Long term investing isn't gambling, but day-trading most certainly is. The number of factors that go into a stock price's short term movements are so numerous as to be incomprehensible. You'd have better luck predicting a coin toss based on starting velocity, wind speed, ambient humidity, etc., than you would predicting a stock's day-to-day movement based on all available data.
Not even close to equivalent. Fox-apologists just like to trot out that comparison to make their propaganda machine seem like just another biased source.
All 24-hour news is ratings-driven crap, but Fox takes it to a level that would make Pravda editors blush.
Oh ho ho, aren't you clever? Some of us still like watching sports, or the first runs of shows that we can enjoy with friends. Getting high def on a big screen without needing half a dozen different solutions to pipe it over from the PC is also quite nice. "It just works", you know? No need to worry about blockiness or buffering or the audio being out of sync.
Seriously though, what point are you trying to make? That the law is unnecessary because "nobody" watches TV? If so, I posit that you don't know very many people.
Don't break what you don't understand. Patents are necessary in most fields. They get abused, yes, but destroying them would do incalculable harm to many industries. Your cavalier "let's fix this for everyone!" attitude is horrifying and represents the worst trends in activism.
He was on the screen for literally two seconds. He looks up from his microscope, sees the models walking in, puts on his glasses, and that's it. You could recut that same scene so that it was a random, properly attired coworker coming into the lab, remove the "sexy" music, and you'd have an ordinary day at the office. Sure, the guy's handsome, but that's not the same thing as being sexualized.
There's a difference between using photogenic actors and actually sexualizing a character. If the male scientist had been performing his work in a Chippendale outfit, people would be more likely to complain. Except, of course, that treating men as sex objects is so uncommon that if they did it, it would have to be some sort of parody.
Read the English-language Al Jazeera. They are a fantastic source for whenever you are worried that your views on the Middle East are being colored by Western propaganda.
I'm sure it's the same in baseball. Batters don't have time to judge the ball's trajectory itself so they rely on the pitcher's delivery to tell them where the pitch is going. When a knuckleball comes their way, there's nothing to read because even the pitcher doesn't know where it's going.
You're close, but not quite right. Batters can pick up some aspects of the pitch from the delivery, especially at lower levels of play, but pitchers try very hard to avoid "tipping their pitches" in such a manner. So in the majors, what batters really look for is the spin of the pitch, judged by looking at the conveniently bright red seamsw. Since major league pitchers throw balls with 2000+ RPM of spin on them, the seams will mostly be a blur, except for key exceptions. For example a 2-seam fastball will appear to have two pinkish vertical stripes on it. On a sinker, those stripes will be tilted. Breaking balls look like they have dots (as the axis of rotation passes through or near the seam), with the dots in different places depending on the type of pitch. Of course, you only have about 200 ms to pick up the seams. On a 3" diameter circle. From fifty feet away. That sharp vision and quick thinking is probably the number one element in setting apart top hitters.
On knuckleballs, there's nothing to read. Which means that major league hitters need to forget about their standard approach. All their skills and practice count for nothing, and they're forced to just hack away at it the way you or I would (albeit with a swing that won't draw laughter from the crowd).
"[I]f highly detailed images become available... [then] it would be impossible to secure every location."
This is completely true, in the same sense that if I stand on my head right now, the sun will rise tomorrow. I'm glad to see Mr. Schumer is aware of both the impossibility of securing every location, and the basics of formal logic.
I have a strong dislike for irrationality, fear-mongering, and lies. I see a lot of all three whenever the topic of the United States comes up on Slashdot. The US certainly has its flaws. Lots of them in fact. But if you believe Slashdot, you'd think the US is some sort of comic book dystopia. So yeah, I push back against that sort of paranoid fear-mongering. I know I'll never get through to the true believers -- just as I'll never convince truthers that Bush didn't plan 9/11 along with Rockefeller and the queen of England -- but hopefully I can stop some forum lurkers from being lured down that path of irrationality and lies.
