No, but his followup was intended to offend Christians....along the lines of..."A pagan holiday, which became a religious holiday, which became a commercial holiday"
Reciting unvarnished facts without a single loaded adjective is offensive to Christians? That says much more about Christians than it does about astrophysicists.
It's funny, I can't think of ever meeting a person who doesn't understand that it's a celebration, not an anniversary.
I've met dozens who have specifically told me as such, and hundreds more who went along with them in beliefs. I know some born-again Christians in Texas who are just now, in the past two or three years, coming around to the idea that Jesus wasn't born in December, and that the choice of that day to celebrate the birth was a public relations move by the Catholic Church.
There's been quite a bit of backlash because of that fact. Born-agains are Protestant and very devout, so anything done by the Catholic Church is immediately suspicious, if not outright wrong.
Except for those doors inserted by your hacked compiler
As long as there is more than one independent open source compiler, this can be eliminated as a threat vector by chains of compilers compiling compilers. Overt backdoor insertion routines can be easily detected and removed from a compromised open source compiler. That leaves only extremely subtle backdoors. Those can be defeated by having compilers compile themselves and each other, to break the subtlety.
If you can afford to perform detailed audits of gcc and clang, then follow the correct procedure, this isn't a concern, at least for the foreseeable future. If you trust the open source community to have found and removed or otherwise prevented all overt compiler comprises, you can pick a random selection of different versions of the various open source compilers and compile them from source yourself, with gratuitous extra or oddly variant flags. Cross compiling somewhere in that chain is also a helpful method of breaking some of the theorized mechanisms.
You can reduce the odds of being caught by a compromised compiler far enough that your odds of being struck by a meteor are higher. That should be good enough.
Assuming you're not running major data service out of your house, what's the point of diminishing return for connectivity?
That would depend on the price, wouldn't it? If the marginal cost of 10 Gbps vs 1 Gbps is negligible, by all means, provide 10 Gbps. 10 Gbps ethernet over copper (for use within the residence to be able to take advantage of this speed) is still at the margins in terms of price, but that's mostly for the same reasons that 1 Gbps was so expensive for so long. If only "enterprise" uses it, it stays expensive, because business, as always, charges all the traffic will bear, and business customers like to pay more because they think that means they're getting something valuable.
Once residences started using 1 Gbps, the price dropped and dropped and dropped and now you can get a very good quality 24 port 1 Gbps ethernet switch for less than $100. 10 Gbps will follow the same trajectory, but the demand has to be there. This is the first move towards creating that demand.
Other people have pointed out that the server side won't talk to you at 10 Gbps anyway. You're throttled by the server at far lower than that. I've pointed it out myself for the past few years. But we know that the backbone bandwidth is in the ground, unlit, to support far higher outbound throughput from data centers. There's just no demand, and it saves on server hardware. Again, this is a move towards creating demand.
Somebody has to be first, and it has to be on the demand side. This is one of the first, at least in the US.
Remember Legolas' skateboarding and the counting contest with Gimli?
It may shock you to discover the counting game was in the books. That was not invented for the movies. It was the start of the friendship between Legolas and Gimli that grew so strong that the appendices go so far as to say Legolas took Gimli with him when he went over sea, the only dwarf ever taken to Elvenhome.
I'm so glad you asked! This is a common misconception. Indeed, unicorn farts are methane! They come from the intestinal bacteria of unicorns, of course. A microbe's gotta eat, ya know. Unicorns only shit rainbows. They don't fart them.
Good news: Bennet Haselton is going away. Bad news: He is being replaced by the Ramble-bot 1000.
Bennett Hasselton IS Ramble-bot 1000. The ramblings are being posted by the same type of machine that has been getting academic journals to publish its articles. Dice wanted to pad their page hit numbers, so they bought a Ramble-bot and named it Bennett.
You think I'm joking, and so do I, but really, just how far away are we from enough Markov chains that Dice can order the Ramble-bot to write 300 words about the frumious bandersnatch and the Ramble-bot will dutifully crank something out that is indistinguishable from a Bennett screed? It's not exactly a high bar to clear.
