Y'see, it is a very simple one, the reason why pretty much any other law hated by everyone is around: money from media companies.
Ah yes, how could we possibly forget: entertainment is the best, nay, only reason to give up civil liberties. Why if it weren't for those billions of relatively small payments we give to media companies, each representing that we only care a little about their content but we're happy to have SOMETHING, where would the economy be?
NASA should not go commercial. They should invest...
Yeah, I stopped here.
NASA has no money, because Congress doesn't fund them for crap. What they would do if they had money is immaterial. They can't invest in blue sky (or starry sky) research when they are barely keeping up with existing research programs--and indeed many valuable programs have been cut in the past few years because of it.
The move to put NASA in a role supporting commercial spaceflight is entirely a cost- and/or face-saving measure by politicians. Nobody at NASA needs to hear it. Talk to your representatives.
It doesn't matter. The only logical ways out of the trap are either break the two party lock by voting for someone else, or reject the current democratic process.
Personally, I reject the current democratic process. Emphasis, probably, on current, but still.
I said in another comment on another story that democracy isn't a meritocracy. That is literally the elephant in the room; everyone knows, nobody says anything or cares. I believe it comes from the founding of america when preventing the union from dissolving into warring states was a billion times more important than ability to govern; considering we only had one civil war instead of becoming another Europe, I think we did well enough.
But a popularity contest to see who gets to screw up running the nation next, and what they do, is stupid. The elections are not set up to find the most qualified candidate, and nobody, anywhere, has any intention of changing that. It's not a question of political will or who's in power. You could even go so far as to argue that a whole lot of politics isn't about governance, it's about playing games with each other and the nation in order to win prizes.
It can be done. There are qualified candidates, not merely for presidency, but for congress, etc. We don't currently know who they are because nobody has thought about how to find them if they aren't running, nor how to make sure we select them (as a country) over less qualified applicants. It can be done. But the huge-ass issue sitting there in the middle of the room is nobody's trying.
If any of that was actually secret, by which I mean classified or close enough to get the men in uniform flustered, it wouldn't matter whether he was saying it on Slashdot or at his grandma's house, he'll still get in trouble.
But, the flight paths of F-117s are a historical note (not only did that one already get shot down, they're a retired design), the analysis of the Chinese jet are something their engineers doubtless already know (if they know what the words even mean, they probably knew it during the design phase, if not, they'll figure it out in testing), and the disparity between prototype and production is just a guess on his part.
But hey, nice job completely quoting the post you thought contained military secrets, for no good reason.
Actually, Einstein figured it out. It is the warping of space caused by an object.
Great. What's space?
We use it to mean a coordinating medium (everything is within "space" and so, all being contained in the same area, they interact instead of passing through each other). Why is that warpable? Does the space have an equivalent of mass or energy (volume perhaps) that would have to be conserved, and if so, where is it going? If it doesn't have any such inertial equivalent, why does space only warp in the presence of mass--if physically speaking, there is no incentive not to warp?
He gave us an idea, but it's not an explanation until certain key questions are answered.
When you want to learn a skill, when you want to learn it really well, you have to spend many years working on it, and you have to practice it a lot. It is utterly impossible to get elected to any position of note, in this country, without a great deal of skill in manipulating people (even given a definition of manipulating that is generous in its lack of evil intent). Further, from what I know, there's not a whole lot you can do while holding such a position if you can't manipulate people. Our government is not based upon expertise (recall: at the time of its founding, there wasn't much in the way of public schooling beyond reading and writing, and the founding fathers were some of the more educated), but upon consensus. Considering that they were a newly created frontier nation that was about to spread itself across a continent, keeping the nation together (as opposed to, oh you know, a million frontier states all at war) was a million times more important than technical meritocracy. And you know what? I support them for having done that. Probably the right decision at the time. It's not anymore though.
Rule by consensus is all kinds of good things compared to rule of an incompetent dictator. It's arguably less than rule by a competent, benevolent dictator, although "rule by dictator" in general is bad policy because you can often get incompetence or malevolence. However, rule by consensus that does not acknowledge the role of division of labor in its own society is stupid. You don't need to allow one supreme electrical engineer to decide all electric policy in the nation, but if you don't consult electricians, you're doing it wrong.
If you leave your car unattended and some asshat criminal steals it, would you say he attacked you, or would you say he has stolen from you?
