As far as I can tell, voters do not know what they want, because they do not think things through. Or rather, they know what they want, but they are unwilling to pay for it.
If asked, voters would prefer not paying any taxes at all while being given everything they want.
Most people, no matter where they live and their tax percentage, will say that they pay too much tax. Need to cut back on spending.
Sure. Where? Reducing waste only goes so far, and at some point, you simply can't avoid it. No matter how much you want to, you can't run a pub and expect your glassware or furniture to last forever. Just because you pick a new pub owner, the patrons will still be clumsy and accidents happen.
Cutting one expenditure will almost always result in expenses elsewhere. Cut back on socialized medicine, and you'll pay for it elsewhere, either in an unhealthy workforce (lower taxable income due to sick days or sub-par performance), at the back door, when the people who can't pay for their own treatment take up much more expensive hospital beds - or at the ethics and morals door by simply letting people without money die.
Education is often mentioned. Too expensive. Alright. Cut education and you end up with a less educated workforce. Great short term solution, horrible long term, as that will reduce the number of high paid jobs and thus your taxable income.
Military, surely. Depends on the country. It'd be difficult for Puerto Rico to cut back on their military spending, as it's entirely dependent on the US for that. And cutting back on military spending will result in job losses elsewhere, as you will either move soldiers from the military to the general work populace (aka unemployment), lose jobs at military contractors (as they no longer get as many orders) or both. Plus, if your military is too small, your geopolitical region too unstable, this could result in losing your country and thus your taxable income. Belgium could probably remove its military entirely without military risk - South Korea, not so much.
Roads? Needed for transporting goods. Cut down on road maintenance and you end up with bad conditions not only for goods transport, but also for your workforce to get to and from work. Similar issues with railroads and public transport.
Electrical infrastructure? Critical for the economy.
Internet infrastructure? Critical for the economy, but rarely regulated in the same way.
Water and sanitation? See socialized medicine.
Elder care? Moral and ethical issues with simply letting poor people suffer and die.
One of the reasons politics, everywhere, is so messed up, is that voters have been spoonfed and accepted this notion, that everything can be cooked down to a 20-second sound-bite. It cannot.
Let me give you an example:
This is the Danish budget for 2012: http://www.oes-cs.dk/bevillingslove/ffl12t0.pdf. It's 562 pages. That's for a country with just under 6 million people, a nominal GDP of about 300 billion dollars and a 2012 budget of about 120 billion dollars.
562 pages. Not that bad. Except that there are three additional documents to add to these 562 pages. First one is 1,024 pages. Second one is 929 pages. Third one is a meager 678 pages. That's a total of 3,193 pages.
All to be summed up in a 20-second sound-bite.
So we end up with these ludicrous discussions about minutia. Minutia that very often only covers 1% of 1% of anything. Sure, the numbers may sound big, but in the whole, they're tiny.
All designed to make us think that we and our opinions matter.
If cars were designed the way we run politics, they'd be pretty much guaranteed to explode and kill the occupants the moment they were turned on.
Can't beat the "what if that was your own family" argument.
Of course you can beat that argument.
"If it was my family, that was wiped out like that, I wouldn't be buying new hard drives for their computers. In other words, I wouldn't be having this problem."
In theory some permutation of the data should eventually resemble what you describe.
True... but you may not ever have enough time to hit all the corner cases.
If it's a single 32-bit word, that can cause the issue, then yes, you can go through every single permutation fairly quickly. There are only 4,294,967,296 of them - nothing that a computer can't handle.
Suppose for a moment that the issue is caused, not by one single faulty piece of data, but two right after each-other. Essentially a 64-bit word causes the issue. Now we're looking at 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. Quite a bit more, but not impossible to test.
Now suppose that the first 64-bit word doesn't cause the fault on its own, but "simply" causes an instability in the software. That instability will be triggered by another specific 64-bit word. Now we're looking at 3.40282367 x 10^38 permutations.
