they were just desperate people who really needed the money they could get from selling his shoes, simply in order to eat.
I've been in a few British and American ghettoes (in England they call them 'council estates'), and the last thing anybody there needs is to eat. Modern Western democracies are qualitatively different from all civilizations that preceded them. Nobody is fatter than their poorest citizens.
Shoe thefts in these places are done because they want fancy shoes. Or drugs. Food? That's what food stamps are for.
Even if it's a bit depressing, it keeps the revolution fueled.
Be careful what you wish for. I had to live through the Carter and Clinton years, gritting my teeth and believing that the Right would eventually return to power through democratic elections. And it did. And the pendulum is swinging back the other way at the moment, and may swing much further in 2008. I will grit my teeth again, and continue working to undermine the left-wing agenda in every legal, non-violent way I possibly can.
But if your precious "revolution" comes to pass? I will be among the counter-revolutionaries, and we are extemely well-armed. If you give up on the ballot box, expect no mercy from people like me.
no one can speak of a "real" democracy when the voter turnout is routinely around 20-30% or some such.
This is a feature, not a bug. I don't want to be ruled by people for whom Jerry Springer Show reruns are more important than getting off their fat asses to vote.
A fine specimen of Eurotrash nitwittery. Mildly amusing, but ultimately of no consequence. He and his countrymen will soon be dead or enslaved, and their daughters clad in burqas and serving as brood mares for howling Mahometan head-choppers. We Americans need pay no attention to their opinions of us, which in any case are based on little more than Hollywood movies and opinion pieces in the Grauniad.
So we all agree instead that a dollar represents an abstract concept of value.
It may be abstract in some sense, but it does have a very practical value: It makes tax collectors go away if you give some of it to them, without stealing your cows or chickens, or ejecting you from your home at gunpoint, or clapping you in prison. This is a great advancement in the history of civilization.
Fiat currency does not have to be inflationary, if the government has the discipline not to increase the money supply by a greater percentage than the national economy's increase in productivity. Theoretically, it can even undergo deflation, which you might remember being discussed in worried tones about seven or eight years ago at the height of the tech bubble.
Conversely, the buying power of commodity-backed money can fluctuate wildly. Spain had dreadful inflation after conquering the gold and silver mining regions of the Americas. In the late 1800s, the question of whether to use gold or silver for backing the currency was a matter of great dispute, because with the discovery of the Comstock Lode and other great silver deposits, farmers and other debtors clamored for a silver-backed currency in full knowledge that it would be inflationary.
Gold-backed currency would not be a good idea for a modern economy. If technology increases the efficiency of gold extraction, a gold note loses value and inflation results. If the mines play out, money becomes more valuable and the nation suffers deflation, even if there is no good reason for it in the economy as a whole.
So long as the government accepts its own greenbacks for payment of taxes owed, and prudently manages the money supply, there is no need for concern about "fiat" money. The best thing we can do to ensure this is the case is to demand transparency from the Federal Reserve, and closely scrutinize the qualifications and good judgment of those persons appointed to its governing board.
Australia had the Monash massacre in 2002, long after Port Arthur and the new gun laws. The Port Arthur massacre was a real record breaker even if it didn't happen in school. Then there's Queen Street, Hoddle Street, Strathfield, Milperra, Central Coast, etc.
Germany has had a couple, including a real bad one in 2002.
Even Sweden had a mass murder some years ago, committed by a soldier with his service rifle.
All of these countries have long had more stringent gun control than the US, except Switzerland. There are more of these in the US, but on a per capita basis, some other countries are not far behind. And I guarantee you it will happen again, even in places like Japan and England where it is practically impossible to get a legal gun.
Not to mention the fact that all the greatest mass murders are done with explosives or firebombs.
Our rule is simple: the kids can have games in which they shoot any kind of animal, robot, monster or space alien. But no realistic violence directed against other human beings.
