You demonstrate my point by suggesting that it's ok to own a handgun but not an "assault" rifle
Here's a proposal for you: US citizens should be allowed to carry suitcase nukes whenever and wherever they want. Nukes are arms, and the 2nd amendment guarantees us the right to bear arms, correct?
Well, no. I think that most people would agree that the proposal above is absurd and unworkable. So assuming you agree with that, then we agree that there must be some limit on the destructive power that civilians are allowed to wield. Therefore it's just a matter of deciding where to draw the line. And "people like me" have every bit as much right to an opinion on where to draw that line as "people like you" do.
My personal opinion is that since the generally accepted rationale for carrying weapons these days is self defense(*), then a reasonable place to draw the line be at weapons that are primarily intended for killing large numbers of people. i.e. "assault weapons" (I'm using the phrase again on purpose, just to annoy you;^)). Anyone who thinks they need to shoot dozens of bullets a second for self-defense (or hunting) is either kidding themselves, lying, or a really lousy shot.
(*) yeah, yeah, I know, the other reason would be to violently resist/overthrow the government if the need arises. But I don't buy that one, since even disregarding the practicalities of violently overthrowing a government that has the world's largest arsenal of nukes and everything else military... violent overthrow of the government is illegal. So expecting support for that contingency from the law is contradictory.
That's their job, should it be necessary. Cheques and Balances.
If Congress feels that it is in their constituents' interests to pass legislation repealing the existing right-to-die laws, then it is their right to do so. Passing legislation to change the law for just one particular case, on the other hand, is improper and unconstitutional. A basic value of our legal system is that justice should be blind -- the law should be applied consistently to everyone. Allowing Congress intervene in the courts on a case-by-case basis makes a mockery of that value.
The way I see it, people are generally smart enough to see past bullshit like that. Observe the previous election. Bush-bashers galore, and yet Bush won.
Funny, to me the fact that Bush won proves precisely the opposite. Now tell me again where all those WMDs are? We've spent several hundred billion dollars and killed tens of thousands of people to find them, and nobody (literally: not one person) has been fired for incompetence yet... so they must be around somewhere?
... but nobody supports her right to defend herself with a weapon. Not a perfect analogy
It's not just an imperfect analogy, it's false and a straw man argument. There are plenty of liberals (like myself) who do support a woman's right to defend herself with a weapon. Where we differ from, say, the NRA, is in drawing the line at what weapons are reasonable to allow. The NRA thinks everyone should be allowed to carry fully automatic military assault rifles. I think military weapons should be restricted to the military -- for civilian self-defense, handguns are sufficient.
As far as the "liberal controlling agenda", I should note that a lot of the web sites I look at talk in equally heated tones about the "conservative controlling agenda". I strongly suspect that each side is no longer actually looking at the other side at all -- they are now both responding to their own internalized caricature of what they think the other side is and wants. Under these conditions, no constructive discussion is possible -- both sides can only talk past each other and fling accusations. I suggest that everyone take a deep breath, count to ten, and remember that just about everyone is at heart a decent human being who is trying to improve his society. Once that is remembered, some common ground can be established and we might get somewhere.
You could also say a member of Judicial branch flipped off the entire Legislative and Executive branches by refusing to honor their request (i.e. law) for a de novo review.
You can phrase it that way if you want to, but in that case the Legislature and Executive branches were very much in need of being flipped off. They were passing unconstitutional bills of attainder and trying to override the independent judgement of the courts (who had ruled consistently on this case over a dozen times). Separation of Powers is a principle that is very much worth defending.
My vehicle gets over a billion miles per gallon, it's called a bicycle.. oh wait
(Just to be a curmudgeon...) your bicycle was powered by the food that you ate before pedalling it... how much gasoline was used to facilitate the production of that food? (Probably more than you think, and easily enough to make your bike get much less than a billion miles per gallon...)
Hybrid car electric motors are very efficient as generators, up to about 80% on production vehicles IIRC, but as you know the best batteries are touchy about being charged and all batteries have limits.
