Clinton was accused of sexual harassment of a subordinate in the Paula Jones case - a charge that he denied. "Ironically" enough, he was also guilty of conducting an affair with another subordinate - Lewinsky. If you can't see the obvious relevance of the Lewinsky matter to the Jones case, you really ought to take off those mud-colored glasses.
So having consensual sex is evidence that you have attempted to coerce sex?
'Dictator For Life has been accused of assualting Jane Doe - a charge that he has denied. "Ironically' enough, he was also guilty of having consensual sex with Halle Berry. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, If you can't see the obvious relevance...'
There's been a lot of discussion about Cryptonomicon, which is a personal favorite. So far this summer I've read A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge, Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke, Bad News by Donald Westlake, and most of Stardust by Neil Gaiman (a re-read). Gaiman's is a fantasy involving a mostly ordinary guy who makes a foolish promise to a girl and goes on a quest. If you like it, go for Good Omens, Neverwhere and American Gods. The Vinge is sci-fi on a grand scale with cool aliens and The Net of A Million Lies. He has other books in the same universe, which I haven't read yet. The Clarke is a nice counterpoint to most SF you read - everyone is very civilized, even the nominal bad guys, but it has lovely eyecandy for your mind. And a space elevator. The Westlake is a comic crime novel featuring a professional thief with very bad luck, but it wasn't as funny as Don't Ask or Drowned Hopes. Yes, a novel titled 'Drowned Hopes' is actually very funny.
You could also try Foucualt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It might be heavier going than some of these others, but it's a damn good novel. If you like hard-edged crime fiction there's always James Ellroy. I'll put it this way - LA Confidential was a much diluted and simplified version of the novel. American Tabloid, Ellroy's take on the JFK assassination is a huge, dark, nasty and brilliant piece of work. He's also written a memoir called My Dark Places, that starts with his mother's (still unsolved) murder, and gets only marginally cheerier.
I've been getting back into comics in the last couple of years, so if that sounds interesting, I'd recommend Kingdom Come, which has nothing to do with the bad Led Zeppelin ripoff band, but is a near-future tale of what happens after Superman returns from self-imposed exile. A good story with amazing art (all oil paintings) by Alex Ross. Ross also did Marvels, which is sort of the man-in-the-street view of the Marvel Universe (Spiderman, the X-Men, etc.) The Astro City collections are sort of non-traditional stories set in a traditional superhero world, while the Top Ten collections are about the police station in a city where everyone and everything is super-powered. Even the rats and cats. Good stuff all around, you shouldn't even feel embarassed reading any of the ones I listed. Heck, there's always the Sandman series, which is where Neil Gaiman got his start and did some of his best work - especially A Season of Mists.
ISTR hearing that one of the most commonly shared, and least mutated, genes known has something to do with how DNA gets coiled up into chromosomes.
Those are the histone proteins, and you are exactly right about them being the most conserved genetic sequences. Only makes sense, since DNA double-helices are only have variations in lengths and on the inner sides of the strands, and any changes in the histone structure can affect anything the cell tries to do (replicate, produce proteins). Just about any biochem or molecular biology text will reference that, but I read it in either Voet & Voet or Lewin Back In The Day.
Additionally, the similarities between humans and any eukaryote are enough to make you feel either very unimpressed about your genes or very impressed with the differences that small things can make, especially in combinations with each other and a nice long developmental stage.
Look, the administration made it a priority to protect the oilfields and the military did a pretty good job of it. Protecting the national museums wouldn't have required any where near as much effort. Say a company of Marines for 24/7 coverage, and not too many professional criminals would be willing to face that, much less your average "I'm gonna pay those Baathist bastards back by stealing their stuff" man-in-the-street looter. Also, since we were there as liberators, not conquerors, using a small force to protect the Iraqi's cultural heritage would have been good PR no just in the present, but also the future as we try to 'win the peace' as well.
Of course, as someone on Usenet pointed out, if there had been more Indiana Jones-style, "Let's grab the artifacts and take them home archeologists in the last century all those baubles would be safe in western museums.
I find the Lord of the Rings so full of holes it isn't funny (Why didn't Gandalf have one of those Eagles who rescued him from Sauraman simply carry Frodo over Mount Doom to drop the ring in? The whole job would have take like a day and a half!)
