I thought aussies are fighting with cane toads and camels.
Indeed they are. Once trained, an Aussie sniper can reliably strike a target with a high-velocity cane toad from up to 2000 meters away. Camels, on the other hand, are too large to fire from a rifle, and require the use of motorized artillery.
Enjoy your pseudo-religious "Armageddon of the heathens" fantasies though.
There's no need to be rude. My only point was that people rely on the biosphere for their air, food, and water. If that biosphere is compromised, then the number of people it can support will be diminished. If the human population becomes larger than the number of people that can be supported, then the 'extra' people will inevitably not get the things they need to survive, and there will be a die-off, just like what happens to any other species that outgrows its resources.
I think that's common sense. Pseudo-religion would be thinking that humans can somehow magically defy the laws of physics and not be effected by an environmental collapse.
It can -- but Gaia's fix will involve the die-off of most or all of humanity. That will work fine as far as Gaia is concerned, but speaking as part of humanity, I'd like to see if a more human-friendly fix can't be devised instead.
On the contrary, it's *very* easy to escape: don't log in.
You're assuming that it's practical for a student to conduct his/her life efficiently these days without using the Internet for anything. Or for that matter, that it's reasonable for bullies to be allowed to effectively DOS someone's entire Internet connectivity if they want to.
And one last problem... even if you personally don't log in to the Internet anymore, the majority of your peers will continue to use the Internet. That means they will be reading all of the nastygrams about you, and they will be effected by them. By not logging in yourself, you have put yourself at a disadvantage -- you no longer know what your enemies are saying about you, and thus have no way to address the libel.
That's assault. And, people have been killed with the right hit in the right place with that force.
Agreed that it is assault, but I want to point out that the assault charge doesn't depend on the projectile being of any particular size or weight to be valid. "Assault" is merely the act of physically attacking or intimidating someone -- if there was actual damage incurred, then you can add "battery" as a separate charge. People are commonly convicted of assault simply for pointing an unloaded gun at someone, or for spitting on someone.
ow, cyber bullying allows them to hit you even at home, and in ways that can often go unnoticed by the parents, not only of the victim, but of the bully's parents. Not sure what we can do about it, but I wouldn't equate this to a typical school yard bullying situation.
Teach the victim how to save screenshots. Have him/her compile a record of the bullying behavior, which can later be used to hold the bullies responsible. One thing real-life bullies do is make sure their bullying happens in situations where they will have plausible deniability later on. On-line bullying, on the other hand, leaves an evidence trail that is hard to cover up.
(of course, the next round of escalation would see children fabricating incriminating screenshots against each other... but that's next year's problem. Plus that will improve the miscreants' Photoshop skills)
At the school the bully is likely to be the teachers best friend among the students.
Really? How do you figure? Teachers are aware that students can't learn when they are frightened, and therefore bullying is anathema to getting the teacher's job done. Perhaps if the teacher didn't care whether the students learn or not, they might be okay with bullying; hopefully few teachers are that cynical.
Even if they get decent media coverage, people still will think that it's safest to vote against the party that they feel will actually destroy America, rather than for the third party, because voting for third parties is "throwing your vote away" - no accident on the part of the Democrats and Republicans, they want the differences between them to look larger than they actually are.
Okay, agreed that the media is usually unfair and manipulated by the people currently in power, and agreed that people will often avoid voting third party for various reasons, and that it is therefore very difficult for a third party to win political power. But isn't it nevertheless the peoples' right to vote for the politicians they choose, even if (in your view) they make that choice poorly? I don't think surreptitiously sneaking a third party into power without the knowledge or approval of the voting public is in keeping with either the letter or the spirit of democracy.
I hear that France has already preemptively surrendered to ET because of this article.
Hilarious! A one-liner about French people being quick to surrender! That joke just never gets old! It's almost as funny as the "Polish people are stupid" jokes, or the "Jewish people like money" jokes! Maybe next you could tell one about lazy Mexicans...
Why has it taken so long for the OS designers to get with the program?
Coming up with a new OS paradigm is hard, but doable.
Coming up with a viable new OS that uses that paradigm is much harder; because even once the new OS is working perfectly, you still have to somehow make it compatible with the zillions of existing applications that people depend on. If you can't do that, your shiny new OS will be viewed as an interesting experiment for the propeller-head set, but it won't ever get the critical mass of users necessary to build up its own application base.
So far, I think Apple has had the most successful transition strategy: Come up with the great new OS, bundle the old OS with it, inside an emulator/sandbox, and after a few years, quietly deprecate (and then drop) the old OS. Repeat as necessary.
However, being cheeky will get you in trouble very quickly so be careful.
Quite right (well, it will get you kicked out of the jury pool very quickly; which might be a good thing, depending on your goals). So the trick is to ask the question with a completely straight face.