That's why the 'poor' are walking around with smart phones and have internet and cable at home, right? Why the standard of living is so good?
None of these stories are about today. All of these stories are about trajectories, and the shape of things to come. And the self-evident fact that unless something changes, the 'poor' as you condescendingly call them with your snide quotation marks, will not be walking around with smart phones and have internet and cable TV at home. When the market value of the things the robots produce is greater than zero and your ability to earn any money is precisely zero because you and 100 million of your neighbors have been displaced, you will not be buying anything.
The poor will be sleeping the sleep which sees no awakening. You can't eat dirt, especially when someone else owns all of the dirt.
The phone uses encryption on calls and is intended to serve the high-security needs of government and industry.
As opposed to the security needs of consumers, which are obviously non-existent. No doubt it will come with a CALEA exemption, because Boeing. (Watch for a one sentence rider inserted into an otherwise totally unrelated bill some time in 2017.) Of course they will be absurdly expensive, but the Citizens who possess them will easily be able to afford them. If you can't pay, you definitely don't deserve security. But you can't have one unless you are on The List anyway. After all, they're CALEA exempt. You must have been background checked, approved, and sponsored before you can get on The List.
Remember, Service Brings Citizenship! Enlist today!
Does this sound paranoid? Think about your answer for a second.
Really? His nice, lazy, all-afternoon hunting down of young people on that island couldn't have ended with fewer deaths if someone on that island had shot him down in self defense before he committed such methodical, unopposed slaughter?
His lazy all-afternoon hunting down of young people could have been ended with fewer deaths if Norwegian youth had ever heard the phrase: run from a knife, charge a gun. No one else needed to be armed to have stopped him far short of the 70-odd deaths he caused. They just didn't know how.
You know, if something works for 60-80 years, maybe it's worth dropping the "unsustainable" tag.
While you're at it, I'd say, given how much less the per capita debt of the nations in question have risen compared to American debt (presumably the bastion of the "free Market" the AC was referring to), maybe it's worth dropping the "cost" tag too.
But really, you shouldn't be responding to the obviously deranged. Arbitrary capitalization of words, arbitrary scare quotes everywhere, and spamming all caps words? Deranged.
It did not need to increase our chances of survival because, evolution only cares about getting us to reproductive maturity.
Well yes, but humans have a long maturation period. Getting us to reproductive maturity necessitates keeping our parents alive as well, not just us. A human with at least one parent who survives 15 years after its birth has a decided evolutionary advantage over a human with no parent surviving a year after birth. A human with two present parents surviving at least 20 years after birth has an even bigger advantage. A human with two present parents surviving at least 20 years after birth plus at least one grandparent surviving at least 20 years after birth has the biggest advantage evolution has yet found.
Characteristics from the human lifespan to human sex drive can be explained in these evolutionary terms. Humans live approximately 60 years in good health, which is their own maturation period plus the maturation period of one offspring, plus the maturation period of that offspring's offspring. The male human sex drive and the female's ability to accommodate him year round (extremely rare in mammals) have been described as the evolutionary mechanism that ensures not just two surviving parents, but the presence of two surviving parents.
Evolution may not care if you get ugly after your 20s, but evolution does care if you contract cancer and die at 35. It's a disadvantage to your offspring.
(Pedants who want to complain about us anthropomorphizing evolution are invited to take a long walk off a short pier. It's shorthand.)
Good post! I agree wholeheartedly. How the hell do you "+1" on Slashdot, or is it only editors that can do it?
You have a six digit user ID and you don't know how the moderation system works?
Probably because the best you can do is agree with a post claiming that because we don't have a video of the cop deleting the video, he must not have deleted it. Really? And he can't even spell "alleges" right.
You eventually get moderator points if your own posts get modded up. If you fail to contribute to the conversation, you don't get to affect the moderation of those who do.
You make it sound like you have a fundamental right to content someone else produces. You don't.
Yes I do.
It's called culture. Humans have been producing it for thousands of years. Claiming it is some sort of property that can be owned is a legal fiction created only in the last few hundred. The vast majority of consumers of culture throughout history and pre-history did not pay for their consumption. If authors got paid at all, they got paid once, by their patron, and forever after the cost of spreading the media was the marginal cost of duplication, and the cost of consumption was zero.