I did allow one exception for the cartoony "Destroy All Humans" game, where invading aliens zap laser beams from their UFO's at crowds of fleeing people, making them disappear in a puff of smoke. But we have successfully held out against the 007 types of games as well as Grand Theft Auto and other obviously anti-social or gory titles.
I don't buy them any realistic toy guns either. We have real guns stored under lock and key, and the children are well versed in how to handle and shoot them safely. We don't want the two confused. They have some neon colored water soakers for the pool and that's about it.
Oh, great, next you're gonna tell us that McCarthy was actually the good guy.
We may question his methods, but the Venona cables have proven that he was correct to be suspicious about Soviet spies infiltrating our government and other public institutions.
I admire McCarthy, and wish he had been more successful in persuading the public to complete the task of rooting out the Gramscian termites.
Famine is worse than ever and desertification, loss of agricultural lands, and overpopulation are enormous problems, as predicted.
Famine is NOT worse than ever, in fact last year was the first time in which there were more obese people than malnourished people worldwide. Famine is really only a problem in nations which follow collectivist economic principles, like Zimbabwe. If people really want to save the world, they should start by hunting down socialist politicians and shooting them all dead.
Overpopulation is a problem, but not even remotely as bad as Erlich and his acolytes predicted. And the rate of growth is decreasing, and in many places going below zero population growth, because of the improvements in health and nutrition and well-being brought about by free-market capitalism.
The troubling issue really is the amount of records being set.
This is really one of the most fatuous statements I have ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying something.
We only have a hundred years or so of data. Because of different methods of data gathering and local effects like urban heat islands, it is questionable whether even that data can be relied upon. Yet there are 365 days in the year, and tens of thousands of weather stations around the globe. Of course there are going to be records broken. Records are going to be broken every year even if every shred of the Global Warming argument is a lie. It proves NOTHING to point to a hot day here or a hurricane there. I could as easily point to the 2006 hurricane season, which was one of the most benign in decades.
Basicall all anyone can say is that things will change, how is uncertain.
Oh, now there's an intellectual achievement we should all bow down before. It takes a special kind of genius to realize that there is no such thing as a steady state climate, and that sea levels are always either rising or falling, and glaciers always either growing or shrinking or both at the same time, regardless of the activities or even the very existence of Man. A mile of ice covered North America before cavemen tamed fire, and before that there were palm trees and dinosaurs at the North Pole.
Yes, by all means let's dismember the most successful civilization the world has ever known because "things will change".
They stated up front that they should be changing policy and some have been shown to favor hyping the negative and downplaying any positive or non-negative aspects in order to scare the public into taking action they want done.
Like Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart (a nurse by training, if you can believe that):
"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. . . Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
As long as the public faces of the global warming scare are building vast energy-hogging mansions, flying around the world in private jets, and shooting down alternative-power proposals that clash with their refined aesthetic sensibilities, I will assume they are all power-crazed liars and mountebanks of the ilk of Christine Stewart.
We are being asked to overturn the very edifice of free-market capitalism, on the basis of wild speculation about the significance of mere statistical noise, teased out of scant and questionable data by grant-chasing academics, and shouted hysterically by power-mad left-wing politicians who won't abide by the same draconian regulations they advocate for the rest of us. No thanks. I'm going to keep living my life as I please.
In my experience, the Swedes criticize the United States more, at least on a per-capita basis, than the citizens of any other civilized nation except perhaps Germany. A great deal of this criticism pertains to things like the PATRIOT Act that offend their exquisitely refined sensibility of human rights.
Now, I am no fan of the PATRIOT Act, starting with its Orwellian title, but I am also sick and tired of being lectured by supercilious Euro-trash. Especially when it is obvious they know nothing about their own internal affairs, much less ours.
All of the countries of Europe have some areas in which they are more free than the US, and some in which they are decidedly less free. They need to get over their conceit that they are somehow better than us in every sphere. It ain't so.
Reading this thread warms my heart. Sometimes the stench of hemp and patchouli and unwashed dreadlocks is a little overpowering around this place. It's nice to get a whiff of cordite and Hoppe's No. 9.
