One of his latest blog posts has a picture of Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame, pointing out that in a month's time she'll be 17 - the age of sexual consent in New York State.
Sure she's attractive, but that's just disgusting!
Just posted a comment on that post, asking if he'd be willing to pay the copyright holder of that photo of Emma in order to make use of it. Will be interesting to see if he approves it.
Say what?! I don't take 10 minutes to lay a cable, never mind take a leak. Seriously, if your bladder was so large that you needed 10 minutes to empty it (including all the attendant activity) you could easily drive for 10 hours without having to stop. I've gone seven hours and 1.2L of water before it became a case of "Next rest stop, or a tree!", and that stop was still well below 10 minutes.
Your calculations may be being generous, to be sure, but 10 minutes is excessive. Five would be closer to the truth in all but extreme cases. Particularly since I don't know anyone who would willingly linger in a petrol station bathroom!
Alternatively, move to a country that actually believes in freedom and doesn't have such stupid booze laws.
Which such country do you recommend, and how does one apply to immigrate?
I happen to think that New Zealand is a pretty decent place to live. Drinking age is 18, and our Prime Minister pretty much told George just where to stick his invasion of Iraq. Downside is that our broadband's not so shit-hot, but things are improving.
If you can get used to the idea of not suing somebody just because you stubbed your toe in a supermarket, you should fit in here just fine. Oh, and we drive on the left.
As far as immigration goes, if you've got lots of money or significant skills it's pretty easy.
Try living in New Zealand, which is nearly at the bottom of the OECD for broadband uptake. Our number of dialup connections is growing!
Seriously, if the worst you've got to complain about is that you're 12th, with only four major companies supplying last-mile access, come here. We've got precisely two companies supplying the last mile, and in our largest city we have only one choice for residential connections.
Consider that NZ is at the top of the OECD for the percentage of the population that actually uses the 'net, so it's not like we're a bunch of technophobes. We're just catching it up the arse from a rapacious monopolist incumbent, which thankfully is about to be unbundled. So, sorry, but y'all should get a grip. You're in the top half, we're in the bottom quarter!
I'm at the largest university in New Zealand, and all we have are campus security. The concept of "campus police" is entirely foreign to me, and to both my fellow students and my colleagues (I work for the Computer Science department as well as studying). Hell we don't even see uniformed cops on campus routinely.
Other than a lot of theft of bicycles (I lost two in six months), there's not all that much crime on campus. Lots of drugs, I'm sure, but bad things happening to people are pretty rare. We're more than adequately served by the same police stations that protect the rest of Auckland City.
Of course, we are a country that doesn't even have permanently-armed police officers. Quite why we would devolve policing functions to employees of some private institution is completely beyond me. I suspect, though, that not even the likes of Cambridge or Oxford would have their own police forces. The notion of letting non-state employees enforce the law seems to be quite uniquely American, witness their gun-toting security guards who patrol gated communities.
He's not using the claims of extortion and anti-trust violations as a defence. Instead, he's using them in a counter-claim.
A counter-claim isn't trying to deflect the shots, it's shooting back and making the other side do some work.
Here the liquor laws state that acceptable forms of ID for the purpose of purchasing alcohol must be gazetted. At present the only ID that can be used are a New Zealand driver's licence, a photo ID card issued by the Hospitality Association (only useful for buying booze), an NZ passport, or a current foreign passport. Service ID (eg: military or police) and firearms licences (which have photo and DoB) or any other ID is not acceptable, and there is no defence available if that is what was used to gain a person entry - as opposed to a faked ID of an accepted form.
Or you could use a pen and an optical scanner like the entire state of New Mexico did.
And like New Zealand does. Sure our voting population is only about two million people, but we get voter turnout in excess of 80% and still have results for most electorates within six hours of the polling booths closing. The official result takes somewhat longer, once all the special votes (taken at hospitals and prisons, registered before the election by persons out of the country on the day, or made outside the country at a diplomatic or military post) are tallied, but it's a rare race that is so close that those results change the preliminary outcome. Given that a lot of polling booths in the US take only a handful of votes, why is it so unthinkable that OCR could work? Even the major inner-city polling stations wouldn't take more than a few thousand ballots individually, and that's no different to polling booths here.
