And so too can religion rally sufficient people to reorder society, and the law, however they see fit. Contrary to the delusions of believers in the Enlightenment faith, there are no rights. Might makes right, and quite frankly - no one is going to bother dying for something as absurd as redefining the word "marriage" contrary to its definition in every single human language on the whole planet.
I don't normally agree with Dawkins, but I think he had a good point when he said that fundamentalists incorrectly believe that everyone, or simply most people who believe in the religion agree with the fundamentalists or believe as fervently as they do.
If you think large amounts of evangelicals have an appetite for violence over gay marriage, you may be sorely disappointed to find out how low that number really is.
The juries themselves, every time someone finds some clever way to avoid having to serve on a jury. They often seem proud that only stupid people serve on juries.
One of my favorites was listening to a news anchor describe the wall of water in the 2011 Japan Tsunami. "The water was twice as tall as I would be if I stood on Gary's [my co-anchor's] shoulders."
That's what happens when you get into a patent war. Sometime tries to shake you down for the stupid patents they hold? Well, you can try to shake them down for your stupid patents as well! Patent war chests are created not because your company has actually been innovative, but because you need ammunition if another company doesn't like that you're provide strong competition to them. That's the way the game is played.
Yeah, but I think proving conspiracy in a mob is pretty difficult. If you could prove that the 50 people gathered beforehand to plan to beat someone to death, then you'd really have something.
Don't forget this part: the amount Koch paid to a security consultant to protect its website ater the attack
So if I have no locks on my door, and someone comes in, they need to pay for the locks I decide maybe I should have had on my door?
That's not how computer security works though. This was a DDoS attack. It's more like having a decent lock on your door, but then someone uses a battering ram so you spring for a steel-reinforced door instead.
Was Chris Dodd disgraced for having sex with farm animals? Does the MPAA arrange coke parties at farms so that Chris Dodd can have wild bestial orgies? Or was Chris Dodd the guy who was disgraced for having anal sex with underage boys in the airport bathroom?
None of the above. The only blemishes I could find on his record were that he was fairly cozy with the financial services industry that he was supposed to regulate from his seat as chairman of the Senate Banking Committe, and they heavily funded his 2008 presidential campaign. He was a VIP customer of Countrywide Financial and then voted to give Countrywide a bailout in the wake of the housing collapse. He was probably rightly seen as being deep in the pockets of Wall Street interests. On the plus side though, at least he managed to sneak in a clause limiting "excessive executive pay" for firms that the government loaned/gave money too (though even that was not without controversy...)
The other big blemish would be that he accepted the MPAA chairman role and has been their mouthpiece ever since.
People don't pick Amazon or Overstock to save on sales tax... they do it because the prices are cheaper. When I head to BestBuy and find a SATA cable listed for 25 bucks, and Amazon has it for 4.50... I don't pick Amazon because I "save" 7.25% in sales tax.
The prices on some things, but not all, are cheaper. The BestBuy and Amazon cables are rarely the same; they're different products. Not that the BestBuy ones are worth the cost, just that the brick-and-mortar stores seem to fall for the rip-off manufacturers like Monster when it comes to things like cables and peripherals.
This has been posted on here before, so I'm kind of just karma whoring, but I have long suspected, and explained to others, that this idea that we can all work until we're 70 or 75 because we'll live to 100 for this generation is bullshit, a scam to keep us grinding along and working until we drop dead.
I don't know if it's a scam as much as it is a necessity of life. Continually increasing the amount of time between retirement and death is unsustainable, especially since that part of your life is where expenses will be highest. What, you thought buying a house is expensive? End-of-life care is crazy expensive compared to that. Whether you pay for it or not is immaterial, society will have to pick up the slack and we won't be able to afford it.
Meaning a Jury could stall a verdict by doing what is right and debate the issue. correct?
Haha, well then you'd actually have to get some good jurors in there since all the "smart people" think it's a good idea to try to get out of their civic service.
It's amazing how many christians seem to be stuck in the old testament.
It's also amazing to see how many people think that the Old Testament doesn't count anymore and was supplanted by Christ. Jesus himself said that it was not so.