An extra-fun home engineering project would be to remove the batteries from your Prius and replace them with a big flywheel... that ought to solve your touchy-battery problems, although it might void your warranty...:^)
Perhaps cover your home and/or office roof in solar panels, and plug your car into those whenever you are at home and/or work. That would give you a much larger surface area to collect energy from, and your Prius wouldn't need to lug the extra weight of solar panels back and forth.
(I suspect this sort of thing will become more common once solar panels get cheaper and more efficient... which they hopefully will soon as all this nanotechnology stuff comes to fruition)
When I was playing around with the first PC-compatible versions... they actually managed to require more and faster hardware than Windows to get comparable performance.
Something must have been wrong with your setup... in my experience, BeOS is very noticably more responsive than Windows on the same machine. Perhaps you were running BeOS on an unsupported video card? (VESA mode graphics are very slow and unoptimized)
If there is one thing BeOS has going for it, it is raw speed and user responsiveness.
BeOS/Zeta still can't even boot on a machine with a gig or more memory. As the world upgrades to more modern machines, BeOS loses more and more potential users.
It's actually worse than that... trying to find a machine that has a supported video chipset AND supported audio AND supported networking AND support motherboard chipset all at the same time is a great way to spend a couple of weeks if you have nothing better to do. BeOS is a great OS, but not really worth the effort to get running on a new machine. In any case, I think OS/X has reached coolness-parity with BeOS now, so for those who want a cool OS and can afford it, I'd say just buy a Mac:^)
-Jeremy (posting with NetPositive running on BeOS on a dual P3/650, btw)
Those who currenetly use grid power for the road are short changing society, because they are not paying for road maintence.
Nothing would make me happier than to see clean electric car usage increase to the point where the above becomes a significant problem! And when it does, it can be dealt with by updating the tax laws as necessary.
Focusing soley on reduced consumption runs a greater risk of producing false economies.
Well, sure... but focusing solely on any one aspect of the problem is likely to lead to false economies. It is always necessary to look at the big picture. That said, increasing efficiency is one of the easier and more straightforward ways to improve our energy situation.
Uhhh, where in Canada is the UK gallon used for gasoline purchases? I've been to Canada many a time, gas prices up there are always cents per liter everywhere I've seen (or heard of).
Most likely, the poster did the conversion for you, to make the comparison easier for people used to seeing gas measured in gallons.
Around here (Pasadena, CA) you have the option of buying "green" electricity for an extra 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. So if you are worried about pollution, that is an option...
Some of the most useful comments in my codebase look like this:
sLayout->addSpacing(10);// FogBugz #2768
This adds very little clutter to the code, and if anyone wants to know why that line is there, they can head over to the bug database and read all 50 paragraphs of description and debate regarding the problem that this line fixed, when it was added, how it works, etc.
Why? There isn't enough energy in the sunlight to sustain the metabolic rate required for movement. In billions of years, nature hasn't figured out how to covert enough sunlight into energy to sustain an animal's movement
Maybe nature hasn't, but NASA seems to have done okay... their Mars rovers get around on sun power, and IIRC Mars gets less sunlight than Earth does...
I don't know why, but the general public seems to like crap. Microsoft is just giving them what they want - crap. Look at the most popular fast-food chains, the most popular music, the most popular TV programs, etc
Here's why: The general public likes things that are easy to obtain. Microsoft, popular music, fast food, and TV programs may be mediocre, but you can get them just about anywhere. Better stuff may exist, but if it has to be hunted down via a three hour search, most people aren't going to bother. And why should they? Unless they are aficionados, it just isn't worth the effort.
it's not our fault identify theives trip over their own fucked up feet and smash their head on desks or similar
Adding perjury to the charges won't help either. At the end of the day, you're either law-abiding or your not; if you're not, then it absolutely is your fault.
It might be fun to think about, but in real life the situation is much more straightforward if there is only one set of criminals in the picture. Battery is a crime, and the story wouldn't be nearly as compelling if it ended with our protagonist going to jail instead of the thieves.