What you do while you're in college matters more than which college you do it at. Let's say person A goes to Harvard and spends their time smoking up, drinking, and barely passing their classes, while person B goes to West Podunk State, where they graduate with high honors and had a leadership role among students. Which person would you expect to be accepted to a graduate program? Which person would you hire?
I have to agree. I was a fuck-up in high school and couldn't get into anything but our great big State cow college. However, I really found my calling and ended up graduating with a magna cum laude degree in physics. Along with an excellent GRE, this was enough to get me into an Ivy League grad school. I now make a comfortable six figure income and love my job. Nobody gives a damn where I got my bachelor's degree.
On the plus side, my big state school is famous for the attractiveness, scanty clothing, and loose morals of its female undergraduates. It's a perennial on the Playboy list of party schools, and even as a physics major I was able to make the most of it. If I had gone to Cal Tech, I wouldn't have had near enough time to chase pussy, even if there was any there.
Safer than giving up and running as Administrator is to use Filemon and Regmon to find out what exactly the broken application is doing that it shouldn't, then changing the ACL for just those files or registry keys.
There is not one Windows user in fifty who even knows what you just said, much less how to do it.
Any solution to Windows security problems that requires fucking around with the Registry is hopelessly impractical and dangerous. I can't believe you could recommend it, even on Slashdot.
I think we are approaching a critical mass with Windows frustration. People are sick of malware, and even sicker of being told things like "oh, just change the ACL for the registry key after you use REGMON to find the problem." This is horse shit.
Of the last ten people I discussed computers with, seven or eight of them are going to buy a Mac. I predict OS X or its successor will capture 50% or more of market share within five years.
If skin cancer rates are up because people spend more time outdoors, and cancer rates go down because of the vitamin D produced in the skin from sunlight, then it would appear that the rates go both up and down at the same time.
Which is precisely why I was careful to distinguish between skin cancer and all other kinds of cancer.
Imagine if climate change caused the desert of the Sahara to shift south
Well, at present the Sahara is retreating rather briskly, and vast new areas of arable land are opening up. I've also read that the deserts of Arizona, where I live, will similarly see cooler temperatures and more rain with climate change. The Canadians and Siberians ought to be happy with things too, as enormous areas of previously frozen ground would become fertile and productive. The deserts will migrate to Oregon, Washington and Europe, but who gives a shit about all those dirty hippies?
Maybe we should just keep doing what we're doing. The world is always getting either warmer or cooler, and believing in a static climate is even more foolish than belief in creationism.
Ozone depletion/Skin cancer: Here in Australia this is a massive problem! Cancer rates are up and people have to wear sunscreen frequently.
It is plausible that skin cancer rates are up because people spend more time in the outdoors. On the other hand, there is evidence that the extra vitmain D produced in the skin by sunlight prevents more cancer deaths of all types than is caused by sun exposure. Sounds like you don't know what post hoc, ergo propter hoc means.
Overpopulation/Mass starvation: There actually are millions of hungry people in the world! And the world population is way too high for everyone to enjoy a high standard of living and not do too much environmental damage.
There will be billions more people starving if the anti-capitalist pot-bangers get their way, and impose failed collectivist economics on the world under the guise of preventing global warming.
Yeah right, there's just an evil cabal of climatologists out to fuck the oil culture
Regardless of the truth or falsehood of global warming, or the anthropogenic component thereof, one thing is certain:
It has become a hobby horse ridden by assorted hard-Left statists anxious to make a grab for power and revenue that has been denied to them at the ballot box for many years.
Unless and until private jets are confiscated from limousine liberals like Laurie David, and Barbara Streisand is driven out of her 20,000 square foot mansion with 10 separate HVAC systems, and the Kennedys are told to go fuck themselves as a thousand windmills are erected in their private yacht harbor, I'm going to assume they don't really believe what they are preaching. I think they see this as an opportunity to ram collectivist squalor down the throats of us peons, while they continue to enjoy every luxury that free-market capitalism can provide to a tiny elite.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Scientific "consensus" is not proof, especially when most of the "scientists" are not climatologists at all, but left-wing professors of social sciences and epidemiology and the like.
