I don't know what genes from E. Coli would be beneficial to crops... Bascillus Thurigiensis? Certainly. It contains proteins that are poisonous to soft bodied insects, but harmless to humans and other mammals.
E. Coli? It makes compounds toxic to PEOPLE. I won discount that there night be useful gene sequences in e. Coli, but they would have to be for celular metabolism, or environmental resistances or something.
Now, before you jump in and state something along the lines of "I don't have to know it for it to be true", remember that the point in contention I raised about infanticide in the first place was that it was *NOT* universally recognized as "bad, M'kay."
(Instead of attacking the reference, you jumped straight to shooting the messenger, and used an ad-hominem. You COULD have asked for specific tribes, for instance, but did not.)
When taken in the fuller context, that compared moral absolutism with fixed solar insolescense, my point becomes fully clarified by your statements.
There is no hypocrisy in what I said. On the other hand, you could not JUDGE me as a hypocrite and remain a consistent moral relativist.
Really now?
Then reconcile these two statements:
Absolutely false. Defending absolute morality does not mean I will punish people who disagree with me. It does not even mean I claim to know the answer. For example, before the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was published, its answer already existed, even if I (or anyone else) did not know it. And even now that I know the answer, I don't punish people for being wrong.
Also, the ends do not justify the means. Infanticide is despicable, and it is abhorrent that you defend it. You should read about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are certain things you MUST NEVER do, even if you think they are necessary. Freaking infanticide is on the top of that list; it is one of the most abhorrent things a person can possibly do.
Those two statements are in direct locigal contention.
Throw in this gem, and the hypocricy is glaring.
What happens is that people temporarily forget about moral relativism when THEY think something is wrong. But as soon as the government wants to forbid something they like, they scream "don't impose your morals on me". I have *never* seen moral relativism be applied with a minimum of consistency. It is ONLY invoked to support something the person agrees with.
I propose that you are guilty of your own condemned vice, as evidenced by your taking a mutually conflicting viewpoint on the subject of morality, taking one view when it suits, and reverting to a 180deg polar opposite when that suits.
As far as I can tell, you either have no ide what you are talking about (but feel strongly about it), or you are a shameless hypocrite.
I picked that particular subject matter because of its implications. Do I agree with infanticide? Not particularly. Do I accept that their cultures do it, and that they do it for a reason? Absolutely.
I can understand their situation and their actions, even if I do not agree with them. Being bound by a faulted dogma of absolute morality, you fell right in, and proved my point, after openly denying it the post prior to that.
Absolute Morality means that there is an absolute right, and an everything else is wrong.
"Killing babies is wrong." is such a statement.
Now, look at it from the NON-religious' side: "If you dont agree with ME that killing babies is wrong, THEN YOU ARE EVIL!"
Nevermind that there in fact, *ARE* cultures that practice infanticide, since they lack the ability to perform abortions. The infanticide performs a valuable civic service. It keeps other people from dieing, and keeps the society healthy. (There are horror stories from native south american indian tribes that practice this form of population control. They do it because they cant afford to have the child around; its existence endangers the rest of the tribe.)
See how that works? Something as "Clearly wrong" as "killing babies" can suddenly not be so clear cut.
Your argument basically boils down to "Without a perfect moral cornerstone, the very idea of morality becomes laughable." This does not hold, as people still practice moral judgement in spite of the lack of a perfect moral cornerstone, as evidenced by taking and comparing the "moral imperatives" of many world peoples.
So yes, Ultimately your argument must state "You must agree or else", because there is no other way it can exist. (amusingly, why do you think philosophies and religions that proclaim absolute moral validity seek to completely destroy opposing philosophies, religions and cultures that hold conflicting moral characters, if NOT to enforce agreement?)
As far as I know, no. But the warning label on said product exists for just the reason I stated. Many companies place absurd warning labels on products, like "Do not weld to rim" on a can of fix-a-flat, or "May contain traces of nuts" on a can of mixed nuts.
without the warning label on the sunshade, if a moron american decided he could drive with it in place, and caused an accident, the sunshade company COULD be held liable. That is why they put the warning label on.