Hurricanes happen in the northern hemisphere, usually golf of Mexico and north of it.
Tropical cyclones form an average of 6.3 times per year in the northern Indian Ocean (crosses the equater), 14.3 times per year in the south-western Indian Ocean (southern hemisphere), 11.0 times per year in the Australian region, and 11.4 times per year in the southern Pacific. Of those storms, an average of 1.5, 5.0, 0, and 4, respectively, per year achieve hurricane strength. Only an average of 13.6% of hurricane strength tropical cyclones form in the North Atlantic.
If you want to talk about storms in the US and around you should focus on Tornados anyway.
The frequency of tornadoes in North America is the lowest it's been in recorded history for the three year period running up to the present day. Discussed on Slashdot yesterday.
So, why do I complain? Because you bring in El Nina and El Nino "years" or "phenomena"... which are phenomena limited to the southern hemisphere like Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and the south Atlantic... they have absolutely no influence on hurricanes or the weather in the US.
When people get their panties in a twist about how much "wealth" the Walton family has it just shows they don't understand what wealth is.
Their "wealth" is paper. They could be worth X millions one day and X - a butt load of money the next. It has no impact on how much they can spend at lunch or whether they get the premium cable package or the standard. It's not cash.
On the contrary, it is very definitely cash. Walmart Corporation pays dividends to the tune of $0.48 per share every quarter for the past four quarters. Walmart has raised their dividend every year for the past 41 years. That amounts to $3.1 billion in cash paid to the Waltons this year. The Walton family still controls a simple majority of the company, owning more than 50% of the 3.223 billion shares outstanding.
That's cash money. No loan, no promissory note, no sale of shares. Of course the Waltons have built an edifice of fictional corporate entities to hold their stock that exists mainly for the purpose of avoiding taxes, so it's not like there's a single bank account that goes cha-ching +$775 million every quarter, but the difference is only significant to the tax man and the lawyers.
You don't understand what wealth is. It's ownership. And ownership PAYS. And pays and pays and pays.
Thanks for being prejudiced against us military folks.
It has nothing to do with prejudice. It has to do with two very different, very stressful jobs, with very different training. Or are you going to try to claim that infantry procedures are appropriate for civilian law enforcement? Are you one of these people who thinks the county sheriff needs an MRAP? Or a Stryker, perhaps?
Your support is appreciated.
Ten years of my professional career writing software for the US military, some of which is currently in use by the Navy, Marines, Air Force, Army, and Coast Guard, in roughly descending order of frequency. Yes, all five services. I've done more to "support our troops" than half of these assholes with US flag bumper stickers on their cars.
Nope, because everyone knows it came from Playboy.
Uh, I didn't. Not until this thread, though I've seen that image before.
No, it's not in the least like blood diamonds or poaching endangered species. No one was enslaved, no creature was killed to produce that image. No population was oppressed, no species went extinct to produce that image.
Depictions of naked people, in whatever medium, do not automatically objectify all members of the person's sex. Nor does it automatically objectify the person depicted. In fact, depictions of naked people that were created specifically to elicit a sexual response still don't automatically objectify the person depicted or members of the person's sex. Whether or not a painting or photograph or sculpture or video objectifies the subject is entirely orthogonal to whether or not the subject is clothed. This is proven by the fact it is possible to objectify clothed people.
The entire American movie genre called 'horror' objectifies people, nearly all of whom are clothed. That is, in fact, a large part of what makes such movies horrifying. Photos of Nazi concentration camps objectify people. That is, in fact, a large part of what makes Nazi concentration camps horrifying.
Conversely, Playboy does not ever objectify women. The women in Playboy photos nearly always have visible faces, and are frequently looking directly at the camera. They are always in fine health, uninjured, unrestrained, and are exemplars of female human beauty. The poses (and photo retouching) used display their bodies to the best possible advantage. The poses are frequently dominant in nature, such as on top of the backs of furniture like sofas and chairs, on top of tables, on top of vehicles, and especially at the top of staircases. You will notice the preponderance of the phrase "on top"—the dominant position among all mammals, including all primates.