We know that natural processes alone can explain far greater variations in temperature than even the worst predictions of the alarmists. Palm trees once grew at the North Pole, and ice once lay a mile deep over Yosemite Valley and Chicago, before cavemen tamed fire. I'm not ready to dismantle Western civilization and hand it over to the proven failures who have given the world the likes of Zimbabwe and Cuba, without a lot better proof than mere statistical noise. The so-called "precautionary principle" is the the most ridiculous crock of shit that the human mind has ever produced, and that's saying something.
Slashdot Mirror
they were just desperate people who really needed the money they could get from selling his shoes, simply in order to eat.
I've been in a few British and American ghettoes (in England they call them 'council estates'), and the last thing anybody there needs is to eat. Modern Western democracies are qualitatively different from all civilizations that preceded them. Nobody is fatter than their poorest citizens.
Shoe thefts in these places are done because they want fancy shoes. Or drugs. Food? That's what food stamps are for.
-ccm
Be careful what you wish for. I had to live through the Carter and Clinton years, gritting my teeth and believing that the Right would eventually return to power through democratic elections. And it did. And the pendulum is swinging back the other way at the moment, and may swing much further in 2008. I will grit my teeth again, and continue working to undermine the left-wing agenda in every legal, non-violent way I possibly can.
But if your precious "revolution" comes to pass? I will be among the counter-revolutionaries, and we are extemely well-armed. If you give up on the ballot box, expect no mercy from people like me.
-ccm
This is a feature, not a bug. I don't want to be ruled by people for whom Jerry Springer Show reruns are more important than getting off their fat asses to vote.
-ccm
-ccm
It may be abstract in some sense, but it does have a very practical value: It makes tax collectors go away if you give some of it to them, without stealing your cows or chickens, or ejecting you from your home at gunpoint, or clapping you in prison. This is a great advancement in the history of civilization.
Fiat currency does not have to be inflationary, if the government has the discipline not to increase the money supply by a greater percentage than the national economy's increase in productivity. Theoretically, it can even undergo deflation, which you might remember being discussed in worried tones about seven or eight years ago at the height of the tech bubble.
Conversely, the buying power of commodity-backed money can fluctuate wildly. Spain had dreadful inflation after conquering the gold and silver mining regions of the Americas. In the late 1800s, the question of whether to use gold or silver for backing the currency was a matter of great dispute, because with the discovery of the Comstock Lode and other great silver deposits, farmers and other debtors clamored for a silver-backed currency in full knowledge that it would be inflationary.
Gold-backed currency would not be a good idea for a modern economy. If technology increases the efficiency of gold extraction, a gold note loses value and inflation results. If the mines play out, money becomes more valuable and the nation suffers deflation, even if there is no good reason for it in the economy as a whole.
So long as the government accepts its own greenbacks for payment of taxes owed, and prudently manages the money supply, there is no need for concern about "fiat" money. The best thing we can do to ensure this is the case is to demand transparency from the Federal Reserve, and closely scrutinize the qualifications and good judgment of those persons appointed to its governing board.
-ccm
Canada has had six school shootings since 1975.
Australia had the Monash massacre in 2002, long after Port Arthur and the new gun laws. The Port Arthur massacre was a real record breaker even if it didn't happen in school. Then there's Queen Street, Hoddle Street, Strathfield, Milperra, Central Coast, etc.
Germany has had a couple, including a real bad one in 2002.
Japan had a gory one in 2001. Eight children killed with a knife.
England had Dunblane, Hungerford and several other massacres.
Switzerland had a massacre in a supposedly secure government building in 2001.
New Zealand had a double-digit massacre in 1990.
Even Sweden had a mass murder some years ago, committed by a soldier with his service rifle.
All of these countries have long had more stringent gun control than the US, except Switzerland. There are more of these in the US, but on a per capita basis, some other countries are not far behind. And I guarantee you it will happen again, even in places like Japan and England where it is practically impossible to get a legal gun.