Have you quite finished?
on
Steve Irwin Dead
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Get the fuck over yourself! My father died of a stroke on a Friday. On the Monday I went to school (I was 14) for the first couple of periods, and between the two someone asked how I was (at this point Dad's death was a very closely-held secret, and this boy hadn't heard). My response? "How would you feel if your father was lying in a casket in your living room?"
Black humour is natural, even healthy. Once you've finished your holier-than-thou anti-religion bullshit, go and smack yourself over the head with a reality stick. Hard. Please. For the good of humanity.
All your rant has done is show that you're a sanctimonious prick with nothing better to do than preach to the rest of us. Get back to your hole and get some experience in dealing with death, then return and tell us how horribly insenstive you are. Better still, go hang out with some fire fighters for a few shifts. Reckon you've got the testicular fortitude to tell them off for "crispy critter" jokes after a fatal fire? No, didn't think so.
See, y'all are so worried about voter fraud with paper ballots, but in countries (such as NZ, where I live) with dead tree voting processes it's almost unheard of. We get our preliminary election results within hours of the polls closing, nobody argues about whether or not votes were counted correctly, and any voter can appeal through the Courts to get a recount of their electorate if they wish. The papers are stored, and don't deteriorate, so in theory one could go back and recount any election for however long the ballots are held for.
I realise that the US is rather larger than NZ, but you can break the process down into small batches. Even California could be done with OCR'd paper ballots if the polling stations were set to cover sufficiently small geographic areas.
This electronic voting thing comes across as technology for technology's sake rather than a desperate need to fix something - well, other than this stupid punch card system. I mean, WTF/strong?!
But, then again, there's no such thing as a "free trade" agreement with the US. It's a "you'll buy our products and we'll fuck your producers and exporters" agreement.
When the agreement is fully in effect, which will be sometime around 2017 IMMIC, its gross effect on the Australian economy will be an increase of 0.5% of current GDP. What a complete and utter fucking waste of time!
What's more terrifying is that the AUS-FTA is the likely shape of agreements hammered out with other nations in the future, and NZ is likely to be one of those nations at some point in the future. BOHICA
What the **AA is right about is that "intellectual property" is a critical industry to the US economy... I don't have numbers, but it is probably the most profitable sector as America continues to fall behind making quality electronics, cars, etc.
You really should've checked up on the numbers, before you looked like a total idiot.
Microsoft is the largest "soft" IP company (that is, they aren't known for making tangibles), and it's half the size of IBM. Microsoft is also roughly four times the size of the entire Hollywood movie industry. It's half the size of IBM, which in turn is: half the size of General Motors; a third the size of WalMart; a quarter the size of ExxonMobil.
The xxAA side of the entertainment industry could curl up and die tomorrow and the US economy would barely notice. The music and movie industries combined (roughly USD21b in 2004) don't equate to Sun and Apple together, never mind the dozens of individual companies that turn over many multiples of that figure.
Female airline captains at airlines who run 747's and A340's as passenger aircraft, and they're captains of those?
And, by the same token, airline captains of same with only three or four years of experience? I'm calling bullshit.
And, in some cases, very senior, experienced individuals will make better decisions, but these aren't the guys that will flying the planes most of the time.
umm, just who do you think the captains of wide-body airliners are? Some trolly dollies with attitude?
There are few people more exhaustively trained, reviewed, trained some more, and then given a bit more training for the hell of it, than the men (currently, but it won't be too long before some women have enough time under their belts) who are in command of large passenger aircraft. They have decades of experience before even being considered, and spend an huge amount of time in simulators running through any number of possible emergency situations.
There's a reason people trust them, and it's not because we think they know what they're doing. It's that, like a consulting neurosurgeon, the simple fact that they are in that position means that they're in the top fraction of a percent of their profession.
More fool you for working in positions where you get treated like shit.
Oh, sorry, that's right, in the US workers HAVE NO RIGHTS!
Don't blame government employees for having it good, go chase one of your elected representatives (who are meant to work for YOU) and get legislation passed requiring that you be treated as something better than a sub-human wage slave. Your at-will employment system is a total joke - ever noticed that no other western country has anything like it?
People should be made pass an iq test before being admitted into congress
But if you did that, Mark Twain's comment wouldn't be nearly as funny - "Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
If the ruling is solely on the bundling of their software, then the Korean government has no hold.