If you leave your ATM card in the ATM and some asshat criminal drains all the money from your account, would you say he attacked you or would you say he committed fraud and/or larceny?
If you leave a candy bar at your desk and an asshat coworker swipes it and eats it without asking you if he may have it, would you say he attacked you or would you say he swiped your candy bar?
If you leave your car unlocked and someone takes the opportunity to change the locks on your car so they can steal it again any day they like (while still letting you drive it--somehow), that's an attack. Doubly so if they use your car to perform illegal activities, then return it before you notice.
Same if you leave your ATM card somewhere, and they not only siphon cash, but do social engineering attacks to get the bank to disclose details that will, for instance, let them obtain a credit card in your name. Or hell, I dunno what else--swipe the stripe, or take down the information, then give the card back to you so that you won't suspect them? I'm sure there are other ways to exploit something like that.
And if he took your chocolate bar and left a bunch of molten chocolate stains around the office and blamed it on you? I think you'd consider that an attack. (Okay, well, I can't think of any better attacks you can do with a chocolate bar.)
It's one thing if you made a mistake and someone profited from it. Criminal exploitation often involves ruthlessness--because let's face it, if you get caught, you're going to be in trouble anyway; why not go for the gold?
I'm not sure if the above is in layman terms, but I hope it is somewhat helpful.
When you go into domain-specific details, it's not "layman" anymore.
I take from your reading that satisfiability means taking a problem made out of a whole bunch of restrictions and finding out what, if anything, can possibly satisfy all of them. Mathematicians have boiled down the entire category to one, much narrower class of problems, and that's 3-SAT.
Further, if they can solve 3-SAT in polynomial time (as opposed to exponential, or anything else that gets super-complicated super-fast), they can solve all of those problems in polynomial time, which is (I am to assume, not remembering myself) all of NP-complete. That puts all of NP-complete into P, the set of problems solvable in polynomial time. Doing so successfully would put to rest a very long argument on the subject, and the algorithm that successfully does so would presumably be of great use to all kinds of people.
Cellphones should not be searchable until a police officer obtains a warrant
Caution: IANAL zone
How about we generalize it to future-proof the idea. Your home and your car are both physically distinct spaces, and (in my understanding) officers are only allowed to search them without warrant because they're already there--if I understand correctly, being arrested while in your car doesn't give them right to search your house without a warrant, being arrested in your home doesn't give them right to search a car you own which isn't on the premises.
Your cell, your computers at home, any webservers you may own, etc, are all digitally distinct spaces; determining that a phone was (probably) used as part of a crime shouldn't allow access to any other device you own until a warrant is issued. Further, determining that your car or house was used to commit a crime doesn't allow access to digital spaces that happen to be in that car until a warrant is issued. That doesn't necessarily mean that the phone can't be impounded with the car, but it should mean that it can't be searched.
The only thing about all this BS that makes me feel better is that the people making these decisions today really are out of touch; in 20-30 years, the people making the laws will be people from a generation familiar with modern technology (even if they aren't necessarily geeks) and you presumably won't have to use baby words with them nearly as much. That it is necessarily going to be a generation or two behind is really upsetting, but unless someone makes some really, really stupid mistakes and forcibly keeps them there, a lot of this will change eventually.
I have yet to find anything I miss from that pile of junk.
I turned off mine for a while--the only thing I missed was the ability to access Facebook streams, and chat, through other applications, such as TweetDeck. I've conscientiously avoided most FB games and all of the cruft apps (quizzes, *ville, etc). But, in the end, I'd turned it back on for those couple things. It may go off again soon.
I don't know if you want the bosses to take note on that example.
When a boss tells the story, he says, "I demanded the employee worked overtime, and the project got done. Or course, they were sick for a year afterwards..."
When an employee (you) tells the story, he says,
I had some health issues with my liver almost failing from work stress that plagued me for about a year afterwards (i.e. yellowish eyes / jaundice) but eventually I recovered...
near literal death march
If bosses should hear an example, they should definitely hear the one that puts the emphasis where it should be and strikes the appropriate tone. It's not like they haven't heard the other version already.
It is if the predicting person's possible positions are properly randomized, and especially if the population including the predicting person has a persistent predilection for settling over fault lines.
Point being that two random sets, earthquakes and people, with some overlap will eventually cause an apparently anomalous artifact of amazing anticipatory acumen.
