You are just as dead if you get shot with a gun, stabbed with a knife, or bashed over the head with a rock. Homicide is homicide, regardless of what weapon was used.
If you take a closer look, you'll find that the *vast* majority of US homicides take place in a handful of very small geographical pockets - a few square miles in each of ~20 cities. Exclude those few hot spots, and the overall homicide rate is indistinguishable any other industrialized nation.
What brilliant java programmers out of work?
No, really -- my employer is trying to find and hire a bunch of those guys[...]
Tell me about it. While we're not looking for Java programmers, my employer has several vacancies that we're having problems filling. Finding warm bodies is no problem - if we wanted warm bodies, that is. Finding engineers with the requisite talent, intelligence, and skills is enormously harder. If you've *really* got the skills, the jobs are still out there, just not in the same quantity as they were 2 years ago.
One problem, though. Many non-geeks might find raceways ugly
Ugh. Many geeks find them ugly, too. Tacking something on as an afterthought is always bad engineering (IMNSHO). Maintainability & expandability is just as important in civil engineering as it is in software engineering.
Not for SQL. Anything less than 8 tabs sucks for formatting SQL statements (10 is actually better because then ORDER BY lines up nicely, but 8 is the de-facto standard).
Oh yeah, I can see why it make so much more sense to use 24 spaces to indent a line than 3 tabs. I mean, harddrives are cheap, caring about filesize is like, so 1980's.:-)
Perl is still a little more adapted for small to medium sized throw-away scripts
Personally, I prefer using awk for little one-off projects and throwaway scripts. (Of course, I'm probably just showing my age). IMHO, Perl is to awk as C++ is to C -- a useful but bloated extension to a small and elegant language.
those of us who program in Python generally consider this to be one of the language's greatest features
I'm sure that rabid Ford Pinto fans consider the possibility of bursting into flames when rear-ended to be a great feature too. If it works for you, that's great. To me, forced indenting brings back painful memories of COBOL and FORTRAN. Then again, I'm one of those people who think Perl code looks like line noise.
There is not any clear line between a registry and seizure
Cite one modern example where a government has implemented a gun registration scheme and not gone back later using (or attempting to use) those registrations to confiscate those weapons from their law-abiding owners. Registry was successfuly used as a precursor to confiscation in England and Australia within the last decade or so.
firearms would be useless as a tool of resistance, with or without a registry. Ask David Koresh.
I'd say that Koresh and the Branch Davidians (BDs) resisted the BATF and FBI quite effectively - the BDs held the government at bay for several weeks. The government was successfully able to shape public opinion that the BDs were dangerous nutjobs (which they were, IMHO) and thus avoided mass protests and/or armed intervention by a pissed-off citizenry. If the BDs hadn't been able to offer an effective resistance, most of us would have never known what happened.
The reason Asscroft and the TIA crown aren't worked up about gun registration is that it's largely irrelevant: all you have to do is buy one box of ammo one time using a credit card and you've given them a solid data point fingering you as a probable gun owner, along with a pretty good idea of what weapon(s) you own. Leaving the guns themselves alone makes them look like they're respecting the Constitution, and wins them points among the pro-RTKBA crowd. It's a way of obeying the letter of the law while ignoring it's intent.
Even more insidiously they can look at your purchase history for things like paper targets, clay pidgeons, gun cleaning supplies, range fees, hunting licenses, and so forth. Every gun-related purchase you make that can be tied back to you gives the government another data point telling them what kind of guns you own, how many you have, and how often you use them. Just one more reason to pay cash for everything.
It would seem to me that if you use multiple directional antennae and adequate signal processing, you can filter out the reflections and other sources of interference. That was the point I got from the original article.
Sorry, you've succumbed to one of the classical logical fallacies: appeal to authority (with a side order of appeal.
Quoting the Bible does not demonstrate anything in reality other than how you interpret the meaning of a particular ~400-year-old English translation of selected scrolls recording a long-dead rabbi's memory of some ancient oral legends he had been taught (since we're talking old testament here). You assert the KJV Bible is the unadulterated and literal Word of God? I say prove it, without resorting to any other logical fallacies.
There are N religions that each make the mutual exclusive claim that they and they alone hold the keys to eternal salvation. At most, only one of them can be correct. The risk of chosing the the wrong holy book (or the wrong intrepretation of a particuar book) is so extremely high (eternal damnnation) that nothing less than the most stringent proof is acceptable.
christians who struggle with pr0n (such as myself).
Welcome to the cognitive dissonance that happens when an arbitrary and artificial belief system collides with the reality of human nature. If your God is supposed to have made us in his own image, why do you think that his rules run completly opposite to our basic nature? If God thinks sex is so bad, why did he make it feel so good?
Perhaps instead of struggling to give up your pr0n habit you should instead be struggling to give up your habit of blindly accepting superstitious beliefs. I suggest Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark as a starting point. Apply a little critical thinking to your situation and determine where the flaw lies.
it has always been possible to write ugly, incomprehensible perl code
[sarcasm]
You mean it's possible to write Perl code that is clean and comprehensible? And here I thought that any sufficently advanced Perl script was indistinguishable from line noise.
[/sarcasm]
If you had a daughter (maybe one whose private parts are being leered at in darkened bedrooms around the world), you might have a different idea about what consitutes free speech, and what is abuse!