Why is it this way? Because a legal requirement intended to make sure that you dont die from eating a fruitcake that contains peanuts due to your peanut allergy, is abused so that morons who refuse to be educated can sue for damages when they try to use a dremel tool as a dentist drill.
There has been a very strong and pernicious trend in the US in the last 25 years or so.
That trend, is to dig in, become a recalcitrant ass, and tell everyone else that they are wrong, supertroll-style.
This is purely speculation, and observation, and will surely reek of bullshit and tinfoil hattery; all the same, here it goes.
The US has developed a culture that, for the past decade at least, fosters a climate of refusing personal liability and culpability. NOBODY wants to accept the natural or legal consequences of their actions. Drive with the dash protecting sun-screen still on the dash? NOT YOUR FAULT! The maker of the sun-screen forgot to put a warning label on, telling you not to be an idiot! Nevermind that it would be completely impossible to see through an OPAQUE device, INTENDED to block light! No, you're an AMERICAN, you are special, and if that company didnt give you a written warning, YOU DESERVE MILLIONS!
This mentality has fostered several unfortunate trends as a consequence.
Firstly, culpability is now tied to foreknowledge. The stupider you can make yourself appear to be (or actually be), the more protected you are from guilt! Naturally, this results in Americans who want to use things they know practically nothing about, absolutely dont know what makes those things work, and makes them staunchly refuse to learn such things, because if they did, they would become legally and culturally liable if they fuck up.
Secondly, it creates a CYA culture. Going to knowingly fuck somebody over? PLAUSIBLE DENI-ABILITY bitches!
Here's the Tinfoil hat prediction now:
Should the US continue down its track, it will not quite resemble Nazi germany. Germany had a central authority. The US wont have one. It will continue to have theoretical checks and balances, for the sole purpose of creating catch 22s for trapping and demasculating attempts to pin culpability for government wrongdoing. Much like seen here, with this government reply to Assange. "Oh, I'm just a senator, I cant fix that!" or "I'm just the president! The congress and senate make the laws! I just enforce them!"
The result would be a lumbering steamroller of runaway government, with no controls. Because without controls, how can you be responsible for what it does?
The same "I dont know about those things, so you cant blame me for them" defense is used everywhere over here, and is why people dont know about the bullshit this country does. People who DO take an interest are considered political nutjobs, or just plain strange. "Why would you even care about that?" etc.
The cultural situation is clearly fucked. But of course, nobody will look at it.
And, as previously demonstrated in this thread, the people who do point it out are told to shut the fuck up, and go away. (because spreading awareness is the same as spreading liability, which our culture pathologically avoids and projects onto others.)
Go america. Show the world how to REALLY become a despotic nightmare place to live. Remember, it's not your fault if you refuse to learn things! Its the teachers for failing to teach you!
Moral relativism is like saying the sun has variable insolesence. Absolute morality is like claiming the sun is the sun everywhere on earth. Try explaining the midnight sun's weak rays with that!
"Morality" has 2 facets: the first, is the societal facet. This is the part where the creationists consider evolution to be dirty lies, and which compells them to interject their religious beliefs onto others via the political system. The microsociety they have created for themselves views the abandonment of creationist dogma as abhorrent and evil. They all share that view within their sub-society, and cling to a dogma of moral absolutism to justify their trespasses. (Sorry creationists, but you are too easy a target.) The other facet of morality, is the personal. What each individual considers to be personally good or bad. Things like my mom's refusal to support the march of dimes, because she heard they funded experiments on babies many years ago.
Moral absolutism, if it were real, would mean that people everywhere would hold a core set of universal beleifs, and that this would be undeniably demonstrable.
The observed reality, as far as I can tell, is that morality looks more like a statistical bell curve, with regional biases and trends. This clearly shows that there is no absolute moral belief being conserved; variance relative to culture, racial heritage, and geographical location is clearly extant.
I would conjecture that the more-universal argument against eugenic fetus production, would be that it is improper, and against the best interests of a society to subject the non-partakers inthat society to the inevitable world that would be created by those who do partake. (EG, if we create supermen, what becomes of the people who are not such?)
