... to disconnect the engine from the drive wheels.
It's called a clutch. You should have one on your car.
In addition to the safety issue, a clutch is cheaper, lighter, more reliable, has better performance & fuel economy and gives you more control over your vehicle.
Next time you buy a car, ask for one with a clutch.
A few decades ago you may have had a point. But guess what - an automatic transmission is smarter and better than anything you as a meatbag can do. You may have more direct control over your transmission, but you're shit compared to a machine. It's the same mentality as people who are against anti lock brakes. Or people who hate fuel injectors and want carburetors. Or people who demand to crank their engine manually.
Any automatic transmission can disconnect the engine from the drive wheels by shifting into neutral or park (go to neutral so you keep power steering). There is no safety issue. A manual transmission is by no means more reliable (indeed, it is subject to idiots manually wrecking shit up), and in many cases is not even cheaper any more. Performance and fuel economy benefits are slim at best, and are typically only there because manual transmissions are more finely tuned, and often have an extra gear vs the automatic counterpart, specifically in order to sell to gearheads.
Lincoln didn't need to do anything; he should have just let the southern states go. He's responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 people. If Obama tries to do anything similar, hopefully someone will take him out before too many lives are lost.
The fun thing about history is that any jackhole can go back and say "No, it really happened this way because I'm stupid and I want to believe this. Also, let's start calling Napoleon, Hitler, all the Caesars, etc. gay. I have no evidence for it but I just want to call people gay to insult them, and I secretly want to inject gay into the past in order to validate my own homosexual desires today. Also the aliens built the pyramids. An expert on the History Channel said so.".
This is why it's good to have, in addition to the sirens, loudspeakers over which an announcer can speak. Then you can have the announcer say "this is not a drill"; any time you hear that phrase, you know there's a real emergency.
The loudspeakers can also be useful for other things, like if specific instructions need to be given.
Then we'd need to test the loudspeaker and people's actions when they hear "this is not a drill". I suggest "This is really not a drill." for actual emergencies.
I just tried Hello World in Groovy and it took almost a whole second (measured with time: 0,7s avg, 0.952s max, 0.668s min) for it to run on my MacBookPro (latest high end 17" model, not ssd).
I'm writing a 68K emulator. Hello World in 68K machine code running in my emulator, itself running in another instance of the same emulator, running in a 68K application on Mac OS 9 (using Apple's 68K emulator) in SheepShaver (emulating PowerPC) on a 2.8 GHz MacBook Pro -- that's four levels of emulation, two of them completely unoptimized -- takes less than half a second.
I just don't see what the problem is.
INCEPTION (was a pretty bad movie and is a terribly overused meme).
A search company that sells ads has a fundamental conflict of interest:
Provide better search results to get more users. vs. Inject more ads into search results to get more money, and sell more user information to get more money.
There is no getting around this. When Google started out, their product was the search results. When Google got big, they switched to being an ad company.
The only company with more fanboy zealots than Google is Apple. Google will never have to pay the piper after screwing users over because the zealots will blindly defend them, and they'll be louder than any opponents. People who get fed up with Google's shit won't rage about it - they'll quietly stop using Google's services.
Remember Google Buzz? Me either. But apparently some people were mad about it, and there were even the usual bullshit stories about "I got caught cheating on my husband because of Buzz!", just like how there's always a bullshit story of someone getting tracked when a location service is turned on (like the recent "Find my iPhone" shit, or a story of someone getting nerd justice against a laptop thief a week after an Apple iMac conference, etc.).
So what did Google lose? A few people disabled Buzz. Well not really, they hid the Buzz tab. Because the language for the option to truly disable Buzz says it will delete your Google profile. What's that? Does that include your Gmail address? Your calendar? What about your youtube account that they forced you to link? Picasa? Who knows, better not click it, just hide all the Buzz notifications and sharing options. And now they're killing off Buzz because they have Google Plus. And Google Plus has far more users than Buzz ever did. Nobody got mad enough to stop using Google. Everyone got kind of annoyed and said no to Buzz. Then Plus came out, invite-only as usual, (to create a false sense of scarcity / exclusivity, thus increasing demand) and nobody learned anything.