The uncropped photograph of Lena fits the mould precisely. There's a link to it a few posts down. I just looked at it for the first time, and it fits every single point above: she is standing (dominant), resting one knee on top of an old piece of luggage (dominant), obviously in fine health, and beautiful. Her face is visible, obviously, and she's looking directly at the camera. I am reminded of another aspect of typical Playboy photography. Articles of clothing, while not concealing her sexual attributes, are often chosen for dominance. She's wearing black leather boots with heavy heels.
In short, Playboy photos are the polar opposite of objectifying: Playboy models are depicted in positions of power, with many of the trappings thereof. Baring their sexual characteristics for a camera is an expression of their power—Playboy models are comfortable in their own skin. Comfortable and more than comfortable. Judging by the expressions on their faces, they know they are beautiful, they know they are sexually attractive, and they like being both.
Just because some lunatic social engineers say naked people are automatically objectified doesn't make it so. When you get right down to it, most objections to depictions of naked people are thinly disguised Puritanism, nothing more.
Is it possible for a depiction of a naked person to objectify the person or people of their sex? Certainly. Modern sexually explicit depictions objectify the men far more often than the women, when both are together. The pictures and videos have her name on them. They seldom have his. She makes most of the money. He doesn't. She often speaks. He doesn't. Her face is always visible. His isn't. The camera frames her, not him. He rarely looks at the camera. She often does. The poses he is required to assume are often awkward and physically painful to hold for any length of time. Hers can be as well, but not as often. He is there to showcase her. He is an accessory, a piece of furniture with a penis. Even the much-maligned cumshot is evidence of her sexual p
Well, you will need to get a grand jury to indict such misbehaving officers first, and that crucial step in the process has not been going so well recently.
I would like to see an investigation of the grand jury selection process. Is our society really so sick that killing-while-in-uniform is always a free pass or have D.A.s managed to rig grand jury selection? Is there a list? "Summon this pool of potential jurists if the thug cop needs to go free." Or is it a skill? Not all of society is so sick, but a large enough percentage have reliable Fascism and Safety At Any Cost pushbuttons that a jury can be effectively rigged during the selection process based on their responses to questions?
It certainly seems like some mechanism is in place, and has been for several decades.
Many of them were soldiers who enlisted, had a gun put in their hand at 18 years old, and taught to kill other people. It's easy to see how cops can become jaded and not give a crap about rights.
This is a big part of the problem, if not the problem. Police are not military personnel, and this habit of hiring ex-military people as cops is exactly the wrong choice. Military are trained a certain way. What is emphasized in military training is diametrically opposed to good policing. Completely the polar opposite. Even military police training is completely inappropriate for civilian application. Just because both jobs involve guns, people think they're the same. Ex-military gets you a bonus in the hiring score. It should be an automatic disqualification, since the retraining is extremely difficult, if not impossible, especially for ex-military who were deployed as combat troops. Unacknowledged PTSD alone is good enough reason to disqualify, never mind the training issues.
When most women look at a car all they see is a box. Just buy any car you want and some Ford badges.
The wife may or may not notice that trick. The extended family is guaranteed to not only notice, but crucify you for it. You don't seem to have contact with actual rabid motor vehicle fans. Rabid is an entirely appropriate adjective: they foam at the mouth. The word 'fan' was derived from is entirely accurate: fanatic. Rebadging a car is grounds not just for divorce but for poisoning your dog and SWATing your house. (If it's one of the Evil Brands. If it's just one of the Bad Brands, they might settle for divorce and salting your lawn.)
Slashdot Mirror
Blessed Be Her Holy Hooves!
Heretic! You shall be touched by his noodly appendages! And you won't like it!
No, but his followup was intended to offend Christians....along the lines of..."A pagan holiday, which became a religious holiday, which became a commercial holiday"
Reciting unvarnished facts without a single loaded adjective is offensive to Christians? That says much more about Christians than it does about astrophysicists.
It's funny, I can't think of ever meeting a person who doesn't understand that it's a celebration, not an anniversary.