Not to mention the fact that all the greatest mass murders are done with explosives or firebombs.
-ccm
What's the risk of dying in a fire in a 9am German class in Buttfuck, Virginia?
So why are there fire alarms and sprinklers, then?
-ccm
I did allow one exception for the cartoony "Destroy All Humans" game, where invading aliens zap laser beams from their UFO's at crowds of fleeing people, making them disappear in a puff of smoke. But we have successfully held out against the 007 types of games as well as Grand Theft Auto and other obviously anti-social or gory titles.
I don't buy them any realistic toy guns either. We have real guns stored under lock and key, and the children are well versed in how to handle and shoot them safely. We don't want the two confused. They have some neon colored water soakers for the pool and that's about it.
-ccm
2713 Bumstead J.! Pick up that piece of bread!
We may question his methods, but the Venona cables have proven that he was correct to be suspicious about Soviet spies infiltrating our government and other public institutions.
I admire McCarthy, and wish he had been more successful in persuading the public to complete the task of rooting out the Gramscian termites.
-ccm
Famine is NOT worse than ever, in fact last year was the first time in which there were more obese people than malnourished people worldwide. Famine is really only a problem in nations which follow collectivist economic principles, like Zimbabwe. If people really want to save the world, they should start by hunting down socialist politicians and shooting them all dead.
Desertification is improving dramatically. The grasslands of the Sahel are expanding, pushing back the south edge of the Sahara Desert all over North Africa.
Overpopulation is a problem, but not even remotely as bad as Erlich and his acolytes predicted. And the rate of growth is decreasing, and in many places going below zero population growth, because of the improvements in health and nutrition and well-being brought about by free-market capitalism.
-ccm
This is really one of the most fatuous statements I have ever seen on Slashdot, and that's saying something.
We only have a hundred years or so of data. Because of different methods of data gathering and local effects like urban heat islands, it is questionable whether even that data can be relied upon. Yet there are 365 days in the year, and tens of thousands of weather stations around the globe. Of course there are going to be records broken. Records are going to be broken every year even if every shred of the Global Warming argument is a lie. It proves NOTHING to point to a hot day here or a hurricane there. I could as easily point to the 2006 hurricane season, which was one of the most benign in decades.
Basicall all anyone can say is that things will change, how is uncertain.
Oh, now there's an intellectual achievement we should all bow down before. It takes a special kind of genius to realize that there is no such thing as a steady state climate, and that sea levels are always either rising or falling, and glaciers always either growing or shrinking or both at the same time, regardless of the activities or even the very existence of Man. A mile of ice covered North America before cavemen tamed fire, and before that there were palm trees and dinosaurs at the North Pole.
Yes, by all means let's dismember the most successful civilization the world has ever known because "things will change".
-ccm
Like Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart (a nurse by training, if you can believe that):
"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. . . Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
As long as the public faces of the global warming scare are building vast energy-hogging mansions, flying around the world in private jets, and shooting down alternative-power proposals that clash with their refined aesthetic sensibilities, I will assume they are all power-crazed liars and mountebanks of the ilk of Christine Stewart.
We are being asked to overturn the very edifice of free-market capitalism, on the basis of wild speculation about the significance of mere statistical noise, teased out of scant and questionable data by grant-chasing academics, and shouted hysterically by power-mad left-wing politicians who won't abide by the same draconian regulations they advocate for the rest of us. No thanks. I'm going to keep living my life as I please.
-ccm
Now, I am no fan of the PATRIOT Act, starting with its Orwellian title, but I am also sick and tired of being lectured by supercilious Euro-trash. Especially when it is obvious they know nothing about their own internal affairs, much less ours.
All of the countries of Europe have some areas in which they are more free than the US, and some in which they are decidedly less free. They need to get over their conceit that they are somehow better than us in every sphere. It ain't so.
-ccm
Ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds, chased by one Norwegian...