This completely discounts several things that science has told us, though: humans are *still* subject to sexual and natural selection pressures, and that nator favors local maxima over optimal performance, due to energy constraints and noisy inputs. What does that have to do with creating a dystopia? Simple: superhumans won't reproduce exclusively via artificial means, as sexual hormones are fundementally required for human health. This means that a truly superhumanized human, would seek mates just like a normal human would, and like humans do, natural choice in mates would rule the day. You cannot assume that the supermen would stay supermen, and that the unaugmented would remain unaugmented. For instance: if you live in north america, how much native american heritage do each of you have? Substitute native american indian heritage for "artificially produced superman heritage", and you can clearly see how deep that blurring between lines would be, and how untenable a racial intolerance would be. All the eugenics program would do is upregulate the availability of selected "desirable" genes in the general public. That could be cause for some alarm, if the "desired" traits are placidity and compliance without thought or question, but then it isn't the supermen that are trying to interject a forced opinion there; it is our faulted and foolish leadership that would be doing that.
Personally, I'd probably pull a big media stunt and end-run the legal clusterfuck that reactionaries to biotechnology on humans that people have made, and produce a wild-type, non-human baby. Like a cloned neanderthal. (Cue the 'oh god, that's evil! You sick bastard!' Chorus.) Neanderthals weren "wrong", they just went extinct. They were clearly intelligent, they had a human-like thyoid bone, and had human FOXP2. In every sense of the word, they were basically just ugly humans with lots of muscles, and appear to have reached sexual maturity by age 12. They are also conveniently listed as nonhuman by legal standards, and so for those people wanting a designer baby, or to work on human cloning, they make an enticing alternative since the genome was sequenced 4 years ago.
quite right, there was more than just a little bit of sarcasm in that post.
We are in the honeymoon stage still, with the Orthodox Church, and Putin's government. Putin still needs allies. When he no longer does, he will butcher the orthodox church.
Aluminum has radically different properties from pretty much all plastics, So, yes.
You can retain a radical amount of strength in milled aluminum with a small radius, which you could never hope to have at the same geometry with ABS plastic.
Again, the *kind* of plastic is fundementally important here. I don't know what kind of plastic was used to make the samsung tablets and phones. It could very well require large radii for structural reasons. I cannot discount that possibility, so I don't.
And *dont* say "plastic". There are nore kinds of plastic than there are world religions, and every bit as diverse in their properties. That was covered in the "wall of words" you just handwaved.
The insurance company incentivises people to provide very detailed information about themselves, that they would normally never provide, and may even try to prevent being obtained.
In the process, they build a precedent that will penalize people that are unwilling to provide this data willingly.
EG, it starts out as "If I voluntarily join this program, I could say 20% on my insurance." It then later becomes the "New standard rate metric, based on your personal driving patterns," and eventually becomes "Penalized rate for not providing data on your traffic patterns."
While it looks good now, it wont look so good to people who value their privacy in the future. They will be lumped in with people who are clearly bad drivers but dont want to admit it, and want to hide that fact from the insurance companies.
Dynamite (Authentic) is nitroglycerine, suspended in an inert matrix. Originally sawdust, but other inert matrices have also been used historically, such as diatomaceous earth.
The sawdust form is especially vulnerable to becoming old and "sweaty". Essentially, the suspended nitroglycerine wicks its way out of the matrix, and toward the surface, where it forms a "coating." This is bad for a large number of reasons:
1) Nitroglycerine is easily and readily absorbed through the skin, and is a well known cardiac-suppressant.
2) Nitroglycerine, without the stabilizing matrix, is a notoriously sensitive contact explosive.
3) The sweated nitroglycerine can wick up into the fuse, making it burn VERY quickly; FAR too quickly to throw away once lit, making old sticks unsafe for any purpose. It will explode almost instantly.
For these reasons and several others, the use of genuine dynamite has fallen out of favor in nearly all developed and developing countries in favor of more stable and less toxic/sensitive high explosives, like PentaErythritol TetraNitrate (PETN), and TriNitroToluene (TNT).