Well, actually, the Korean Government can do whatever the hell they like. Who will Microsoft appeal to? If the Koreans decide that Microsoft must sacrifice a goat beneath every full moon in order to continue trading, Microsoft have no choice.
This is not an issue of fair trade practice, that MS could take to the WTO. This is a country dictating the terms under which a product may be sold there, and that is a nation's sovereign right. Microsoft can put up or piss off, those are their choices. They have no right of appeal, and nowhere to which they could appeal.
<1) Cause billions of dollars of damage in less than an hour's time and shut down an entire industry for days.
I'm not sure it was billions of dollars for the buildings (and, btw, that's the only fair measure; take 400,000 people / 2 people/car * $10,000/car and you're looking at ~$2 billion loss,
Here in NZ, when cost-benefit analysis is being performed for road works, if it's being done as a result of fatal crashes a figure of NZD2m is used per life. That's direct costs of the crash itself (Fire Service, Police, ambulance, road closures and the resultant disruption, funeral) plus the flow-on effects of lost income, financial assistance for the survivors, etc etc. Similar numbers are used all over the world, for the same reason.
Based on today's exchange rate of 0.682, that's USD1.364million per life, or USD66.836billion on 1998's figure of 49,000 road deaths. Bumped up to the GP's 400,000, that's USD546b over 10 years. The single-year figures make the WTC look pretty cheap, and when you blow it up to 10 years the numbers make the WTC look like Monopoly money.
Every time I hear about privacy laws in the US, I'm stunned at how little privacy you lot have.
This is yet another example, though admittedly it's better than a lot of what's already in existence.
Here in NZ, we've had a Privacy Act for 15 years, and it's stronger than this proposal. You have a right-to-access-and-correct information held by any organisation, even the Government, for example. Getting a credit card or a loan is not a licence for the bank to sell your name and address to a dozen different direct-advertising agencies. Buying something on HP will not require you to purchase a larger mailbox just to cope with the influx of targeted mail.
If you allow the corporations to define the rules of the game, you are fair game. I'd hate to live in a society where any company that has my details can sell them.
Oh, and to the people who say that this exceeds the authority of the federal government, surely this is an inter-state commerce matter? A uniform set of rules under which you may be fucked over by corporations sounds like inter-state commerce regulation to me.
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This April Fool's Day shit is taken waaaaay the fuck too far at times.
Sure she's attractive, but that's just disgusting!
Just posted a comment on that post, asking if he'd be willing to pay the copyright holder of that photo of Emma in order to make use of it. Will be interesting to see if he approves it.
Your calculations may be being generous, to be sure, but 10 minutes is excessive. Five would be closer to the truth in all but extreme cases. Particularly since I don't know anyone who would willingly linger in a petrol station bathroom!
If you can get used to the idea of not suing somebody just because you stubbed your toe in a supermarket, you should fit in here just fine. Oh, and we drive on the left.
As far as immigration goes, if you've got lots of money or significant skills it's pretty easy.
Seriously, if the worst you've got to complain about is that you're 12th, with only four major companies supplying last-mile access, come here. We've got precisely two companies supplying the last mile, and in our largest city we have only one choice for residential connections.
Consider that NZ is at the top of the OECD for the percentage of the population that actually uses the 'net, so it's not like we're a bunch of technophobes. We're just catching it up the arse from a rapacious monopolist incumbent, which thankfully is about to be unbundled. So, sorry, but y'all should get a grip. You're in the top half, we're in the bottom quarter!
Other than a lot of theft of bicycles (I lost two in six months), there's not all that much crime on campus. Lots of drugs, I'm sure, but bad things happening to people are pretty rare. We're more than adequately served by the same police stations that protect the rest of Auckland City.
Of course, we are a country that doesn't even have permanently-armed police officers. Quite why we would devolve policing functions to employees of some private institution is completely beyond me. I suspect, though, that not even the likes of Cambridge or Oxford would have their own police forces. The notion of letting non-state employees enforce the law seems to be quite uniquely American, witness their gun-toting security guards who patrol gated communities.
He's not using the claims of extortion and anti-trust violations as a defence. Instead, he's using them in a counter-claim.
A counter-claim isn't trying to deflect the shots, it's shooting back and making the other side do some work.