This is why you disable third party cookies, and use ad block plus and noscript.
Users have to be proactive about security. Nearly every fucking site out there is actively working against good security practices even when they're not compromised by an attacker. The browsers are all in a race to reach stupid version numbers, pass some arbitrary and ridiculously convoluted css benchmark, and enable javascript bloat by endlessly tweaking the performance of the js engine.
the way to stop this kind of BS is to make as a statutory penalty when a company is found violating any Law or FCC or FTC rule all customers have the option to cancel their contract with no fee or requirement to return a handset.
Or how about all customers are refunded the full retail price of the phone, as it was at the time of purchase, while still keeping the phone. Add in explicit language that states the rule covers discounted phones bought with a contract agreement, and covers any bullshit they may try to pull by saying people are leasing / renting the phones (like cable boxes).
It also doesn't count because the ostrich egg, like any other bird egg, contains, but is not, the egg which turns into an embryo. The vast majority of that egg is a food dump for the chick.
The vast majority of any cell is a fluid that isn't a cellular structure.
They can, but you can't afford them. Maybe if you didn't get yourself $100,000 in debt pursuing a useless degree, you'd be better off. But hey - if you were smart enough to figure that out you wouldn't have needed college.
Came here to say this, not sure if an egg properly qualifies as an organism.
Ostrich egg+sperm immediately after fertilization. (Still doesn't count, because the organisms typical life cycle does not have it staying as a single cell.)
First, development of Cell has been discontinued by IBM. Second, the architecture proved difficult to use well; there are very few PS3 games that actually use the Cell.
The PS4 is more likely to be a PowerPC based machine with GPGPUs; they're cheaper, have much higher performance than Cell (the reason IBM discontinued them), and can be used to augment the main graphics board if they're not required for other tasks.
FUD. Cell has NOT been discontinued. Every PS3 game uses the Cell processor. If they switched from Cell to something else, they'd be throwing away all that effort devs made learning it, and all the effort they put into supporting the devs.
What they choose will be determined by: 1) Price 2) Power consumption 3) Performance
The Cell architecture is certainly still a contender.
They'll be shown off in 7 months at next year's E3. The next X-Box will have a launch date before the end of the year, and it will be bungled. The next Playstation will have a launch date by the end of the year in Japan, and early 2013 in the US, but both dates will be pushed back a bit.
The Wii U has already been shown, and it too will target a release before the end of 2012, but Nintendo never makes their dates for home consoles.
Everyone thinks it's fake, except I had a brother who was exactly that flavor of mentally ill. Though none of us were giggling like the other kid...it's pretty miserable to be around. He'd just do stuff like that for hours on end, even into the night sometimes.
I'm leaning toward skepticism of skepticism on this one. Is there any confirmation that it's fake?
There's an entire series of increasingly retarded videos with that that. They're all fake.
He's been on a ton of interviews, and while he was adamant about them all being real at first, he admitted they were fake in later interviews.
Mercury is bad for a long, long list of reasons and should be avoided whenever possible. Much of it still breaks down into elemental mercury. When there's a safer alternative that costs nearly the same, we should use it.
Elemental mercury accumulates, organomercury compounds do not. The compound in vaccines has a half life of 18 days and is removed from the body through fecal extraction.
How long was that shit sitting in the bottle? How long does it take for you to shit out what was injected to you?
If the half life is 18 days (in the syringe? in the body?), that means a significant portion of it will break down while still in your body. Any guesses as to what it breaks down into?
Well, it's not so straightforward with 7 (2008 and Vista too). Yes, desktop performance & experience is great, but the abomination that WinSxS folder is fucks it up rather ruthlessly for VM, laptop and SSD usage. As it is, there is no way to strip it down to bare minimum and run lightweight.
I have VMs running XP on 2 gigs of disk and 256mb of RAM. Let me see you do that with any of the above mentioned. And don't tell me disk is cheap, because those VMs number in tens for me, and probably hundreds for other people.
Now how about my laptop with Windows partition of 25 gigs consisting of 17 gigs of Windows and tiny program files of 1.7 gigs? I'm fucking scared to run Windows update on it.