Of course he's billing for it, but proving that in court would be extremely difficult. I doubt you'd be able to get a case.
with no care for the wishes or health of the patient.
Au contraire, the health of the patient is of paramount importance to him. Many doctors believe that ending the life of the patient, in not doing everything possible to prevent death, is counter to their oath. The oath has been revised, and the notion that there are lives not worth living was removed from the oath when Nazi German doctors experimented on Jews, deeming their lives not worth living.
Older versions of the Hippocratic oath explicitly forbade the giving of deadly medicine, even when asked (the same sections forbade abortion), but I can't find any reference to that in the modern American oath.
You may think that those doctors trap the patients in a life that's not worth living. That's fair, and I share that sentiment. But many many people, including many doctors, feel that any amount of life is better than death.
The problems the site faces seem to be elementary, the type of mistakes that I made when I was first doing web development.
I feel there's actually no single thing you can point to and say "that. That's what happened," but all the problems I have heard of seem to fall into two categories:
1) The website tries to tie together a dozenish agencies with very very different computer systems and methods of handling and accessing of information. It needs to check SS, Medicare, the IRS, (the NSA?? Who knows) and I have heard that many of the website hangs came from that interaction with a communications breakdown. It's a website that has as many incompatible backends as there are government agencies that need to be consulted.
2) Unfortunately, and this is pretty unforgivable, the people who were writing the front-end code for healthcare.gov were simply bad at their jobs. There's no excuse for the sorts of Javascript 101 novice-level errors that we saw on day 1 (accidentally putting a code block ending in a comment section so that the rest of the script is accidentally slurped into that function? Really? That's intro-to-programming level zaniness right there). That's like me writing stupid stuff into my project because it's 3am and the program is due in 5 hours and I spent the previous weeks procrastinating and playing Civilization.
Look at "change.gov" for example; that site gets massive traffic and holds up pretty well, even if the responses from the WH are patronizing as hell at times
Change.gov has a far far far simpler mission that's fairly self-contained. How much does traffic need to leave change.gov? Not much, I would wager. It's not the amount of traffic that is important, it's what the site has to do with that traffic, and that's what kills healthcare.gov.
(If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.)
I reject that sentiment. The statement was a motivating tool. It may not have been said - it probably didn't need to be said during the real mission as these were people that worked with those astronauts for years before the launch occurred. They didn't need to be told that the future of the space program and the three astronauts hung on their actions. But it got the point across to the audience, who didn't have that relationship.
I always saw it as shorthand -- failure is not an acceptable option, and thus everything has to be planned to prevent failure. It usually (though not always) means that you'll be given all resources available to ensure success, which is much less likely in a business setting.
If you actually think Amazon's reasons for fighting state sales tax was because of the complexity of implementing it, you are even dumber than I thought.
It is ridiculously complex if you need to charge both state sales taxes and local sales taxes, which is what was being discussed at the time. There literally was no way to keep track of every borrough's local taxes without putting together a very expensive system.
a single payer system would have been simpler and better for us but the republicans kept sayins "but, but, but, SOCIALISM!" and so they got what they wanted
Uh, it was the Democrats that killed single-payer. Not enough Democrats supported it, so it was scrapped to ensure Democratic unity.
he did mess it up. The identities of Seal Team 6 was exposed and most of them ended up getting killed.
That's a pretty big claim to make without offering any proof. Are you referring to the Chinook helicopter crash in 2011, when Taliban fighters fired an RPG at a helicopter chasing another group of Taliban? The crash killed a whole Navy SEAL troop, their biggest loss of life ever, but I fail to see how any of that was a result of the exposing of SEAL identities.
His partisan politics are responsible for his failing the people of his state by refusing to do what he said he could do better. His decision was not rational, it was partisan
You are completely ignoring the cost issue. If it's going to cost $$$ to put together a website but someone else offers to do it for free, that "free" part is pretty tempting.