Now, keep in mind that at this point, we're really looking at a fairly simple error triggered by two pieces of data. One sets it up, the other causes the fault.
Now let's make it slightly more complex.
The actual issue is caused by two different error conditions happening at once. If they are similar as above, we're now looking at, essentially, a 256-bit word. That's 1.15792089 x 10^77 permutations.
In comparison, the world's fastest super computer can do 10.51 petaflops, which is 10.51 x 10^15, and it would take that computer 0.409 microseconds to go through all permutations in a 32 bit word. About 30 minutes for a 64 bit word. 10^15 years for a 128 bit word and 10^53 years for a 256 bit word.
Yes, you can test every single permutation, if the problem is small enough. But the problem with most software is that it really isn't small.
Even if we are only talking 32 bit words causing the issue, will it happen every time that single word is issued, or do you need specific conditions? How is that condition created? As soon as the issue becomes even slightly complex, it becomes essentially impossible to test for.
During your average day, how many really bad drivers did you personally interact with that created a dangerous situation resulting in an accident?
Does that mean that dangerous situations that do not result in an accident are okay?
For instance - suppose someone fired a gun towards you but missed by a few inches. Dangerous situation, no accident. Pretty sure you'd want to avoid those situations at all times, which is why firing ranges keep shooters at one end, targets at the other, and try their best to keep bullets from straying into other areas.
How about someone randomly swinging a knife towards your throat, but missing by an inch. Dangerous situation, no accident. Also something we'd want to avoid, which is why professional kitchens really hate people running around with knives.
Dangerous situations that do not result in accidents are still quite dangerous, as they are likely to result in accidents.
Do not confuse dangerous situations with seemingly dangerous situations. Seemingly dangerous situations are perfectly safe (within reason), which is why we don't worry about them. I can stand about a foot from traffic moving at 80 km/h without worrying, as long as it's at the side of a road.
However, if I stand in the middle of that traffic, it's no longer a seemingly dangerous situation, but an actual dangerous situation. It may not result in accidents, but again - pretty sure the people involved would rather it didn't happen.
Don't use a laser light - those things are illegal and an outright hazard to piloted aircrafts passing overhead.
Better to build your own roof lights. Just make sure that you accidentally include some very powerful IR LEDs aimed straight up.
Or run solar water heaters on the entirety of your roof. Bonus points for running a hot water pipe spelling out a message to your local surveillance overlords.
Look, don't be an idiot and make fun of Asians and their general problems speaking proper English. I'm pretty sure you'd sound like an idiot when trying to speak an Asian language.
And don't even get me started on Apple and their price gouging 100$+ mice, keyboards and trackpads! Granted, I can't find any 100$+ keyboards, mice or trackpads on Apple's store, but I'm sure they're there! It's not like you'd just pull that 100$+ number out of your ass, right?
The problem with streaming and rentals (at least here in Sweden), is that there is no browsing.
You can't randomly stumble across Firefly and find it to be much less cheesy than it's description: "Five hundred years in the future, a renegade crew aboard a small, spacecraft tries to survive as they travel the unknown parts of the galaxy and evade warring factions as well as authority agents out to get them." or "Like a western, but in space". If you completely remove browsing from the equation, you won't find it. At least I wont, because those two descriptions sound about as cheesy as they come.
You won't be able to leave the streaming on when you're done watching one show, and come back to find something that makes you go "hmm... let's see what this is and then get hooked on a new show or movie".
You certainly won't be finding any shows or movies that are "old". When's the last time you found Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon while streaming? I've stumbled across both of those on TV on weekend afternoons, and the only reason I watched them, is because I stumbled across them, because I wouldn't be actively seeking out a movie from the 1940s and '50.
The reason TV works, is because I can browse pretty much for free - I just pay for the TV set. Sure, I won't be able to decide what to watch, but it does expose me to stuff I haven't seen before - stuff I wouldn't want to pay a small fortune for, just to find out it sucks.
If he then enters that URL into a clean browser and accesses his own user information, how is that trespassing? It's the exact address he was given to access his own account.