The WinSxS folder doesn't actually use all the space you think it does. It's actually just a link to the file elsewhere on your system. So despite the fact that it takes up 18 GB and is growing rapidly, that space isn't really gone.
This is MS's standard response. But it's complete horseshit. The OS sees the space as being gone, and low diskspace warnings will be triggered, and file write operations will fail. I don't even believe they're symlinks like they claim. It's so fucking stupid. The folder contains a copy of every version of every driver/dll/whatever that was ever WHQLd or registered and in use at one point by your system. Install Program X? Get every version of its components that MS knows about. This is all done to prevent the rare case of "Install Program X, Install Program Y, Y breaks X because it overwrote a shared library with a different version, Uninstall Y, but X is still broken because Y either left it's incompatible shit behind, or took it with it (leaving none behind)." The traditional fix was to not use programs that were retarded, and to reinstall the broken program if some other program fucked it up.
As long as people will agree that the earth is warming up - will a long discussion about whether man caused it really serve any useful purpose?
Here's how I see it:
Picture yourself as a passenger of the Quantas A380 plane whose engine exploded mid-flight. The moment the engine exploded, what would you look at first:
a) trying to figure out what CAN be done?
b) trying to figure out whether it was caused by humans or not (terrorists or material faults vs. meteor or lightning strikes)?
Think that you will have to decide what to focus on, while the plane is having trouble staying in the air.
My guess is, that getting to land safely ANYWHERE was the top priority... But - it's just my guess... Maybe you want to fund a study into the event asking everyone on board to see what they did first...
_OR_ we might try and focus on how to get the situation under control as safely as possible - by reducing the number of maneuvers that could contribute or increase the problem, and thinking about counter-maneuvers.
I bet you, even if the wing of that A380 would have gone, and even if chances of the pilot making ANY difference AT ALL - I bet you, they would have tried EVERYTHING to even minimally increase the chances of ANYONE surviving.
Your anaolgy begs the question.
1: Show that the Earth's climate is changing. 2: Show that a miniscule temperature increase is a problem 3: Show that it's an urgent problem, akin to an exploded engine. 4: Decide if anything can be done about it. 5: If something can be done about it, you have to decide what, how, and who.
We're on step two.
Politicians and "climatologists" want to move onto step 5 with the answers "Reduce carbon dioxide emissions. By taxing them. And giving me the money.". Anyone with a brain knows that we can't even pass step 2 until we can show that the temperature will exceed what it has in the past hundred thousand years or so, when life flourished.
If we pass step 2, we'll then have to show that the planet is doomed if the trend continues. Coastlines being redefined, continents moving, major metropolitan centers being destroyed and populations being displaced, the sea level rising, and endangered species going extinct do not qualify. Showing that the planet would be unable to sustain life qualifies. I'll even give you showing that the planet would be unable to sustain human life. But after the dust settles, if the changed planet can support something on the order of 100,000,000 humans, we're still sitting pretty.
If we can show that all life (or all human life) will be wiped out, then we have to decide if we can do something about it. If we decide humans were the cause, then we can probably do something about it. The best thing will unfold by itself through inaction - population reduction. If we decide humans were not the cause, then the odds of us having any chance at changing shit are extremely low, and likely not worth the effort. Better efforts would include things like colonization of other planets using biomes and shit we'll have to seriously work on on an increasingly-hostile Earth.
If we somehow decide we can alter the planet's climate, the plan of attack must involve "everyone" as the "who". Every single fucking thing the politicians work on today involves "you" as the who that has to do shit and "me" as the who that benefits monetarily.
Dosage is absolutely not the key. Mercury accumulates. It doesn't go away. When you put it in a person in a "safe" form, you have to be sure it will stay in that form forever.
Using mercury when alternatives are available is about as smart as using leaded paint and gasoline, or going for a romp in that fluffy, itchy stuff in the attic.
verbal contract anyone? Or just for fun, let's consider implied-in-fact contracts...
"I promise to pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today".
Then when the state decides to "investigate" you, you'll have to divulge the terms of those verbal contracts. Verbal contracts aren't a fucking magic wand to make this law go away.