Here the liquor laws state that acceptable forms of ID for the purpose of purchasing alcohol must be gazetted. At present the only ID that can be used are a New Zealand driver's licence, a photo ID card issued by the Hospitality Association (only useful for buying booze), an NZ passport, or a current foreign passport. Service ID (eg: military or police) and firearms licences (which have photo and DoB) or any other ID is not acceptable, and there is no defence available if that is what was used to gain a person entry - as opposed to a faked ID of an accepted form.
Black humour is natural, even healthy. Once you've finished your holier-than-thou anti-religion bullshit, go and smack yourself over the head with a reality stick. Hard. Please. For the good of humanity.
All your rant has done is show that you're a sanctimonious prick with nothing better to do than preach to the rest of us. Get back to your hole and get some experience in dealing with death, then return and tell us how horribly insenstive you are. Better still, go hang out with some fire fighters for a few shifts. Reckon you've got the testicular fortitude to tell them off for "crispy critter" jokes after a fatal fire? No, didn't think so.
I realise that the US is rather larger than NZ, but you can break the process down into small batches. Even California could be done with OCR'd paper ballots if the polling stations were set to cover sufficiently small geographic areas.
This electronic voting thing comes across as technology for technology's sake rather than a desperate need to fix something - well, other than this stupid punch card system. I mean, WTF/strong?!
When the agreement is fully in effect, which will be sometime around 2017 IMMIC, its gross effect on the Australian economy will be an increase of 0.5% of current GDP. What a complete and utter fucking waste of time!
What's more terrifying is that the AUS-FTA is the likely shape of agreements hammered out with other nations in the future, and NZ is likely to be one of those nations at some point in the future. BOHICA
Microsoft is the largest "soft" IP company (that is, they aren't known for making tangibles), and it's half the size of IBM. Microsoft is also roughly four times the size of the entire Hollywood movie industry. It's half the size of IBM, which in turn is: half the size of General Motors; a third the size of WalMart; a quarter the size of ExxonMobil.
The xxAA side of the entertainment industry could curl up and die tomorrow and the US economy would barely notice. The music and movie industries combined (roughly USD21b in 2004) don't equate to Sun and Apple together, never mind the dozens of individual companies that turn over many multiples of that figure.
Female airline captains at airlines who run 747's and A340's as passenger aircraft, and they're captains of those?
And, by the same token, airline captains of same with only three or four years of experience? I'm calling bullshit.
There are few people more exhaustively trained, reviewed, trained some more, and then given a bit more training for the hell of it, than the men (currently, but it won't be too long before some women have enough time under their belts) who are in command of large passenger aircraft. They have decades of experience before even being considered, and spend an huge amount of time in simulators running through any number of possible emergency situations.
There's a reason people trust them, and it's not because we think they know what they're doing. It's that, like a consulting neurosurgeon, the simple fact that they are in that position means that they're in the top fraction of a percent of their profession.
Oh, sorry, that's right, in the US workers HAVE NO RIGHTS!
Don't blame government employees for having it good, go chase one of your elected representatives (who are meant to work for YOU) and get legislation passed requiring that you be treated as something better than a sub-human wage slave. Your at-will employment system is a total joke - ever noticed that no other western country has anything like it?
$23.45?! I mean, come on people, if you're going to pull a number out of your arse at least make it look semi-random!
Based on today's exchange rate of 0.682, that's USD1.364million per life, or USD66.836billion on 1998's figure of 49,000 road deaths. Bumped up to the GP's 400,000, that's USD546b over 10 years. The single-year figures make the WTC look pretty cheap, and when you blow it up to 10 years the numbers make the WTC look like Monopoly money.
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
This is yet another example, though admittedly it's better than a lot of what's already in existence.
Here in NZ, we've had a Privacy Act for 15 years, and it's stronger than this proposal. You have a right-to-access-and-correct information held by any organisation, even the Government, for example. Getting a credit card or a loan is not a licence for the bank to sell your name and address to a dozen different direct-advertising agencies. Buying something on HP will not require you to purchase a larger mailbox just to cope with the influx of targeted mail.
If you allow the corporations to define the rules of the game, you are fair game. I'd hate to live in a society where any company that has my details can sell them.
Oh, and to the people who say that this exceeds the authority of the federal government, surely this is an inter-state commerce matter? A uniform set of rules under which you may be fucked over by corporations sounds like inter-state commerce regulation to me.