Genuine dynamite is fairly rare, and it is much more likely that this chinese fisherman was using home-made devices, like nitrogen fertilizer bombs made from ammonium nitrate and kerosine, but it could be possible he has/had access to the genuine article.
Dynamite is very effective at causing a major shockfront in the water, that ruptures the fish's swim bladders, which are used to control the fish's altituded in the water. Once ruptured, the fish can no longer swim, and will float listlessly on the top. It is usually also directly fatal to the fish.
It is a very indescriminate way to fish, but also *very* effective. It can completely denude a body of water of all fish.
if this man really was using dynamite to fish, it sounds like he got hold of one with a very fast burning fuse, which happens when the sticks get old. He is lucky to be alive at all.
I propose that we send select delegates from both the house and senate on this noteworthy mission, so that they can see for themselves how silly it was to scrub the "return stage" construction budget.
We of course, need to supply them with 2 way radio contact so thay can debate the matter via telepresence with their peers in washington.
While true for mainline ubuntu, xubuntu uses xfce by default (why I liked it), but still uses the ubuntu repositories, and suffers from cannonocial's poor decision making in the politics of the distro. Debian takes a more staid approach.
Debian defaults with legacy Gnome, but I switched to XFCE almost imediately, so its a nonissue.
There aren't any advantages over xubuntu other than not dealing with cannonocial, and I just wanted to give it a try. Had an HDD failure awhile back, (primary./ volume) so I had to reinstall anyway. Just wanted to explore the landscape more.
It isn't like I switched for $UberFeature! Or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what genes from E. Coli would be beneficial to crops... Bascillus Thurigiensis? Certainly. It contains proteins that are poisonous to soft bodied insects, but harmless to humans and other mammals.
E. Coli? It makes compounds toxic to PEOPLE. I won discount that there night be useful gene sequences in e. Coli, but they would have to be for celular metabolism, or environmental resistances or something.
Now, before you jump in and state something along the lines of "I don't have to know it for it to be true", remember that the point in contention I raised about infanticide in the first place was that it was *NOT* universally recognized as "bad, M'kay."
(Instead of attacking the reference, you jumped straight to shooting the messenger, and used an ad-hominem. You COULD have asked for specific tribes, for instance, but did not.)
When taken in the fuller context, that compared moral absolutism with fixed solar insolescense, my point becomes fully clarified by your statements.
Really now?
Then reconcile these two statements:
Those two statements are in direct locigal contention.
Throw in this gem, and the hypocricy is glaring.
I propose that you are guilty of your own condemned vice, as evidenced by your taking a mutually conflicting viewpoint on the subject of morality, taking one view when it suits, and reverting to a 180deg polar opposite when that suits.
As far as I can tell, you either have no ide what you are talking about (but feel strongly about it), or you are a shameless hypocrite.
No, *YOU* assert such.
I picked that particular subject matter because of its implications. Do I agree with infanticide? Not particularly. Do I accept that their cultures do it, and that they do it for a reason? Absolutely.
I can understand their situation and their actions, even if I do not agree with them. Being bound by a faulted dogma of absolute morality, you fell right in, and proved my point, after openly denying it the post prior to that.
Who's the hypocrite again?
Is that NOT what it means?
Ok, lets look at it from the religious' side.
Absolute Morality means that there is an absolute right, and an everything else is wrong.
"Killing babies is wrong." is such a statement.
Now, look at it from the NON-religious' side: "If you dont agree with ME that killing babies is wrong, THEN YOU ARE EVIL!"
Nevermind that there in fact, *ARE* cultures that practice infanticide, since they lack the ability to perform abortions. The infanticide performs a valuable civic service. It keeps other people from dieing, and keeps the society healthy. (There are horror stories from native south american indian tribes that practice this form of population control. They do it because they cant afford to have the child around; its existence endangers the rest of the tribe.)
See how that works? Something as "Clearly wrong" as "killing babies" can suddenly not be so clear cut.
Your argument basically boils down to "Without a perfect moral cornerstone, the very idea of morality becomes laughable." This does not hold, as people still practice moral judgement in spite of the lack of a perfect moral cornerstone, as evidenced by taking and comparing the "moral imperatives" of many world peoples.