I'm no expert, but I believe a lot of musicians get most of their revenue from merchandise, live shows, etc--and all for items that probably took a few weeks of effort to finalize. Books take months or years of daily effort (no up-front cost my ass, that's a lot of lost productivity which might NEVER be recovered if publishers don't like it), require the services of a proofreader at the very least, and take enough time to be read that you don't typically buy several copies nor reread them more than a few times--and of course, with physical books, the secondary market is huge, which is automatically taken away from the authors/publishers. Merchandise? Maybe book signings, or if you're very popular, convention appearances. I guess.
If we were talking about serialized novels or comics (and webcomics do persist on far less than the music industry, being largely independent, but again: merchandise is a big factor), you could argue that it's similar to music, being that they're both served in bite-sized chunks. But we're not, and music isn't all symphony orchestras, either. I just don't see an apples-to-apples here.
Stylus input "tablets" have been around for over a decade - and they've mostly died off.
I don't think the GP is supporting stylus-only input, which would indeed be an absolutely shitty turn-around compared to how good capacitive multitouch has proven to be. However, the precision of a stylus, and especially, the ability to use it for any pencil- or pen-related skills that you've been developing your whole life, such as handwriting, sketching, signatures, etc, is noticeably missing.
I know that there are those fuzzy-tipped styluses--and I've used one a couple times. But it doesn't have the right feel, IMO, especially since you can't exactly rest your hand on the screen and have only the stylus be recognized (although I remember a tech demo somewhere to that effect).
Ranting in general and "getting on your soap box" (in other words, making your displeasure publicly known) are different. Ranting in general has absolutely no intent to change anything; public speaking is generally done to raise awareness, gather like-minded fellows, etc, and by doing so put pressure on the person in charge.
As the sibling comment points out, the power of the "jury box" means civil or criminal lawsuits. Those are only applicable to serious injustices (otherwise the law won't recognize your case), but if you're willing to kill someone, you probably think it's pretty serious.
You'll notice "Ammo" is at the end of that list, and it usually comes with the admonishment, "In that order". Do you think that guy (or the people he represents, if any) went through any of the other steps, except maybe possibly the ballot box?
Politics (which I hate, by the way) encompasses the first three. The reason the fourth is there is both in order to point out that it's at the end of the list, and also to remind people that if it all really does go down shit creek, you shouldn't sit there and take it.
All of the problems quoted have commercial solutions (barred windows, electronic locks, security systems, trained guard dogs, etc) for exactly that reason, should a person find themselves living in an area where they could reasonably expect people to try breaking in.
The free market at work has provided a solution to those problem for affected parties. The question of whether you become an affected party or not is some combination of logistics and statistics. Over time, a larger and larger percentage of those people who are at risk will adopt them, assuming they have the money.
Logically, if casinos are on the ragged edge of losing millions every day from insufficient security, they'll feel that same pressure. If on the other hand, anyone who dares is arrested by federal agents, that's not market pressure. If all cops worked as hard to solve burglary cases and reclaim stolen property, there wouldn't be much of a market for home security, either. And speaking to the GP's point, if you live in an area where you DON'T get that kind of support from the police, but casinos do on your tax dime, then yes, the federal government is actually, incredibly irresponsible. It would be different if this one person stealing millions was going to build a criminal empire or something, which might arguably be a federal issue (if it crossed state lines, otherwise a state issue).
Is the person who stole money from a casino somehow not a criminal? No, I agree with you on that, they are. However, protecting people who don't bother to properly secure their millions of dollars is bad policy, when it's at the state or federal level. Arguably, local economies may have more vested interests, but there's not all that much that local cops can do, either.
As someone of a scientific mind, I would just like to see *ONE* good test that conclusively shuts people up.
I don't particularly want to defend psychics et al, but I want to make it clear that we are lightyears shy of actually, tangibly being able to prove such a nonexistence--and if you have any appreciation for statistics, you ought to understand that.
To disprove it, we'd have to understand the brain or the mind (mind being "ourselves" in that self-obvious way that philosophers argue about, brain being the physical substrate where it happens) from an engineer's perspective, that is, knowing what everything actually does and how it fits into the larger picture. The reason we got a spaceship from the earth to the moon and back again, the reason we've created sub-nanometer structures, the reason computers function at all is because we actually do know what we're talking about and there are no question marks left; computers would have been the highest, most heretical form of voodoo before we understood what electricity was. And even once we have that engineer's perspective, we have to create or find an experimentally clean slate (which we cannot create without that knowledge, much less verify) and do the tests necessary. It's probably possible, given another hundred or thousand years worth of research, but there's no actual disproving possible right now; you can only tell believers to "give up" because of your own belief that they're wrong and a bunch of (perhaps incidental) testing.