The law states that second hand cash sales are verboten. If you want to introduce some sort of debt scheme so cash can be used, you'll need to document that scheme and provide that documentation to the authorities when they hassle you. If the entire agreement was verbal, or a fucking wink and a nod, you'll still have to divulge the details of who, what, when, where, and how much.
Law enforcement: when someone steals your stereo and sells it to the second hand shop, they'll have a record of who did it, and when someone buys it from that shop before you find out and can recover it, you can find it and get it back.
As if the cops give a shit about your stolen property. Thanks for the LOL dude, Thursday was pretty boring up until this post.
I wonder if the law specifies what kind of checks are allowed. Remember, in the olden days, a check (cheque) didn't have magnetic ink and wasn't issued by a bank, it was just a hand-printed IOU on a slip of paper. What keeps people from just hand-writing their own "checks"/IOUs, which may or may not have the person's real name on them (or might just say "John Doe"), paying the merchant with these, and then immediately following up by paying off this debt with cash?
If the government decides to check a merchant's records, they'll have a giant pile of handwritten IOUs from John Doe.
Literally.4 seconds of thought reveals the problem. When a merchant tries to sue someone who skipped out on their debts, all he has is a giant pile of handwritten IOUs.
Using a big evil bank with scary traceable forms of payments that the dirty government controls means you don't have to personally know everyone you decide to extend a line of credit to - be it at a bar, a grocery market, whatever. This means you can get a lot more customers. It also means you're less liable to have Billford Tarspit and his boys bust in with their six shooters and demand all your money in a burlap sack.
Slashdot Mirror
... to disconnect the engine from the drive wheels.
It's called a clutch. You should have one on your car.
In addition to the safety issue, a clutch is cheaper, lighter, more reliable, has better performance & fuel economy and gives you more control over your vehicle.
Next time you buy a car, ask for one with a clutch.
A few decades ago you may have had a point. But guess what - an automatic transmission is smarter and better than anything you as a meatbag can do.
You may have more direct control over your transmission, but you're shit compared to a machine. It's the same mentality as people who are against anti lock brakes. Or people who hate fuel injectors and want carburetors. Or people who demand to crank their engine manually.
Any automatic transmission can disconnect the engine from the drive wheels by shifting into neutral or park (go to neutral so you keep power steering). There is no safety issue.
A manual transmission is by no means more reliable (indeed, it is subject to idiots manually wrecking shit up), and in many cases is not even cheaper any more.
Performance and fuel economy benefits are slim at best, and are typically only there because manual transmissions are more finely tuned, and often have an extra gear vs the automatic counterpart, specifically in order to sell to gearheads.
Lincoln didn't need to do anything; he should have just let the southern states go. He's responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 people. If Obama tries to do anything similar, hopefully someone will take him out before too many lives are lost.
The fun thing about history is that any jackhole can go back and say "No, it really happened this way because I'm stupid and I want to believe this. Also, let's start calling Napoleon, Hitler, all the Caesars, etc. gay. I have no evidence for it but I just want to call people gay to insult them, and I secretly want to inject gay into the past in order to validate my own homosexual desires today. Also the aliens built the pyramids. An expert on the History Channel said so.".
This is why it's good to have, in addition to the sirens, loudspeakers over which an announcer can speak. Then you can have the announcer say "this is not a drill"; any time you hear that phrase, you know there's a real emergency.
The loudspeakers can also be useful for other things, like if specific instructions need to be given.
Then we'd need to test the loudspeaker and people's actions when they hear "this is not a drill".
I suggest "This is really not a drill." for actual emergencies.
I just tried Hello World in Groovy and it took almost a whole second (measured with time: 0,7s avg, 0.952s max, 0.668s min) for it to run on my MacBookPro (latest high end 17" model, not ssd).
I'm writing a 68K emulator. Hello World in 68K machine code running in my emulator, itself running in another instance of the same emulator, running in a 68K application on Mac OS 9 (using Apple's 68K emulator) in SheepShaver (emulating PowerPC) on a 2.8 GHz MacBook Pro -- that's four levels of emulation, two of them completely unoptimized -- takes less than half a second.