So yes, Ultimately your argument must state "You must agree or else", because there is no other way it can exist. (amusingly, why do you think philosophies and religions that proclaim absolute moral validity seek to completely destroy opposing philosophies, religions and cultures that hold conflicting moral characters, if NOT to enforce agreement?)
As far as I know, no. But the warning label on said product exists for just the reason I stated. Many companies place absurd warning labels on products, like "Do not weld to rim" on a can of fix-a-flat, or "May contain traces of nuts" on a can of mixed nuts.
They do this pre-emptively to avoid such cases. This is because we have laws requiring companies to disclose all *foreseeable* dangers. (warning, PDF)
without the warning label on the sunshade, if a moron american decided he could drive with it in place, and caused an accident, the sunshade company COULD be held liable. That is why they put the warning label on.
Why is it this way? Because a legal requirement intended to make sure that you dont die from eating a fruitcake that contains peanuts due to your peanut allergy, is abused so that morons who refuse to be educated can sue for damages when they try to use a dremel tool as a dentist drill.
Or get burned by a poptart. Pick your poison.
There has been a very strong and pernicious trend in the US in the last 25 years or so.
That trend, is to dig in, become a recalcitrant ass, and tell everyone else that they are wrong, supertroll-style.
This is purely speculation, and observation, and will surely reek of bullshit and tinfoil hattery; all the same, here it goes.
The US has developed a culture that, for the past decade at least, fosters a climate of refusing personal liability and culpability. NOBODY wants to accept the natural or legal consequences of their actions. Drive with the dash protecting sun-screen still on the dash? NOT YOUR FAULT! The maker of the sun-screen forgot to put a warning label on, telling you not to be an idiot! Nevermind that it would be completely impossible to see through an OPAQUE device, INTENDED to block light! No, you're an AMERICAN, you are special, and if that company didnt give you a written warning, YOU DESERVE MILLIONS!
This mentality has fostered several unfortunate trends as a consequence.
Firstly, culpability is now tied to foreknowledge. The stupider you can make yourself appear to be (or actually be), the more protected you are from guilt! Naturally, this results in Americans who want to use things they know practically nothing about, absolutely dont know what makes those things work, and makes them staunchly refuse to learn such things, because if they did, they would become legally and culturally liable if they fuck up.
Secondly, it creates a CYA culture. Going to knowingly fuck somebody over? PLAUSIBLE DENI-ABILITY bitches!
Here's the Tinfoil hat prediction now:
Should the US continue down its track, it will not quite resemble Nazi germany. Germany had a central authority. The US wont have one. It will continue to have theoretical checks and balances, for the sole purpose of creating catch 22s for trapping and demasculating attempts to pin culpability for government wrongdoing. Much like seen here, with this government reply to Assange. "Oh, I'm just a senator, I cant fix that!" or "I'm just the president! The congress and senate make the laws! I just enforce them!"
The result would be a lumbering steamroller of runaway government, with no controls. Because without controls, how can you be responsible for what it does?
The same "I dont know about those things, so you cant blame me for them" defense is used everywhere over here, and is why people dont know about the bullshit this country does. People who DO take an interest are considered political nutjobs, or just plain strange. "Why would you even care about that?" etc.
The cultural situation is clearly fucked. But of course, nobody will look at it.
And, as previously demonstrated in this thread, the people who do point it out are told to shut the fuck up, and go away. (because spreading awareness is the same as spreading liability, which our culture pathologically avoids and projects onto others.)
Go america. Show the world how to REALLY become a despotic nightmare place to live. Remember, it's not your fault if you refuse to learn things! Its the teachers for failing to teach you!
Non-binding? I do not follow the logic.
Moral relativism is like saying the sun has variable insolesence. Absolute morality is like claiming the sun is the sun everywhere on earth. Try explaining the midnight sun's weak rays with that!