I don't require you to believe that paranormal or religious things exist, and in fact I'm not really defending those beliefs. But without an experimentally clean slate, you're left with statistics--and those statistics are formed under all kinds of biases with regards to who is being studied, when, and under what circumstances, and we don't even know whether one or all of those contaminates the study, nor how to compensate. Even the best defense of the science involved has to accept that.
Character is hard to judge based on looks, appearances are easily doctored, and longevity is being adequately privatized. Looks-based dating doesn't tell you a damned thing, irrespective of how long it's been around. If you accept it only because it's enjoyable, and not because it's wise, you're making a shallow decision.
Is it just me, or do the right-wingers always claim the slippery slope argument whenever they can't provide valid arguments?
As a depressed person (and not a right-winger, if it matters), I can say that that slippery slope comes up a LOT whenever you tread around your insecurities, and that those insecurities have a lot to do with inexperience and/or ignorance.
I've been pretty antisocial most of my life so far, and so as a result, I have lots of questions I just don't know how to answer about how normal people would respond if I did something weird, wrong, or stupid. If for example I broke out in song in a public space, would something horrible happen--spontaneous violence or something? Logically, no. But what if / what if / what if / what if / oh god I'd better not risk it. Calling someone who doesn't know I'm going to call? Logically, if they're interrupted, they'll say so and I'll call back, rather than the worst case, they turn out to be a serial killer who makes me their next target.
I really don't think the extreme right and left understand that you can come to understand the people on the other side (on a person by person basis), and by understanding them, you can learn to predict their (personal) opinions and responses. There's no need to make people into ogres.
The right term is parenthetical phrase, and while you're correct, I also feel like it's not quite right. Maybe it's the way it's led with a preposition, making it sound like it's part of the sentence.
Slashdot Mirror
Y'see, it is a very simple one, the reason why pretty much any other law hated by everyone is around: money from media companies.
Ah yes, how could we possibly forget: entertainment is the best, nay, only reason to give up civil liberties. Why if it weren't for those billions of relatively small payments we give to media companies, each representing that we only care a little about their content but we're happy to have SOMETHING, where would the economy be?
Arguably, if that greed is causing an economic collapse, it's stupidity, too.
NASA should not go commercial. They should invest...
Yeah, I stopped here.
NASA has no money, because Congress doesn't fund them for crap. What they would do if they had money is immaterial. They can't invest in blue sky (or starry sky) research when they are barely keeping up with existing research programs--and indeed many valuable programs have been cut in the past few years because of it.
The move to put NASA in a role supporting commercial spaceflight is entirely a cost- and/or face-saving measure by politicians. Nobody at NASA needs to hear it. Talk to your representatives.
to find he had died of a simultaneous heart attack, aneurysm, and stroke, with the Windows kernel source code open on his screen.
And people say that it's selfish of MS to keep it to themselves...
It doesn't matter. The only logical ways out of the trap are either break the two party lock by voting for someone else, or reject the current democratic process.
Personally, I reject the current democratic process. Emphasis, probably, on current, but still.
I said in another comment on another story that democracy isn't a meritocracy. That is literally the elephant in the room; everyone knows, nobody says anything or cares. I believe it comes from the founding of america when preventing the union from dissolving into warring states was a billion times more important than ability to govern; considering we only had one civil war instead of becoming another Europe, I think we did well enough.
But a popularity contest to see who gets to screw up running the nation next, and what they do, is stupid. The elections are not set up to find the most qualified candidate, and nobody, anywhere, has any intention of changing that. It's not a question of political will or who's in power. You could even go so far as to argue that a whole lot of politics isn't about governance, it's about playing games with each other and the nation in order to win prizes.
It can be done. There are qualified candidates, not merely for presidency, but for congress, etc. We don't currently know who they are because nobody has thought about how to find them if they aren't running, nor how to make sure we select them (as a country) over less qualified applicants. It can be done. But the huge-ass issue sitting there in the middle of the room is nobody's trying.
If any of that was actually secret, by which I mean classified or close enough to get the men in uniform flustered, it wouldn't matter whether he was saying it on Slashdot or at his grandma's house, he'll still get in trouble.