As for Iran, I don't consider them to be a threat to the US. But if they obtain nukes, it will cement the leadership in power, as it did in North Korea. We all saw the beatings, rapes, and murders that the Iranian government employed against its people when they protested Ahmadinejad's reelection. Do you really think it would be a good thing for that regime to have even more power? I would never support a war in Iran, because that would kill innocent people. I don't even support Israel's assassination of nuclear scientists. But by the same token, I do support actions that prevent the current regime from obtaining nukes, because I think that Iran having nukes would also cause more death. Not through nuclear attacks, mind you, but by perpetuating a regime with a horrid record of human rights abuses. Delaying or preventing that possibility, without bloodshed, is a Good Thing.
Oh come on, you know full well that Stuxnet was targeting the centrifuges. Screwing with centrifuges is not going to take their power grid offline, and it's certainly not "risking the lives of Iranian citizens". You're either being dishonest, or you are woefully ignorant of how nuclear power works.
As for your support, I couldn't care less about it, and I've certainly never said anything even remotely like "they hate our freedoms".
And if a normal person builds an aircraft carrier and conducts military exercises in national waters, they'd also go to prison. What is your point? If a government isn't allowed to do things that individual citizens can't, then it's not a government. It's a social club.
If a virus set back some research at Raytheon, do you really think that the US would jump into another war?
They made it very clear that they were talking about the sort of attack that thus far only exists in movies, not just some computer worm that damages some equipment.
So will you come back and admit to being wrong when you inevitably are?
Israel has been trying to get Obama to go to war alongside them for quite some time now. He's refused. Maybe because we can't afford it, maybe because he doesn't think its necessary, maybe because his base would desert him, maybe because he just thinks that wars of aggression are bad. But declaring war right before an election? Absolute political suicide. His base would desert him, his opponents would mock him for his transparent ploy, and independents would look at the bill from Iraq and blanch.
Now, if Romney wins, we might be in Iran by November of 2013... maybe. But I think Syria is the more likely candidate. He already wants to arm the rebels, and his party wants to go further than that.
You're referring to a previous story that you misinterpreted to mean that the US would consider cyberattacks to be an act of war. What that story actually said was that cyberattacks against certain key infrastructure might be considered an act of war if it were serious enough. Quoting:
If a cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a "use of force" consideration, which could merit retaliation.
That basically says that they won't rule out military force in certain extreme cases. Nor should they.
And for Iran's part, if they'd like to consider Stuxnet to be an act of war, they can. Heck, they could consider Obama forgetting to say "bless you" after Ahmadinejad sneezes to be an act of war. That's the fun thing about the word "consider". But they won't, just as they didn't consider Israel's assassination of their nuclear scientists to be one.
I'm sorry that international espionage isn't as cut and dry as you'd like it to be, but that's just how it is and has been for most of history. There were pretenses of chivalry in Europe (and likely other places) for a time, back when royalty was a good ole boys' club and the peasants would be the ones dying. We're past that now, and I for one am glad of it.
Al-Awlaki wasn't "blissfully unaware that anyone was out to get him". He had openly and loudly proclaimed himself to be at war with America. He had insisted that it was every Muslim's duty to kill Americans. He had declared death sentences against people for drawing pictures of Mohammed, forcing them to spend their lives in hiding or face the same fate as Theo van Gogh. Most importantly though, he had been behind multiple attempts to set off bombs in the US.
Lots of people criticize the United States. It's a more popular international pastime than soccer. We don't go around killing them. Al-Awlaki was different. He actively and repeated tried to kill American citizens. It would have been nice to bring him in for a trial, but that wasn't possible. So we can either sit back and let people die, or we can defend ourselves.
As you said: "When someone shoots at you, you're allowed to shoot back to neutralize the threat." What does it matter, whether we're shooting bullets or bombs?
Impossible! Blasphemy! The Constitution is the divine word of Jesus, handed down to George Washington on stone tablets atop Mount Sinai. Nothing it says can ever, ever being wrong!
What is war, if not killing human beings without charge or trial? What defines the borders of a war zone? During WWII, Japan floated balloons full of bombs over to the American Pacific coast, with the obvious intent of "killing human beings without charge or trial", even though no one would have considered California to be an active war zone. That is, unless you define war zone as "a place where our enemies live", in which case the targeted killings by the US lose all meaning.
Personally, I prefer targeted killings to the alternatives. If there is person Y in country X planning to kill citizens of country Z, there are only so many ways to handle it.