Sure, they probably could have done it better. But it wasn't "free good Tennessee website" versus "free bad federal website." It was "expensive good Tennessee website" versus "free bad federal website." You may notice that under those terms it comes down to much more than a "state versus federal" partisan battle. I'm not privee to Tennessee's finances, but most states are pretty cash-strapped these days and can't afford to turn down something the feds say they'll do.
Not the poster but, you do realize the current system of law and enforcement exonerates and elevates sociopaths.
Only the right type of sociopaths, the social darwinist ones in the corporate culture. And even then they often need connections or to have otherwise shown success.
It's probably part of the reason why his occular implants were changed when the next movie rolled around
I think that's giving them a little too much credit (or is it?). ST: Generations was full of bad writing, and the visor hack, which cool in principle, is an example where things weren't thought through. They'd recently gone through a whole battle with one Borg cube where they had routines to rotate shield frequencies. In fact, they had routines loaded in for -just- the occasion of an enemy adapting to a shield frequency, so they would have the computer rotate frequencies constantly to prevent any system from exploiting a specific frequency. If anyone with half a brain were on board the Enterprise (and the series establishes the crew is made up of the best and brightest), the first step would have been to change the frequencies. Or activate the routine that changes frequencies too fast for even someone with a visual feed of engineering to adapt to. But in Generations, everyone has forgotten that this was even possible (though they do it once again by the next movie when the Borg reappear). The plot needed for the Enterprise to be destroyed, so the writers put in the laziest way to do it.
I always hate it when movies write in character deaths or other disasters that takes place because a character suddenly gets much stupider contrary to what had been previously established. I'm looking at you, Prometheus. >_>
Slashdot Mirror
And so too can religion rally sufficient people to reorder society, and the law, however they see fit. Contrary to the delusions of believers in the Enlightenment faith, there are no rights. Might makes right, and quite frankly - no one is going to bother dying for something as absurd as redefining the word "marriage" contrary to its definition in every single human language on the whole planet.
I don't normally agree with Dawkins, but I think he had a good point when he said that fundamentalists incorrectly believe that everyone, or simply most people who believe in the religion agree with the fundamentalists or believe as fervently as they do.
If you think large amounts of evangelicals have an appetite for violence over gay marriage, you may be sorely disappointed to find out how low that number really is.
And who picks the juries...?
The juries themselves, every time someone finds some clever way to avoid having to serve on a jury. They often seem proud that only stupid people serve on juries.
One of my favorites was listening to a news anchor describe the wall of water in the 2011 Japan Tsunami. "The water was twice as tall as I would be if I stood on Gary's [my co-anchor's] shoulders."
Did you want to carry around CAT6 size cable to charge your phone?
I carry around a cat 60 (image search it, plebes) sized cable to take a piss.
Hopefully not a 100m length though, or even a 3m one.
But unfortunately encumbered by a Patent, and the patent is held by a company that won't share the design.
Which makes me wonder if they'll be sued for copying the Apple lightning connector style. And before you say "OMG Apple sues over every silly patent!" remember that Samsung sued Apple for the bounce-back effect when you scroll a list and reach the end (no I'm not joking they really did).
That's what happens when you get into a patent war. Sometime tries to shake you down for the stupid patents they hold? Well, you can try to shake them down for your stupid patents as well! Patent war chests are created not because your company has actually been innovative, but because you need ammunition if another company doesn't like that you're provide strong competition to them. That's the way the game is played.
Yeah, but I think proving conspiracy in a mob is pretty difficult. If you could prove that the 50 people gathered beforehand to plan to beat someone to death, then you'd really have something.
Don't forget this part: the amount Koch paid to a security consultant to protect its website ater the attack
So if I have no locks on my door, and someone comes in, they need to pay for the locks I decide maybe I should have had on my door?
That's not how computer security works though. This was a DDoS attack. It's more like having a decent lock on your door, but then someone uses a battering ram so you spring for a steel-reinforced door instead.
Was Chris Dodd disgraced for having sex with farm animals? Does the MPAA arrange coke parties at farms so that Chris Dodd can have wild bestial orgies? Or was Chris Dodd the guy who was disgraced for having anal sex with underage boys in the airport bathroom?