But, the flight paths of F-117s are a historical note (not only did that one already get shot down, they're a retired design), the analysis of the Chinese jet are something their engineers doubtless already know (if they know what the words even mean, they probably knew it during the design phase, if not, they'll figure it out in testing), and the disparity between prototype and production is just a guess on his part.
But hey, nice job completely quoting the post you thought contained military secrets, for no good reason.
Actually, Einstein figured it out. It is the warping of space caused by an object.
Great. What's space?
We use it to mean a coordinating medium (everything is within "space" and so, all being contained in the same area, they interact instead of passing through each other). Why is that warpable? Does the space have an equivalent of mass or energy (volume perhaps) that would have to be conserved, and if so, where is it going? If it doesn't have any such inertial equivalent, why does space only warp in the presence of mass--if physically speaking, there is no incentive not to warp?
He gave us an idea, but it's not an explanation until certain key questions are answered.
Democracy != Meritocracy.
When you want to learn a skill, when you want to learn it really well, you have to spend many years working on it, and you have to practice it a lot. It is utterly impossible to get elected to any position of note, in this country, without a great deal of skill in manipulating people (even given a definition of manipulating that is generous in its lack of evil intent). Further, from what I know, there's not a whole lot you can do while holding such a position if you can't manipulate people. Our government is not based upon expertise (recall: at the time of its founding, there wasn't much in the way of public schooling beyond reading and writing, and the founding fathers were some of the more educated), but upon consensus. Considering that they were a newly created frontier nation that was about to spread itself across a continent, keeping the nation together (as opposed to, oh you know, a million frontier states all at war) was a million times more important than technical meritocracy. And you know what? I support them for having done that. Probably the right decision at the time. It's not anymore though.
Rule by consensus is all kinds of good things compared to rule of an incompetent dictator. It's arguably less than rule by a competent, benevolent dictator, although "rule by dictator" in general is bad policy because you can often get incompetence or malevolence. However, rule by consensus that does not acknowledge the role of division of labor in its own society is stupid. You don't need to allow one supreme electrical engineer to decide all electric policy in the nation, but if you don't consult electricians, you're doing it wrong.
If you leave your car unattended and some asshat criminal steals it, would you say he attacked you, or would you say he has stolen from you?
If you leave your ATM card in the ATM and some asshat criminal drains all the money from your account, would you say he attacked you or would you say he committed fraud and/or larceny?
If you leave a candy bar at your desk and an asshat coworker swipes it and eats it without asking you if he may have it, would you say he attacked you or would you say he swiped your candy bar?
If you leave your car unlocked and someone takes the opportunity to change the locks on your car so they can steal it again any day they like (while still letting you drive it--somehow), that's an attack. Doubly so if they use your car to perform illegal activities, then return it before you notice.
Same if you leave your ATM card somewhere, and they not only siphon cash, but do social engineering attacks to get the bank to disclose details that will, for instance, let them obtain a credit card in your name. Or hell, I dunno what else--swipe the stripe, or take down the information, then give the card back to you so that you won't suspect them? I'm sure there are other ways to exploit something like that.
And if he took your chocolate bar and left a bunch of molten chocolate stains around the office and blamed it on you? I think you'd consider that an attack. (Okay, well, I can't think of any better attacks you can do with a chocolate bar.)
It's one thing if you made a mistake and someone profited from it. Criminal exploitation often involves ruthlessness--because let's face it, if you get caught, you're going to be in trouble anyway; why not go for the gold?
I'm not sure if the above is in layman terms, but I hope it is somewhat helpful.
When you go into domain-specific details, it's not "layman" anymore.
I take from your reading that satisfiability means taking a problem made out of a whole bunch of restrictions and finding out what, if anything, can possibly satisfy all of them. Mathematicians have boiled down the entire category to one, much narrower class of problems, and that's 3-SAT.
Further, if they can solve 3-SAT in polynomial time (as opposed to exponential, or anything else that gets super-complicated super-fast), they can solve all of those problems in polynomial time, which is (I am to assume, not remembering myself) all of NP-complete. That puts all of NP-complete into P, the set of problems solvable in polynomial time. Doing so successfully would put to rest a very long argument on the subject, and the algorithm that successfully does so would presumably be of great use to all kinds of people.