Now, even without testing another ID, I can be pretty sure that it will work. Only "downside" is that the ID might be random and not sequential, but that's barely an improvement.
Essentially something like this would be the equivalent of me walking into a bank, asking to withdraw 200 dollars, telling them my name is "Martin Schou" (which it is), and them simply giving me 200 dollars without any kinds of checks.
It's not in any way, shape or form trespassing, fraud, identity theft or similar. What it is is a huge security issue.
However - since the original poster didn't specify what the issue was and with whom (with good reasons), you can't make a factual statement as to whether or not he's trespassing.
If we assume the worst about every situation, then we'll assume that somebody's going to try to kill you
Every time I venture out into anything resembling traffic, I do exactly that. While pedestrians and cyclists are unlikely to kill me by accident, inattentive drivers are indeed quite likely to do just that.
So far I've managed to stave off death by blunt force trauma at least four times, including one where I landed on the hood of the car after jumping up, so I wouldn't get sucked under it. And that was in a pedestrian crossing AND red lights for the cars.
That's your assumption. I'd rather we operate under the assumption that the black-hats don't have it
Alright. Let's pick something different as the problem item.
I'd rather we operate under the assumption that bad people do not have weapons of various kinds. It's a more pleasant thought for sure, but it also means that when someone tells me "your money or your life", I just ignore him - after all, the assumption is that he has no weapons. And that's likely to either get me hurt or killed.
Yes, if we don't make assumptions that include rather unfortunate views, the world seems a lot nicer, but then again - a bear and her cubs also do look awfully cute together, and I assume mama bear doesn't mind if I go play with her cub.
However, if an eminent scholar presents forward a *theory*, there is no harm in at least reading what he is writing.
True. But keep in mind that gravity is so far, also just a theory.
A theory isn't just "well, I think God did it". That does not constitute a theory. That's just a guess, and I rather doubt it would even qualify as a hypothesis.
And this is the problem. People are so used to the idea of "theory" just being random guess work, that they don't realize what it means when they say "the theory of evolution".
They might compare it to "the laws of gravity", but not only are those also "just" theories, they "fall apart" a lot easier than people imagine, but that's okay - that's why we have "intelligent falling".
But I may be mistaken in thinking, that we should laugh at, ridicule and point fingers at all religious nutjobs, and not just the ones of my own skin colour and my country's largest denomination.
I don't care about the colour of their skin OR their religious freedoms - they're idiots.
PS. We also focused on Ted Stevens and his series of tubes and made fun of him for it. Should we instead have focused on the 534 other members of congress, who weren't this stupid? No - we shouldn't.
I really pity the American intelligence community. They're expected to catch every single credible threat, not just to America but to any nation or political figure on the planet,
Yes... that's why there was such an outcry that the CIA, NSA, FBI and DHS didn't warn Norway about Anders Breivik and his doings.
Same with the car bomb in Stockholm in late 2010.
And don't get me started on how Spain crucified every single American ever so slightly connected with the CIA, NSA, FBI and DHS over their failure to stop the Madrid train bombings in 2004.
And the UK?!? They declared war on the US over the 2005 London bombings! Seriously - they had a Trident submarine launch nuclear warheads to level New York City.
Wait... none of that actually happened. No one blamed the US intelligence community for failing to prevent or even warn about these attacks.
If you let users pick all four words in the password, yes, but that's not the suggestion.
Not necessarily a problem.
A friend of mine used to use the password "Itjtmjtlstx2". A short form of:
"In the jungle the mighty jungle the lion sleeps tonight" repeat twice
He couldn't grasp the concept that not only is it easier to remember and type out "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight", but it's also a hell of a lot harder to brute force.
Well, what are "significant amounts"? Half a liter? A liter? Two? Ten? And in what time span?
I think most of us can agree, that 100 liters of water is a significant amount, but if you were able to even consume that much regular water in a day, you'd kill yourself.
