We resumed the hostilities suspended in 1992, because Saddam Hussein failed to fulfill his cease-fire obligations and our patience finally ran out. Yes, we should've done it earlier, but Bill Clinton was not the kind...
the US young service men and women I feel sorry for.
Yeah, the "sophisticated" (but impotent) Europe might be understanding it, but here in America we have a distinct dislike for mad dictators. Why, some of us even still subscribe to the doctrine of that previous adorable President from Chicago:
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
It is a shame, which Obama is finally beginning to rectify. Unfortunately, I doubt he'll succeed — not for lack of trying, but simply due to incompetence of a man, who never ran anything successful until his own election campaigns. Maybe, his spectacular failure will inoculate Americans against his kind of approach for a few decades — the way Jimmy Carter's presidency did in its time...
It's highly unlikely that the world can safely produce almost five times as much electricity by 2035 as it does now—which is what it would take to provide everyone with a circa-2010 American standard of living
In 1890 a similar egg-head "predicted", Manhattan will be feet-deep in horse manure by 1930. A similar prediction was made for London of 1950 — the number of horses required to bring in supplies necessary for the growing population and its growing demands was calculated, along with the amount of excrement the beasts produced. The volume was then divided by the area of the city's streets to produce the depth of "coverage". An easy mathematical problem, a high-schooler solve it, so it had to be correct — and any attempts to argue against the conclusions were, of course, "anti-science".
Of course, as we know now, the automobile arrived to save the environment. But the fear-mongering did not cease...
Why exactly is humanity "highly unlikely" to be producing as much electricity as it wants to by 2035? Even today's technologies allow for that, and in 20 years we are bound to see improvements in both electricity production (higher) and consumption (lower).
I for one refuse to feel guilty about my recreation.
Yeah. "Recent additions" to a language over 20 years old... Sorry, not for me.
I've seen far too many little mistakes caused by forgetting some detail that could easily have been automated in a C++ program.
From my experience, the very skill required to make use of these finer parts of the language obviate the need for most of the advantages any way.
In other words, yes, an expert programmer may make some fancy use of a feature, but he'd also be able to do the same with plain C. Meanwhile, it remains very easy for a bad programmer to unwittingly introduce enough memory copying (where passing a pointer would've sufficed) or otherwise use constructs with substantial run-time cost, to make the whole of a program too memory-hungry and slow...
I'd argue, that the primary usefulness of C++ is for large developer-groups, where at least some programmers have vastly lower experience. It helps compartmentalize various things and hide internals. This is not all that useful, when the software project at hand is an operating system kernel — newbies should not be messing with that to begin with.
The other benefit of C++ — stricter compiler, which will flag various problems at compile time — is rather marginal, because commonly used C-compilers (clang, gcc) can be (and are) asked to do the same flagging as well. For example, here are the warning-flags used by my FreeBSD system to build its kernel: -Wall -Wredundant-decls -Wnested-externs -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Winline -Wcast-qual -Wundef -Wno-pointer-sign -Wmissing-include-dirs...
I can tell you that Asians aren't known for criminality like young male blacks are.
Well, there you go... If Asians aren't known for criminality, but (male) Blacks are — is it evidence of racism or of something genuinely wrong with the young male Blacks? Such as, for example, the horrendous rate of kids Black kids growing up without fathers (17% for Asians, 25% for Whites, 67% for Blacks)?
I posted it. You didn't accept it.
I could not accept it, because I could not access it...
Hell, I pointed out that the studies show that being young/male is a bigger factor than being black.
That would seem to support my argument — that the "racism" of law-enforcement is not to blame. But, again, I can not "accept" it without reading it...
community organizer is the role in which Obama belongs
It is also a play on the Democrat's own sneer against the previous President: Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot (bumper stickers still available).
I think, mine has more class to it, though. As do most things Republican...
I can not open the actual document without paying for it — only the summary is available.
"(1) young black males are sentenced more harshly than any other group, (2) race is most influential in the sentencing of younger rather than older males, (3) the influence of offender's age on sentencing is greater among males than females, and (4) the main effects of race, gender, and age are more modest compared to the very large differences in sentencing outcomes across certain age-race-gender combinations."