Yes, and I'm sure if some Google employee came up with some great idea that he spent his 20% free time on, and Google made an assload of money on it, they would give that employee a cut. NOT!
That's what stock options are for... so that employees get a share of the company profits, and therefore have more motivation to help the company succeed. I presume that Google provides stock options to their employees?
Following your logic, have P2P copyright infringers asked permission from every single artist from whom they copy music?
Is that practical to do? Most people don't have hours to spend tracking down the author of every mp3 file that floats by and asking him for permission, and most authors wouldn't have time to reply to that many requests, either.
Why do people think they're entitled to anything that can be pirated?
For the same reason they feel that they're entitled to breathe the air that is in their vicinity without paying for it... because it's so trivially easy to do.
The root cause of all this me-me-me silliness seems to be a blistering lack of self-confidence in the general populace, creating a need to conform.
And the real irony is, the "everyone else is a sheep, but I know better, I'm a unique individual who blazes his own path" meme is itself yet another form of social-control group-think. Of course you want to be unique and different from the crowd... advertisers have spent millions making sure you (and everyone else) knows just how important such individuality is.:^)
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a proposal for you: US citizens should be allowed to carry suitcase nukes whenever and wherever they want. Nukes are arms, and the 2nd amendment guarantees us the right to bear arms, correct?
Well, no. I think that most people would agree that the proposal above is absurd and unworkable. So assuming you agree with that, then we agree that there must be some limit on the destructive power that civilians are allowed to wield. Therefore it's just a matter of deciding where to draw the line. And "people like me" have every bit as much right to an opinion on where to draw that line as "people like you" do.
My personal opinion is that since the generally accepted rationale for carrying weapons these days is self defense(*), then a reasonable place to draw the line be at weapons that are primarily intended for killing large numbers of people. i.e. "assault weapons" (I'm using the phrase again on purpose, just to annoy you
(*) yeah, yeah, I know, the other reason would be to violently resist/overthrow the government if the need arises. But I don't buy that one, since even disregarding the practicalities of violently overthrowing a government that has the world's largest arsenal of nukes and everything else military... violent overthrow of the government is illegal. So expecting support for that contingency from the law is contradictory.
If Congress feels that it is in their constituents' interests to pass legislation repealing the existing right-to-die laws, then it is their right to do so. Passing legislation to change the law for just one particular case, on the other hand, is improper and unconstitutional. A basic value of our legal system is that justice should be blind -- the law should be applied consistently to everyone. Allowing Congress intervene in the courts on a case-by-case basis makes a mockery of that value.
Funny, to me the fact that Bush won proves precisely the opposite. Now tell me again where all those WMDs are? We've spent several hundred billion dollars and killed tens of thousands of people to find them, and nobody (literally: not one person) has been fired for incompetence yet... so they must be around somewhere?
It's not just an imperfect analogy, it's false and a straw man argument. There are plenty of liberals (like myself) who do support a woman's right to defend herself with a weapon. Where we differ from, say, the NRA, is in drawing the line at what weapons are reasonable to allow. The NRA thinks everyone should be allowed to carry fully automatic military assault rifles. I think military weapons should be restricted to the military -- for civilian self-defense, handguns are sufficient.
As far as the "liberal controlling agenda", I should note that a lot of the web sites I look at talk in equally heated tones about the "conservative controlling agenda". I strongly suspect that each side is no longer actually looking at the other side at all -- they are now both responding to their own internalized caricature of what they think the other side is and wants. Under these conditions, no constructive discussion is possible -- both sides can only talk past each other and fling accusations. I suggest that everyone take a deep breath, count to ten, and remember that just about everyone is at heart a decent human being who is trying to improve his society. Once that is remembered, some common ground can be established and we might get somewhere.
You can phrase it that way if you want to, but in that case the Legislature and Executive branches were very much in need of being flipped off. They were passing unconstitutional bills of attainder and trying to override the independent judgement of the courts (who had ruled consistently on this case over a dozen times). Separation of Powers is a principle that is very much worth defending.