In fact, there have been cases where drinking a gallon in a few hours have been fatal (and not because they drowned).
The problem is that you still need a penetrator - and that's going to be really heavy, and there's a good chance that the nuke won't survive intact, so conventional explosives are the solution.
Honestly, I realize that this is a somewhat silly question, but the idea popped into my head, and it won't really go away.
What if you were to build shaped charge triggered by a nuclear explosion?
Ignoring the practicalities of it, and ignoring that I don't know what I'm talking about, wouldn't you be able to end up with a much higher velocity for the molten metal, not to mention a hell of a lot more of it for an even more effective penetration?
I don't understand why you use the US as an example of markets that have good contracts for cell phones. From where I'm at (Denmark and Sweden), those guys gets raped and just beg for more while praying that next time lube will be introduced.
Here I get 10 GB/month with my 32 EUR/month subscription, and that includes paying for the phone itself.
That being said, I don't want to be without mobile data on my iPhone. If I'm even slightly lost, it has maps and that requires data. I can check email. I can use Skype. I can use the fucking internet, without having to go hunting for a WiFi connection when I'm in the middle of nowhere (Sweden has exceptionally good coverage).
I can even listen to almost live radio from anywhere in the world, as long as they're streaming through Stitcher.
Hell, I can use the phone as a modem for my portable computer, when I'm in a hotel that has decided that they'll charge me 5 EUR/hour for access to a limited subset of websites and email.
And honestly, paying 32 EUR/month for that is fine with me.
Lazy and barely-literate types will mewl "o u new wut i ment", and it's true that a reasonably intelligent person can figure it out
Suppose you have a 150+ IQ and you're very dyslexic. You might train yourself to recognize the words, if they're spelled exactly correct, but "o u new wut i ment" will not make any sense at all.
And I do have to wonder about deaf people. How do you know that "oh" and "o" are homophones, if you can't hear them being spoken? Same of "you" and "u", "knew" and "new", "what" and "wut" and of course "meant" and "ment".
Personally I get pissed off when people write like that, because their laziness is creating extra work for me. And no, dyslectic people do not write like that. I've never had the same kind of guttural reaction of hatred when reading a text from someone I don't know who's dyslectic - somehow (and I don't know how) my brain can tell the difference.
Now, if it was a small decrease in reading speed and comprehension, I might not be as upset as I become, but when I run into writing like that, it gives me the same aftershock to my brain, as hitting a speedbump at 80 km/h - it's very very uncomfortable, and it takes a bit for my brain to gather itself again.
Well, there are reasons why it can't reasonably destroy all data - it would crash a lot of systems.
For instance - suppose you make a post about something. This post sparks a massive amount of responses. Now you delete your post. What is supposed to happen?
Should the entire discussion disappear? That seems unreasonable, as a lot of other people's time and effort has gone into debating this.
What if we leave the discussion, but erase everything you wrote? Well... what if they quote you - should that also be erased? Again - the time and effort others put into the debate has to weigh in.
They could remove your account name and link and simply change it to "Anonymous", but then what happens when someone references you by name? Should that also be changed to Anonymous? What if your name is Bob, and the reference is simply "That's not what Bob said", and there are multiple Bobs in the discussion?
What about all the posts that someone else references later, and they spark debates? Twice removed? Thrice, etc.?
While it is relatively easy to remove the account, the posts that are connected to it is a completely different beast.
If you write something, and noone links or replies to it, removing it is easy.
I do agree it should be possible to delete my Google+ account - but I cannot reasonably expect everything to go away. I expect my personal details to disappear, the ability to easily check what I have posted earlier etc., but expecting that thousands and thousands of other people's work and effort should just disappear because I don't want my account to be active anymore is entirely too selfish for me to accept.
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As far as I can tell, voters do not know what they want, because they do not think things through. Or rather, they know what they want, but they are unwilling to pay for it.
If asked, voters would prefer not paying any taxes at all while being given everything they want.
