shoot the irresponsible adult), much less killed.
Allow me to be extra clear here, I was referring to the death / serious injury rate. The rate at which the accidental shootings happen is much, much, higher. The number of people who call the cops after their guns mysteriously "go off while cleaning" or "go off after being dropped", amongst other such situations, is far higher. Thankfully those random bullet holes do not often lead straight to children.
*looks at my safe* - yeah, I'd have liked some assistance with that. ;)
I'm glad you have one. Use it properly and you have not a thing to fear from my position. My guns are in a safe as well.
anti-Second Amendment
as you claim, wouldn't they jump all over every single one of these?
We had one woman in Milwaukee killed by her boyfriend's gun and it made national news. There have been over 100 accidental deaths involving young children and guns already in this country and how many of them made the national news?
My suspicion is that the Gun Fail blog reports every story which is reported to them without making any effort to corroborate those stories (which will result in a significant portion of their stories being, for all intents and purposes, false).
Not. Even. Remotely. Close. Every single story on GunFail has at least one link to a local news outlet or official police report to support it. You could hardly be further from reality on that matter if you tried.
As to gun safety being taught in school, I do indeed remember gun safety being taught.
I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying it's never been a part of any public education of any person I have ever met.
And I recall one aspect of that training being to make sure that those who were too young to know how to handle a gun would be unable to do so (by storing the gun out of their reach, or otherwise so that they could not get to it, and by making sure that you did not leave the gun unattended while it was out of storage)
Which is exactly what I want people to do. I want to prevent the preventable deaths. These kids are dying of 100% preventable accidents. I want people to take gun safety seriously again or face the consequences of their irresponsibility.