It may very well be, the harsher-sentenced folks really do commit "harsher" crimes — or under more judge-infuriating circumstances (such as with particular brutality or against a particularly sympathetic victim, under influence of drugs, or by being repeat offenders). Also, being poorer on average, they might be unable to secure as good a lawyer.
The giant elephant in the room, which various race-baiters refuse to acknowledge, is that Asians should be just as much (if not more) a target of the "Whitey" racism as Blacks. And yet, there aren't even any allegations of them being targeted by neither cops nor judges. They also study so well, some universities even choose to impose harsher requirements on them to get a more "balanced" student body (a truly racist practice too)...
So, no — until I see actual statistics showing certain races punished harsher for the same crimes, I'm not going to accept that assertion on face-value. My comment demanding proof was downmodded and OP's is currently at "5 Insightful" — which means, lots of people saw the exchange, but not one was able to offer the evidence I asked for... Not one person.
Well, if you are unable to substantiate your assertions, then don't be surprised, if your arguments are summarily discarded — with prejudice and even an occasional glee.
I did not include the link in an attempt to provide statistics.
Right, you didn't. Out of politeness, I assumed, that you tried to, but failed...
so much evidence that had been published in so many years
Once again, if "so much evidence" really existed, you would've had no problem offering links to some of it. Yet, you did not. The most obvious reason is — no such evidence actually exists. Thanks for playing.
No. It is about race, in a significant number of cases. Just look at the statistics of people open carrying (or people getting shot at).
Your attempt to include links to such statistics failed. Please, try again. Be sure, your links point to differences between ratios of law-breakers vs. prosecutions by race. Any pointers comparing ratios populations vs. prosecutions are meaningless and will be discarded.
In the specific case of John Crawford (RIP), the poor guy that got shot down while carrying a toy gun to the cash register
A single case does not make for statistics.
but there is a clear distinction in attitude and partial/subjective enforcement of the law that still crosses racial lines
If it were "clear", you would've had no problems substantiating it with links to evidence...
You know that FBI Director Comer, the guy that started this BS a couple of days ago is a Republican, right?? The only thing I blame Obama for is appointing Republicans, as cover, to defense, security and law enforcement posts.
Except, the person quoted by TFA is Eric Holder, who is as Democrat as it can possibly get...
We have to make the laws that are reasonable to our time.
Sure. The point was, for any such laws to be valid, the Second Amendment has to be abolished (or altered) first. Hardly unheard of — the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, was repealed by the Twenty-first, for example.
Make arguments, please, that are really arguments, rather than hiding behind a document
I am making a legal argument, and I'm referencing (not "hiding behind" — whatever that means) a legal document — the Constitution.
Does it make sense now for individuals to buy and sell full-auto weapons? "Assault rifles"? Flamethrowers? Surface-to-air missles? What are the real distinctions?
As long as the Second Amendment is in effect, there are no distinctions. If you feel there should be, you need to discard (or reword) the Amendment — until then, any and all weapons are, indeed, legal under the Constitution.
deeply-confused gun-nuts who thinks that banning guns designed for mass murder means banning defensive guns.
I don't see, where in the Second Amendment there is any distinction made. An 18-century cannon fired at the right target would be no less devastating ("mass-murderous"), than an M-16 today. Yet, the Constitution makes no exceptions — any arms can kept and any can be born.
If you wish to see any such limitations added, you should be arguing for abolishing the Amendment — not violating it, as is common practice now.
But, if limiting the weapons "designed for mass murder" were indeed the goal, why are the brass knuckles and "bladed weapons" illegal anywhere? I mentioned this mystery in the post you replied to, but you chose to bring up "mass murder" anyway — which means, you are not merely mistaken here, but are a liar (or, indeed, simply a troll).
Do you somehow find yourself aggrieved by not being able to carry a sword with you?
The point was to demonstrate, that people harping on "assault weapons" and seek to limit the size of a magazine, are fools or liars. As are those, who try to limit the Second Amendment protection to the sort of weaponry available when the Amendment was written.
