How about a cat that doesn't shed, a cat that sleeps AT NIGHT instead of during the day, a cat that doesn't s**t behind the couch when you piss it off, a cat that is hairball resistant, a cat that doesn't care if the bowl isn't exactly full, a cat that can actually decide if it wants to be inside or outside (as opposed to wanting both simultaneously), a cat that views keyboards as natural preditors, a cat that will not release any "presents" in the house until said "gift" is completely DEAD, a cat that will actually kill said "gifts" that get into your house by other means, a cat that'll bring home USEFUL things instead of the typical birds, rabbits, mice, frogs... a new lawnmower would be nice once in awhile, or maybe some PC hardware - but no, it's always half-dead stuff.
Or maybe it's that we evolved with the rest of the animal kingdom living in the great outdoors, where vast volumes of relatively clean air tend to move through our personal space and dilute the levels of particulates in the air, and we aren't used to having such a high concentration of animal dander and other things getting into our lungs on a daily basis. If you think about it, it's really only within the last century or so that we've started developing buildings that are basically airtight. No drafty doors or open windows to transfer air from outside. As the air quality experts say, the air in your home these days is about 5 times as dirty as anything outside, even in areas with poor air quality.
Here's something no one seems to think about. If we find that the "man" and "woman" part of marriage is subject to change, then there is nothing to prevent people from making the same argument to "two".
Yeah, and? What, would the world be destroyed if some people decided to practice polygamy? Last time I checked polygamy was still active in parts of the world, and going on behind the scenes in a lot of places where it's supposedly illegal. In other words, in many cases the so-called monogamous marriage is a sham. If polygamy were to become legal the world would certainly change, but it wouldn't come to a sudden, abrupt end.
When marriage becomes meaningless, the family's disintegratation is hastened.
That last part is called an "opinion". More accurately, you could say the disintegration of your definition of family may be hastened. Another opinion might be that if the definition of marriage changes then the definition of family changes along with it. Extending that, the mere fact that people are actively living together and sharing the burden of life as a family unit should be enough to get some sort of benefit. It shouldn't matter what gender or genders they are, and if medical care and insurance wasn't so astronomically expensive we wouldn't have to worry so much about people "abusing" the system to get their basic health and insurance needs.
p.s. Abortion is easy: No abortion? One (in theory) harmed. Abortion? One harmed, one dead.
Yeah, except for those cases where no abortion = one or two dead from complications. Ever think about that? The world is not black and white. Yours is one of those answers that is straightforward, simple, and wrong.
One, at least some of the attackers WOULD have been caught long before the attacks of the agents investigating them had been given the authorization to proceed. It was clear at that point what they were up to,
Some may have been caught, but I doubt things were clear enough at that point to catch enough of them to make any real difference in the final outcome.
and at that point it would have been relatively easy to clean up the rest of that particular plot, or at least prevent it from proceeding.
Remember we're dealing with fanatics here, catching one doesn't necessarily lead to catching more. They tend not to "spill their guts" as soon as you get them down to the station. So I still disagree on this. Unless they were all dumb enough to be clearly associated with each other in a clearly outlined plot. Maybe they were, I don't know enough details about it. If they were that dumb, I'm wrong, and they should have all been caught. But if that were the case there shouldn't have even been the usual illogical reason to support the Patriot Act.
Two, realistically, the only reason the hijackings worked was that people expected the old "be quiet and we'll all land safely" arrangement that had been the case in past hijackings. Once people realize that's not the case they'll jump the attackers, weapons or no. That's what happened on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.
Agreed, attitude is a large part of it, but most people will still find difficulty taking down an armed attacker without any arms of their own, especially if they will be endangering a hostage in the process. If every fourth person on the plane has a projectile weapon, taser or stun gun, they will be much less likely to hesitate in applying force.
Not that letting people arm themselves for protection is necessarily a bad idea.