Arguably, the second amendment's intent was to allow nuclear weapons to be owned by the populace.
No, I don't think that's arguable at all. For the founders to have any intent (one way or the other) regarding the appropriate role of nuclear weapons, they would have needed to have at least some idea what nuclear weapons are. But since the founding documents were drawn up hundreds of years before even the idea of nuclear weapons existed, they couldn't possibly have anticipated them. You could certainly speculate as to what the founders' intentions would have been had they known about nuclear weapons, but that's pretty hazy territory and more likely to work against your position than for it. (e.g. "A single person with one of these weapons could kill a million other people in an instant? Geez, maybe we'd better leave the 2nd Amendment out of the Bill of Rights after all... or at least limit the types of weapons that are covered!" -- hypothetical Thomas Jefferson)
That is, to allow the populace to own what's needed to fight the government. If it's nukes, it's nukes.
That sounds noble in theory, but "winning the war against government tyranny" would be a pretty hollow victory if you reduce most of the nation to an unlivable radioactive wasteland in the process. There has to be a better solution than that (and of course, there is -- change through peaceful democratic reform, not armed conflict)
Now, I actually think the correct answer is to create a shadow party within both the Republican and Democratic parties, get the shadow party to power, keep them in power for long enough to get all three branches of government controlled completely (presidency, 2/3 of both House and Senate, and majority in Supreme Court,) and then reveal their true allegiance once the shadow party is in power.
That sounds suspiciously like a coup. If the "shadow party" has popular support, why does it need to stay "in the shadows" until after it seizes power? And if it doesn't have popular support, then what makes it any more legitimate than the government it is trying to replace?
People in the military (and yes, I was one) are not mindless drones who follow orders from the top unquestionably.
If that's true, then we have an even bigger problem: if some or all of the military is only conditionally loyal to the elected government, then all it would take is a sufficiently popular extra-governmental leader or cause, and the nation would be vulnerable to a coup by his/her supporters in the military. Then instead of having to figure out how to deal with an out-of-control (but democratically elected) government, we'd have to figure out how to deal with an out-of-control, nuclear-armed military dictatorship. That's not my idea of a desirable outcome.
Pretty sure there's still one box, and that one's even stated as a constitutional right.
I love thinly-veiled allusions to violent rebellion as much as the next guy, but frankly your ammo box isn't going to do anyone much good when your opponent is armed with freaking nuclear weapons. Call me cynical.
then the obvious question is; when will the same pedantic DA be charging the two officers with the multitude of apparent crimes such as assult, battery, perjury, conspiring to pervert the course of justice, etc?
I'd tell you the obvious answer, but you can probably guess it for yourself.:^P
Allowing a jury to determine whether the law *should* be followed or not undermines the criminal justice system, and is a bad suggestion.
And yet jury nullifications can and do happen. So clearly juries are 'allowed' to use their own criteria if they choose to, at least in the sense that there is no way to stop them from doing so.
There's actually plenty of funding available... for example, in the USA people spend $34 billion per year on their pets. If people thought it was important, they could devote, say, half of their pet-support money to sea and/or space exploration, and that would be plenty to do a lot of exploration of both areas.
But the truth is, most people just don't put that much importance on exploration. Sad, but true.
If the oceans 'dried up' whatever that actually means then life may die out, but its more likely it would continue on in another form.
Of course, if the sun goes red-giant and becomes so large that it encompasses Earth's orbit, it's unlikely that life would continue in the expanding cloud of plasma that used to be Earth.
We nor anything else is going to 'destroy life on Earth' at any point in time that we're going to find relevant.
True, but not really relevant -- what's important to us humans is not whether life can exist in some form, but whether the Earth will continue to be a place where humans can live with (roughly) the same quality of life that we enjoy now.
Human life or life as we know it may end, something will carry on and evolve to survive.
That's not very comforting... it's not enough for 'something' to carry on -- I want to carry on. (okay, my descendants actually, but you get the idea).
When the two already vetted candidates cannot be substantially differentiated between, we do not have democracy.
Democracy isn't just about voting for President once every 4 years. You also had a chance to vote in the primaries beforehand, and support (or oppose) various primary candidates before that.
Not to mention the numerous other officials other than President that you also get to vote for (or against). It's not like the President gets to make all (or even most) of the government decisions that affect your life.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought aussies are fighting with cane toads and camels.
Indeed they are. Once trained, an Aussie sniper can reliably strike a target with a high-velocity cane toad from up to 2000 meters away. Camels, on the other hand, are too large to fire from a rifle, and require the use of motorized artillery.
Enjoy your pseudo-religious "Armageddon of the heathens" fantasies though.