I should think there's very little call for walking around with a sword.
I should think, it is none of your business. Whether there is such "call" or not, as long as the Second Amendment is in effect, no local ordinances can (legally) ban any arms — certainly not those, which were in wide use, when the Amendment was written
That said, the brass knuckles, which I listed in the same sentence, remain quite convenient to carry — and will not harm your toddler, should he find them (another oft-repeated argument against firearms) — yet, you chose to ignore them completely...
I thus doubt your honesty and sincerity here and am unlikely to respond again.
But in the mind of libertarian nutball Cody Wilson
Instead of calling people names, why don't you and yours simply campaign to abolish the Second Amendment altogether? If we read the First the same way we are told to read the Second, our freedom of speech too would be limited to "petitioning the government" — and only for "redress of grievances". Oh, and only after a "cool-down" period.
"Assault firearms" my foot — you can't even carry a freaking sword or brass-knuckles in many parts of the country nowadays. If only the British kept those blades away from Patrick Henry and his "nutball" cohorts!
Not much. RedHat/CentOS dominate — and they are vulnerable...
It is also an OSX bug, an HPUX bug, a vxWorks bug, and, well, really, a bug in any OS that has bash installed
Not quite. Merely having it installed is not enough. Placing it into the all-important role of/bin/sh — that is what makes it particularly dangerous — and a bug of whatever OS does such a thing.
You may have all your CGI-scripts written in Perl or Lisp, but if you use system() anywhere to spawn off a different program, then you are exposed to this problem on those systems.
Whether or not Ubuntu and CentOS are different OSes or just different distributions, is a matter of semantics...
Neither bug was a Linux bug, though both affected Linux systems
Arguably, the bug in Linux was in that it chose to use a program as large and complicated as bash as its idea of/bin/sh.
Though bash is, of course, available on all other OSes, no one else makes it the interpreter behind most of the system's own scripts as well as the system(3) function.
FAA has a monopoly on hiring air traffic controllers
Yes, and Pentagon has a monopoly power to hire soldiers. It is a governmental organization and any government is a monopoly by definition (which is a good reason to keep its responsibilities to a minimum, but that's another story).
Unions exist because a single employee does not have bargaining power against a corporation.
Which corporation were the air-traffic controllers bargaining with, when Reagan crushed them? Hint: public employees (be they air controllers or policemen) aren't struggling against any corporations — their employers are the taxpayers. They should not be allowed to unionize — and certainly, not strike:
strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Without them, we'd be working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week with no benefits.
Really? So, if we get the current abysmal union-membership to, say, above 80%, we'll only have to work one day a week? For 2 hours? Wouldn't that be great!!
People aren't the same as products.
People — workers — choose to sell their labor on the free market to the willing buyers. Any attempts to make that market not free should be met with the same energetic response Standard Oil and AT&T have encountered, when they tried to become a monopoly.
They have basic needs and human rights that we prefer them to have.
Any smart employer addresses basic needs of the workers — in order to keep them happy and thus more productive. No employer is allowed to violate human rights — unions or not...
Yeah.... but sanctions really only send a message in the moment you apply them...
There, there. "It is complicated"... GP was accusing RethugliKKKans of wanting to end sanctions against Russia in exchange for oil. You seem to be supporting such a maneuver.
Also it doesn't make sense to carry a grudge forever... Sometimes it's better to just move along.
Any sanctions imposed in retaliation for a certain deed — such as Russia's invasion into Afghanistan, Georgia or Ukraine — must last until the deed is reversed.
Lifting the punishment prematurely — as Obama did in 2010 — simply sends the aggressor the following signal: outlast the current American Administration and you can keep, whatever you gained. Had Obama kept (and ratcheted up) the pressure on Russia instead of lifting the sanctions, imposing new ones over Russian attack on Ukraine might even have been necessary — for no such attack would've taken place...
There was no other "beef" with him — unlike Iran, Libya did not seek nuclear weapons, nor was it providing anything better than "moral" support to any other terrorists.