Cellphones should not be searchable until a police officer obtains a warrant
Caution: IANAL zone
How about we generalize it to future-proof the idea. Your home and your car are both physically distinct spaces, and (in my understanding) officers are only allowed to search them without warrant because they're already there--if I understand correctly, being arrested while in your car doesn't give them right to search your house without a warrant, being arrested in your home doesn't give them right to search a car you own which isn't on the premises.
Your cell, your computers at home, any webservers you may own, etc, are all digitally distinct spaces; determining that a phone was (probably) used as part of a crime shouldn't allow access to any other device you own until a warrant is issued. Further, determining that your car or house was used to commit a crime doesn't allow access to digital spaces that happen to be in that car until a warrant is issued. That doesn't necessarily mean that the phone can't be impounded with the car, but it should mean that it can't be searched.
The only thing about all this BS that makes me feel better is that the people making these decisions today really are out of touch; in 20-30 years, the people making the laws will be people from a generation familiar with modern technology (even if they aren't necessarily geeks) and you presumably won't have to use baby words with them nearly as much. That it is necessarily going to be a generation or two behind is really upsetting, but unless someone makes some really, really stupid mistakes and forcibly keeps them there, a lot of this will change eventually.
I have yet to find anything I miss from that pile of junk.
I turned off mine for a while--the only thing I missed was the ability to access Facebook streams, and chat, through other applications, such as TweetDeck. I've conscientiously avoided most FB games and all of the cruft apps (quizzes, *ville, etc). But, in the end, I'd turned it back on for those couple things. It may go off again soon.
*sigh* Times are tough.
I don't know if you want the bosses to take note on that example.
When a boss tells the story, he says, "I demanded the employee worked overtime, and the project got done. Or course, they were sick for a year afterwards..."
When an employee (you) tells the story, he says,
If bosses should hear an example, they should definitely hear the one that puts the emphasis where it should be and strikes the appropriate tone. It's not like they haven't heard the other version already.
It is if the predicting person's possible positions are properly randomized, and especially if the population including the predicting person has a persistent predilection for settling over fault lines.
Point being that two random sets, earthquakes and people, with some overlap will eventually cause an apparently anomalous artifact of amazing anticipatory acumen.
I'm so sorry. I don't know what came over me.
I'm no expert, but I believe a lot of musicians get most of their revenue from merchandise, live shows, etc--and all for items that probably took a few weeks of effort to finalize. Books take months or years of daily effort (no up-front cost my ass, that's a lot of lost productivity which might NEVER be recovered if publishers don't like it), require the services of a proofreader at the very least, and take enough time to be read that you don't typically buy several copies nor reread them more than a few times--and of course, with physical books, the secondary market is huge, which is automatically taken away from the authors/publishers. Merchandise? Maybe book signings, or if you're very popular, convention appearances. I guess.
If we were talking about serialized novels or comics (and webcomics do persist on far less than the music industry, being largely independent, but again: merchandise is a big factor), you could argue that it's similar to music, being that they're both served in bite-sized chunks. But we're not, and music isn't all symphony orchestras, either. I just don't see an apples-to-apples here.
Stylus input "tablets" have been around for over a decade - and they've mostly died off.
I don't think the GP is supporting stylus-only input, which would indeed be an absolutely shitty turn-around compared to how good capacitive multitouch has proven to be. However, the precision of a stylus, and especially, the ability to use it for any pencil- or pen-related skills that you've been developing your whole life, such as handwriting, sketching, signatures, etc, is noticeably missing.
I know that there are those fuzzy-tipped styluses--and I've used one a couple times. But it doesn't have the right feel, IMO, especially since you can't exactly rest your hand on the screen and have only the stylus be recognized (although I remember a tech demo somewhere to that effect).
Ranting in general and "getting on your soap box" (in other words, making your displeasure publicly known) are different. Ranting in general has absolutely no intent to change anything; public speaking is generally done to raise awareness, gather like-minded fellows, etc, and by doing so put pressure on the person in charge.
As the sibling comment points out, the power of the "jury box" means civil or criminal lawsuits. Those are only applicable to serious injustices (otherwise the law won't recognize your case), but if you're willing to kill someone, you probably think it's pretty serious.
You'll notice "Ammo" is at the end of that list, and it usually comes with the admonishment, "In that order". Do you think that guy (or the people he represents, if any) went through any of the other steps, except maybe possibly the ballot box?