There's no need to be rude. My only point was that people rely on the biosphere for their air, food, and water. If that biosphere is compromised, then the number of people it can support will be diminished. If the human population becomes larger than the number of people that can be supported, then the 'extra' people will inevitably not get the things they need to survive, and there will be a die-off, just like what happens to any other species that outgrows its resources.
I think that's common sense. Pseudo-religion would be thinking that humans can somehow magically defy the laws of physics and not be effected by an environmental collapse.
Why can't "Gaia" fix its own problems itself?
It can -- but Gaia's fix will involve the die-off of most or all of humanity. That will work fine as far as Gaia is concerned, but speaking as part of humanity, I'd like to see if a more human-friendly fix can't be devised instead.
Ban the party system.
Which party should we support in order to get that change implemented?
On the contrary, it's *very* easy to escape: don't log in.
You're assuming that it's practical for a student to conduct his/her life efficiently these days without using the Internet for anything. Or for that matter, that it's reasonable for bullies to be allowed to effectively DOS someone's entire Internet connectivity if they want to.
And one last problem... even if you personally don't log in to the Internet anymore, the majority of your peers will continue to use the Internet. That means they will be reading all of the nastygrams about you, and they will be effected by them. By not logging in yourself, you have put yourself at a disadvantage -- you no longer know what your enemies are saying about you, and thus have no way to address the libel.
That's assault. And, people have been killed with the right hit in the right place with that force.
Agreed that it is assault, but I want to point out that the assault charge doesn't depend on the projectile being of any particular size or weight to be valid. "Assault" is merely the act of physically attacking or intimidating someone -- if there was actual damage incurred, then you can add "battery" as a separate charge. People are commonly convicted of assault simply for pointing an unloaded gun at someone, or for spitting on someone.
ow, cyber bullying allows them to hit you even at home, and in ways that can often go unnoticed by the parents, not only of the victim, but of the bully's parents. Not sure what we can do about it, but I wouldn't equate this to a typical school yard bullying situation.
Teach the victim how to save screenshots. Have him/her compile a record of the bullying behavior, which can later be used to hold the bullies responsible. One thing real-life bullies do is make sure their bullying happens in situations where they will have plausible deniability later on. On-line bullying, on the other hand, leaves an evidence trail that is hard to cover up.
(of course, the next round of escalation would see children fabricating incriminating screenshots against each other... but that's next year's problem. Plus that will improve the miscreants' Photoshop skills)
At the school the bully is likely to be the teachers best friend among the students.
Really? How do you figure? Teachers are aware that students can't learn when they are frightened, and therefore bullying is anathema to getting the teacher's job done. Perhaps if the teacher didn't care whether the students learn or not, they might be okay with bullying; hopefully few teachers are that cynical.
Yeah, but does it run Linux?
Even if they get decent media coverage, people still will think that it's safest to vote against the party that they feel will actually destroy America, rather than for the third party, because voting for third parties is "throwing your vote away" - no accident on the part of the Democrats and Republicans, they want the differences between them to look larger than they actually are.
Okay, agreed that the media is usually unfair and manipulated by the people currently in power, and agreed that people will often avoid voting third party for various reasons, and that it is therefore very difficult for a third party to win political power. But isn't it nevertheless the peoples' right to vote for the politicians they choose, even if (in your view) they make that choice poorly? I don't think surreptitiously sneaking a third party into power without the knowledge or approval of the voting public is in keeping with either the letter or the spirit of democracy.
I hear that France has already preemptively surrendered to ET because of this article.
Hilarious! A one-liner about French people being quick to surrender! That joke just never gets old! It's almost as funny as the "Polish people are stupid" jokes, or the "Jewish people like money" jokes! Maybe next you could tell one about lazy Mexicans...
I come to /. to read tech news... not so see people fisting.
Well, I came here to see the fisting. And frankly, so far this site has been a real disappointment.
Why has it taken so long for the OS designers to get with the program?
Coming up with a new OS paradigm is hard, but doable.
Coming up with a viable new OS that uses that paradigm is much harder; because even once the new OS is working perfectly, you still have to somehow make it compatible with the zillions of existing applications that people depend on. If you can't do that, your shiny new OS will be viewed as an interesting experiment for the propeller-head set, but it won't ever get the critical mass of users necessary to build up its own application base.
So far, I think Apple has had the most successful transition strategy: Come up with the great new OS, bundle the old OS with it, inside an emulator/sandbox, and after a few years, quietly deprecate (and then drop) the old OS. Repeat as necessary.
However, being cheeky will get you in trouble very quickly so be careful.
Quite right (well, it will get you kicked out of the jury pool very quickly; which might be a good thing, depending on your goals). So the trick is to ask the question with a completely straight face.
Arguably, the second amendment's intent was to allow nuclear weapons to be owned by the populace.