All I can say is that if someone tries to hurt my children, he better pray to your God that the police find him first.
It is my job as a parent to protect my children. And protect them I will: both from predators like the ones you allude to, and from self-righteous bigots who would impose their own twisted definitions of morality on the rest of the world.
Yeah it's much better to make this filth available to little kids, isn't it?
Personally I find the possibility of my kids seeing sex and nudity much less offensive than having their minds poisoned with nonsensical religous propeganda.
AFIK, whether the on-base drinking age is 18 or 21 is at the sole discresion of the post commander. Naturally the commander is answerable to his superiors, and I think there's a DoD policy that encourages commanders to mirror the law of the surrounding community.
As you said, things could have changed in the 10 years since they handed me my DD-214, but it's a long standing custom (in the US Military, at least) to give the base commander a large amount of leeway in how he runs his command.
My point was that the idea of solar sails has been bounced around for quite a while. A number of different sci-fi authors (at least among those who understand physics) have used it as a plot element. I have not traced the idea to it's origin, but it probably originated in a research paper before it ever was incorporated into a work of fiction.
I'd like to have (dare I suggest it) an SE DVD that lets me pick whether I want to see the original or enhanced version of a particular scene. EG: I like most of of the enhancements in the SE, but would like to be able to revert to the old version for some of the more egregous plot modifications (the aforementioned scene being the best example)
Travel by a laser-powered solar sail was not an original idea of Niven's. Try reading "The Flight of the Dragonfly" by Robert L. Forward. Excellent book.
Pro wrestling is enormously popular and makes tons of money. Does that mean it has any artistic (or athletic) merit whatsoever? Ditto that for Ba[y|be]watch or any other popular bit of eye candy.
Media awards should reward artists for making good art, not for pandering to the least common denominator. The reward for pandering to people's base instincts is money, pure and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
If you take a closer look, you'll find that the *vast* majority of US homicides take place in a handful of very small geographical pockets - a few square miles in each of ~20 cities. Exclude those few hot spots, and the overall homicide rate is indistinguishable any other industrialized nation.
Oh yeah, I can see why it make so much more sense to use 24 spaces to indent a line than 3 tabs. I mean, harddrives are cheap, caring about filesize is like, so 1980's. :-)
Even more insidiously they can look at your purchase history for things like paper targets, clay pidgeons, gun cleaning supplies, range fees, hunting licenses, and so forth. Every gun-related purchase you make that can be tied back to you gives the government another data point telling them what kind of guns you own, how many you have, and how often you use them. Just one more reason to pay cash for everything.
It would seem to me that if you use multiple directional antennae and adequate signal processing, you can filter out the reflections and other sources of interference. That was the point I got from the original article.
Heinlein's The Number of the Beast is based around the concept of 3-dimensional time. An interesting read, to say the least.
So would that mean that our universe is in the reject bin at God's donut shop?
Quoting the Bible does not demonstrate anything in reality other than how you interpret the meaning of a particular ~400-year-old English translation of selected scrolls recording a long-dead rabbi's memory of some ancient oral legends he had been taught (since we're talking old testament here). You assert the KJV Bible is the unadulterated and literal Word of God? I say prove it, without resorting to any other logical fallacies.
There are N religions that each make the mutual exclusive claim that they and they alone hold the keys to eternal salvation. At most, only one of them can be correct. The risk of chosing the the wrong holy book (or the wrong intrepretation of a particuar book) is so extremely high (eternal damnnation) that nothing less than the most stringent proof is acceptable.
Perhaps instead of struggling to give up your pr0n habit you should instead be struggling to give up your habit of blindly accepting superstitious beliefs. I suggest Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark as a starting point. Apply a little critical thinking to your situation and determine where the flaw lies.
You mean it's possible to write Perl code that is clean and comprehensible? And here I thought that any sufficently advanced Perl script was indistinguishable from line noise.
[/sarcasm]
It is my job as a parent to protect my children. And protect them I will: both from predators like the ones you allude to, and from self-righteous bigots who would impose their own twisted definitions of morality on the rest of the world.
Personally I find the possibility of my kids seeing sex and nudity much less offensive than having their minds poisoned with nonsensical religous propeganda.
As you said, things could have changed in the 10 years since they handed me my DD-214, but it's a long standing custom (in the US Military, at least) to give the base commander a large amount of leeway in how he runs his command.
My point was that the idea of solar sails has been bounced around for quite a while. A number of different sci-fi authors (at least among those who understand physics) have used it as a plot element. I have not traced the idea to it's origin, but it probably originated in a research paper before it ever was incorporated into a work of fiction.
I'd like to have (dare I suggest it) an SE DVD that lets me pick whether I want to see the original or enhanced version of a particular scene. EG: I like most of of the enhancements in the SE, but would like to be able to revert to the old version for some of the more egregous plot modifications (the aforementioned scene being the best example)
Travel by a laser-powered solar sail was not an original idea of Niven's. Try reading "The Flight of the Dragonfly" by Robert L. Forward. Excellent book.
If that is the case, it would appear that Peter Jackson & New Line Cinema are infringing on it.
Media awards should reward artists for making good art, not for pandering to the least common denominator. The reward for pandering to people's base instincts is money, pure and simple.