Country Z can try to defend its borders and keep the killers out, but that's simply not practical. Homeland security is just theater. Terrorists can always, if nothing else, slip into the country as a tourist, acquire a weapon, and kill some people. Look at the guy who shot up the summer camp in Norway, or the stabbings of school children in China a while back. Both of those were native attackers, but they could just as easily have been outsiders.
Country Z can demand that country X's government intervene, but most terrorists are based in lawless countries.
Country Z can go to war, as the US did in Afghanistan, but I think we all agree that that leads to far more death and destruction.
Country Z can sit back and let its people die, but those people will respond by voting out the current government. Complain all you want, no people on Earth will respond to repeated terrorist attacks by turning the other cheek.
Or finally, Country Z can try to kill person Y, and only person Y. To me, that seems like the least bad of a bunch of bad options.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. This video shows some clips of Bush's speeches back when he was running for governor. He comes across as intelligent and articulate. Now, the video's voice over concludes that Bush has some sort of early onset dementia. But I think the far more likely answer is that he concluded, correctly, that most Americans would rather vote for "someone they can have a beer with" than someone who sounds smarter than they are.
You don't get to be president, or attain any other position of power, by being a moron.
Oh, look, a angry little child with no knowledge of history! Do your parents know you're using the internet?
It's very easy to fall into the trap of "this thing that is happening right now" is the "worst/best thing in all of history!". I'm no fan of the TSA, but when you spout crap like that, all you do is drive people away from your line of thinking.
Disenfranchisement is a bad thing. It was designed to keep black people from voting. It's a stain on the country, which has thankfully been reduced to only a few regions. It is not something we should be looking to duplicate in other areas.
Google+ is still around. Only people who expected it to be Facebook II call it a failure. Orkut is very popular in India and Brazil. iGoogle is still around and makes for a good home page. Goog-411 was only intended to as an experiment to help them gather data on voice recognition. Google desktop was a huge success, which only saw its user base decline when Windows 7 made it obsolete.
Those are just the ones that leapt out at me. I suspect there are other flaws in your list as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Long term investing isn't gambling, but day-trading most certainly is. The number of factors that go into a stock price's short term movements are so numerous as to be incomprehensible. You'd have better luck predicting a coin toss based on starting velocity, wind speed, ambient humidity, etc., than you would predicting a stock's day-to-day movement based on all available data.
Not even close to equivalent. Fox-apologists just like to trot out that comparison to make their propaganda machine seem like just another biased source.
All 24-hour news is ratings-driven crap, but Fox takes it to a level that would make Pravda editors blush.
That's all well and good, but most atheists (or at least the outspoken ones) very much believe in the absence of god(s).
Oh ho ho, aren't you clever? Some of us still like watching sports, or the first runs of shows that we can enjoy with friends. Getting high def on a big screen without needing half a dozen different solutions to pipe it over from the PC is also quite nice. "It just works", you know? No need to worry about blockiness or buffering or the audio being out of sync.
Seriously though, what point are you trying to make? That the law is unnecessary because "nobody" watches TV? If so, I posit that you don't know very many people.
You're right, back then the stories would be driven by last week's Google Doodle.
Don't break what you don't understand. Patents are necessary in most fields. They get abused, yes, but destroying them would do incalculable harm to many industries. Your cavalier "let's fix this for everyone!" attitude is horrifying and represents the worst trends in activism.
He was on the screen for literally two seconds. He looks up from his microscope, sees the models walking in, puts on his glasses, and that's it. You could recut that same scene so that it was a random, properly attired coworker coming into the lab, remove the "sexy" music, and you'd have an ordinary day at the office. Sure, the guy's handsome, but that's not the same thing as being sexualized.
There's a difference between using photogenic actors and actually sexualizing a character. If the male scientist had been performing his work in a Chippendale outfit, people would be more likely to complain. Except, of course, that treating men as sex objects is so uncommon that if they did it, it would have to be some sort of parody.
Read the English-language Al Jazeera. They are a fantastic source for whenever you are worried that your views on the Middle East are being colored by Western propaganda.
I'm sure it's the same in baseball. Batters don't have time to judge the ball's trajectory itself so they rely on the pitcher's delivery to tell them where the pitch is going. When a knuckleball comes their way, there's nothing to read because even the pitcher doesn't know where it's going.