Your visualization of Middle-Earth's Cosmic All is not complete;). Not to veer too far off-topic, but the eagle was actually a powerful, sentient entity, not just a really big bird. (Someone with a much better memory than I will be able to give name, rank and serial number.) Therefore, the Ring's ability to corrupt those nearby would affect the eagle. Now it's a powerful, sentient, giant eagle that can turn invisible as it flies back to Mordor to serve Sauron. An unmentioned advantage of giving the Ring to Frodo is that if he gets possessed by the Ring, Aragorn, Gimli or just about anybody else can smack some sense into him before he does too much damage. Gandalf with the Ring on the other hand...
The whole I was reading Snow Crash, I kept thinking to myself "This would be such a great movie, if nobody screwed it up." That's the downside to adaptations, unfortunately. Still, a radioactive killer drug dealer, a sk8r grrl, a nearly impossible to cast accurately Protagonist (bad pun), an armored personnel wheelchair, the dentata, ancient Sumerian tablets of mind control, a pizza delivering Mafia, and The Greatest Cybernetic Dog Ever, who can resist it?
Ringworld was the first book that came to mind when I saw this topic. (Actually, it's the example I used a couple of years ago when I submitted a very similar Ask Slashdot that was never posted.) Mote would be a pretty good choice too, along with Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
ObSF: Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and his description of Waterhouse's family "As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet."
Locking sentients up for any potential act is madness. You could run over your neighbor with your car but I don't think you should be arrested for it until you try to do so.
The politicians in the movie want to ID and imprison ALL mutants before they DO anything. There was a leader in Europe in the early part of the last century who wanted to ID and imprison ALL members of certain ethnic and religious groups before they DID anything becuase they were 'dangerous and harmful'. This rightfully came to be regarded as an evil thing.
Because it's none of the Feds business. If you aren't concerned with your privacy, why do you post as 'beee', rather than under your real name? If you're a conservative, you should be worried that the ultra-liberal feds will take offense at your racist/. sig and toss you in jail. If you're a liberal, you should be afraid that the neo-fascists will come by and arrest you for opposing Gulf War II. If you have nothing to hide, why not let everybody from every government agency eavesdrop on your phone calls, e-mail, and website postings? Why not let them bug your house, car, place of employment, and your clothes? What are you trying to hide?
I've had this happen at places where I've worked - Someone 'needs' to get on Bob's computer and rather finding Bob, asking him to log on, etc., they just yell across the office "Hey Bob, what's your password?" and Bob yells back "'Password'!". Bob might think he has told one person, but he's really told the whole first floor. I then go ahead and change his password to something else and then leave it on Bob's voice-mail.
Re:Gene sequencing/splicing
on
Ancient DNA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I thought the way the Human Genome project worked was by breaking our DNA into lots of small bits and sequencing them in parallel, then putting those sequences together in a computer.
When scientists do sequencing on DNA, they use enzymes that cut the strands at specific sequences (frex: an enzyme will 'look' for the sequence ATGCCGTAATCGA and cut the strand so you get a segment that ends ATGCCGTA and one that begins ATCGA) so you you get known beginning and ending points. Also since the DNA strands are complementary you know that if one side of the double helix has the ATGCCGTAATCGA sequence, you also know that the other has TACGGCATTAGCT. Which helps with making sure that you are connecting your cut strands in the right order. If your strands are broken into too many small pieces in a random pattern it's much harder to put them back together again. It's the difference between re-assembling an Encyclopedia Brittanica that has been cut between each article and one that has been run through a cross-cut shredder.
The one thing Jurassic Park never explained was how they made the dinosaur eggs.
Considering that Watson and Crick kinda-sorta stole Franklin's unpublished raw data, she should have been a co-author, not just thanked. Yes, the significance of the paper is that Watson and Crick made a huge conceptual breakthrough on DNA's structure (two strands rather than the three that Pauling thought - sort of like correcting Hawking's black hole physics) that leads directly to determining how DNA replicates (I love that para at the end: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." - One sentence that basically says "We just earned a Nobel Prize, folks"), but they would not have been able to do that without Franklin's crystallography. For that matter, my Genetics prof back in the day said that they were originally using the wrong tautomers for their models but were corrected (by Wilkins, ims), which is where the bit about keto v. enol comes from. This is also a huge piece of evidence that was not really credited "properly".
Don't make a 'quick stop' to pay your traffic ticket at the county courthouse if you're loaded down with the equipment you've been using to move computers in offices either. I had my cellphone, my Gerber multiplier, a nic and some patch cables on me when I tried to. The (all things considered pretty polite) security guard finally told me to just get the hell out of there, rather than waste her time explaining what all of it was.