Most people, no matter where they live and their tax percentage, will say that they pay too much tax. Need to cut back on spending.
Sure. Where? Reducing waste only goes so far, and at some point, you simply can't avoid it. No matter how much you want to, you can't run a pub and expect your glassware or furniture to last forever. Just because you pick a new pub owner, the patrons will still be clumsy and accidents happen.
Cutting one expenditure will almost always result in expenses elsewhere. Cut back on socialized medicine, and you'll pay for it elsewhere, either in an unhealthy workforce (lower taxable income due to sick days or sub-par performance), at the back door, when the people who can't pay for their own treatment take up much more expensive hospital beds - or at the ethics and morals door by simply letting people without money die.
Education is often mentioned. Too expensive. Alright. Cut education and you end up with a less educated workforce. Great short term solution, horrible long term, as that will reduce the number of high paid jobs and thus your taxable income.
Military, surely. Depends on the country. It'd be difficult for Puerto Rico to cut back on their military spending, as it's entirely dependent on the US for that. And cutting back on military spending will result in job losses elsewhere, as you will either move soldiers from the military to the general work populace (aka unemployment), lose jobs at military contractors (as they no longer get as many orders) or both. Plus, if your military is too small, your geopolitical region too unstable, this could result in losing your country and thus your taxable income. Belgium could probably remove its military entirely without military risk - South Korea, not so much.
Roads? Needed for transporting goods. Cut down on road maintenance and you end up with bad conditions not only for goods transport, but also for your workforce to get to and from work. Similar issues with railroads and public transport.
Electrical infrastructure? Critical for the economy.
Internet infrastructure? Critical for the economy, but rarely regulated in the same way.
Water and sanitation? See socialized medicine.
Elder care? Moral and ethical issues with simply letting poor people suffer and die.
One of the reasons politics, everywhere, is so messed up, is that voters have been spoonfed and accepted this notion, that everything can be cooked down to a 20-second sound-bite. It cannot.
Let me give you an example:
This is the Danish budget for 2012: http://www.oes-cs.dk/bevillingslove/ffl12t0.pdf. It's 562 pages. That's for a country with just under 6 million people, a nominal GDP of about 300 billion dollars and a 2012 budget of about 120 billion dollars.
562 pages. Not that bad. Except that there are three additional documents to add to these 562 pages. First one is 1,024 pages. Second one is 929 pages. Third one is a meager 678 pages. That's a total of 3,193 pages.
All to be summed up in a 20-second sound-bite.
So we end up with these ludicrous discussions about minutia. Minutia that very often only covers 1% of 1% of anything. Sure, the numbers may sound big, but in the whole, they're tiny.
All designed to make us think that we and our opinions matter.
If cars were designed the way we run politics, they'd be pretty much guaranteed to explode and kill the occupants the moment they were turned on.
Of course you can beat that argument.
"If it was my family, that was wiped out like that, I wouldn't be buying new hard drives for their computers. In other words, I wouldn't be having this problem."
True ... but you may not ever have enough time to hit all the corner cases.
If it's a single 32-bit word, that can cause the issue, then yes, you can go through every single permutation fairly quickly. There are only 4,294,967,296 of them - nothing that a computer can't handle.
Suppose for a moment that the issue is caused, not by one single faulty piece of data, but two right after each-other. Essentially a 64-bit word causes the issue. Now we're looking at 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. Quite a bit more, but not impossible to test.
Now suppose that the first 64-bit word doesn't cause the fault on its own, but "simply" causes an instability in the software. That instability will be triggered by another specific 64-bit word. Now we're looking at 3.40282367 x 10^38 permutations.
Now, keep in mind that at this point, we're really looking at a fairly simple error triggered by two pieces of data. One sets it up, the other causes the fault.
Now let's make it slightly more complex.
The actual issue is caused by two different error conditions happening at once. If they are similar as above, we're now looking at, essentially, a 256-bit word. That's 1.15792089 x 10^77 permutations.
