I'm expecting the DIY microcontroller community to get cracked down on eventually. The Makers have flown under ther radar for now, but eventually someone will use an Arduino to build a motion detecing mine or something like that and it will all go downhill from there.
As a citizen of the United States of America I have a duty to defend the principles that this nation once stood for until I no longer draw breath. Lying down and giving up may be how AC's do things in your neck of the woods, but the way I was raised forbids me from giving up on this great land that I call my home as long as I have the health and some shred of resources left to fight for it.
I can take 10 minutes out of my day to sign a damned online petition. Whether it is futile or not is irrelevant. At least I will go to bed at the end of my life saying I tried. What will you have to show for your apathy? "I told you so?" Yeah, that's something to be proud of.
We have to do something, if for no other reason than to say that we tried everything else before we resulted to torches, pitchforks, and AK-47's.
So who is going to pick up the dead bodies of the people who bleed out and die on the streets because they were turned away from the ER? The police? Hey, guess what, our taxes are being used to pay for them too! Yay socialized medicine^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean, socialized corpse removal!
:)
Sick and hurt people don't just disappear you know.
You know, it's funny. I was raised Christian but a few years back I just kinda walked away from that title. I don't hate Christianity, I just don't care to devote my time to any of it anymore. I have more important things to do, like learning to be a better rocket scientist. But anyways, the folks that I mentioned in the post above are often the most zealously, "Christian," of the people I know. Many of them are concerned over the fact that I don't claim Jesus as my savior anymore and what not. And yet, despite all their concern for me, I, the treacherous leper that turned his back on God, am the one that spends my money on other people. WTF? Is about the only applicable expression I have to sum my general attitude towards most folks' thought processes these days.
I don't know why andy thought the Ballistic part was important to mention, but he does have a point about G-limits. The human body can only endure so much acceleration before it essentially turns to mush. A number of non-human-rated launchers are desgined to deliver payloads fast, hard, and quickly (that's doubly true for missiles that are designed to kill shit before their launch is detected). That said, the G-loading on the peacekeepers is probably well above safe-limits for the human body to endure. Of course, that's just an educated guess on my part. But what do I know? I'm just a launch vehicle flight safety engineer...
Is there some reason that the U.N. cannot set up an international equivalent to ICANN and announce it to the world? Given time and the proper campaign, couldn't such a name distributor become mroe popular and, thus, exert more control than the U.S. ICANN? Or, hell, for that matter, is there a reason we can't set up an open, non-profit, distributed system like ICANN and try to get that established as the status quo?
I am asking this seriously. My background is not in networking, and I don't know enough about the low-level architecture of the internet to know why the U.S. ICANN is the only server farm that can perform the functions which it does.
Oh yes, because the leaders of those countries have such a well-grounded moral compass that they will feel horrible about lying to the rest of the world. They would never want to do that. *rolls eyes*
Not sure why you had such a tough time. I navigated to the site, clicked, "Sign Up," input my name and e-mail, accessed my e-mail on my phone, copy pasted the link from the e-mail to a web browser, clicked the, "Change Password," button that was big and blue like the website told me to, input a password that was easy for me to remember, signed onto the site from my browser on my computer and signed the petition.
It's all pretty straight forward from what I can tell, no different than any other,"Sign up with our site using a throw away e-mail because you won't care enough about this website to every login a second time" website that I've ever signed up for.
The entirety of the rest of the civilized world either can't or won't tell the American government to go fuck itself off successfully. What makes you think the minority of us citizens in the United States that actually make a point to be educated and critical in our thoughts are going to be anymore successful? Here's a hint: we're trying to reign our government in as hard as we can. And yet, somehow, each election year, the same politicians that everyone declares loudly and proudly they hate with an animosity get reelected. Go figure.
Social media won't die until you find some other effective means for creepy guys to stalk scantily clad young women in a semi-anonymous manner. Social media sites have pictures of real college-aged (or younger) girls posting pictures of themselves in bikinis or less without the negative social stigma of being a 'porn' site. Until you find an alternative to that, there will always be some sort of social media demand.
Ah, I miss the days of WordPerfect.... such a powerful word processing program, and pleasant to use as well. For the life of me I can't understand why MS Word got so widely adopted....
It's interesting stuff, full of giants and angels and hell.