I think that there may be confusion over what the OP meant by 'non-consecutive' text. In Office XP you can select some text, copy it to the clipboard, select a second batch of text and copy it to the clipboard, rinse lather, repeat. A window pops up and you can select which one you want to paste.
Give me a break. The metric system is a system of measures designed by committee.
Much like a blind pig sometimes finding an acorn, sometimes committees get things right. Or do you think that making an inch dependent on the size of 3 seeds (why 3? why not 1, 2, or 5?) and making a foot 12 of those (why not 10? why not 14?) and a mile based on 52xx of those is the only logical why to do it? The metric system's advantage is that it is based on easily remembered numbers (water freezes at 0, boils at 100), and on powers of 10. The only reason it seems hard is that we aren't taught it when we are kids, so we try to translate it as we go.
As another poster pointed out, the feathered limbs wouldn't be much more awkward than the big flaps of skin that flying squirrels have.
Also, not to be too anal here but your use of the word evolution makes it sound as though evolution makes decisions about growing wings then losing them. That's not really how it works. Evolution makes decisions the same way that gravity does .
The microraptors were probably just small lizards/dinos with feathers that were used more for temperature regulation and/or sexual display than movement, whose offspring x generations down the road were gliders, whose offspring y generations down the road were more birds than dinos, whose offspring z generations down the road were chicken fricasee.
I would agree that his fiction varied greatly in quality (compare the Real Foundation Trilogy with the sequels that he wrote ~30-40 years later, if you dare), but his non-fiction was consistently excellent.
Re:Your dressed casually to the first day of work?
on
Cool Work Shirts?
·
· Score: 2
Maybe he asked about the dress code and they said something vague like 'business casual'. I've worked at three different places that were 'business casual' and they all had different dress codes. The first meant button-down shirt and tie (but nobody complained when I wore a button-down collarless shirt, sans tie), no jeans or shorts. At the second place it meant no ties needed (in fact my boss ordered me not to wear ties as I was so clumsy I'd probably get it caught in a CPU fan and strangle myself), but no jeans or shorts either. My current employer is also business casual two or three times a week, but that just means that management has to wear ties but not suits. The other week days it's max casual (jeans, shorts, t-shirts, sports jerseys) with the condition that t-shirts must be tucked in.
I agree with the ROT that it's better to be overdressed than under. I tend to always wear the dress shirts and khakis even on casual days since I've got pretty long hair and it makes me feel a little bit more presentable in those surprise meetings with the President.
The ballistics of the gun/ammo being used just don't fit right since people are saying they don't hear the shots, or don't hear very loud shots,...
I've only fired guns on one occasion - at a friends bachelor party - but one of the guns was a AR-15, the civilian version (more or less) of the.223 M-16. It was noticeably quieter than the other guns (and I had headache coming on so I was paying attention to the noise level), except the.22 pistols, especially since Hollywood has conditioned me to expect that guns would sound like thunder. I could definitely see that you might not notice or recognize the sound from a couple hundred yards away in a moderately noisy urban environment.
But I get your point. Feet first into the mulcher is too good a fate for this ass clown. Shooting old men and children and women. In the back. I'm having a hard time coming up with suitable retribution...
Exactly. People like this (and McVeigh and Gacy) are the reason why I have such a hard time saying that the death penalty should be abolished. Of course, since I live in Illinois where more people are found not guilty on death row than executed, I have a hard time saying the death penalty actually works...
Evolution is in complete contradiction to God's nature.
In what way? Because evolution is a long, round-about way to get to human beings? God is not concerned with quick fixes, otherwise He would have made humans incorruptible rather than let them fall from grace. Or just made everyone fall in line with Him, rather than going through all the prophets and sacrificing His Son. Waiting several thousand years and letting billions of people suffer both active evil and the pain of not knowing Christ is hardly more efficient than waiting several billion years and letting billions of people suffer both active evil and the pain of not knowing Christ when you can take the big picture view the way God can.
Literalists say that evolution and the Big Bang limit God's powers, but God lets evil happen for reasons that are not knowable to mere humans. If God lets death camps and child molesters exist for reasons that we cannot understand, but that are correct in the long run, why can't he have used the Big Bang and evolution as the mechanisms for his grand design for reasons that we can't understand?
Slashdot Mirror
Clinton was accused of sexual harassment of a subordinate in the Paula Jones case - a charge that he denied. "Ironically" enough, he was also guilty of conducting an affair with another subordinate - Lewinsky. If you can't see the obvious relevance of the Lewinsky matter to the Jones case, you really ought to take off those mud-colored glasses.