"Morality" has 2 facets: the first, is the societal facet. This is the part where the creationists consider evolution to be dirty lies, and which compells them to interject their religious beliefs onto others via the political system. The microsociety they have created for themselves views the abandonment of creationist dogma as abhorrent and evil. They all share that view within their sub-society, and cling to a dogma of moral absolutism to justify their trespasses. (Sorry creationists, but you are too easy a target.) The other facet of morality, is the personal. What each individual considers to be personally good or bad. Things like my mom's refusal to support the march of dimes, because she heard they funded experiments on babies many years ago.
Moral absolutism, if it were real, would mean that people everywhere would hold a core set of universal beleifs, and that this would be undeniably demonstrable.
The observed reality, as far as I can tell, is that morality looks more like a statistical bell curve, with regional biases and trends. This clearly shows that there is no absolute moral belief being conserved; variance relative to culture, racial heritage, and geographical location is clearly extant.
I would conjecture that the more-universal argument against eugenic fetus production, would be that it is improper, and against the best interests of a society to subject the non-partakers inthat society to the inevitable world that would be created by those who do partake. (EG, if we create supermen, what becomes of the people who are not such?)
This completely discounts several things that science has told us, though: humans are *still* subject to sexual and natural selection pressures, and that nator favors local maxima over optimal performance, due to energy constraints and noisy inputs. What does that have to do with creating a dystopia? Simple: superhumans won't reproduce exclusively via artificial means, as sexual hormones are fundementally required for human health. This means that a truly superhumanized human, would seek mates just like a normal human would, and like humans do, natural choice in mates would rule the day. You cannot assume that the supermen would stay supermen, and that the unaugmented would remain unaugmented. For instance: if you live in north america, how much native american heritage do each of you have? Substitute native american indian heritage for "artificially produced superman heritage", and you can clearly see how deep that blurring between lines would be, and how untenable a racial intolerance would be. All the eugenics program would do is upregulate the availability of selected "desirable" genes in the general public. That could be cause for some alarm, if the "desired" traits are placidity and compliance without thought or question, but then it isn't the supermen that are trying to interject a forced opinion there; it is our faulted and foolish leadership that would be doing that.
Personally, I'd probably pull a big media stunt and end-run the legal clusterfuck that reactionaries to biotechnology on humans that people have made, and produce a wild-type, non-human baby. Like a cloned neanderthal. (Cue the 'oh god, that's evil! You sick bastard!' Chorus.) Neanderthals weren "wrong", they just went extinct. They were clearly intelligent, they had a human-like thyoid bone, and had human FOXP2. In every sense of the word, they were basically just ugly humans with lots of muscles, and appear to have reached sexual maturity by age 12. They are also conveniently listed as nonhuman by legal standards, and so for those people wanting a designer baby, or to work on human cloning, they make an enticing alternative since the genome was sequenced 4 years ago.
People produce children and throw them into th
And how is that different from what I said earlier?
The actual explosive in dynamite is nitroglycerin. The inert matrix does not contribute to the explosive yield any any meaningful way.
quite right, there was more than just a little bit of sarcasm in that post.
We are in the honeymoon stage still, with the Orthodox Church, and Putin's government. Putin still needs allies. When he no longer does, he will butcher the orthodox church.
Whoever shopped the grizzlebearded old far needs to be shot. They forgot to shop the damn reflection in the table.
Incompetence abounds.
[/sarcasm]
Looks more like the cozy relations the national socialist party of germany had with the catholic church.
Sorry for the godwin, but the parallel is eerie.
Why would anyone care about that? It isn't like being a jew grants you magic powers for evil or something.
Kasparov is famous for being a world chess chamion and a leader opposing putin. Being a jew is only important if you are a fucking stupid bigot.
Just sayin.
When his re-election comes up (hahahah...ha.. sorry.), Vladimir should use the slogan:
"The president of ill; RE:Putin!"
That's strange, I just read the wikipedia article on dynamite, and it clearly does say it is nitroglycerin... and no, I did not vandalize the page.
What page were you reading?
Aluminum has radically different properties from pretty much all plastics, So, yes.
You can retain a radical amount of strength in milled aluminum with a small radius, which you could never hope to have at the same geometry with ABS plastic.