That's what makes it one of my favorite books of the Bible. You've got to hand credit to the Biblical authors, they were damned good fantasy writers.:D
The fundamental problem is that religion assumes God knows everything (omniscient) and yet, somehow, we humans have free will. In a logically consistent universe (which is an assumption many people make, but is not, necessarily, true), if one creature already knows the outcome of every coin flip that occurs in the universe, then free will cannot exist. It is only an illusion laid upon lesser beings (humans) for shit only knows what reason. If there is one path through the universe and God knows what that path is, and God has to be right all the time, then every time you or I or any human, "chooses," to do anything, it is only an illusory choice. We had to make that choice to arrive at the known outcome.
Thus, Epicurus's assumption that people are God's puppets is a logically consistent one to make.
The only real debate that can be raised with any merit is whether or not the universe itself is logically consistent, which is a completely different question...sort of.
I'm a former Poly-wag myself. I got my B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from SLO. I don't know if this is much of a consultation, but the classes I took in physics while at Poly were, far and away, some of the worst of my entire experience there. If you don't mind my saying, I think that particular department is uniquely schednfreude and insane. Conversely, my aero classes were mostly pleasant and informative (of course, there were always some gripes folks could come up with if they wanted). Anyways, all I am getting at is that I think the Physics department at SLO might have been the problem in your case, as opposed to brick and mortar learning in general.
Though, I do agree, online courses can be fantastic for a number of subjects.
Meh. I'll see your anecdote and raise you my own. Near the end of my undergrad work I had a number of GE's I needed to flufill that I had put off until my last quarter. I ended up taking three classes online: Philosophy 20x, Economics 20x, and World History 20x. I was an engineering major so none of these really came close to the core tenants of my education. Anyways, I took all three online and enjoyed myself quite thoroughly. I could read at my own pace. The lack of time constraints on when I had to be paying attention to the material made it so I was actually awake when I read through lecture notes and such. All in all, I remember quite a bit from each of those classes and ended up recommending them to a number of folk. One big factor in my enjoyment of the courses, however, was that I was very interested in the subject material and I actually wanted to learn about it all. I think that pretty much makes all the difference for online courses. If you don't have the gumption, they just won't do you any good.
A lot of my friends and family are staunchly conservative (their words, not mine). They walk along the Republican party lines and watch a lot of Fox News, and all that kind of crap. When the discussion about healthcare comes up, I will ask questions about how they would address certain fringe cases, how they would cover certain social costs of not having socialized medicine, etc. etc. I ask these questions sincerely and earnestly because I want to hear what the self-proclaimed conservative philosophy is on this subject.
After dozens of conversations with otherwise decent folk, the discussion always comes down to this: my friends and family would typically prefer to watch another human being die, and still have an extra $200 in their pockets at the end of the year, than to simply reach out and help the folks who need it.
And that is the mindset, so far as I can tell, of the modern American conservative: "My money is more important and valuable to me than another man's life."
Some folks don't seem to see anything morally bankrupt about this stance. At the end of the day, it is just a game of, "me first, my shit's more important, always." But it really is a heart-breaking eye-opener when you notice that the folks you have respected and loved all your life would rather be rich and on top than be charitable and do with a little less.
So, ordinary Americans are 'the enemy,' at least in the eyes of our own government?
I figure there are probably some folk in agencies like the NSA that have a skewed enough world view that they figure most people are criminals and, therefore, most Americans are, indeed, the enemy. That may not be the common mindest, but, yet, some folks in the NSA probably do see Americans as the enemy.
Well I don't know how or why you got modded flaimebait. That was pretty much my response, "9 AM? Where? How does that tell me anything?"
And yet, some moderator who has apparently never seen Pulp Fiction is too busy on his holy crusade for ambiguous units to figure out you were making a joke. Ah well, I giggled.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm expecting the DIY microcontroller community to get cracked down on eventually. The Makers have flown under ther radar for now, but eventually someone will use an Arduino to build a motion detecing mine or something like that and it will all go downhill from there.
As a citizen of the United States of America I have a duty to defend the principles that this nation once stood for until I no longer draw breath. Lying down and giving up may be how AC's do things in your neck of the woods, but the way I was raised forbids me from giving up on this great land that I call my home as long as I have the health and some shred of resources left to fight for it.