So having consensual sex is evidence that you have attempted to coerce sex?
'Dictator For Life has been accused of assualting Jane Doe - a charge that he has denied. "Ironically' enough, he was also guilty of having consensual sex with Halle Berry. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, If you can't see the obvious relevance...'
First off, congrats on graduation!
There's been a lot of discussion about Cryptonomicon, which is a personal favorite. So far this summer I've read A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge, Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke, Bad News by Donald Westlake, and most of Stardust by Neil Gaiman (a re-read). Gaiman's is a fantasy involving a mostly ordinary guy who makes a foolish promise to a girl and goes on a quest. If you like it, go for Good Omens, Neverwhere and American Gods. The Vinge is sci-fi on a grand scale with cool aliens and The Net of A Million Lies. He has other books in the same universe, which I haven't read yet. The Clarke is a nice counterpoint to most SF you read - everyone is very civilized, even the nominal bad guys, but it has lovely eyecandy for your mind. And a space elevator. The Westlake is a comic crime novel featuring a professional thief with very bad luck, but it wasn't as funny as Don't Ask or Drowned Hopes. Yes, a novel titled 'Drowned Hopes' is actually very funny.
You could also try Foucualt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It might be heavier going than some of these others, but it's a damn good novel. If you like hard-edged crime fiction there's always James Ellroy. I'll put it this way - LA Confidential was a much diluted and simplified version of the novel. American Tabloid, Ellroy's take on the JFK assassination is a huge, dark, nasty and brilliant piece of work. He's also written a memoir called My Dark Places, that starts with his mother's (still unsolved) murder, and gets only marginally cheerier.
I've been getting back into comics in the last couple of years, so if that sounds interesting, I'd recommend Kingdom Come, which has nothing to do with the bad Led Zeppelin ripoff band, but is a near-future tale of what happens after Superman returns from self-imposed exile. A good story with amazing art (all oil paintings) by Alex Ross. Ross also did Marvels, which is sort of the man-in-the-street view of the Marvel Universe (Spiderman, the X-Men, etc.) The Astro City collections are sort of non-traditional stories set in a traditional superhero world, while the Top Ten collections are about the police station in a city where everyone and everything is super-powered. Even the rats and cats. Good stuff all around, you shouldn't even feel embarassed reading any of the ones I listed. Heck, there's always the Sandman series, which is where Neil Gaiman got his start and did some of his best work - especially A Season of Mists.
ISTR hearing that one of the most commonly shared, and least mutated, genes known has something to do with how DNA gets coiled up into chromosomes.
Those are the histone proteins, and you are exactly right about them being the most conserved genetic sequences. Only makes sense, since DNA double-helices are only have variations in lengths and on the inner sides of the strands, and any changes in the histone structure can affect anything the cell tries to do (replicate, produce proteins). Just about any biochem or molecular biology text will reference that, but I read it in either Voet & Voet or Lewin Back In The Day.
Additionally, the similarities between humans and any eukaryote are enough to make you feel either very unimpressed about your genes or very impressed with the differences that small things can make, especially in combinations with each other and a nice long developmental stage.
Look, the administration made it a priority to protect the oilfields and the military did a pretty good job of it. Protecting the national museums wouldn't have required any where near as much effort. Say a company of Marines for 24/7 coverage, and not too many professional criminals would be willing to face that, much less your average "I'm gonna pay those Baathist bastards back by stealing their stuff" man-in-the-street looter. Also, since we were there as liberators, not conquerors, using a small force to protect the Iraqi's cultural heritage would have been good PR no just in the present, but also the future as we try to 'win the peace' as well.
Of course, as someone on Usenet pointed out, if there had been more Indiana Jones-style, "Let's grab the artifacts and take them home archeologists in the last century all those baubles would be safe in western museums.
I find the Lord of the Rings so full of holes it isn't funny (Why didn't Gandalf have one of those Eagles who rescued him from Sauraman simply carry Frodo over Mount Doom to drop the ring in? The whole job would have take like a day and a half!)
Your visualization of Middle-Earth's Cosmic All is not complete;). Not to veer too far off-topic, but the eagle was actually a powerful, sentient entity, not just a really big bird. (Someone with a much better memory than I will be able to give name, rank and serial number.) Therefore, the Ring's ability to corrupt those nearby would affect the eagle. Now it's a powerful, sentient, giant eagle that can turn invisible as it flies back to Mordor to serve Sauron. An unmentioned advantage of giving the Ring to Frodo is that if he gets possessed by the Ring, Aragorn, Gimli or just about anybody else can smack some sense into him before he does too much damage. Gandalf with the Ring on the other hand...
