> How is "the right to own a gun" on the same team as "ban abortions and gay marriage"?
If it helps, it wasn't in the 1960s. Then, the Libs wanted to own guns, and the Conservatives were leery of it. Catch The President's Analyst on TV, tape, or DVD, sometime, and look for the VW Microbus.
BTW, gay marriage isn't about keeping two people apart who love each other, it is about forcing the government to recognize something as a marriage NOT dedicated to the purpose of regulating reproduction and child rearing (take Anthropology 101, marriage and love, the emotion, are entirely orthogonal) and making SSI payments to the partner. Gay marriage wasn't merely banned, it was logically absurd, in Western culture, until gay activists started demanding it.
BTW2, the above means that two gays with children, or who can adopt, becomes an interesting quibble, upon which I am not willing to comment at this time.
The decision on abortion was correct, Constitutionally speaking. Abortion isn't protected in the Constitution, therefore, laws can be made restricting it. I do not like the result, but it is consistent with our system of law. The law just happens to suck.
Um, backwards. Either, Roe vs. Wade was incorrect, because "Abortion isn't protected in the Constitution" or it was correct because privacy is (under some emanation of a penumbra, was the Justice TRYING to make it sound made up?).
Interestingly, according to usual readings of Roe vs. Wade, restricting minors from abortions without parental consent is unconstitutional, but restricting minors from nose jobs (or even breast removals in families with a history of breast cancer) without parental consent is OK.
In this respect, however, I have to agree with the dissent, where they say that Scalia's argument creates a catch-22- weapons cannot be in common use unless Congress allows them to be, but laws against them cannot be struck down unless they're in common use.
> weapons cannot be in common use unless Congress allows them to be.
Surely not, or else pistols could be banned by Congress, despite their being reasonably common pre-Constitution. Perhaps you mean that new classes of weapons (grenades, panzerfausts, RPGs, tanks, weaponized smallpox, etc.) cannot be common unless Congress allows them?
> but laws against them cannot be struck down unless they're in common use
I think that you must have meant not in common use, or else laws could not regulate the use of tanks or M-2 50 cal machine guns, since they are not in common use, either.
BTW, did they clarify the Amendment definition of "militia"? Or are they depending on the fact that everyone of military age in legally part of the "Unorganized Militia" in case of necessity (like Soviet nuclear attack, originally)?
Re:The explanation is obvious
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
> I can board the train 15 minutes before it leaves.
Until someone bombs a train, a which point they get the same 2 hour wait.
> Obviously this is different going from NY to LA, > but amongst denser areas of the US (north-east, > california) this is feasible within 1000km distances.
The BosWash corridor is the only place in the US that trains have been run profitably, since the 1960's. California would be profitable only if the interstates were left to crack, or if there was suddenly some reason to go the entire LA-SF run, rather than exit after a few tens of miles.
> Likewise, my ADD friends claim to be able to multi-task, but do a VERY poor job of actually doing it.
Because if they COULD do a good job of multitasking, they would just be called smart and quick. Just as someone who drinks a lot but keeps his/her life going isn't called an alcoholic, just a heavy drinker.
> Sure, it's nice to have every single event in > your child's life on demand at the touch of a > button/click of a mouse, but aren't just plain > old memories ok?
No. Auto accident. Child dead. Now what?
Also, if the original poster is smart, he will include his wife and himself in some of the videos, and his children and grandchildren can see what grandfather Surname was like if something happens to him, instead. Let his wife take a few of him, or it will be like our family, where we have just one half inch high photo of my one grandfather, who took all the photos of everyone else.
> Each time I do, I make a mental note that one day > I'll scan them and make them digital. Then I realize > that we only drag out that box once or twice a year, > and never do anything with the photos anyway, and > resign to scan them once it gets even cheaper.
Scan them before a leaky roof or basement ruins them. Annotate them, while someone still lives who can identify who is who. Then you have a backup to the photos, as well.
> Well, that might actually be slightly inaccurate, > though no one really counts the Presentation > Manager or Windows 1 or Windows 2.
Yes, they do. They may not have enjoyed Windows 1 or 2, but they definitely counted when determining who was first, especially as MS used the mistakes of earlier Windows to improve the later versions, at least until Win2000.