I just don't see what the problem is.
INCEPTION (was a pretty bad movie and is a terribly overused meme).
Trollpost is trollpost.
A search company that sells ads has a fundamental conflict of interest:
Provide better search results to get more users.
vs.
Inject more ads into search results to get more money, and sell more user information to get more money.
There is no getting around this.
When Google started out, their product was the search results.
When Google got big, they switched to being an ad company.
The only company with more fanboy zealots than Google is Apple. Google will never have to pay the piper after screwing users over because the zealots will blindly defend them, and they'll be louder than any opponents. People who get fed up with Google's shit won't rage about it - they'll quietly stop using Google's services.
Remember Google Buzz? Me either. But apparently some people were mad about it, and there were even the usual bullshit stories about "I got caught cheating on my husband because of Buzz!", just like how there's always a bullshit story of someone getting tracked when a location service is turned on (like the recent "Find my iPhone" shit, or a story of someone getting nerd justice against a laptop thief a week after an Apple iMac conference, etc.).
So what did Google lose? A few people disabled Buzz. Well not really, they hid the Buzz tab. Because the language for the option to truly disable Buzz says it will delete your Google profile. What's that? Does that include your Gmail address? Your calendar? What about your youtube account that they forced you to link? Picasa? Who knows, better not click it, just hide all the Buzz notifications and sharing options.
And now they're killing off Buzz because they have Google Plus. And Google Plus has far more users than Buzz ever did. Nobody got mad enough to stop using Google. Everyone got kind of annoyed and said no to Buzz. Then Plus came out, invite-only as usual, (to create a false sense of scarcity / exclusivity, thus increasing demand) and nobody learned anything.
This is why you disable third party cookies, and use ad block plus and noscript.
Users have to be proactive about security. Nearly every fucking site out there is actively working against good security practices even when they're not compromised by an attacker. The browsers are all in a race to reach stupid version numbers, pass some arbitrary and ridiculously convoluted css benchmark, and enable javascript bloat by endlessly tweaking the performance of the js engine.
the way to stop this kind of BS is to make as a statutory penalty when a company is found violating any Law or FCC or FTC rule all customers have the option to cancel their contract with no fee or requirement to return a handset.
Or how about all customers are refunded the full retail price of the phone, as it was at the time of purchase, while still keeping the phone. Add in explicit language that states the rule covers discounted phones bought with a contract agreement, and covers any bullshit they may try to pull by saying people are leasing / renting the phones (like cable boxes).
It also doesn't count because the ostrich egg, like any other bird egg, contains, but is not, the egg which turns into an embryo. The vast majority of that egg is a food dump for the chick.
The vast majority of any cell is a fluid that isn't a cellular structure.
Can they make dreams for the downtrodden out there who will be locked out college - http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/10/24/1316228/ron-paul-wants-to-end-the-federal-student-loan-program - or those who will become the indentured servants to the rising upper elite class when their own dreams are crushed?
They can, but you can't afford them. Maybe if you didn't get yourself $100,000 in debt pursuing a useless degree, you'd be better off.
But hey - if you were smart enough to figure that out you wouldn't have needed college.
Interestingly enough, in 75 years time there may be the reverse problem - population *shrinkage*.
We were in the pool!
Came here to say this, not sure if an egg properly qualifies as an organism.
Ostrich egg+sperm immediately after fertilization.
(Still doesn't count, because the organisms typical life cycle does not have it staying as a single cell.)
That's not going to happen, for a few reasons.
First, development of Cell has been discontinued by IBM.
Second, the architecture proved difficult to use well; there are very few PS3 games that actually use the Cell.
The PS4 is more likely to be a PowerPC based machine with GPGPUs; they're cheaper, have much higher performance than Cell (the reason IBM discontinued them), and can be used to augment the main graphics board if they're not required for other tasks.
FUD.
Cell has NOT been discontinued.
Every PS3 game uses the Cell processor.
If they switched from Cell to something else, they'd be throwing away all that effort devs made learning it, and all the effort they put into supporting the devs.