I can take 10 minutes out of my day to sign a damned online petition. Whether it is futile or not is irrelevant. At least I will go to bed at the end of my life saying I tried. What will you have to show for your apathy? "I told you so?" Yeah, that's something to be proud of.
We have to do something, if for no other reason than to say that we tried everything else before we resulted to torches, pitchforks, and AK-47's.
As for reproduction, it's not an issue, you only need to have sex with one person for that to happen.
What a boring shitty fate for the human race. I'd rather die of AIDS then spend 80 years on this Earth and only fuck one person. God bless freedom. :D
So who is going to pick up the dead bodies of the people who bleed out and die on the streets because they were turned away from the ER? The police? Hey, guess what, our taxes are being used to pay for them too! Yay socialized medicine^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean, socialized corpse removal!
:)
Sick and hurt people don't just disappear you know.
You know, it's funny. I was raised Christian but a few years back I just kinda walked away from that title. I don't hate Christianity, I just don't care to devote my time to any of it anymore. I have more important things to do, like learning to be a better rocket scientist. But anyways, the folks that I mentioned in the post above are often the most zealously, "Christian," of the people I know. Many of them are concerned over the fact that I don't claim Jesus as my savior anymore and what not. And yet, despite all their concern for me, I, the treacherous leper that turned his back on God, am the one that spends my money on other people. WTF? Is about the only applicable expression I have to sum my general attitude towards most folks' thought processes these days.
Go figure.
Bummer, so who are the Communists and anti-Americans in this evil scenario.
The folks who watch whatever the hell they want to watch over the internet, from what I can tell.
I'm pretty sure you can find a lot of episodes up on Youtube...
I don't know why andy thought the Ballistic part was important to mention, but he does have a point about G-limits. The human body can only endure so much acceleration before it essentially turns to mush. A number of non-human-rated launchers are desgined to deliver payloads fast, hard, and quickly (that's doubly true for missiles that are designed to kill shit before their launch is detected). That said, the G-loading on the peacekeepers is probably well above safe-limits for the human body to endure. Of course, that's just an educated guess on my part. But what do I know? I'm just a launch vehicle flight safety engineer...
Is there some reason that the U.N. cannot set up an international equivalent to ICANN and announce it to the world? Given time and the proper campaign, couldn't such a name distributor become mroe popular and, thus, exert more control than the U.S. ICANN? Or, hell, for that matter, is there a reason we can't set up an open, non-profit, distributed system like ICANN and try to get that established as the status quo?
I am asking this seriously. My background is not in networking, and I don't know enough about the low-level architecture of the internet to know why the U.S. ICANN is the only server farm that can perform the functions which it does.
Oh yes, because the leaders of those countries have such a well-grounded moral compass that they will feel horrible about lying to the rest of the world. They would never want to do that. *rolls eyes*
Not sure why you had such a tough time. I navigated to the site, clicked, "Sign Up," input my name and e-mail, accessed my e-mail on my phone, copy pasted the link from the e-mail to a web browser, clicked the, "Change Password," button that was big and blue like the website told me to, input a password that was easy for me to remember, signed onto the site from my browser on my computer and signed the petition.
,"Sign up with our site using a throw away e-mail because you won't care enough about this website to every login a second time" website that I've ever signed up for.
It's all pretty straight forward from what I can tell, no different than any other
The entirety of the rest of the civilized world either can't or won't tell the American government to go fuck itself off successfully. What makes you think the minority of us citizens in the United States that actually make a point to be educated and critical in our thoughts are going to be anymore successful? Here's a hint: we're trying to reign our government in as hard as we can. And yet, somehow, each election year, the same politicians that everyone declares loudly and proudly they hate with an animosity get reelected. Go figure.
Hey now, Soma-dosed orgies are nothing to be afraid of. After all, they are the 'killer-app' of the future!
Ask not what your orgie can do for you, but ask what you can do for your orgie!
Social media won't die until you find some other effective means for creepy guys to stalk scantily clad young women in a semi-anonymous manner. Social media sites have pictures of real college-aged (or younger) girls posting pictures of themselves in bikinis or less without the negative social stigma of being a 'porn' site. Until you find an alternative to that, there will always be some sort of social media demand.
Ah, I miss the days of WordPerfect .... such a powerful word processing program, and pleasant to use as well. For the life of me I can't understand why MS Word got so widely adopted....