Agreed. I think tasers would be great. They've got some 20 feet of effective reach, they're non-lethal and can't punch a hole in the plane. Stun guns would be almost as good in such close quarters. Firearms should probably still be in checked baggage since you can just whip one out and start shooting people or blowing out windows.
I also think the Israeli solution of sealing the cockpit off from the passenger compartment entirely would be good and simple.
Agreed, and I wonder how many decades it will be before people will realize that that sort of thing is one of the only effective protections and is therefore necessary. People in civilized nations are just too used to being sheep.
There was little need for the Patriot Act besides; had our normal law-enforcement apparatus been functioning as designed, the 9/11 hijackers would have been caught.
A couple of them might have been caught if the FBI had been paying attention, but they all had perfectly valid passports and last I checked they weren't doing anything illegal when they boarded the planes. This is not a good argument against the Patriot Act. The argument against the Patriot Act is the opposite. It's the fact that the Patriot Act doesn't increase the likelyhood of catching people like that, because it's impossible to catch most people like that.
Unless you can see into the future or read minds, you cannot stop dedicated individual fanatics that are willing to trade their life to acheive their goals. The only way to stop those people completely would be to eject all dark-skinned people from the United States (and no, I don't find this an acceptable solution). Even then you will wind up with whites who pick up the cause and become fanatics in the same way. It's human nature. Thus with the Patriot Act we give up certain rights and gain zero security.
Actually, there is another way in which the hijackers could have been stopped: make sure that a large portion of the population is armed and allow them to carry those arms onto the plane. Which is of course exactly the opposite of what we've been doing. We strip search everyone to make absolutely certain they are unarmed, and thus vulnerable to ANY possible aggression that occurs aboard the plane. Of course we include the pilots, making sure they can't defend themselves, and we still don't put any sky marshals on board. My God, the sky marshals would have to carry weapons! What a horrible thought. A weapon on board a plane. Tsk tsk, can't have that. Only criminals have weapons.
Anyone else having trouble with Firefox and links lately? I'm using 1.0PR and this ikobo.com website is one of a handful of sites where I go and try to click on the links and nothing happens. None of the links on the page work. I have to keep loading things in a new tab, and then the links on that page don't work either.
I have adblock running but disabling it doesn't seem to make any difference. These aren't those weird links with nothing but a "#" symbol that only IE seems to be able to open. They're perfectly normal links, they just don't work in Firefox.
Anyone else having this problem when you go to ikobo.com? It's incredibly frustrating.
Yeah, amusing, but remember the micro-sized Orange Catholic Bible that Doctor Yueh gave to Paul Atreides in Dune? Thousands of unabridged pages in something the size of a matchbox, with some kind of device in the casing to help you open it to the correct page, and a magnifier to allow you to read the micro-printing. This nano-fabric is one more step to making that little book a reality. In 30 years, not 3,000.
I remember also there was mention of some kind of sheets of superstrong crystal material that they used for long-term archiving of documents. This may also be a step in that direction.
Sometimes life really is amazing. What's next, a working 'thopter?
Ok you wait in line to have your passport checked. I will happily go threw the reader with my passport safely on my person. With a little green light that says it is OK for me to enter the US or even other countries.
Wow. So if I clonk you over the head and take your passport, or even just cut your RFID out of it, I can get into the US without anyone bothering to confirm my identity? Hell, I can just bump into you with an RFID scanner and not even touch your passport, and with the right resources make a copy of your RFID signal and gallavant right through border security checkpoints. No problem, because the electronic signal proves I'm you, so it's perfectly safe for me to be let into any country without any further checks!
Sweet. Why don't you just paint a target on the back of every American's head while you're at it? Put a sign on our back that says, "Steal my passport, it's worth its weight in gold because you won't even have to modify the photo to get into the US!"
Your convenience is not important enough to get me killed. What scares me most is that there's a mod here who actually thought what you said was insightful! I hope to God you were at least trying to be facetious, but you do give the appearance of being serious.