What they choose will be determined by:
1) Price
2) Power consumption
3) Performance
The Cell architecture is certainly still a contender.
They'll be shown off in 7 months at next year's E3.
The next X-Box will have a launch date before the end of the year, and it will be bungled.
The next Playstation will have a launch date by the end of the year in Japan, and early 2013 in the US, but both dates will be pushed back a bit.
The Wii U has already been shown, and it too will target a release before the end of 2012, but Nintendo never makes their dates for home consoles.
Parent here. Sorry for the typos and lack of structure. iPhone's don't make for friendly slashdot commenting companions.
It's not your fault. And for once it's not even Steve's fault.
Slashdot doesn't make for friendly Slashdot commenting.
No, hes not doing it wrong. 5 GHz is shit for anything but open-air.
Everyone thinks it's fake, except I had a brother who was exactly that flavor of mentally ill. Though none of us were giggling like the other kid...it's pretty miserable to be around. He'd just do stuff like that for hours on end, even into the night sometimes.
I'm leaning toward skepticism of skepticism on this one. Is there any confirmation that it's fake?
There's an entire series of increasingly retarded videos with that that.
They're all fake.
He's been on a ton of interviews, and while he was adamant about them all being real at first, he admitted they were fake in later interviews.
Very old and very fake.
Onyxia Wipe is better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvIYRrgZ04
Mercury is bad for a long, long list of reasons and should be avoided whenever possible.
Much of it still breaks down into elemental mercury.
When there's a safer alternative that costs nearly the same, we should use it.
Elemental mercury accumulates, organomercury compounds do not. The compound in vaccines has a half life of 18 days and is removed from the body through fecal extraction.
How long was that shit sitting in the bottle?
How long does it take for you to shit out what was injected to you?
If the half life is 18 days (in the syringe? in the body?), that means a significant portion of it will break down while still in your body. Any guesses as to what it breaks down into?
Well, it's not so straightforward with 7 (2008 and Vista too). Yes, desktop performance & experience is great, but the abomination that WinSxS folder is fucks it up rather ruthlessly for VM, laptop and SSD usage. As it is, there is no way to strip it down to bare minimum and run lightweight.
I have VMs running XP on 2 gigs of disk and 256mb of RAM. Let me see you do that with any of the above mentioned. And don't tell me disk is cheap, because those VMs number in tens for me, and probably hundreds for other people.
Now how about my laptop with Windows partition of 25 gigs consisting of 17 gigs of Windows and tiny program files of 1.7 gigs? I'm fucking scared to run Windows update on it.
The WinSxS folder doesn't actually use all the space you think it does.
It's actually just a link to the file elsewhere on your system.
So despite the fact that it takes up 18 GB and is growing rapidly, that space isn't really gone.
This is MS's standard response. But it's complete horseshit. The OS sees the space as being gone, and low diskspace warnings will be triggered, and file write operations will fail. I don't even believe they're symlinks like they claim. It's so fucking stupid. The folder contains a copy of every version of every driver/dll/whatever that was ever WHQLd or registered and in use at one point by your system. Install Program X? Get every version of its components that MS knows about. This is all done to prevent the rare case of "Install Program X, Install Program Y, Y breaks X because it overwrote a shared library with a different version, Uninstall Y, but X is still broken because Y either left it's incompatible shit behind, or took it with it (leaving none behind)." The traditional fix was to not use programs that were retarded, and to reinstall the broken program if some other program fucked it up.
As long as people will agree that the earth is warming up - will a long discussion about whether man caused it really serve any useful purpose?
Here's how I see it:
Picture yourself as a passenger of the Quantas A380 plane whose engine exploded mid-flight. The moment the engine exploded, what would you look at first:
a) trying to figure out what CAN be done?
b) trying to figure out whether it was caused by humans or not (terrorists or material faults vs. meteor or lightning strikes)?
Think that you will have to decide what to focus on, while the plane is having trouble staying in the air.
My guess is, that getting to land safely ANYWHERE was the top priority... But - it's just my guess...
Maybe you want to fund a study into the event asking everyone on board to see what they did first...