> Selling office 97 pro for $99 to the consumer, and licensing it to universities for $1 a copy
As DEC and Apple did before them. Hell, as AT&T did with Unix, except that a source license for a non-acedemic copy was more like $20K, back in Ye Olde Days.
So, logged into RSTS lately? DECSystem-10 or -20? Apple has finally worked its way back from near the grave, but AT&T owns nothing of Unix, I believe, having donated it (to USL, I htink?), as it was a non-performing asset.
> Microsoft was one of the first (maybe the first?) > company of that era who grew HUGE and simply > refused to pay dividends to stockholders.
DEC, Digital General, and probably a bunch of other companies did the same. It was actually fairly common in the high-tech sector. It works until the increase in the business starts lagging, when all the current stockholders start abandoning it for better "investments". MS was just smarter, and were able to recognize the way things were going when it went past them, as opposed to recognising the future only when it buried them, like a lot of the others.
One of Microsoft's great inventions is the elimination of the Sr Software Architect or Sr Engineer, or whatever you want to call the position which management used to rely on for picking the right computing tools( software & hardware ) for the new projects.
Nonsense. No one who bought PCs in the early years used Sr. Software Architects or Sr Engineers to decide which one they bought. They used people who bought their own, or bought some of the computer magazines coming out, and decided what they liked. The IBM PC and its clones worked well enough, many of the companies seemed well established, and they all used some MS or PC DOS version that MS developed from QDOS, but was not just QDOS anymore (and they could use other OSs as well, but none were quite as good as MS).
Eliminating the hardware priesthood was IBM's contribution, and the S-100 industry's before that. Microsoft then got a good seat, didn't decide to slack off after the originals got their first couple million, or to play fun money games with their own company funds, and rode the elevator, and MS rode it better than anyone else. When some outside company had a good idea, MS either bought it, coopted it, or made something that worked 75% as well but well enough and kept improving it until it beat its original.
The illegal stuff came later. It was probably unnecessary, too, to still achieve its dominating position.
Actually, in the REAL Celcius scale, invented and used by the REAL Celcius, your 32F is 100. As it warms up to boiling water, the temeperature value decreases to zero.
Which is why I always call it Centigrade. Naming it after an idiot like that is not merely stupid, it is wrong, as it gives immortality to someone how should remain in obscurity.
Better, use K all the time, until the world is familiar enough with Kelvin they can think in it.
> You have to vote both these parties out if you want
> to get rid of this stuff. Not just the candidates
> that voted for this bill.
No, you have to get rid of the very idea of parties, and the idea of friends who think alike helping friends, and eventually the idea of rule by elected representatives vs. an elite corps of philosopher-statesman who are all a bit suicidal and have no ties of blood or affection to sway them. So, when you find your Jedis, tell me.
Sorry, you clearly want rule by angels, not fallible humans, and they aren't commonly around.
Because volcano's don't conveniently locate themselves next to large population centers?
You've got the logic reversed. Large population centers wisely do not locate themselves near volcanoes.
See: Pompei
You've got the facts reversed. Large population centers do locate themselves near volcanoes, if only because the soil is more fertile there. "Wisely" is another question.
See: Naples, built on the lower slopes of the same damned volcano that ate Pompeii.
And, of course, nothing he did can ever be reversed, especially by the party that first euphemised his tenure as "difficult circumstances" , i.e., the Democrats.
OTOH, the Republicans will do it as soon as they elect a President. No reason not to let a hypothetical Democrat not take the heat for alienating his base, if Obama wins, so Bush will not announce it unless McCain wins.
We have no written constitution in the sense the US does. In fact, our constitutional law is written but it is spread all over the place. There is no constitutional court and no need for lawyers (in general) to argue about the wording of the constitution. This works well because those in power can do whatever they can get away with instead of what they think they can get away with, given a judiciary with the power to declare their acts illegal or unconstitutional, if someone with legal standing objects.
> So for example I can predict that cell phones will > be disposable (costing under $10) within four years.
For a particular subset of cell phone (those over 3 years old) that has been the case for years. Hence the iPhone, a computer with a teeny display and attached cell phone, to try to avoid this fate.
After coming from an interview today, it could be because they have a lot of women working there, as most engineers can attest, are rather rare in most high-tech environments.
And now we know why! The bastards at Apple have monopolized them all!