None of the above. The only blemishes I could find on his record were that he was fairly cozy with the financial services industry that he was supposed to regulate from his seat as chairman of the Senate Banking Committe, and they heavily funded his 2008 presidential campaign. He was a VIP customer of Countrywide Financial and then voted to give Countrywide a bailout in the wake of the housing collapse. He was probably rightly seen as being deep in the pockets of Wall Street interests. On the plus side though, at least he managed to sneak in a clause limiting "excessive executive pay" for firms that the government loaned/gave money too (though even that was not without controversy...)
The other big blemish would be that he accepted the MPAA chairman role and has been their mouthpiece ever since.
American Revolutionary War was started over taxes.
It had many reasons, one being taxation without representation. The Founders were fine with taxation -with- representation.
People don't pick Amazon or Overstock to save on sales tax... they do it because the prices are cheaper. When I head to BestBuy and find a SATA cable listed for 25 bucks, and Amazon has it for 4.50... I don't pick Amazon because I "save" 7.25% in sales tax.
The prices on some things, but not all, are cheaper. The BestBuy and Amazon cables are rarely the same; they're different products.
Not that the BestBuy ones are worth the cost, just that the brick-and-mortar stores seem to fall for the rip-off manufacturers like Monster when it comes to things like cables and peripherals.
Also, "I win this debate" while the opponent is in mourning. Classy.
Scott brought it up and upped the ante with his rhetoric. I suppose you could excuse him by saying he's just in mourning, but he was asking for it.
This has been posted on here before, so I'm kind of just karma whoring, but I have long suspected, and explained to others, that this idea that we can all work until we're 70 or 75 because we'll live to 100 for this generation is bullshit, a scam to keep us grinding along and working until we drop dead.
I don't know if it's a scam as much as it is a necessity of life. Continually increasing the amount of time between retirement and death is unsustainable, especially since that part of your life is where expenses will be highest. What, you thought buying a house is expensive? End-of-life care is crazy expensive compared to that. Whether you pay for it or not is immaterial, society will have to pick up the slack and we won't be able to afford it.
Meaning a Jury could stall a verdict by doing what is right and debate the issue. correct?
Haha, well then you'd actually have to get some good jurors in there since all the "smart people" think it's a good idea to try to get out of their civic service.
It's amazing how many christians seem to be stuck in the old testament.
It's also amazing to see how many people think that the Old Testament doesn't count anymore and was supplanted by Christ. Jesus himself said that it was not so.
Of course he's billing for it, but proving that in court would be extremely difficult. I doubt you'd be able to get a case.
with no care for the wishes or health of the patient.
Au contraire, the health of the patient is of paramount importance to him. Many doctors believe that ending the life of the patient, in not doing everything possible to prevent death, is counter to their oath. The oath has been revised, and the notion that there are lives not worth living was removed from the oath when Nazi German doctors experimented on Jews, deeming their lives not worth living.
Older versions of the Hippocratic oath explicitly forbade the giving of deadly medicine, even when asked (the same sections forbade abortion), but I can't find any reference to that in the modern American oath.
You may think that those doctors trap the patients in a life that's not worth living. That's fair, and I share that sentiment. But many many people, including many doctors, feel that any amount of life is better than death.
The problems the site faces seem to be elementary, the type of mistakes that I made when I was first doing web development.
I feel there's actually no single thing you can point to and say "that. That's what happened," but all the problems I have heard of seem to fall into two categories:
1) The website tries to tie together a dozenish agencies with very very different computer systems and methods of handling and accessing of information. It needs to check SS, Medicare, the IRS, (the NSA?? Who knows) and I have heard that many of the website hangs came from that interaction with a communications breakdown. It's a website that has as many incompatible backends as there are government agencies that need to be consulted.
2) Unfortunately, and this is pretty unforgivable, the people who were writing the front-end code for healthcare.gov were simply bad at their jobs. There's no excuse for the sorts of Javascript 101 novice-level errors that we saw on day 1 (accidentally putting a code block ending in a comment section so that the rest of the script is accidentally slurped into that function? Really? That's intro-to-programming level zaniness right there). That's like me writing stupid stuff into my project because it's 3am and the program is due in 5 hours and I spent the previous weeks procrastinating and playing Civilization.