In comparison, the world's fastest super computer can do 10.51 petaflops, which is 10.51 x 10^15, and it would take that computer 0.409 microseconds to go through all permutations in a 32 bit word. About 30 minutes for a 64 bit word. 10^15 years for a 128 bit word and 10^53 years for a 256 bit word.
Yes, you can test every single permutation, if the problem is small enough. But the problem with most software is that it really isn't small.
Even if we are only talking 32 bit words causing the issue, will it happen every time that single word is issued, or do you need specific conditions? How is that condition created? As soon as the issue becomes even slightly complex, it becomes essentially impossible to test for.
Does that mean that dangerous situations that do not result in an accident are okay?
For instance - suppose someone fired a gun towards you but missed by a few inches. Dangerous situation, no accident. Pretty sure you'd want to avoid those situations at all times, which is why firing ranges keep shooters at one end, targets at the other, and try their best to keep bullets from straying into other areas.
How about someone randomly swinging a knife towards your throat, but missing by an inch. Dangerous situation, no accident. Also something we'd want to avoid, which is why professional kitchens really hate people running around with knives.
Dangerous situations that do not result in accidents are still quite dangerous, as they are likely to result in accidents.
Do not confuse dangerous situations with seemingly dangerous situations. Seemingly dangerous situations are perfectly safe (within reason), which is why we don't worry about them. I can stand about a foot from traffic moving at 80 km/h without worrying, as long as it's at the side of a road.
However, if I stand in the middle of that traffic, it's no longer a seemingly dangerous situation, but an actual dangerous situation. It may not result in accidents, but again - pretty sure the people involved would rather it didn't happen.
Don't use a laser light - those things are illegal and an outright hazard to piloted aircrafts passing overhead.
Better to build your own roof lights. Just make sure that you accidentally include some very powerful IR LEDs aimed straight up.
Or run solar water heaters on the entirety of your roof. Bonus points for running a hot water pipe spelling out a message to your local surveillance overlords.
Look, don't be an idiot and make fun of Asians and their general problems speaking proper English. I'm pretty sure you'd sound like an idiot when trying to speak an Asian language.
Besides - it's just razy lacism.
What part of "unethical" makes you think it's illegal?
Yes, not even Amazon has any sub-100 dollar bluetooth mice. And the certainly have no sub-100 dollar bluetooth keyboards either!
And don't even get me started on Apple and their price gouging 100$+ mice, keyboards and trackpads! Granted, I can't find any 100$+ keyboards, mice or trackpads on Apple's store, but I'm sure they're there! It's not like you'd just pull that 100$+ number out of your ass, right?
The problem with streaming and rentals (at least here in Sweden), is that there is no browsing.
You can't randomly stumble across Firefly and find it to be much less cheesy than it's description: "Five hundred years in the future, a renegade crew aboard a small, spacecraft tries to survive as they travel the unknown parts of the galaxy and evade warring factions as well as authority agents out to get them." or "Like a western, but in space". If you completely remove browsing from the equation, you won't find it. At least I wont, because those two descriptions sound about as cheesy as they come.
You won't be able to leave the streaming on when you're done watching one show, and come back to find something that makes you go "hmm ... let's see what this is and then get hooked on a new show or movie".
You certainly won't be finding any shows or movies that are "old". When's the last time you found Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon while streaming? I've stumbled across both of those on TV on weekend afternoons, and the only reason I watched them, is because I stumbled across them, because I wouldn't be actively seeking out a movie from the 1940s and '50.
The reason TV works, is because I can browse pretty much for free - I just pay for the TV set. Sure, I won't be able to decide what to watch, but it does expose me to stuff I haven't seen before - stuff I wouldn't want to pay a small fortune for, just to find out it sucks.
How do you know he is?
He didn't specify what the issue is. Granted, he did say "hack into", so maybe he was using it and noticed that his user account page was
http://example.com/user.html?ID=123456789&loggedin=true
If he then enters that URL into a clean browser and accesses his own user information, how is that trespassing? It's the exact address he was given to access his own account.