But eventually Honest Abe will burst out from the grave, pull an AK--47 out from under his hat, and blow Batman away with a rat-a-tat-tat. :D
It's interesting stuff, full of giants and angels and hell.
That's what makes it one of my favorite books of the Bible. You've got to hand credit to the Biblical authors, they were damned good fantasy writers. :D
The fundamental problem is that religion assumes God knows everything (omniscient) and yet, somehow, we humans have free will. In a logically consistent universe (which is an assumption many people make, but is not, necessarily, true), if one creature already knows the outcome of every coin flip that occurs in the universe, then free will cannot exist. It is only an illusion laid upon lesser beings (humans) for shit only knows what reason. If there is one path through the universe and God knows what that path is, and God has to be right all the time, then every time you or I or any human, "chooses," to do anything, it is only an illusory choice. We had to make that choice to arrive at the known outcome.
Thus, Epicurus's assumption that people are God's puppets is a logically consistent one to make.
The only real debate that can be raised with any merit is whether or not the universe itself is logically consistent, which is a completely different question...sort of.
Hey there,
I'm a former Poly-wag myself. I got my B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from SLO. I don't know if this is much of a consultation, but the classes I took in physics while at Poly were, far and away, some of the worst of my entire experience there. If you don't mind my saying, I think that particular department is uniquely schednfreude and insane. Conversely, my aero classes were mostly pleasant and informative (of course, there were always some gripes folks could come up with if they wanted). Anyways, all I am getting at is that I think the Physics department at SLO might have been the problem in your case, as opposed to brick and mortar learning in general.
Though, I do agree, online courses can be fantastic for a number of subjects.
Anyways, just my $0.02
Meh. I'll see your anecdote and raise you my own. Near the end of my undergrad work I had a number of GE's I needed to flufill that I had put off until my last quarter. I ended up taking three classes online: Philosophy 20x, Economics 20x, and World History 20x. I was an engineering major so none of these really came close to the core tenants of my education. Anyways, I took all three online and enjoyed myself quite thoroughly. I could read at my own pace. The lack of time constraints on when I had to be paying attention to the material made it so I was actually awake when I read through lecture notes and such. All in all, I remember quite a bit from each of those classes and ended up recommending them to a number of folk. One big factor in my enjoyment of the courses, however, was that I was very interested in the subject material and I actually wanted to learn about it all. I think that pretty much makes all the difference for online courses. If you don't have the gumption, they just won't do you any good.
A lot of my friends and family are staunchly conservative (their words, not mine). They walk along the Republican party lines and watch a lot of Fox News, and all that kind of crap. When the discussion about healthcare comes up, I will ask questions about how they would address certain fringe cases, how they would cover certain social costs of not having socialized medicine, etc. etc. I ask these questions sincerely and earnestly because I want to hear what the self-proclaimed conservative philosophy is on this subject.
After dozens of conversations with otherwise decent folk, the discussion always comes down to this: my friends and family would typically prefer to watch another human being die, and still have an extra $200 in their pockets at the end of the year, than to simply reach out and help the folks who need it.
And that is the mindset, so far as I can tell, of the modern American conservative: "My money is more important and valuable to me than another man's life."
Some folks don't seem to see anything morally bankrupt about this stance. At the end of the day, it is just a game of, "me first, my shit's more important, always." But it really is a heart-breaking eye-opener when you notice that the folks you have respected and loved all your life would rather be rich and on top than be charitable and do with a little less.
So stands modern America, as far as I can tell.
So, ordinary Americans are 'the enemy,' at least in the eyes of our own government?
I figure there are probably some folk in agencies like the NSA that have a skewed enough world view that they figure most people are criminals and, therefore, most Americans are, indeed, the enemy. That may not be the common mindest, but, yet, some folks in the NSA probably do see Americans as the enemy.
Well I don't know how or why you got modded flaimebait. That was pretty much my response, "9 AM? Where? How does that tell me anything?"
And yet, some moderator who has apparently never seen Pulp Fiction is too busy on his holy crusade for ambiguous units to figure out you were making a joke. Ah well, I giggled.
You could start flying Virgin Galactic.
Go to a non-smoking bar then. You're not entitled to demand every business operate on the principles you chose to live by.