You should have torn up his $20US right in front of him. Then while he's standing there speechless, say "Oh here, let me make it up to you," and pay him back with the equivalent amount in Euros (15.83Eu). Plus one Euro for his trouble, of course. Would have blown his little mind.
Why is it physically impossible to design VGA displays less than 2.4 inches? Too small pixels?
Because current LCD pixels require six lead lines, and we can't make lead lines small enough to shrink the pixels any further.
This is weird to me, because the Konica Minolta Dimage A2 has an electronic viewfinder (EVF, basically a small LCD screen) that's about half an inch diagonal with VGA resolution. That's been out since February or so. But maybe I'm missing something.
The parent is incorrect. The device sends out "off" codes, it will not turn any TV on, ever. It does not "toggle" the on/off state, it ONLY TURNS TVs OFF.
As others have pointed out a hundred times on this page already, most TV remotes have only one button that does toggle the on/off state of the TV, but built into the receiver on the TV are discrete codes for "on" and "off". This device only sends out the "off" codes for hundreds of different TVs. If it toggled the TV, why would they call it TV-B-Gone? They'd call it Fsck-with-the-TV-by-toggling-its-on-off-state.
When I'm in the airport, sometimes I *[DON'T] like* to watch CNN to catch up on what's been happening while I sit for 6 hours between connections. I was stranded overnight in [someplace], and let me tell you, I would have absolutely *gone off* on some sanctimonious jackass turning [ON] the tv I WASN'T blearily watching [as I tried to read my book/newspaper/sleep some more] to pass the time after sleeping on the floor the night before. I hope people like you carry around big signs to illustrate your pomposity, so I can clear out before being subjected to what you think I should be doing with my time.
Can my one-sided self-centered opinion also be modded insightful please? Seems to work for everyone else.
Correct except for OS X Server, which has a bigass long serial number that you must enter to use it. But, even that doesn't require "product activation" like every copy of Windows XP. And, I only have experience with the unlimited client edition of Server, the half-price 5-client version may have a different requirement.
Still vastly better than Microsoft. Regular OS X installs require no key, and if you don't set up your internet connection during the install process the survey never gets sent anywhere unless you choose to send it later on.
Yeah, their rates might go up, but would the rates for the rest of us go DOWN? Recently there was a law put into place where I live that makes not having proof of insurance in your vehicle an arrestable offence. With more people forced to buy insurance, the rates should have gone down slightly. After that law was passed the insurance companies apparently realized they had a captive audience. The rates soon went up by about 45%.
Insurance companies are thieves. I don't see why anyone should be supporting them getting more invasive access into any information about a person. It never results in rates that are more "fair", just added penalties for certain people, often depending on something totally nonsensical like hair color.
As for your "crime detection systems", apparently you don't realize that everyone and every vehicle doesn't fit in a little square box. What if you have a vehicle that you want to take on a racing track? Obviously you'd want to make it illegal to disable the crime detection equipment in your car, so you'd have to get a specially licensed vehicle for doing any racing even on a private track. Some people happen to own a lot of land, and they use it to take a vehicle out now and then and do crazy stuff. This would result in them getting an automated ticket from Big Brother.
No, sir. You do not have all the answers, and you better stay the hell away from my car. I'm sure I'm not alone in this sentiment. Does this sentiment make me a crazy-speeding-cracksmoking-drunkdriving lunatic driver? No. Most of us do obey the laws, and we don't need an electronic nanny sitting on our dashboard making sure we walk your line every day of our lives. Get over yourself.
And if we were to consider the possiblity of up to every gene interacting with each other, that would give us 20000!, or roughly 1.819e+77337 possibilities. (surprisingly enough, that didn't crash the windows calculator program, although it did take a second or two even on an A64)
Your computer may be fast, but your calculator program gave you the wrong result. I get 1.8192063202303451348276417569e+77337, which is obviously a much larger number.