-ccm
-ccm
I have to agree. I was a fuck-up in high school and couldn't get into anything but our great big State cow college. However, I really found my calling and ended up graduating with a magna cum laude degree in physics. Along with an excellent GRE, this was enough to get me into an Ivy League grad school. I now make a comfortable six figure income and love my job. Nobody gives a damn where I got my bachelor's degree.
On the plus side, my big state school is famous for the attractiveness, scanty clothing, and loose morals of its female undergraduates. It's a perennial on the Playboy list of party schools, and even as a physics major I was able to make the most of it. If I had gone to Cal Tech, I wouldn't have had near enough time to chase pussy, even if there was any there.
-ccm
There is not one Windows user in fifty who even knows what you just said, much less how to do it.
Any solution to Windows security problems that requires fucking around with the Registry is hopelessly impractical and dangerous. I can't believe you could recommend it, even on Slashdot.
I think we are approaching a critical mass with Windows frustration. People are sick of malware, and even sicker of being told things like "oh, just change the ACL for the registry key after you use REGMON to find the problem." This is horse shit.
Of the last ten people I discussed computers with, seven or eight of them are going to buy a Mac. I predict OS X or its successor will capture 50% or more of market share within five years.
-ccm
Which is precisely why I was careful to distinguish between skin cancer and all other kinds of cancer.
-ccm
Well, at present the Sahara is retreating rather briskly, and vast new areas of arable land are opening up. I've also read that the deserts of Arizona, where I live, will similarly see cooler temperatures and more rain with climate change. The Canadians and Siberians ought to be happy with things too, as enormous areas of previously frozen ground would become fertile and productive. The deserts will migrate to Oregon, Washington and Europe, but who gives a shit about all those dirty hippies?
Maybe we should just keep doing what we're doing. The world is always getting either warmer or cooler, and believing in a static climate is even more foolish than belief in creationism.
-ccm
It is plausible that skin cancer rates are up because people spend more time in the outdoors. On the other hand, there is evidence that the extra vitmain D produced in the skin by sunlight prevents more cancer deaths of all types than is caused by sun exposure. Sounds like you don't know what post hoc, ergo propter hoc means.
Overpopulation/Mass starvation: There actually are millions of hungry people in the world! And the world population is way too high for everyone to enjoy a high standard of living and not do too much environmental damage.
There will be billions more people starving if the anti-capitalist pot-bangers get their way, and impose failed collectivist economics on the world under the guise of preventing global warming.
-ccm
That's a feature, not a bug.
-ccm
Regardless of the truth or falsehood of global warming, or the anthropogenic component thereof, one thing is certain:
It has become a hobby horse ridden by assorted hard-Left statists anxious to make a grab for power and revenue that has been denied to them at the ballot box for many years.
They speak of carbon taxes, but there seems precious little concern about the "carbon" part and plenty of hand-rubbing over the "tax" part.
Unless and until private jets are confiscated from limousine liberals like Laurie David, and Barbara Streisand is driven out of her 20,000 square foot mansion with 10 separate HVAC systems, and the Kennedys are told to go fuck themselves as a thousand windmills are erected in their private yacht harbor, I'm going to assume they don't really believe what they are preaching. I think they see this as an opportunity to ram collectivist squalor down the throats of us peons, while they continue to enjoy every luxury that free-market capitalism can provide to a tiny elite.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Scientific "consensus" is not proof, especially when most of the "scientists" are not climatologists at all, but left-wing professors of social sciences and epidemiology and the like.
We know that natural processes alone can explain far greater variations in temperature than even the worst predictions of the alarmists. Palm trees once grew at the North Pole, and ice once lay a mile deep over Yosemite Valley and Chicago, before cavemen tamed fire. I'm not ready to dismantle Western civilization and hand it over to the proven failures who have given the world the likes of Zimbabwe and Cuba, without a lot better proof than mere statistical noise. The so-called "precautionary principle" is the the most ridiculous crock of shit that the human mind has ever produced, and that's saying something.
-ccm
-ccm
Hey, I didn't know your name was Alex, man!