> Makes me wonder though why it is that these kind of things only seem to occur in the software industry?
Oh?
In no particular order, the Spruce Goose, the Northrup Flying Wing projects (up until the Stealth fighter and bomber, when the computer controls finally caught up to the requirements), the German equivalent of the Manhattan Project, the German Mause tank (which had a 5 inch naval gun on the turret, but weighed so much that it couldn't drive on the roads or the fields), the Zeppelin, French military tactics in WWI, the Army Of The Potomac at least until Gettysburg, the British precision screw (at least compared to the US screw - there was an article in Scientific American about this a few years ago), Hapsburg political and military goals in the 16th and 17th centuries (where the Spanish Hapsburg frittered away a century of wealth from the Indies on religious and dynastic wars that went nowhere), the Crusades (from the Christian side, except possibly the First), and, of course, the famous military "victory" of Pyrrus.
Compared to what we expected, the Space Shuttle. The Chinese navy that once sailed to at least Madagscar, and might have visited the territory that would become the Continental USA, and then was abandoned and the shipyards burned. Every attempt at building a Panama Canal before Roosevelt. Heaven's Gate (the movie). WaterWorld. The movie that Howard Hughes reshot because it was finished filming right before the advent of sound but would have been released as a Silent right after sound became common (forget the name, damn it). Apocalypse Now. The Big Dig project in Boston, Massachusetts.
Since you work in the software industry, you will hear about those in that industry all the time, but not those in other fields, especially because you will tend to ignore those that don't affect you.
> Is it the fact almost every major s/w project is pretty unique? No, because they usually aren't. Seriously, unless you work somewhere that actually *is* unique, someone else has done, or will do, almost the exact same thing as your company does, or wants to do.
> Or the industry is willing to put fresh out of college engineers straight onto the project? No, because everyone does that. Do you really think that graduates just sit and study until they magically become experienced engineers, architects, surgeons, backhoe operators, or division commanders?
Now, if the fresh graduates are operating without any supervision, and the project "has" to work on the bleeding edge of performance and have the neatest user interface (designed by people who never used anything like it, before) while using the latest software paradigms (whether they make sense for the problem or not), you might have a few problems.
but as I understand it one of the more difficult engineering challenges of designing an implosion type device is getting the arrangement of the explosive lenses just right to compress the plutonium pit into a critical mass symmetrically
Yes, that pushed the envelope, in 1944-45. Since then, the off-the-shelf timers that the Manhattan Project used are positively old hat. I would be surprised if the companies that blow up buildings, old baseball stadiums, and the like, don't use timers at least as good, anymore. Getting the timing right is largely a matter of taking care of the signaling distances, just like in the old Crays. Speaking of Crays, remember the designers of Little Boy did their calculations on adding machines and slide rules, not 1980s supermicros like everyone and their grandmother now uses for web and email access for $700 or less.
This is certainly beyond the capacity of small splinter groups of splinter groups; whether it is beyond the capacity of the major groups, especially if they have a nice "safe area" to play in, is another question.
Go down to Legal and ask them if they think that's "burying" the recipient, particularly in a defense of your company's key patent.
Go down to legal and ask them if that's burying the recipient more than usual, even on a trivial point.
If you forget to send something (worse, decide not to bother sending something), however tangential it might appear to YOU, the other side can make all sorts of hay on it when they discover it was omitted. If you think that 20 kg of documents is much you never had to deal with litigation, or even had the chance to watch from the side. If you wouldn't want to read through that much documentation, now you know why corporate lawyers get paid so much for doing what might seem trivial work (especially when the best that they can do is not screw up the case, as is often so).
If they had used a semi-trailer to deliver the documents, that would be excessive. This seems quite reasonable, and maybe even a bit small.
Fission will easily last the 20 (according to ITER designers) to 50 (really conservative estimate) it will take for fusion to come in to full force.
Unfortunately, break-even fusion has been (claimed to be) 50 years from the first commercial plant since I could first read Asimov's science books, back in the late 1960's. Further, extracting deuterium is not easy.
> (and later on, you can mine comets etc.)
By that point, they are more likely to figure out how to crack H-H fusion (maybe some variant of the Carbon cycle?), rather than mining comets.