I'm just going by what I saw a Swiss guy say here a couple years back, and it's the only thing that makes sense to me, which is that they have both the weapons and the ammo to go with it in their homes during their military terms. But of course both are regulated very closely by the government/military so they know at the end of your term that you haven't used them inappropriately for shooting up the neighborhood or hunting or something like that. They do have the guns, that much we know, but a gun without ammo is a very expensive paperweight. That just doesn't jive. If the Swiss want their people ready to fight, they will give them all the necessary tools, not half the necessary tools. I also get the feeling that he said they even keep things like tanks at home, but I can't confirm that. It wouldn't surprise me since that goes along with the Swiss idea of having every man ready to fight immediately. Also a great way to decentralize your weak points, kind of like the Internet.
You aren't a Constitutional Scholar, but your votes affect the way this country operates, so if you think what I've said is insightful please take it to heart and vote accordingly in the future. If not, well, it is a free country after all. When the war comes I'll be fighting by your side to protect your right to have a differing opinion.;)
[...] every adult male Swiss is required to have not only a gun, but something quite capable like an H-K stashed away in their closet. They don't get to keep the ammunition, but they are required to have that automatic weapon at the ready.
Exactly what use is a gun without bullets? Do you think if someone is going to attempt to overrun the Swiss they will give adequate warning for the citizenry to take their guns (paperweights) and line up at some central facility for bullet rationing? Wouldn't it be just as easy to hand out the guns at the same time? No, I don't think it works that way. I once read a post from a Swiss that mentioned that they do actually have ammunition in their homes along with the firearm. Anything else would make no sense. Of course they are in sealed packages and the military keeps close track on exactly how many cartridges you were given. If you give back less than that or an open package, you better have a damn good reason.
Can we restrict where you can take a gun? Why not -- the 2nd Amendment protects the right to own guns, not the right to wave them around.
The exact language is "keep and bear arms", I don't see how that can be interpreted except as giving the right to both own and carry a firearm. Private establishments of course will always have the right to refuse to let individuals onto the premesis with a firearm (or for any other reason they deem fit). But in public and on your own land --according to the Constitution-- there should be no laws restricting the owning, purchasing or carrying of a firearm.
Your other point is very good. A narrow interpretation of the 2nd Amendment can reflect negatively on the other amendments.
Can we bar felons from guns? We bar them from voting.
This part is offtopic and shouldn't have been included in the conversation. Restricting the rights of felons to vote has been left up to the states by the 14th Amendment, it's not a federal thing. There are many people who would class this activity as cruel and unusual punishment. Why should we punish a person for the rest of their lives, after they've served their sentence?
Most importantly, relating the restriction of voting with the restriction of gun ownership is exactly the kind of slippery-slope argument and false tying interpretation that you are arguing against. "We can already do this thing, so obviously it's acceptable do this other unrelated thing." Very dangerous thinking.
When it comes right down to it, there is nothing in the 2nd Amendment saying that felons can't own firearms. The language is very clear and simple. Felons are still people (they're even full citizens!) and "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". So unless you want to make them non-persons, I don't see how it can be interpreted as legal to restrict gun ownership by ex-felons, who have served out their punishment.
And secondarily, does not a felon still have an inalienable human right to self-defense? It makes no sense to continue punishing people after they have served the debt that society assigned to them. Punish the action, not the person. Give them some kind of hope for the future, so they don't just give up and continually revert to the criminal activities that are easiest for many of them to fall back on in hard times. Our treatment of ex-convicts throughout society is partially responsible for their lack of successful rehabilitation. I said "partially". People of course make their own choices, but they should always be assisted into making the right ones if possible.
Can we restrict the kind of gun? In my opinion, we can restrict the type of gun to what is reasonable to use in training and practicing shooting skills.