Now, even without testing another ID, I can be pretty sure that it will work. Only "downside" is that the ID might be random and not sequential, but that's barely an improvement.
Essentially something like this would be the equivalent of me walking into a bank, asking to withdraw 200 dollars, telling them my name is "Martin Schou" (which it is), and them simply giving me 200 dollars without any kinds of checks.
It's not in any way, shape or form trespassing, fraud, identity theft or similar. What it is is a huge security issue.
However - since the original poster didn't specify what the issue was and with whom (with good reasons), you can't make a factual statement as to whether or not he's trespassing.
Every time I venture out into anything resembling traffic, I do exactly that. While pedestrians and cyclists are unlikely to kill me by accident, inattentive drivers are indeed quite likely to do just that.
So far I've managed to stave off death by blunt force trauma at least four times, including one where I landed on the hood of the car after jumping up, so I wouldn't get sucked under it. And that was in a pedestrian crossing AND red lights for the cars.
And where will they get those, if not from the manufacturer? Obviously they can't buy carrier independent handsets from the carriers.
Or did you mean that they should stop buying phones from the carriers instead?
Alright. Let's pick something different as the problem item.
I'd rather we operate under the assumption that bad people do not have weapons of various kinds. It's a more pleasant thought for sure, but it also means that when someone tells me "your money or your life", I just ignore him - after all, the assumption is that he has no weapons. And that's likely to either get me hurt or killed.
Yes, if we don't make assumptions that include rather unfortunate views, the world seems a lot nicer, but then again - a bear and her cubs also do look awfully cute together, and I assume mama bear doesn't mind if I go play with her cub.
True. But keep in mind that gravity is so far, also just a theory.
A theory isn't just "well, I think God did it". That does not constitute a theory. That's just a guess, and I rather doubt it would even qualify as a hypothesis.
And this is the problem. People are so used to the idea of "theory" just being random guess work, that they don't realize what it means when they say "the theory of evolution".
They might compare it to "the laws of gravity", but not only are those also "just" theories, they "fall apart" a lot easier than people imagine, but that's okay - that's why we have "intelligent falling".
Because we also focus on the tiny minority of idiots who believe in intelligent design bestowed from upon high by the Noodly Appendage.
Sorry ... I meant God and his intelligently designed banana.
But I may be mistaken in thinking, that we should laugh at, ridicule and point fingers at all religious nutjobs, and not just the ones of my own skin colour and my country's largest denomination.
I don't care about the colour of their skin OR their religious freedoms - they're idiots.
PS.
We also focused on Ted Stevens and his series of tubes and made fun of him for it. Should we instead have focused on the 534 other members of congress, who weren't this stupid? No - we shouldn't.
Wasn't that John McCain?
Yes ... that's why there was such an outcry that the CIA, NSA, FBI and DHS didn't warn Norway about Anders Breivik and his doings.
Same with the car bomb in Stockholm in late 2010.
And don't get me started on how Spain crucified every single American ever so slightly connected with the CIA, NSA, FBI and DHS over their failure to stop the Madrid train bombings in 2004.
And the UK?!? They declared war on the US over the 2005 London bombings! Seriously - they had a Trident submarine launch nuclear warheads to level New York City.
Wait ... none of that actually happened. No one blamed the US intelligence community for failing to prevent or even warn about these attacks.
Not necessarily a problem.
A friend of mine used to use the password "Itjtmjtlstx2". A short form of:
He couldn't grasp the concept that not only is it easier to remember and type out "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight", but it's also a hell of a lot harder to brute force.
Well, what are "significant amounts"? Half a liter? A liter? Two? Ten? And in what time span?
I think most of us can agree, that 100 liters of water is a significant amount, but if you were able to even consume that much regular water in a day, you'd kill yourself.
In fact, there have been cases where drinking a gallon in a few hours have been fatal (and not because they drowned).