I've met dozens who have specifically told me as such, and hundreds more who went along with them in beliefs. I know some born-again Christians in Texas who are just now, in the past two or three years, coming around to the idea that Jesus wasn't born in December, and that the choice of that day to celebrate the birth was a public relations move by the Catholic Church.
There's been quite a bit of backlash because of that fact. Born-agains are Protestant and very devout, so anything done by the Catholic Church is immediately suspicious, if not outright wrong.
It's been amusing to watch.
Is working for Sony that bad?
Deja vu. This exact question was asked the last time Sony made the news.
Yes. Yes it is.
Except for those doors inserted by your hacked compiler
As long as there is more than one independent open source compiler, this can be eliminated as a threat vector by chains of compilers compiling compilers. Overt backdoor insertion routines can be easily detected and removed from a compromised open source compiler. That leaves only extremely subtle backdoors. Those can be defeated by having compilers compile themselves and each other, to break the subtlety.
If you can afford to perform detailed audits of gcc and clang, then follow the correct procedure, this isn't a concern, at least for the foreseeable future. If you trust the open source community to have found and removed or otherwise prevented all overt compiler comprises, you can pick a random selection of different versions of the various open source compilers and compile them from source yourself, with gratuitous extra or oddly variant flags. Cross compiling somewhere in that chain is also a helpful method of breaking some of the theorized mechanisms.
You can reduce the odds of being caught by a compromised compiler far enough that your odds of being struck by a meteor are higher. That should be good enough.
Assuming you're not running major data service out of your house, what's the point of diminishing return for connectivity?
That would depend on the price, wouldn't it? If the marginal cost of 10 Gbps vs 1 Gbps is negligible, by all means, provide 10 Gbps. 10 Gbps ethernet over copper (for use within the residence to be able to take advantage of this speed) is still at the margins in terms of price, but that's mostly for the same reasons that 1 Gbps was so expensive for so long. If only "enterprise" uses it, it stays expensive, because business, as always, charges all the traffic will bear, and business customers like to pay more because they think that means they're getting something valuable.
Once residences started using 1 Gbps, the price dropped and dropped and dropped and now you can get a very good quality 24 port 1 Gbps ethernet switch for less than $100. 10 Gbps will follow the same trajectory, but the demand has to be there. This is the first move towards creating that demand.
Other people have pointed out that the server side won't talk to you at 10 Gbps anyway. You're throttled by the server at far lower than that. I've pointed it out myself for the past few years. But we know that the backbone bandwidth is in the ground, unlit, to support far higher outbound throughput from data centers. There's just no demand, and it saves on server hardware. Again, this is a move towards creating demand.
Somebody has to be first, and it has to be on the demand side. This is one of the first, at least in the US.
Remember Legolas' skateboarding and the counting contest with Gimli?
It may shock you to discover the counting game was in the books. That was not invented for the movies. It was the start of the friendship between Legolas and Gimli that grew so strong that the appendices go so far as to say Legolas took Gimli with him when he went over sea, the only dwarf ever taken to Elvenhome.
The shield-surfing... not so much.
Are unicorn farts methane or rainbows?
I'm so glad you asked! This is a common misconception. Indeed, unicorn farts are methane! They come from the intestinal bacteria of unicorns, of course. A microbe's gotta eat, ya know. Unicorns only shit rainbows. They don't fart them.
Good news: Bennet Haselton is going away. Bad news: He is being replaced by the Ramble-bot 1000.
Bennett Hasselton IS Ramble-bot 1000. The ramblings are being posted by the same type of machine that has been getting academic journals to publish its articles. Dice wanted to pad their page hit numbers, so they bought a Ramble-bot and named it Bennett.
You think I'm joking, and so do I, but really, just how far away are we from enough Markov chains that Dice can order the Ramble-bot to write 300 words about the frumious bandersnatch and the Ramble-bot will dutifully crank something out that is indistinguishable from a Bennett screed? It's not exactly a high bar to clear.
That's why the 'poor' are walking around with smart phones and have internet and cable at home, right? Why the standard of living is so good?