Exactly what good would that do? I'm honestly wondering how you can have this opinion. Do you really think the founders meant for the well regulated militia to carry around practice weapons? Then
You should save words like "asinine" for people who deserve it. This person's conclusion that "tabs are problematic" was merely a misunderstanding. This is quite common and a sign of ignorance of the underlying issue, but not asinine. Unless he sticks to his conclusion in the face of all arguments to the contrary, in which case he would be acting "stupid and obstinate" like an ass (of the four-legged variety). There are plenty of folks here for which the word is very fitting... don't waste it.
That doesn't solve anything unless you don't use tabs at all. Firefox already uses sheets. But sheets come out of the window, not the tab. Therefore you can't tell which tab called it up. It's the same as a detached dialog box, but cuter. Might solve things if you always use a separate window, but how many of us do that?
Last I checked the Firefox development numbers went batsh_t when 1.0PR came out. On the surface it's called 1.0, but apparently the developers are calling it 0.10.1 (you know, because 0.10 comes after 0.9, which makes oh so much sense).
You'll actually see that goofy number in some spots when you go looking for extensions. As if people weren't confused enough about the whole Firebird/Firefox/Thunderbird thing.
How is user education going to solve the problem? You saw how it worked. If you're not paying close attention how will you know which website popped up the dialog? You can't. They simply need to disable those kind of displays and use some other method to alert the user that a background window or tab wants something.
The other problem is just as bad. Several times now I've caught myself before typing in my username or password or a search into a field in a background tab, after the background tab finished loading and grabbed the focus away from the front tab with some Javascript. EBay does that a lot. Not good. The tabs just need to be more isolated from each other. Even the most technically "educated" of us have lapses in attention, and that's when these things can happen. I'm looking forward to seeing the Firefox people fixing this within a short time frame.
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How about a cat that doesn't shed, a cat that sleeps AT NIGHT instead of during the day, a cat that doesn't s**t behind the couch when you piss it off, a cat that is hairball resistant, a cat that doesn't care if the bowl isn't exactly full, a cat that can actually decide if it wants to be inside or outside (as opposed to wanting both simultaneously), a cat that views keyboards as natural preditors, a cat that will not release any "presents" in the house until said "gift" is completely DEAD, a cat that will actually kill said "gifts" that get into your house by other means, a cat that'll bring home USEFUL things instead of the typical birds, rabbits, mice, frogs... a new lawnmower would be nice once in awhile, or maybe some PC hardware - but no, it's always half-dead stuff.
AKA, a dog.
Or maybe it's that we evolved with the rest of the animal kingdom living in the great outdoors, where vast volumes of relatively clean air tend to move through our personal space and dilute the levels of particulates in the air, and we aren't used to having such a high concentration of animal dander and other things getting into our lungs on a daily basis. If you think about it, it's really only within the last century or so that we've started developing buildings that are basically airtight. No drafty doors or open windows to transfer air from outside. As the air quality experts say, the air in your home these days is about 5 times as dirty as anything outside, even in areas with poor air quality.
If that's your basis for comparison then according to the RIAA my dual 867MHz machine gets 1,664.64 hours of uptime per day! Sweet.
Here's something no one seems to think about. If we find that the "man" and "woman" part of marriage is subject to change, then there is nothing to prevent people from making the same argument to "two".
Yeah, and? What, would the world be destroyed if some people decided to practice polygamy? Last time I checked polygamy was still active in parts of the world, and going on behind the scenes in a lot of places where it's supposedly illegal. In other words, in many cases the so-called monogamous marriage is a sham. If polygamy were to become legal the world would certainly change, but it wouldn't come to a sudden, abrupt end.
When marriage becomes meaningless, the family's disintegratation is hastened.
That last part is called an "opinion". More accurately, you could say the disintegration of your definition of family may be hastened. Another opinion might be that if the definition of marriage changes then the definition of family changes along with it. Extending that, the mere fact that people are actively living together and sharing the burden of life as a family unit should be enough to get some sort of benefit. It shouldn't matter what gender or genders they are, and if medical care and insurance wasn't so astronomically expensive we wouldn't have to worry so much about people "abusing" the system to get their basic health and insurance needs.
p.s. Abortion is easy: No abortion? One (in theory) harmed. Abortion? One harmed, one dead.