> the war was started because the North was determined > to continue subjugating all states to the will of the > federal government.
The "war" started because Pierre Beauregard, as commander of the South Carolina military, started firing on a Federal garrison. The Federal response was no different, except in scale, to that it made when John Brown tried to seize the Federal Armory in Harper's Ferry; I would have to check to see whether it was different in proportion,
Without such an incident, the whole thing might have been settled, or the Democrat's dream of peaceful separation accomplished. Sorry, the War of Northern Aggression is only in the dreams of the most ridiculous Confederate supporters, those like Granny Clampett.
Slashdot Mirror
> How is "the right to own a gun" on the same team as "ban abortions and gay marriage"?
If it helps, it wasn't in the 1960s. Then, the Libs wanted to own guns, and the Conservatives were leery of it. Catch The President's Analyst on TV, tape, or DVD, sometime, and look for the VW Microbus.
BTW, gay marriage isn't about keeping two people apart who love each other, it is about forcing the government to recognize something as a marriage NOT dedicated to the purpose of regulating reproduction and child rearing (take Anthropology 101, marriage and love, the emotion, are entirely orthogonal) and making SSI payments to the partner. Gay marriage wasn't merely banned, it was logically absurd, in Western culture, until gay activists started demanding it.
BTW2, the above means that two gays with children, or who can adopt, becomes an interesting quibble, upon which I am not willing to comment at this time.
Um, backwards. Either, Roe vs. Wade was incorrect, because "Abortion isn't protected in the Constitution" or it was correct because privacy is (under some emanation of a penumbra, was the Justice TRYING to make it sound made up?).
Interestingly, according to usual readings of Roe vs. Wade, restricting minors from abortions without parental consent is unconstitutional, but restricting minors from nose jobs (or even breast removals in families with a history of breast cancer) without parental consent is OK.
Anyway, still like your third paragraph, on.
> weapons cannot be in common use unless Congress allows them to be.
Surely not, or else pistols could be banned by Congress, despite their being reasonably common pre-Constitution. Perhaps you mean that new classes of weapons (grenades, panzerfausts, RPGs, tanks, weaponized smallpox, etc.) cannot be common unless Congress allows them?
> but laws against them cannot be struck down unless they're in common use
I think that you must have meant not in common use, or else laws could not regulate the use of tanks or M-2 50 cal machine guns, since they are not in common use, either.
BTW, did they clarify the Amendment definition of "militia"? Or are they depending on the fact that everyone of military age in legally part of the "Unorganized Militia" in case of necessity (like Soviet nuclear attack, originally)?
> I can board the train 15 minutes before it leaves.
Until someone bombs a train, a which point they get the same 2 hour wait.
> Obviously this is different going from NY to LA,
> but amongst denser areas of the US (north-east,
> california) this is feasible within 1000km distances.
The BosWash corridor is the only place in the US that trains have been run profitably, since the 1960's. California would be profitable only if the interstates were left to crack, or if there was suddenly some reason to go the entire LA-SF run, rather than exit after a few tens of miles.
Well, you wouldn't need to eat that much if you just got that infestation of tapeworm treated.
> Likewise, my ADD friends claim to be able to multi-task, but do a VERY poor job of actually doing it.
Because if they COULD do a good job of multitasking, they would just be called smart and quick. Just as someone who drinks a lot but keeps his/her life going isn't called an alcoholic, just a heavy drinker.
> Sure, it's nice to have every single event in
> your child's life on demand at the touch of a
> button/click of a mouse, but aren't just plain
> old memories ok?
No. Auto accident. Child dead. Now what?
Also, if the original poster is smart, he will include his wife and himself in some of the videos, and his children and grandchildren can see what grandfather Surname was like if something happens to him, instead. Let his wife take a few of him, or it will be like our family, where we have just one half inch high photo of my one grandfather, who took all the photos of everyone else.
> Each time I do, I make a mental note that one day
> I'll scan them and make them digital. Then I realize
> that we only drag out that box once or twice a year,
> and never do anything with the photos anyway, and
> resign to scan them once it gets even cheaper.
Scan them before a leaky roof or basement ruins them. Annotate them, while someone still lives who can identify who is who. Then you have a backup to the photos, as well.
> Well, that might actually be slightly inaccurate,
> though no one really counts the Presentation
> Manager or Windows 1 or Windows 2.