(Just to be a curmudgeon...) your bicycle was powered by the food that you ate before pedalling it... how much gasoline was used to facilitate the production of that food? (Probably more than you think, and easily enough to make your bike get much less than a billion miles per gallon...)
Perhaps this problem could be solved by having two counter-rotating flywheels, so that their gyroscopic effects cancel each other out?
An extra-fun home engineering project would be to remove the batteries from your Prius and replace them with a big flywheel... that ought to solve your touchy-battery problems, although it might void your warranty...
(I suspect this sort of thing will become more common once solar panels get cheaper and more efficient... which they hopefully will soon as all this nanotechnology stuff comes to fruition)
True. A better metric might be "miles per dollar spent on refueling/recharging".
Something must have been wrong with your setup... in my experience, BeOS is very noticably more responsive than Windows on the same machine. Perhaps you were running BeOS on an unsupported video card? (VESA mode graphics are very slow and unoptimized)
If there is one thing BeOS has going for it, it is raw speed and user responsiveness.
It's actually worse than that... trying to find a machine that has a supported video chipset AND supported audio AND supported networking AND support motherboard chipset all at the same time is a great way to spend a couple of weeks if you have nothing better to do. BeOS is a great OS, but not really worth the effort to get running on a new machine. In any case, I think OS/X has reached coolness-parity with BeOS now, so for those who want a cool OS and can afford it, I'd say just buy a Mac
-Jeremy (posting with NetPositive running on BeOS on a dual P3/650, btw)
Nothing would make me happier than to see clean electric car usage increase to the point where the above becomes a significant problem! And when it does, it can be dealt with by updating the tax laws as necessary.
Well, sure... but focusing solely on any one aspect of the problem is likely to lead to false economies. It is always necessary to look at the big picture. That said, increasing efficiency is one of the easier and more straightforward ways to improve our energy situation.
Most likely, the poster did the conversion for you, to make the comparison easier for people used to seeing gas measured in gallons.
Around here (Pasadena, CA) you have the option of buying "green" electricity for an extra 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. So if you are worried about pollution, that is an option...
sLayout->addSpacing(10);
This adds very little clutter to the code, and if anyone wants to know why that line is there, they can head over to the bug database and read all 50 paragraphs of description and debate regarding the problem that this line fixed, when it was added, how it works, etc.
Absolutely! Here's a link to a program that will do that for you.
Maybe nature hasn't, but NASA seems to have done okay... their Mars rovers get around on sun power, and IIRC Mars gets less sunlight than Earth does...
Here's why: The general public likes things that are easy to obtain. Microsoft, popular music, fast food, and TV programs may be mediocre, but you can get them just about anywhere. Better stuff may exist, but if it has to be hunted down via a three hour search, most people aren't going to bother. And why should they? Unless they are aficionados, it just isn't worth the effort.
Adding perjury to the charges won't help either. At the end of the day, you're either law-abiding or your not; if you're not, then it absolutely is your fault.
It might be fun to think about, but in real life the situation is much more straightforward if there is only one set of criminals in the picture. Battery is a crime, and the story wouldn't be nearly as compelling if it ended with our protagonist going to jail instead of the thieves.
That's what stock options are for... so that employees get a share of the company profits, and therefore have more motivation to help the company succeed. I presume that Google provides stock options to their employees?
Is that practical to do? Most people don't have hours to spend tracking down the author of every mp3 file that floats by and asking him for permission, and most authors wouldn't have time to reply to that many requests, either.
Why do people think they're entitled to anything that can be pirated?
For the same reason they feel that they're entitled to breathe the air that is in their vicinity without paying for it
And the real irony is, the "everyone else is a sheep, but I know better, I'm a unique individual who blazes his own path" meme is itself yet another form of social-control group-think. Of course you want to be unique and different from the crowd... advertisers have spent millions making sure you (and everyone else) knows just how important such individuality is.
More-cynical-than-thou,
Jeremi