That Obama — eager to show, that the sophisticated progressives can fight wars better, than the oil-thirsty KKKonservatives — chose to attack Mr. Ghadaffi anyway, was shameful treachery, which is bound to make any future "conversions" of foreign tyrants that much harder...
Time until Republicans start saying "Lift sanctions" 5...4..3..2...1
Last time it was your boy-wonder, who lifted the sanctions against Russia... Abandoning American ally Georgia for the sake of Putin's help against Iran. Ha-ha — much good did it do then...
Slashdot Mirror
We resumed the hostilities suspended in 1992, because Saddam Hussein failed to fulfill his cease-fire obligations and our patience finally ran out. Yes, we should've done it earlier, but Bill Clinton was not the kind...
Yeah, the "sophisticated" (but impotent) Europe might be understanding it, but here in America we have a distinct dislike for mad dictators. Why, some of us even still subscribe to the doctrine of that previous adorable President from Chicago:
By withdrawing from Iraq too early, we failed the Iraqis. The fault, however, is not in invading in the first place, but in electing an incompetent "community organizer" to Presidency on account of his race — with a lunatic providing "foreign policy expertise"...
It is a shame, which Obama is finally beginning to rectify. Unfortunately, I doubt he'll succeed — not for lack of trying, but simply due to incompetence of a man, who never ran anything successful until his own election campaigns. Maybe, his spectacular failure will inoculate Americans against his kind of approach for a few decades — the way Jimmy Carter's presidency did in its time...
Because we — and our allies — were being attacked.
Or do you suppose, the attacks will cease as soon as we apologize to everyone, who feels slighted?
In 1890 a similar egg-head "predicted", Manhattan will be feet-deep in horse manure by 1930. A similar prediction was made for London of 1950 — the number of horses required to bring in supplies necessary for the growing population and its growing demands was calculated, along with the amount of excrement the beasts produced. The volume was then divided by the area of the city's streets to produce the depth of "coverage". An easy mathematical problem, a high-schooler solve it, so it had to be correct — and any attempts to argue against the conclusions were, of course, "anti-science".
Of course, as we know now, the automobile arrived to save the environment. But the fear-mongering did not cease...
Why exactly is humanity "highly unlikely" to be producing as much electricity as it wants to by 2035? Even today's technologies allow for that, and in 20 years we are bound to see improvements in both electricity production (higher) and consumption (lower).
I for one refuse to feel guilty about my recreation.
Yeah. "Recent additions" to a language over 20 years old... Sorry, not for me.
From my experience, the very skill required to make use of these finer parts of the language obviate the need for most of the advantages any way.
In other words, yes, an expert programmer may make some fancy use of a feature, but he'd also be able to do the same with plain C. Meanwhile, it remains very easy for a bad programmer to unwittingly introduce enough memory copying (where passing a pointer would've sufficed) or otherwise use constructs with substantial run-time cost, to make the whole of a program too memory-hungry and slow...
I'd argue, that the primary usefulness of C++ is for large developer-groups, where at least some programmers have vastly lower experience. It helps compartmentalize various things and hide internals. This is not all that useful, when the software project at hand is an operating system kernel — newbies should not be messing with that to begin with.
The other benefit of C++ — stricter compiler, which will flag various problems at compile time — is rather marginal, because commonly used C-compilers (clang, gcc) can be (and are) asked to do the same flagging as well. For example, here are the warning-flags used by my FreeBSD system to build its kernel: -Wall -Wredundant-decls -Wnested-externs -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Winline -Wcast-qual -Wundef -Wno-pointer-sign -Wmissing-include-dirs...
Well, there you go... If Asians aren't known for criminality, but (male) Blacks are — is it evidence of racism or of something genuinely wrong with the young male Blacks? Such as, for example, the horrendous rate of kids Black kids growing up without fathers (17% for Asians, 25% for Whites, 67% for Blacks)?
I could not accept it, because I could not access it...
That would seem to support my argument — that the "racism" of law-enforcement is not to blame. But, again, I can not "accept" it without reading it...
It is also a play on the Democrat's own sneer against the previous President: Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot (bumper stickers still available).