So ... is 3 a magical number? Prime? Fermat prime? Mersenne prime? Lucase prime? Stern prime? Unique prime? Odd? A root? Natural? Positive? Heegner number?
Interestingly enough, 3 is all of these things, yet mathematics works perfectly well.
And when I say "works" I don't mean it has a job, and when I say "well" I don't mean a hole in the ground where you retrieve water.
And by "mean" I do not refer to the statistical mean, nor how something is treated.
Honestly, I realize that this is a somewhat silly question, but the idea popped into my head, and it won't really go away.
What if you were to build shaped charge triggered by a nuclear explosion?
Ignoring the practicalities of it, and ignoring that I don't know what I'm talking about, wouldn't you be able to end up with a much higher velocity for the molten metal, not to mention a hell of a lot more of it for an even more effective penetration?
I don't understand why you use the US as an example of markets that have good contracts for cell phones. From where I'm at (Denmark and Sweden), those guys gets raped and just beg for more while praying that next time lube will be introduced.
Here I get 10 GB/month with my 32 EUR/month subscription, and that includes paying for the phone itself.
That being said, I don't want to be without mobile data on my iPhone. If I'm even slightly lost, it has maps and that requires data. I can check email. I can use Skype. I can use the fucking internet, without having to go hunting for a WiFi connection when I'm in the middle of nowhere (Sweden has exceptionally good coverage).
I can even listen to almost live radio from anywhere in the world, as long as they're streaming through Stitcher.
Hell, I can use the phone as a modem for my portable computer, when I'm in a hotel that has decided that they'll charge me 5 EUR/hour for access to a limited subset of websites and email.
And honestly, paying 32 EUR/month for that is fine with me.
Suppose you have a 150+ IQ and you're very dyslexic. You might train yourself to recognize the words, if they're spelled exactly correct, but "o u new wut i ment" will not make any sense at all.
And I do have to wonder about deaf people. How do you know that "oh" and "o" are homophones, if you can't hear them being spoken? Same of "you" and "u", "knew" and "new", "what" and "wut" and of course "meant" and "ment".
Personally I get pissed off when people write like that, because their laziness is creating extra work for me. And no, dyslectic people do not write like that. I've never had the same kind of guttural reaction of hatred when reading a text from someone I don't know who's dyslectic - somehow (and I don't know how) my brain can tell the difference.
Now, if it was a small decrease in reading speed and comprehension, I might not be as upset as I become, but when I run into writing like that, it gives me the same aftershock to my brain, as hitting a speedbump at 80 km/h - it's very very uncomfortable, and it takes a bit for my brain to gather itself again.
Sure, that keeps the database intact, but that'd make for a lot of interesting discussions, when the original post no longer exists.
Now imagine that fictitious discussion without the parent post:
Sure, your referential integrity is maintained, but the discussion integrity isn't.
Well, there are reasons why it can't reasonably destroy all data - it would crash a lot of systems.
For instance - suppose you make a post about something. This post sparks a massive amount of responses. Now you delete your post. What is supposed to happen?
Should the entire discussion disappear? That seems unreasonable, as a lot of other people's time and effort has gone into debating this.
What if we leave the discussion, but erase everything you wrote? Well ... what if they quote you - should that also be erased? Again - the time and effort others put into the debate has to weigh in.
They could remove your account name and link and simply change it to "Anonymous", but then what happens when someone references you by name? Should that also be changed to Anonymous? What if your name is Bob, and the reference is simply "That's not what Bob said", and there are multiple Bobs in the discussion?
What about all the posts that someone else references later, and they spark debates? Twice removed? Thrice, etc.?
While it is relatively easy to remove the account, the posts that are connected to it is a completely different beast.
If you write something, and noone links or replies to it, removing it is easy.
I do agree it should be possible to delete my Google+ account - but I cannot reasonably expect everything to go away. I expect my personal details to disappear, the ability to easily check what I have posted earlier etc., but expecting that thousands and thousands of other people's work and effort should just disappear because I don't want my account to be active anymore is entirely too selfish for me to accept.