Yes, they do. They may not have enjoyed Windows 1 or 2, but they definitely counted when determining who was first, especially as MS used the mistakes of earlier Windows to improve the later versions, at least until Win2000.
> Selling office 97 pro for $99 to the consumer, and licensing it to universities for $1 a copy
As DEC and Apple did before them. Hell, as AT&T did with Unix, except that a source license for a non-acedemic copy was more like $20K, back in Ye Olde Days.
So, logged into RSTS lately? DECSystem-10 or -20? Apple has finally worked its way back from near the grave, but AT&T owns nothing of Unix, I believe, having donated it (to USL, I htink?), as it was a non-performing asset.
Clearly, this tactic doesn't guarantee success.
> Microsoft was one of the first (maybe the first?)
> company of that era who grew HUGE and simply
> refused to pay dividends to stockholders.
DEC, Digital General, and probably a bunch of other companies did the same. It was actually fairly common in the high-tech sector. It works until the increase in the business starts lagging, when all the current stockholders start abandoning it for better "investments". MS was just smarter, and were able to recognize the way things were going when it went past them, as opposed to recognising the future only when it buried them, like a lot of the others.
Nonsense. No one who bought PCs in the early years used Sr. Software Architects or Sr Engineers to decide which one they bought. They used people who bought their own, or bought some of the computer magazines coming out, and decided what they liked. The IBM PC and its clones worked well enough, many of the companies seemed well established, and they all used some MS or PC DOS version that MS developed from QDOS, but was not just QDOS anymore (and they could use other OSs as well, but none were quite as good as MS).
Eliminating the hardware priesthood was IBM's contribution, and the S-100 industry's before that. Microsoft then got a good seat, didn't decide to slack off after the originals got their first couple million, or to play fun money games with their own company funds, and rode the elevator, and MS rode it better than anyone else. When some outside company had a good idea, MS either bought it, coopted it, or made something that worked 75% as well but well enough and kept improving it until it beat its original.
The illegal stuff came later. It was probably unnecessary, too, to still achieve its dominating position.
Actually, in the REAL Celcius scale, invented and used by the REAL Celcius, your 32F is 100. As it warms up to boiling water, the temeperature value decreases to zero.
Which is why I always call it Centigrade. Naming it after an idiot like that is not merely stupid, it is wrong, as it gives immortality to someone how should remain in obscurity.
Better, use K all the time, until the world is familiar enough with Kelvin they can think in it.
> to get rid of this stuff. Not just the candidates
> that voted for this bill.
No, you have to get rid of the very idea of parties, and the idea of friends who think alike helping friends, and eventually the idea of rule by elected representatives vs. an elite corps of philosopher-statesman who are all a bit suicidal and have no ties of blood or affection to sway them. So, when you find your Jedis, tell me.
Sorry, you clearly want rule by angels, not fallible humans, and they aren't commonly around.
No, just 40. And every year since then, it has still been described by someone as just 50 years away.
You've got the facts reversed. Large population centers do locate themselves near volcanoes, if only because the soil is more fertile there. "Wisely" is another question.
See: Naples, built on the lower slopes of the same damned volcano that ate Pompeii.
> The US stopped reprocessing under Carter
And, of course, nothing he did can ever be reversed, especially by the party that first euphemised his tenure as "difficult circumstances" , i.e., the Democrats.
OTOH, the Republicans will do it as soon as they elect a President. No reason not to let a hypothetical Democrat not take the heat for alienating his base, if Obama wins, so Bush will not announce it unless McCain wins.
There, fixed it for you.
> So for example I can predict that cell phones will
> be disposable (costing under $10) within four years.
For a particular subset of cell phone (those over 3 years old) that has been the case for years. Hence the iPhone, a computer with a teeny display and attached cell phone, to try to avoid this fate.
And now we know why! The bastards at Apple have monopolized them all!
> Makes me wonder though why it is that these kind of things only seem to occur in the software industry?
Oh?