You're close, but not quite right. Batters can pick up some aspects of the pitch from the delivery, especially at lower levels of play, but pitchers try very hard to avoid "tipping their pitches" in such a manner. So in the majors, what batters really look for is the spin of the pitch, judged by looking at the conveniently bright red seamsw. Since major league pitchers throw balls with 2000+ RPM of spin on them, the seams will mostly be a blur, except for key exceptions. For example a 2-seam fastball will appear to have two pinkish vertical stripes on it. On a sinker, those stripes will be tilted. Breaking balls look like they have dots (as the axis of rotation passes through or near the seam), with the dots in different places depending on the type of pitch. Of course, you only have about 200 ms to pick up the seams. On a 3" diameter circle. From fifty feet away. That sharp vision and quick thinking is probably the number one element in setting apart top hitters.
On knuckleballs, there's nothing to read. Which means that major league hitters need to forget about their standard approach. All their skills and practice count for nothing, and they're forced to just hack away at it the way you or I would (albeit with a swing that won't draw laughter from the crowd).
"[I]f highly detailed images become available... [then] it would be impossible to secure every location."
This is completely true, in the same sense that if I stand on my head right now, the sun will rise tomorrow. I'm glad to see Mr. Schumer is aware of both the impossibility of securing every location, and the basics of formal logic.
Well since you asked...
I have a strong dislike for irrationality, fear-mongering, and lies. I see a lot of all three whenever the topic of the United States comes up on Slashdot. The US certainly has its flaws. Lots of them in fact. But if you believe Slashdot, you'd think the US is some sort of comic book dystopia. So yeah, I push back against that sort of paranoid fear-mongering. I know I'll never get through to the true believers -- just as I'll never convince truthers that Bush didn't plan 9/11 along with Rockefeller and the queen of England -- but hopefully I can stop some forum lurkers from being lured down that path of irrationality and lies.
As for Iran, I don't consider them to be a threat to the US. But if they obtain nukes, it will cement the leadership in power, as it did in North Korea. We all saw the beatings, rapes, and murders that the Iranian government employed against its people when they protested Ahmadinejad's reelection. Do you really think it would be a good thing for that regime to have even more power? I would never support a war in Iran, because that would kill innocent people. I don't even support Israel's assassination of nuclear scientists. But by the same token, I do support actions that prevent the current regime from obtaining nukes, because I think that Iran having nukes would also cause more death. Not through nuclear attacks, mind you, but by perpetuating a regime with a horrid record of human rights abuses. Delaying or preventing that possibility, without bloodshed, is a Good Thing.
Oh come on, you know full well that Stuxnet was targeting the centrifuges. Screwing with centrifuges is not going to take their power grid offline, and it's certainly not "risking the lives of Iranian citizens". You're either being dishonest, or you are woefully ignorant of how nuclear power works.
As for your support, I couldn't care less about it, and I've certainly never said anything even remotely like "they hate our freedoms".
And if a normal person builds an aircraft carrier and conducts military exercises in national waters, they'd also go to prison. What is your point? If a government isn't allowed to do things that individual citizens can't, then it's not a government. It's a social club.
If a virus set back some research at Raytheon, do you really think that the US would jump into another war?
They made it very clear that they were talking about the sort of attack that thus far only exists in movies, not just some computer worm that damages some equipment.
So will you come back and admit to being wrong when you inevitably are?
Israel has been trying to get Obama to go to war alongside them for quite some time now. He's refused. Maybe because we can't afford it, maybe because he doesn't think its necessary, maybe because his base would desert him, maybe because he just thinks that wars of aggression are bad. But declaring war right before an election? Absolute political suicide. His base would desert him, his opponents would mock him for his transparent ploy, and independents would look at the bill from Iraq and blanch.
Now, if Romney wins, we might be in Iran by November of 2013... maybe. But I think Syria is the more likely candidate. He already wants to arm the rebels, and his party wants to go further than that.
You're referring to a previous story that you misinterpreted to mean that the US would consider cyberattacks to be an act of war. What that story actually said was that cyberattacks against certain key infrastructure might be considered an act of war if it were serious enough. Quoting:
If a cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a "use of force" consideration, which could merit retaliation.
That basically says that they won't rule out military force in certain extreme cases. Nor should they.