I think, mine has more class to it, though. As do most things Republican...
I can not open the actual document without paying for it — only the summary is available.
It may very well be, the harsher-sentenced folks really do commit "harsher" crimes — or under more judge-infuriating circumstances (such as with particular brutality or against a particularly sympathetic victim, under influence of drugs, or by being repeat offenders). Also, being poorer on average, they might be unable to secure as good a lawyer.
The giant elephant in the room, which various race-baiters refuse to acknowledge, is that Asians should be just as much (if not more) a target of the "Whitey" racism as Blacks. And yet, there aren't even any allegations of them being targeted by neither cops nor judges. They also study so well, some universities even choose to impose harsher requirements on them to get a more "balanced" student body (a truly racist practice too)...
So, no — until I see actual statistics showing certain races punished harsher for the same crimes, I'm not going to accept that assertion on face-value. My comment demanding proof was downmodded and OP's is currently at "5 Insightful" — which means, lots of people saw the exchange, but not one was able to offer the evidence I asked for... Not one person.
Well, if you are unable to substantiate your assertions, then don't be surprised, if your arguments are summarily discarded — with prejudice and even an occasional glee.
I would have thought, Hans Christian Andersen took care of this particular line of reasoning 200 years ago or so...
Right, you didn't. Out of politeness, I assumed, that you tried to, but failed...
Once again, if "so much evidence" really existed, you would've had no problem offering links to some of it. Yet, you did not. The most obvious reason is — no such evidence actually exists. Thanks for playing.
Your attempt to include links to such statistics failed. Please, try again. Be sure, your links point to differences between ratios of law-breakers vs. prosecutions by race. Any pointers comparing ratios populations vs. prosecutions are meaningless and will be discarded.
A single case does not make for statistics.
If it were "clear", you would've had no problems substantiating it with links to evidence...
Except, the person quoted by TFA is Eric Holder, who is as Democrat as it can possibly get...
Off-topic much?
In a way pornography is consistent with the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Heck, much better than that: any militia — well-regulated or otherwise — can use such a rifle whether or not it has serial number.
Nope, there until the Thirteenth Amendment.
Nope, the Constitution was silent on the matter until the Nineteenth Amendment.
Sure. The point was, for any such laws to be valid, the Second Amendment has to be abolished (or altered) first. Hardly unheard of — the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, was repealed by the Twenty-first, for example.
I am making a legal argument, and I'm referencing (not "hiding behind" — whatever that means) a legal document — the Constitution.
As long as the Second Amendment is in effect, there are no distinctions. If you feel there should be, you need to discard (or reword) the Amendment — until then, any and all weapons are, indeed, legal under the Constitution.
I don't see, where in the Second Amendment there is any distinction made. An 18-century cannon fired at the right target would be no less devastating ("mass-murderous"), than an M-16 today. Yet, the Constitution makes no exceptions — any arms can kept and any can be born.
If you wish to see any such limitations added, you should be arguing for abolishing the Amendment — not violating it, as is common practice now.
But, if limiting the weapons "designed for mass murder" were indeed the goal, why are the brass knuckles and "bladed weapons" illegal anywhere? I mentioned this mystery in the post you replied to, but you chose to bring up "mass murder" anyway — which means, you are not merely mistaken here, but are a liar (or, indeed, simply a troll).
The point was to demonstrate, that people harping on "assault weapons" and seek to limit the size of a magazine, are fools or liars. As are those, who try to limit the Second Amendment protection to the sort of weaponry available when the Amendment was written.
I should think, it is none of your business. Whether there is such "call" or not, as long as the Second Amendment is in effect, no local ordinances can (legally) ban any arms — certainly not those, which were in wide use, when the Amendment was written
That said, the brass knuckles, which I listed in the same sentence, remain quite convenient to carry — and will not harm your toddler, should he find them (another oft-repeated argument against firearms) — yet, you chose to ignore them completely...
I thus doubt your honesty and sincerity here and am unlikely to respond again.