None of these stories are about today. All of these stories are about trajectories, and the shape of things to come. And the self-evident fact that unless something changes, the 'poor' as you condescendingly call them with your snide quotation marks, will not be walking around with smart phones and have internet and cable TV at home. When the market value of the things the robots produce is greater than zero and your ability to earn any money is precisely zero because you and 100 million of your neighbors have been displaced, you will not be buying anything.
The poor will be sleeping the sleep which sees no awakening. You can't eat dirt, especially when someone else owns all of the dirt.
The phone uses encryption on calls and is intended to serve the high-security needs of government and industry.
As opposed to the security needs of consumers, which are obviously non-existent. No doubt it will come with a CALEA exemption, because Boeing. (Watch for a one sentence rider inserted into an otherwise totally unrelated bill some time in 2017.) Of course they will be absurdly expensive, but the Citizens who possess them will easily be able to afford them. If you can't pay, you definitely don't deserve security. But you can't have one unless you are on The List anyway. After all, they're CALEA exempt. You must have been background checked, approved, and sponsored before you can get on The List.
Remember, Service Brings Citizenship! Enlist today!
Does this sound paranoid? Think about your answer for a second.
I second Extra Credits. They provide a lot of good analysis and breakdowns of why some games work well, and how others could be made to work better.
Sounds like Lum the Mad, except in annoying video format.
A shame that site is gone... Turns out Lum can't design very well himself, but he's a good analyst and critic.
Really? His nice, lazy, all-afternoon hunting down of young people on that island couldn't have ended with fewer deaths if someone on that island had shot him down in self defense before he committed such methodical, unopposed slaughter?
His lazy all-afternoon hunting down of young people could have been ended with fewer deaths if Norwegian youth had ever heard the phrase: run from a knife, charge a gun. No one else needed to be armed to have stopped him far short of the 70-odd deaths he caused. They just didn't know how.
You know, if something works for 60-80 years, maybe it's worth dropping the "unsustainable" tag.
While you're at it, I'd say, given how much less the per capita debt of the nations in question have risen compared to American debt (presumably the bastion of the "free Market" the AC was referring to), maybe it's worth dropping the "cost" tag too.
But really, you shouldn't be responding to the obviously deranged. Arbitrary capitalization of words, arbitrary scare quotes everywhere, and spamming all caps words? Deranged.
It did not need to increase our chances of survival because, evolution only cares about getting us to reproductive maturity.
Well yes, but humans have a long maturation period. Getting us to reproductive maturity necessitates keeping our parents alive as well, not just us. A human with at least one parent who survives 15 years after its birth has a decided evolutionary advantage over a human with no parent surviving a year after birth. A human with two present parents surviving at least 20 years after birth has an even bigger advantage. A human with two present parents surviving at least 20 years after birth plus at least one grandparent surviving at least 20 years after birth has the biggest advantage evolution has yet found.
Characteristics from the human lifespan to human sex drive can be explained in these evolutionary terms. Humans live approximately 60 years in good health, which is their own maturation period plus the maturation period of one offspring, plus the maturation period of that offspring's offspring. The male human sex drive and the female's ability to accommodate him year round (extremely rare in mammals) have been described as the evolutionary mechanism that ensures not just two surviving parents, but the presence of two surviving parents.
Evolution may not care if you get ugly after your 20s, but evolution does care if you contract cancer and die at 35. It's a disadvantage to your offspring.
(Pedants who want to complain about us anthropomorphizing evolution are invited to take a long walk off a short pier. It's shorthand.)
Good post! I agree wholeheartedly. How the hell do you "+1" on Slashdot, or is it only editors that can do it?
You have a six digit user ID and you don't know how the moderation system works?
Probably because the best you can do is agree with a post claiming that because we don't have a video of the cop deleting the video, he must not have deleted it. Really? And he can't even spell "alleges" right.
You eventually get moderator points if your own posts get modded up. If you fail to contribute to the conversation, you don't get to affect the moderation of those who do.
You make it sound like you have a fundamental right to content someone else produces. You don't.
Yes I do.