In no particular order, the Spruce Goose, the Northrup Flying Wing projects (up until the Stealth fighter and bomber, when the computer controls finally caught up to the requirements), the German equivalent of the Manhattan Project, the German Mause tank (which had a 5 inch naval gun on the turret, but weighed so much that it couldn't drive on the roads or the fields), the Zeppelin, French military tactics in WWI, the Army Of The Potomac at least until Gettysburg, the British precision screw (at least compared to the US screw - there was an article in Scientific American about this a few years ago), Hapsburg political and military goals in the 16th and 17th centuries (where the Spanish Hapsburg frittered away a century of wealth from the Indies on religious and dynastic wars that went nowhere), the Crusades (from the Christian side, except possibly the First), and, of course, the famous military "victory" of Pyrrus.
Compared to what we expected, the Space Shuttle. The Chinese navy that once sailed to at least Madagscar, and might have visited the territory that would become the Continental USA, and then was abandoned and the shipyards burned. Every attempt at building a Panama Canal before Roosevelt. Heaven's Gate (the movie). WaterWorld. The movie that Howard Hughes reshot because it was finished filming right before the advent of sound but would have been released as a Silent right after sound became common (forget the name, damn it). Apocalypse Now. The Big Dig project in Boston, Massachusetts.
Since you work in the software industry, you will hear about those in that industry all the time, but not those in other fields, especially because you will tend to ignore those that don't affect you.
> Is it the fact almost every major s/w project is pretty unique?
No, because they usually aren't. Seriously, unless you work somewhere that actually *is* unique, someone else has done, or will do, almost the exact same thing as your company does, or wants to do.
> Or the industry is willing to put fresh out of college engineers straight onto the project?
No, because everyone does that. Do you really think that graduates just sit and study until they magically become experienced engineers, architects, surgeons, backhoe operators, or division commanders?
Now, if the fresh graduates are operating without any supervision, and the project "has" to work on the bleeding edge of performance and have the neatest user interface (designed by people who never used anything like it, before) while using the latest software paradigms (whether they make sense for the problem or not), you might have a few problems.
Yes, that pushed the envelope, in 1944-45. Since then, the off-the-shelf timers that the Manhattan Project used are positively old hat. I would be surprised if the companies that blow up buildings, old baseball stadiums, and the like, don't use timers at least as good, anymore. Getting the timing right is largely a matter of taking care of the signaling distances, just like in the old Crays. Speaking of Crays, remember the designers of Little Boy did their calculations on adding machines and slide rules, not 1980s supermicros like everyone and their grandmother now uses for web and email access for $700 or less.
This is certainly beyond the capacity of small splinter groups of splinter groups; whether it is beyond the capacity of the major groups, especially if they have a nice "safe area" to play in, is another question.
Go down to legal and ask them if that's burying the recipient more than usual, even on a trivial point.
If you forget to send something (worse, decide not to bother sending something), however tangential it might appear to YOU, the other side can make all sorts of hay on it when they discover it was omitted. If you think that 20 kg of documents is much you never had to deal with litigation, or even had the chance to watch from the side. If you wouldn't want to read through that much documentation, now you know why corporate lawyers get paid so much for doing what might seem trivial work (especially when the best that they can do is not screw up the case, as is often so).
If they had used a semi-trailer to deliver the documents, that would be excessive. This seems quite reasonable, and maybe even a bit small.
Unfortunately, break-even fusion has been (claimed to be) 50 years from the first commercial plant since I could first read Asimov's science books, back in the late 1960's. Further, extracting deuterium is not easy.
> (and later on, you can mine comets etc.)
By that point, they are more likely to figure out how to crack H-H fusion (maybe some variant of the Carbon cycle?), rather than mining comets.
> From Wikipedia, the best fuel to use is Pu-238 (as in, zomg Plutonium, atomic bombs)
No, fission uses Pu-239, not 238. Alas, I only know how to produce Pu-239 (oblig. bwah, hah, hah!) or I would write how different they are.
> the war was started because the North was determined
> to continue subjugating all states to the will of the
> federal government.
The "war" started because Pierre Beauregard, as commander of the South Carolina military, started firing on a Federal garrison. The Federal response was no different, except in scale, to that it made when John Brown tried to seize the Federal Armory in Harper's Ferry; I would have to check to see whether it was different in proportion,
Without such an incident, the whole thing might have been settled, or the Democrat's dream of peaceful separation accomplished. Sorry, the War of Northern Aggression is only in the dreams of the most ridiculous Confederate supporters, those like Granny Clampett.