Instead of calling people names, why don't you and yours simply campaign to abolish the Second Amendment altogether? If we read the First the same way we are told to read the Second, our freedom of speech too would be limited to "petitioning the government" — and only for "redress of grievances". Oh, and only after a "cool-down" period.
"Assault firearms" my foot — you can't even carry a freaking sword or brass-knuckles in many parts of the country nowadays. If only the British kept those blades away from Patrick Henry and his "nutball" cohorts!
Not much. RedHat/CentOS dominate — and they are vulnerable...
Not quite. Merely having it installed is not enough. Placing it into the all-important role of /bin/sh — that is what makes it particularly dangerous — and a bug of whatever OS does such a thing.
You may have all your CGI-scripts written in Perl or Lisp, but if you use system() anywhere to spawn off a different program, then you are exposed to this problem on those systems.
Whether or not Ubuntu and CentOS are different OSes or just different distributions, is a matter of semantics...
Yep.
What is the market share of your Linux-distribution?
It absolutely is a bash bug, yes. It is also a bug in any Linux, that makes it /bin/sh.
Oh, it has plenty to do with Linux, because if you happen to use that OS, even putting the #!/bin/sh at the top still makes you vulnerable. Observe:
I said that already, you chose to ignore it for some reason...
And then, of course, comes the system(3) call, which invokes /bin/sh too...
Arguably, the bug in Linux was in that it chose to use a program as large and complicated as bash as its idea of /bin/sh.
Though bash is, of course, available on all other OSes, no one else makes it the interpreter behind most of the system's own scripts as well as the system(3) function.
You only need one island — no matter, how small — to make a claim.
So do we. As long as we aren't attacking anyone, but simply building a peaceful house, there is no fighting...
Yeah, sure. It is all about me... Ad hominem much? BTW, you misspelled the "neo-KKKonz"...
Yes, and Pentagon has a monopoly power to hire soldiers. It is a governmental organization and any government is a monopoly by definition (which is a good reason to keep its responsibilities to a minimum, but that's another story).
Which corporation were the air-traffic controllers bargaining with, when Reagan crushed them? Hint: public employees (be they air controllers or policemen) aren't struggling against any corporations — their employers are the taxpayers. They should not be allowed to unionize — and certainly, not strike:
Really? So, if we get the current abysmal union-membership to, say, above 80%, we'll only have to work one day a week? For 2 hours? Wouldn't that be great!!
People — workers — choose to sell their labor on the free market to the willing buyers. Any attempts to make that market not free should be met with the same energetic response Standard Oil and AT&T have encountered, when they tried to become a monopoly.
Any smart employer addresses basic needs of the workers — in order to keep them happy and thus more productive. No employer is allowed to violate human rights — unions or not...
There, there. "It is complicated"... GP was accusing RethugliKKKans of wanting to end sanctions against Russia in exchange for oil. You seem to be supporting such a maneuver.
Any sanctions imposed in retaliation for a certain deed — such as Russia's invasion into Afghanistan, Georgia or Ukraine — must last until the deed is reversed.
Lifting the punishment prematurely — as Obama did in 2010 — simply sends the aggressor the following signal: outlast the current American Administration and you can keep, whatever you gained. Had Obama kept (and ratcheted up) the pressure on Russia instead of lifting the sanctions, imposing new ones over Russian attack on Ukraine might even have been necessary — for no such attack would've taken place...
It was not "free". In order to "get out of jail", Qaddafi had to acknowledge Libya being behind the Lockerbie bombing, and pay restitution to the victims' kin. That was, what was demanded of him and he complied (shortly after seeing Saddam Hussein being pulled from a hiding hole).
There was no other "beef" with him — unlike Iran, Libya did not seek nuclear weapons, nor was it providing anything better than "moral" support to any other terrorists.
That Obama — eager to show, that the sophisticated progressives can fight wars better, than the oil-thirsty KKKonservatives — chose to attack Mr. Ghadaffi anyway, was shameful treachery, which is bound to make any future "conversions" of foreign tyrants that much harder...
Last time it was your boy-wonder, who lifted the sanctions against Russia... Abandoning American ally Georgia for the sake of Putin's help against Iran. Ha-ha — much good did it do then...