It's called culture. Humans have been producing it for thousands of years. Claiming it is some sort of property that can be owned is a legal fiction created only in the last few hundred. The vast majority of consumers of culture throughout history and pre-history did not pay for their consumption. If authors got paid at all, they got paid once, by their patron, and forever after the cost of spreading the media was the marginal cost of duplication, and the cost of consumption was zero.
If I assume the existence of unicorns, I too may be able to predict global warming's impact on the length of their horns...
No, no, no. If you assume the existence of unicorns, you can predict how much global warming they cause.
Hurricanes happen in the northern hemisphere, usually golf of Mexico and north of it.
Tropical cyclones form an average of 6.3 times per year in the northern Indian Ocean (crosses the equater), 14.3 times per year in the south-western Indian Ocean (southern hemisphere), 11.0 times per year in the Australian region, and 11.4 times per year in the southern Pacific. Of those storms, an average of 1.5, 5.0, 0, and 4, respectively, per year achieve hurricane strength. Only an average of 13.6% of hurricane strength tropical cyclones form in the North Atlantic.
If you want to talk about storms in the US and around you should focus on Tornados anyway.
The frequency of tornadoes in North America is the lowest it's been in recorded history for the three year period running up to the present day. Discussed on Slashdot yesterday.
So, why do I complain? Because you bring in El Nina and El Nino "years" or "phenomena" ... which are phenomena limited to the southern hemisphere like Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and the south Atlantic ... they have absolutely no influence on hurricanes or the weather in the US.
Changes caused by El Niño-Southern Oscillation
So much to your +5 Informative
Everything you said was either useless or wrong. Which is why he's modded +5 and you're at 1.
When people get their panties in a twist about how much "wealth" the Walton family has it just shows they don't understand what wealth is.
Their "wealth" is paper. They could be worth X millions one day and X - a butt load of money the next. It has no impact on how much they can spend at lunch or whether they get the premium cable package or the standard. It's not cash.
On the contrary, it is very definitely cash. Walmart Corporation pays dividends to the tune of $0.48 per share every quarter for the past four quarters. Walmart has raised their dividend every year for the past 41 years. That amounts to $3.1 billion in cash paid to the Waltons this year. The Walton family still controls a simple majority of the company, owning more than 50% of the 3.223 billion shares outstanding.
That's cash money. No loan, no promissory note, no sale of shares. Of course the Waltons have built an edifice of fictional corporate entities to hold their stock that exists mainly for the purpose of avoiding taxes, so it's not like there's a single bank account that goes cha-ching +$775 million every quarter, but the difference is only significant to the tax man and the lawyers.
You don't understand what wealth is. It's ownership. And ownership PAYS. And pays and pays and pays.
Thanks for being prejudiced against us military folks.
It has nothing to do with prejudice. It has to do with two very different, very stressful jobs, with very different training. Or are you going to try to claim that infantry procedures are appropriate for civilian law enforcement? Are you one of these people who thinks the county sheriff needs an MRAP? Or a Stryker, perhaps?
Your support is appreciated.
Ten years of my professional career writing software for the US military, some of which is currently in use by the Navy, Marines, Air Force, Army, and Coast Guard, in roughly descending order of frequency. Yes, all five services. I've done more to "support our troops" than half of these assholes with US flag bumper stickers on their cars.
You're welcome.
Nope, because everyone knows it came from Playboy.
Uh, I didn't. Not until this thread, though I've seen that image before.
No, it's not in the least like blood diamonds or poaching endangered species. No one was enslaved, no creature was killed to produce that image. No population was oppressed, no species went extinct to produce that image.
Depictions of naked people, in whatever medium, do not automatically objectify all members of the person's sex. Nor does it automatically objectify the person depicted. In fact, depictions of naked people that were created specifically to elicit a sexual response still don't automatically objectify the person depicted or members of the person's sex. Whether or not a painting or photograph or sculpture or video objectifies the subject is entirely orthogonal to whether or not the subject is clothed. This is proven by the fact it is possible to objectify clothed people.
The entire American movie genre called 'horror' objectifies people, nearly all of whom are clothed. That is, in fact, a large part of what makes such movies horrifying. Photos of Nazi concentration camps objectify people. That is, in fact, a large part of what makes Nazi concentration camps horrifying.