Politics (which I hate, by the way) encompasses the first three. The reason the fourth is there is both in order to point out that it's at the end of the list, and also to remind people that if it all really does go down shit creek, you shouldn't sit there and take it.
All of the problems quoted have commercial solutions (barred windows, electronic locks, security systems, trained guard dogs, etc) for exactly that reason, should a person find themselves living in an area where they could reasonably expect people to try breaking in.
The free market at work has provided a solution to those problem for affected parties. The question of whether you become an affected party or not is some combination of logistics and statistics. Over time, a larger and larger percentage of those people who are at risk will adopt them, assuming they have the money.
Logically, if casinos are on the ragged edge of losing millions every day from insufficient security, they'll feel that same pressure. If on the other hand, anyone who dares is arrested by federal agents, that's not market pressure. If all cops worked as hard to solve burglary cases and reclaim stolen property, there wouldn't be much of a market for home security, either. And speaking to the GP's point, if you live in an area where you DON'T get that kind of support from the police, but casinos do on your tax dime, then yes, the federal government is actually, incredibly irresponsible. It would be different if this one person stealing millions was going to build a criminal empire or something, which might arguably be a federal issue (if it crossed state lines, otherwise a state issue).
Is the person who stole money from a casino somehow not a criminal? No, I agree with you on that, they are. However, protecting people who don't bother to properly secure their millions of dollars is bad policy, when it's at the state or federal level. Arguably, local economies may have more vested interests, but there's not all that much that local cops can do, either.
As someone of a scientific mind, I would just like to see *ONE* good test that conclusively shuts people up.
I don't particularly want to defend psychics et al, but I want to make it clear that we are lightyears shy of actually, tangibly being able to prove such a nonexistence--and if you have any appreciation for statistics, you ought to understand that.
To disprove it, we'd have to understand the brain or the mind (mind being "ourselves" in that self-obvious way that philosophers argue about, brain being the physical substrate where it happens) from an engineer's perspective, that is, knowing what everything actually does and how it fits into the larger picture. The reason we got a spaceship from the earth to the moon and back again, the reason we've created sub-nanometer structures, the reason computers function at all is because we actually do know what we're talking about and there are no question marks left; computers would have been the highest, most heretical form of voodoo before we understood what electricity was. And even once we have that engineer's perspective, we have to create or find an experimentally clean slate (which we cannot create without that knowledge, much less verify) and do the tests necessary. It's probably possible, given another hundred or thousand years worth of research, but there's no actual disproving possible right now; you can only tell believers to "give up" because of your own belief that they're wrong and a bunch of (perhaps incidental) testing.
I don't require you to believe that paranormal or religious things exist, and in fact I'm not really defending those beliefs. But without an experimentally clean slate, you're left with statistics--and those statistics are formed under all kinds of biases with regards to who is being studied, when, and under what circumstances, and we don't even know whether one or all of those contaminates the study, nor how to compensate. Even the best defense of the science involved has to accept that.
Character is hard to judge based on looks, appearances are easily doctored, and longevity is being adequately privatized. Looks-based dating doesn't tell you a damned thing, irrespective of how long it's been around. If you accept it only because it's enjoyable, and not because it's wise, you're making a shallow decision.
Ah yes the classic No true slashdotter fallacy.
Is it just me, or do the right-wingers always claim the slippery slope argument whenever they can't provide valid arguments?
As a depressed person (and not a right-winger, if it matters), I can say that that slippery slope comes up a LOT whenever you tread around your insecurities, and that those insecurities have a lot to do with inexperience and/or ignorance.
I've been pretty antisocial most of my life so far, and so as a result, I have lots of questions I just don't know how to answer about how normal people would respond if I did something weird, wrong, or stupid. If for example I broke out in song in a public space, would something horrible happen--spontaneous violence or something? Logically, no. But what if / what if / what if / what if / oh god I'd better not risk it. Calling someone who doesn't know I'm going to call? Logically, if they're interrupted, they'll say so and I'll call back, rather than the worst case, they turn out to be a serial killer who makes me their next target.
I really don't think the extreme right and left understand that you can come to understand the people on the other side (on a person by person basis), and by understanding them, you can learn to predict their (personal) opinions and responses. There's no need to make people into ogres.
The right term is parenthetical phrase, and while you're correct, I also feel like it's not quite right. Maybe it's the way it's led with a preposition, making it sound like it's part of the sentence.