No, I don't think that's arguable at all. For the founders to have any intent (one way or the other) regarding the appropriate role of nuclear weapons, they would have needed to have at least some idea what nuclear weapons are. But since the founding documents were drawn up hundreds of years before even the idea of nuclear weapons existed, they couldn't possibly have anticipated them. You could certainly speculate as to what the founders' intentions would have been had they known about nuclear weapons, but that's pretty hazy territory and more likely to work against your position than for it. (e.g. "A single person with one of these weapons could kill a million other people in an instant? Geez, maybe we'd better leave the 2nd Amendment out of the Bill of Rights after all... or at least limit the types of weapons that are covered!" -- hypothetical Thomas Jefferson)
That is, to allow the populace to own what's needed to fight the government. If it's nukes, it's nukes.
That sounds noble in theory, but "winning the war against government tyranny" would be a pretty hollow victory if you reduce most of the nation to an unlivable radioactive wasteland in the process. There has to be a better solution than that (and of course, there is -- change through peaceful democratic reform, not armed conflict)
Now, I actually think the correct answer is to create a shadow party within both the Republican and Democratic parties, get the shadow party to power, keep them in power for long enough to get all three branches of government controlled completely (presidency, 2/3 of both House and Senate, and majority in Supreme Court,) and then reveal their true allegiance once the shadow party is in power.
That sounds suspiciously like a coup. If the "shadow party" has popular support, why does it need to stay "in the shadows" until after it seizes power? And if it doesn't have popular support, then what makes it any more legitimate than the government it is trying to replace?
People in the military (and yes, I was one) are not mindless drones who follow orders from the top unquestionably.
If that's true, then we have an even bigger problem: if some or all of the military is only conditionally loyal to the elected government, then all it would take is a sufficiently popular extra-governmental leader or cause, and the nation would be vulnerable to a coup by his/her supporters in the military. Then instead of having to figure out how to deal with an out-of-control (but democratically elected) government, we'd have to figure out how to deal with an out-of-control, nuclear-armed military dictatorship. That's not my idea of a desirable outcome.
Pretty sure there's still one box, and that one's even stated as a constitutional right.
I love thinly-veiled allusions to violent rebellion as much as the next guy, but frankly your ammo box isn't going to do anyone much good when your opponent is armed with freaking nuclear weapons. Call me cynical.
This is why we have jury nullification and why the correct answer to "Do you believe in jury nullfication?" is "no, I do not".
Actually the best answer is "Sorry, I don't follow you. What do you mean by 'jury nullification'?"
then the obvious question is; when will the same pedantic DA be charging the two officers with the multitude of apparent crimes such as assult, battery, perjury, conspiring to pervert the course of justice, etc?
I'd tell you the obvious answer, but you can probably guess it for yourself. :^P
Allowing a jury to determine whether the law *should* be followed or not undermines the criminal justice system, and is a bad suggestion.
And yet jury nullifications can and do happen. So clearly juries are 'allowed' to use their own criteria if they choose to, at least in the sense that there is no way to stop them from doing so.
Limited resources, namely funding.
There's actually plenty of funding available... for example, in the USA people spend $34 billion per year on their pets. If people thought it was important, they could devote, say, half of their pet-support money to sea and/or space exploration, and that would be plenty to do a lot of exploration of both areas.
But the truth is, most people just don't put that much importance on exploration. Sad, but true.
my source was taken away in the middle of the night by guys in a black van
A lousy black van? What, their black helicopter was repossessed for lack of payments? God, this economy sucks!
If the oceans 'dried up' whatever that actually means then life may die out, but its more likely it would continue on in another form.
Of course, if the sun goes red-giant and becomes so large that it encompasses Earth's orbit, it's unlikely that life would continue in the expanding cloud of plasma that used to be Earth.
We nor anything else is going to 'destroy life on Earth' at any point in time that we're going to find relevant.
True, but not really relevant -- what's important to us humans is not whether life can exist in some form, but whether the Earth will continue to be a place where humans can live with (roughly) the same quality of life that we enjoy now.
Human life or life as we know it may end, something will carry on and evolve to survive.
That's not very comforting... it's not enough for 'something' to carry on -- I want to carry on. (okay, my descendants actually, but you get the idea).
So, if you have a twin, you need to off them in case they commit a crime.
Certainly not! If I decide to commit a crime, and they find my DNA, I'll need my twin alive so that he can take the blame.
When the two already vetted candidates cannot be substantially differentiated between, we do not have democracy.
Democracy isn't just about voting for President once every 4 years. You also had a chance to vote in the primaries beforehand, and support (or oppose) various primary candidates before that.
Not to mention the numerous other officials other than President that you also get to vote for (or against). It's not like the President gets to make all (or even most) of the government decisions that affect your life.