Conversely, Playboy does not ever objectify women. The women in Playboy photos nearly always have visible faces, and are frequently looking directly at the camera. They are always in fine health, uninjured, unrestrained, and are exemplars of female human beauty. The poses (and photo retouching) used display their bodies to the best possible advantage. The poses are frequently dominant in nature, such as on top of the backs of furniture like sofas and chairs, on top of tables, on top of vehicles, and especially at the top of staircases. You will notice the preponderance of the phrase "on top"—the dominant position among all mammals, including all primates.
The uncropped photograph of Lena fits the mould precisely. There's a link to it a few posts down. I just looked at it for the first time, and it fits every single point above: she is standing (dominant), resting one knee on top of an old piece of luggage (dominant), obviously in fine health, and beautiful. Her face is visible, obviously, and she's looking directly at the camera. I am reminded of another aspect of typical Playboy photography. Articles of clothing, while not concealing her sexual attributes, are often chosen for dominance. She's wearing black leather boots with heavy heels.
In short, Playboy photos are the polar opposite of objectifying: Playboy models are depicted in positions of power, with many of the trappings thereof. Baring their sexual characteristics for a camera is an expression of their power—Playboy models are comfortable in their own skin. Comfortable and more than comfortable. Judging by the expressions on their faces, they know they are beautiful, they know they are sexually attractive, and they like being both.
Just because some lunatic social engineers say naked people are automatically objectified doesn't make it so. When you get right down to it, most objections to depictions of naked people are thinly disguised Puritanism, nothing more.
Is it possible for a depiction of a naked person to objectify the person or people of their sex? Certainly. Modern sexually explicit depictions objectify the men far more often than the women, when both are together. The pictures and videos have her name on them. They seldom have his. She makes most of the money. He doesn't. She often speaks. He doesn't. Her face is always visible. His isn't. The camera frames her, not him. He rarely looks at the camera. She often does. The poses he is required to assume are often awkward and physically painful to hold for any length of time. Hers can be as well, but not as often. He is there to showcase her. He is an accessory, a piece of furniture with a penis. Even the much-maligned cumshot is evidence of her sexual p
Well, you will need to get a grand jury to indict such misbehaving officers first, and that crucial step in the process has not been going so well recently.
I would like to see an investigation of the grand jury selection process. Is our society really so sick that killing-while-in-uniform is always a free pass or have D.A.s managed to rig grand jury selection? Is there a list? "Summon this pool of potential jurists if the thug cop needs to go free." Or is it a skill? Not all of society is so sick, but a large enough percentage have reliable Fascism and Safety At Any Cost pushbuttons that a jury can be effectively rigged during the selection process based on their responses to questions?
It certainly seems like some mechanism is in place, and has been for several decades.
Many of them were soldiers who enlisted, had a gun put in their hand at 18 years old, and taught to kill other people. It's easy to see how cops can become jaded and not give a crap about rights.
This is a big part of the problem, if not the problem. Police are not military personnel, and this habit of hiring ex-military people as cops is exactly the wrong choice. Military are trained a certain way. What is emphasized in military training is diametrically opposed to good policing. Completely the polar opposite. Even military police training is completely inappropriate for civilian application. Just because both jobs involve guns, people think they're the same. Ex-military gets you a bonus in the hiring score. It should be an automatic disqualification, since the retraining is extremely difficult, if not impossible, especially for ex-military who were deployed as combat troops. Unacknowledged PTSD alone is good enough reason to disqualify, never mind the training issues.
When most women look at a car all they see is a box. Just buy any car you want and some Ford badges.
The wife may or may not notice that trick. The extended family is guaranteed to not only notice, but crucify you for it. You don't seem to have contact with actual rabid motor vehicle fans. Rabid is an entirely appropriate adjective: they foam at the mouth. The word 'fan' was derived from is entirely accurate: fanatic. Rebadging a car is grounds not just for divorce but for poisoning your dog and SWATing your house. (If it's one of the Evil Brands. If it's just one of the Bad Brands, they might settle for divorce and salting your lawn.)
Don't cross these people. It's not safe.