The whole I was reading Snow Crash, I kept thinking to myself "This would be such a great movie, if nobody screwed it up." That's the downside to adaptations, unfortunately. Still, a radioactive killer drug dealer, a sk8r grrl, a nearly impossible to cast accurately Protagonist (bad pun), an armored personnel wheelchair, the dentata, ancient Sumerian tablets of mind control, a pizza delivering Mafia, and The Greatest Cybernetic Dog Ever, who can resist it?
Ringworld was the first book that came to mind when I saw this topic. (Actually, it's the example I used a couple of years ago when I submitted a very similar Ask Slashdot that was never posted.) Mote would be a pretty good choice too, along with Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
All humans are in fact dangerous and harmful.
ObSF: Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and his description of Waterhouse's family "As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet."
Locking sentients up for any potential act is madness. You could run over your neighbor with your car but I don't think you should be arrested for it until you try to do so.
Going OT here for a bit...
The politicians in the movie want to ID and imprison ALL mutants before they DO anything. There was a leader in Europe in the early part of the last century who wanted to ID and imprison ALL members of certain ethnic and religious groups before they DID anything becuase they were 'dangerous and harmful'. This rightfully came to be regarded as an evil thing.
Because it's none of the Feds business. If you aren't concerned with your privacy, why do you post as 'beee', rather than under your real name? If you're a conservative, you should be worried that the ultra-liberal feds will take offense at your racist /. sig and toss you in jail. If you're a liberal, you should be afraid that the neo-fascists will come by and arrest you for opposing Gulf War II. If you have nothing to hide, why not let everybody from every government agency eavesdrop on your phone calls, e-mail, and website postings? Why not let them bug your house, car, place of employment, and your clothes? What are you trying to hide?
(Allow me to slip into comic book geek mode for a moment)
Dude, Aquaman and Prince Namor are from Atlantis. Wonder Woman is from Paradise Island/Thymiscira (sp?).
I've had this happen at places where I've worked - Someone 'needs' to get on Bob's computer and rather finding Bob, asking him to log on, etc., they just yell across the office "Hey Bob, what's your password?" and Bob yells back "'Password'!". Bob might think he has told one person, but he's really told the whole first floor. I then go ahead and change his password to something else and then leave it on Bob's voice-mail.
I thought the way the Human Genome project worked was by breaking our DNA into lots of small bits and sequencing them in parallel, then putting those sequences together in a computer.
;)
When scientists do sequencing on DNA, they use enzymes that cut the strands at specific sequences (frex: an enzyme will 'look' for the sequence ATGCCGTAATCGA and cut the strand so you get a segment that ends ATGCCGTA and one that begins ATCGA) so you you get known beginning and ending points. Also since the DNA strands are complementary you know that if one side of the double helix has the ATGCCGTAATCGA sequence, you also know that the other has TACGGCATTAGCT. Which helps with making sure that you are connecting your cut strands in the right order. If your strands are broken into too many small pieces in a random pattern it's much harder to put them back together again. It's the difference between re-assembling an Encyclopedia Brittanica that has been cut between each article and one that has been run through a cross-cut shredder.
The one thing Jurassic Park never explained was how they made the dinosaur eggs.
They called the FX department.
Considering that Watson and Crick kinda-sorta stole Franklin's unpublished raw data, she should have been a co-author, not just thanked. Yes, the significance of the paper is that Watson and Crick made a huge conceptual breakthrough on DNA's structure (two strands rather than the three that Pauling thought - sort of like correcting Hawking's black hole physics) that leads directly to determining how DNA replicates (I love that para at the end: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." - One sentence that basically says "We just earned a Nobel Prize, folks"), but they would not have been able to do that without Franklin's crystallography. For that matter, my Genetics prof back in the day said that they were originally using the wrong tautomers for their models but were corrected (by Wilkins, ims), which is where the bit about keto v. enol comes from. This is also a huge piece of evidence that was not really credited "properly".
Don't make a 'quick stop' to pay your traffic ticket at the county courthouse if you're loaded down with the equipment you've been using to move computers in offices either. I had my cellphone, my Gerber multiplier, a nic and some patch cables on me when I tried to. The (all things considered pretty polite) security guard finally told me to just get the hell out of there, rather than waste her time explaining what all of it was.