And for Iran's part, if they'd like to consider Stuxnet to be an act of war, they can. Heck, they could consider Obama forgetting to say "bless you" after Ahmadinejad sneezes to be an act of war. That's the fun thing about the word "consider". But they won't, just as they didn't consider Israel's assassination of their nuclear scientists to be one.
I'm sorry that international espionage isn't as cut and dry as you'd like it to be, but that's just how it is and has been for most of history. There were pretenses of chivalry in Europe (and likely other places) for a time, back when royalty was a good ole boys' club and the peasants would be the ones dying. We're past that now, and I for one am glad of it.
Al-Awlaki wasn't "blissfully unaware that anyone was out to get him". He had openly and loudly proclaimed himself to be at war with America. He had insisted that it was every Muslim's duty to kill Americans. He had declared death sentences against people for drawing pictures of Mohammed, forcing them to spend their lives in hiding or face the same fate as Theo van Gogh. Most importantly though, he had been behind multiple attempts to set off bombs in the US.
Lots of people criticize the United States. It's a more popular international pastime than soccer. We don't go around killing them. Al-Awlaki was different. He actively and repeated tried to kill American citizens. It would have been nice to bring him in for a trial, but that wasn't possible. So we can either sit back and let people die, or we can defend ourselves.
As you said: "When someone shoots at you, you're allowed to shoot back to neutralize the threat." What does it matter, whether we're shooting bullets or bombs?
Impossible! Blasphemy! The Constitution is the divine word of Jesus, handed down to George Washington on stone tablets atop Mount Sinai. Nothing it says can ever, ever being wrong!
What is war, if not killing human beings without charge or trial? What defines the borders of a war zone? During WWII, Japan floated balloons full of bombs over to the American Pacific coast, with the obvious intent of "killing human beings without charge or trial", even though no one would have considered California to be an active war zone. That is, unless you define war zone as "a place where our enemies live", in which case the targeted killings by the US lose all meaning.
Personally, I prefer targeted killings to the alternatives. If there is person Y in country X planning to kill citizens of country Z, there are only so many ways to handle it.
Country Z can try to defend its borders and keep the killers out, but that's simply not practical. Homeland security is just theater. Terrorists can always, if nothing else, slip into the country as a tourist, acquire a weapon, and kill some people. Look at the guy who shot up the summer camp in Norway, or the stabbings of school children in China a while back. Both of those were native attackers, but they could just as easily have been outsiders.
Country Z can demand that country X's government intervene, but most terrorists are based in lawless countries.
Country Z can go to war, as the US did in Afghanistan, but I think we all agree that that leads to far more death and destruction.
Country Z can sit back and let its people die, but those people will respond by voting out the current government. Complain all you want, no people on Earth will respond to repeated terrorist attacks by turning the other cheek.
Or finally, Country Z can try to kill person Y, and only person Y. To me, that seems like the least bad of a bunch of bad options.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. This video shows some clips of Bush's speeches back when he was running for governor. He comes across as intelligent and articulate. Now, the video's voice over concludes that Bush has some sort of early onset dementia. But I think the far more likely answer is that he concluded, correctly, that most Americans would rather vote for "someone they can have a beer with" than someone who sounds smarter than they are.
You don't get to be president, or attain any other position of power, by being a moron.
Oh, look, a angry little child with no knowledge of history! Do your parents know you're using the internet?
It's very easy to fall into the trap of "this thing that is happening right now" is the "worst/best thing in all of history!". I'm no fan of the TSA, but when you spout crap like that, all you do is drive people away from your line of thinking.
That doesn't make them failures. There's a whole lot of room between "takes the world by storm" and "failure". Lots of products fall into that range.
Disenfranchisement is a bad thing. It was designed to keep black people from voting. It's a stain on the country, which has thankfully been reduced to only a few regions. It is not something we should be looking to duplicate in other areas.
A lot of those didn't fail.
Google+ is still around. Only people who expected it to be Facebook II call it a failure.
Orkut is very popular in India and Brazil.
iGoogle is still around and makes for a good home page.
Goog-411 was only intended to as an experiment to help them gather data on voice recognition.
Google desktop was a huge success, which only saw its user base decline when Windows 7 made it obsolete.
Those are just the ones that leapt out at me. I suspect there are other flaws in your list as well.