Look at "change.gov" for example; that site gets massive traffic and holds up pretty well, even if the responses from the WH are patronizing as hell at times
Change.gov has a far far far simpler mission that's fairly self-contained. How much does traffic need to leave change.gov? Not much, I would wager. It's not the amount of traffic that is important, it's what the site has to do with that traffic, and that's what kills healthcare.gov.
(If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.)
I reject that sentiment. The statement was a motivating tool. It may not have been said - it probably didn't need to be said during the real mission as these were people that worked with those astronauts for years before the launch occurred. They didn't need to be told that the future of the space program and the three astronauts hung on their actions. But it got the point across to the audience, who didn't have that relationship.
I always saw it as shorthand -- failure is not an acceptable option, and thus everything has to be planned to prevent failure. It usually (though not always) means that you'll be given all resources available to ensure success, which is much less likely in a business setting.
If you actually think Amazon's reasons for fighting state sales tax was because of the complexity of implementing it, you are even dumber than I thought.
It is ridiculously complex if you need to charge both state sales taxes and local sales taxes, which is what was being discussed at the time. There literally was no way to keep track of every borrough's local taxes without putting together a very expensive system.
a single payer system would have been simpler and better for us but the republicans kept sayins "but, but, but, SOCIALISM!" and so they got what they wanted
Uh, it was the Democrats that killed single-payer. Not enough Democrats supported it, so it was scrapped to ensure Democratic unity.
he did mess it up. The identities of Seal Team 6 was exposed and most of them ended up getting killed.
That's a pretty big claim to make without offering any proof. Are you referring to the Chinook helicopter crash in 2011, when Taliban fighters fired an RPG at a helicopter chasing another group of Taliban? The crash killed a whole Navy SEAL troop, their biggest loss of life ever, but I fail to see how any of that was a result of the exposing of SEAL identities.
His partisan politics are responsible for his failing the people of his state by refusing to do what he said he could do better. His decision was not rational, it was partisan
You are completely ignoring the cost issue. If it's going to cost $$$ to put together a website but someone else offers to do it for free, that "free" part is pretty tempting.
Sure, they probably could have done it better. But it wasn't "free good Tennessee website" versus "free bad federal website."
It was "expensive good Tennessee website" versus "free bad federal website."
You may notice that under those terms it comes down to much more than a "state versus federal" partisan battle.
I'm not privee to Tennessee's finances, but most states are pretty cash-strapped these days and can't afford to turn down something the feds say they'll do.
"No one is more righteous than the fallen man reformed."
"Born again" maybe.
Surely conflict of interest is an argument for keeping utilities under public rather than private control,
This is Arizona we're talking about here, they do not believe in a public sector.
Not the poster but, you do realize the current system of law and enforcement exonerates and elevates sociopaths.
Only the right type of sociopaths, the social darwinist ones in the corporate culture.
And even then they often need connections or to have otherwise shown success.
It's probably part of the reason why his occular implants were changed when the next movie rolled around
I think that's giving them a little too much credit (or is it?). ST: Generations was full of bad writing, and the visor hack, which cool in principle, is an example where things weren't thought through. They'd recently gone through a whole battle with one Borg cube where they had routines to rotate shield frequencies. In fact, they had routines loaded in for -just- the occasion of an enemy adapting to a shield frequency, so they would have the computer rotate frequencies constantly to prevent any system from exploiting a specific frequency. If anyone with half a brain were on board the Enterprise (and the series establishes the crew is made up of the best and brightest), the first step would have been to change the frequencies. Or activate the routine that changes frequencies too fast for even someone with a visual feed of engineering to adapt to. But in Generations, everyone has forgotten that this was even possible (though they do it once again by the next movie when the Borg reappear). The plot needed for the Enterprise to be destroyed, so the writers put in the laziest way to do it.
I always hate it when movies write in character deaths or other disasters that takes place because a character suddenly gets much stupider contrary to what had been previously established. I'm looking at you, Prometheus. >_>