Again, the *kind* of plastic is fundementally important here. I don't know what kind of plastic was used to make the samsung tablets and phones. It could very well require large radii for structural reasons. I cannot discount that possibility, so I don't.
Failure to read what was written; likewise.
What *MATERIAL* is the casing made from?
And *dont* say "plastic". There are nore kinds of plastic than there are world religions, and every bit as diverse in their properties. That was covered in the "wall of words" you just handwaved.
You are now being a troll.
What about japanese prayer scrolls, and spell papers?
Those are physical items, and actually quite intricate in their designs. Much more interesting aesthetically than a tobasco bottle filled with water.
True story.
You can stun fish (still illegal without special permits) using some jumper cables and a running vehicle's alternator.
You can also chemically stun them with juglones and other phytotoxic substances as well.
Dynamite is simply highly portable, and relatively easy to use: light, and toss.
I'd say it is more a slippery slope:
The insurance company incentivises people to provide very detailed information about themselves, that they would normally never provide, and may even try to prevent being obtained.
In the process, they build a precedent that will penalize people that are unwilling to provide this data willingly.
EG, it starts out as "If I voluntarily join this program, I could say 20% on my insurance." It then later becomes the "New standard rate metric, based on your personal driving patterns," and eventually becomes "Penalized rate for not providing data on your traffic patterns."
While it looks good now, it wont look so good to people who value their privacy in the future. They will be lumped in with people who are clearly bad drivers but dont want to admit it, and want to hide that fact from the insurance companies.
Quite.
Dynamite (Authentic) is nitroglycerine, suspended in an inert matrix. Originally sawdust, but other inert matrices have also been used historically, such as diatomaceous earth.
The sawdust form is especially vulnerable to becoming old and "sweaty". Essentially, the suspended nitroglycerine wicks its way out of the matrix, and toward the surface, where it forms a "coating." This is bad for a large number of reasons:
1) Nitroglycerine is easily and readily absorbed through the skin, and is a well known cardiac-suppressant.
2) Nitroglycerine, without the stabilizing matrix, is a notoriously sensitive contact explosive.
3) The sweated nitroglycerine can wick up into the fuse, making it burn VERY quickly; FAR too quickly to throw away once lit, making old sticks unsafe for any purpose. It will explode almost instantly.
For these reasons and several others, the use of genuine dynamite has fallen out of favor in nearly all developed and developing countries in favor of more stable and less toxic/sensitive high explosives, like PentaErythritol TetraNitrate (PETN), and TriNitroToluene (TNT).
Genuine dynamite is fairly rare, and it is much more likely that this chinese fisherman was using home-made devices, like nitrogen fertilizer bombs made from ammonium nitrate and kerosine, but it could be possible he has/had access to the genuine article.
Dynamite is very effective at causing a major shockfront in the water, that ruptures the fish's swim bladders, which are used to control the fish's altituded in the water. Once ruptured, the fish can no longer swim, and will float listlessly on the top. It is usually also directly fatal to the fish.
It is a very indescriminate way to fish, but also *very* effective. It can completely denude a body of water of all fish.
if this man really was using dynamite to fish, it sounds like he got hold of one with a very fast burning fuse, which happens when the sticks get old. He is lucky to be alive at all.
I propose that we send select delegates from both the house and senate on this noteworthy mission, so that they can see for themselves how silly it was to scrub the "return stage" construction budget.
We of course, need to supply them with 2 way radio contact so thay can debate the matter via telepresence with their peers in washington.
While true for mainline ubuntu, xubuntu uses xfce by default (why I liked it), but still uses the ubuntu repositories, and suffers from cannonocial's poor decision making in the politics of the distro. Debian takes a more staid approach.
Debian defaults with legacy Gnome, but I switched to XFCE almost imediately, so its a nonissue.
There aren't any advantages over xubuntu other than not dealing with cannonocial, and I just wanted to give it a try. Had an HDD failure awhile back, (primary ./ volume) so I had to reinstall anyway. Just wanted to explore the landscape more.
It isn't like I switched for $UberFeature! Or something.
^^RMS! RMS! I don't see how I managed to put RMH.... I blame lack of coffee.