I think that there may be confusion over what the OP meant by 'non-consecutive' text. In Office XP you can select some text, copy it to the clipboard, select a second batch of text and copy it to the clipboard, rinse lather, repeat. A window pops up and you can select which one you want to paste.
Give me a break. The metric system is a system of measures designed by committee.
Much like a blind pig sometimes finding an acorn, sometimes committees get things right. Or do you think that making an inch dependent on the size of 3 seeds (why 3? why not 1, 2, or 5?) and making a foot 12 of those (why not 10? why not 14?) and a mile based on 52xx of those is the only logical why to do it? The metric system's advantage is that it is based on easily remembered numbers (water freezes at 0, boils at 100), and on powers of 10. The only reason it seems hard is that we aren't taught it when we are kids, so we try to translate it as we go.
As another poster pointed out, the feathered limbs wouldn't be much more awkward than the big flaps of skin that flying squirrels have.
Also, not to be too anal here but your use of the word evolution makes it sound as though evolution makes decisions about growing wings then losing them. That's not really how it works. Evolution makes decisions the same way that gravity does .
The microraptors were probably just small lizards/dinos with feathers that were used more for temperature regulation and/or sexual display than movement, whose offspring x generations down the road were gliders, whose offspring y generations down the road were more birds than dinos, whose offspring z generations down the road were chicken fricasee.
What exactly do you propose to use to judge people if you put ethics aside, and ignore what they think is right?
If you would simply agree with whoever had the best-dressed lawyers, you could be on the Supreme Court...
"The policy seems to be, we work in order to be free", as Bob Mould said.
I would agree that his fiction varied greatly in quality (compare the Real Foundation Trilogy with the sequels that he wrote ~30-40 years later, if you dare), but his non-fiction was consistently excellent.
Maybe he asked about the dress code and they said something vague like 'business casual'. I've worked at three different places that were 'business casual' and they all had different dress codes. The first meant button-down shirt and tie (but nobody complained when I wore a button-down collarless shirt, sans tie), no jeans or shorts. At the second place it meant no ties needed (in fact my boss ordered me not to wear ties as I was so clumsy I'd probably get it caught in a CPU fan and strangle myself), but no jeans or shorts either. My current employer is also business casual two or three times a week, but that just means that management has to wear ties but not suits. The other week days it's max casual (jeans, shorts, t-shirts, sports jerseys) with the condition that t-shirts must be tucked in.
I agree with the ROT that it's better to be overdressed than under. I tend to always wear the dress shirts and khakis even on casual days since I've got pretty long hair and it makes me feel a little bit more presentable in those surprise meetings with the President.
The ballistics of the gun/ammo being used just don't fit right since people are saying they don't hear the shots, or don't hear very loud shots, ...
.223 M-16. It was noticeably quieter than the other guns (and I had headache coming on so I was paying attention to the noise level), except the .22 pistols, especially since Hollywood has conditioned me to expect that guns would sound like thunder. I could definitely see that you might not notice or recognize the sound from a couple hundred yards away in a moderately noisy urban environment.
I've only fired guns on one occasion - at a friends bachelor party - but one of the guns was a AR-15, the civilian version (more or less) of the
But I get your point. Feet first into the mulcher is too good a fate for this ass clown. Shooting old men and children and women. In the back. I'm having a hard time coming up with suitable retribution...
Exactly. People like this (and McVeigh and Gacy) are the reason why I have such a hard time saying that the death penalty should be abolished. Of course, since I live in Illinois where more people are found not guilty on death row than executed, I have a hard time saying the death penalty actually works...
Evolution is in complete contradiction to God's nature.
In what way? Because evolution is a long, round-about way to get to human beings? God is not concerned with quick fixes, otherwise He would have made humans incorruptible rather than let them fall from grace. Or just made everyone fall in line with Him, rather than going through all the prophets and sacrificing His Son. Waiting several thousand years and letting billions of people suffer both active evil and the pain of not knowing Christ is hardly more efficient than waiting several billion years and letting billions of people suffer both active evil and the pain of not knowing Christ when you can take the big picture view the way God can.
Literalists say that evolution and the Big Bang limit God's powers, but God lets evil happen for reasons that are not knowable to mere humans. If God lets death camps and child molesters exist for reasons that we cannot understand, but that are correct in the long run, why can't he have used the Big Bang and evolution as the mechanisms for his grand design for reasons that we can't understand?