_OR_ we might try and focus on how to get the situation under control as safely as possible - by reducing the number of maneuvers that could contribute or increase the problem, and thinking about counter-maneuvers.
I bet you, even if the wing of that A380 would have gone, and even if chances of the pilot making ANY difference AT ALL - I bet you, they would have tried EVERYTHING to even minimally increase the chances of ANYONE surviving.
Your anaolgy begs the question.
1: Show that the Earth's climate is changing.
2: Show that a miniscule temperature increase is a problem
3: Show that it's an urgent problem, akin to an exploded engine.
4: Decide if anything can be done about it.
5: If something can be done about it, you have to decide what, how, and who.
We're on step two.
Politicians and "climatologists" want to move onto step 5 with the answers "Reduce carbon dioxide emissions. By taxing them. And giving me the money.".
Anyone with a brain knows that we can't even pass step 2 until we can show that the temperature will exceed what it has in the past hundred thousand years or so, when life flourished.
If we pass step 2, we'll then have to show that the planet is doomed if the trend continues. Coastlines being redefined, continents moving, major metropolitan centers being destroyed and populations being displaced, the sea level rising, and endangered species going extinct do not qualify. Showing that the planet would be unable to sustain life qualifies. I'll even give you showing that the planet would be unable to sustain human life. But after the dust settles, if the changed planet can support something on the order of 100,000,000 humans, we're still sitting pretty.
If we can show that all life (or all human life) will be wiped out, then we have to decide if we can do something about it. If we decide humans were the cause, then we can probably do something about it. The best thing will unfold by itself through inaction - population reduction. If we decide humans were not the cause, then the odds of us having any chance at changing shit are extremely low, and likely not worth the effort. Better efforts would include things like colonization of other planets using biomes and shit we'll have to seriously work on on an increasingly-hostile Earth.
If we somehow decide we can alter the planet's climate, the plan of attack must involve "everyone" as the "who". Every single fucking thing the politicians work on today involves "you" as the who that has to do shit and "me" as the who that benefits monetarily.
Dosage is absolutely not the key. Mercury accumulates. It doesn't go away.
When you put it in a person in a "safe" form, you have to be sure it will stay in that form forever.
Using mercury when alternatives are available is about as smart as using leaded paint and gasoline, or going for a romp in that fluffy, itchy stuff in the attic.
verbal contract anyone? Or just for fun, let's consider implied-in-fact contracts...
"I promise to pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today".
Then when the state decides to "investigate" you, you'll have to divulge the terms of those verbal contracts.
Verbal contracts aren't a fucking magic wand to make this law go away.
The law states that second hand cash sales are verboten. If you want to introduce some sort of debt scheme so cash can be used, you'll need to document that scheme and provide that documentation to the authorities when they hassle you. If the entire agreement was verbal, or a fucking wink and a nod, you'll still have to divulge the details of who, what, when, where, and how much.
Other motive?
Law enforcement: when someone steals your stereo and sells it to the second hand shop, they'll have a record of who did it, and when someone buys it from that shop before you find out and can recover it, you can find it and get it back.
As if the cops give a shit about your stolen property.
Thanks for the LOL dude, Thursday was pretty boring up until this post.
I wonder if the law specifies what kind of checks are allowed. Remember, in the olden days, a check (cheque) didn't have magnetic ink and wasn't issued by a bank, it was just a hand-printed IOU on a slip of paper. What keeps people from just hand-writing their own "checks"/IOUs, which may or may not have the person's real name on them (or might just say "John Doe"), paying the merchant with these, and then immediately following up by paying off this debt with cash?
If the government decides to check a merchant's records, they'll have a giant pile of handwritten IOUs from John Doe.
Literally .4 seconds of thought reveals the problem.
When a merchant tries to sue someone who skipped out on their debts, all he has is a giant pile of handwritten IOUs.
Using a big evil bank with scary traceable forms of payments that the dirty government controls means you don't have to personally know everyone you decide to extend a line of credit to - be it at a bar, a grocery market, whatever. This means you can get a lot more customers. It also means you're less liable to have Billford Tarspit and his boys bust in with their six shooters and demand all your money in a burlap sack.