Yeah, except for those cases where no abortion = one or two dead from complications. Ever think about that? The world is not black and white. Yours is one of those answers that is straightforward, simple, and wrong.
One, at least some of the attackers WOULD have been caught long before the attacks of the agents investigating them had been given the authorization to proceed. It was clear at that point what they were up to,
Some may have been caught, but I doubt things were clear enough at that point to catch enough of them to make any real difference in the final outcome.
and at that point it would have been relatively easy to clean up the rest of that particular plot, or at least prevent it from proceeding.
Remember we're dealing with fanatics here, catching one doesn't necessarily lead to catching more. They tend not to "spill their guts" as soon as you get them down to the station. So I still disagree on this. Unless they were all dumb enough to be clearly associated with each other in a clearly outlined plot. Maybe they were, I don't know enough details about it. If they were that dumb, I'm wrong, and they should have all been caught. But if that were the case there shouldn't have even been the usual illogical reason to support the Patriot Act.
Two, realistically, the only reason the hijackings worked was that people expected the old "be quiet and we'll all land safely" arrangement that had been the case in past hijackings. Once people realize that's not the case they'll jump the attackers, weapons or no. That's what happened on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.
Agreed, attitude is a large part of it, but most people will still find difficulty taking down an armed attacker without any arms of their own, especially if they will be endangering a hostage in the process. If every fourth person on the plane has a projectile weapon, taser or stun gun, they will be much less likely to hesitate in applying force.
Not that letting people arm themselves for protection is necessarily a bad idea.
Agreed. I think tasers would be great. They've got some 20 feet of effective reach, they're non-lethal and can't punch a hole in the plane. Stun guns would be almost as good in such close quarters. Firearms should probably still be in checked baggage since you can just whip one out and start shooting people or blowing out windows.
I also think the Israeli solution of sealing the cockpit off from the passenger compartment entirely would be good and simple.
Agreed, and I wonder how many decades it will be before people will realize that that sort of thing is one of the only effective protections and is therefore necessary. People in civilized nations are just too used to being sheep.
You misspelled "Symantec".
There was little need for the Patriot Act besides; had our normal law-enforcement apparatus been functioning as designed, the 9/11 hijackers would have been caught.
A couple of them might have been caught if the FBI had been paying attention, but they all had perfectly valid passports and last I checked they weren't doing anything illegal when they boarded the planes. This is not a good argument against the Patriot Act. The argument against the Patriot Act is the opposite. It's the fact that the Patriot Act doesn't increase the likelyhood of catching people like that, because it's impossible to catch most people like that.
Unless you can see into the future or read minds, you cannot stop dedicated individual fanatics that are willing to trade their life to acheive their goals. The only way to stop those people completely would be to eject all dark-skinned people from the United States (and no, I don't find this an acceptable solution). Even then you will wind up with whites who pick up the cause and become fanatics in the same way. It's human nature. Thus with the Patriot Act we give up certain rights and gain zero security.
Actually, there is another way in which the hijackers could have been stopped: make sure that a large portion of the population is armed and allow them to carry those arms onto the plane. Which is of course exactly the opposite of what we've been doing. We strip search everyone to make absolutely certain they are unarmed, and thus vulnerable to ANY possible aggression that occurs aboard the plane. Of course we include the pilots, making sure they can't defend themselves, and we still don't put any sky marshals on board. My God, the sky marshals would have to carry weapons! What a horrible thought. A weapon on board a plane. Tsk tsk, can't have that. Only criminals have weapons.
Anyone else having trouble with Firefox and links lately? I'm using 1.0PR and this ikobo.com website is one of a handful of sites where I go and try to click on the links and nothing happens. None of the links on the page work. I have to keep loading things in a new tab, and then the links on that page don't work either.
I have adblock running but disabling it doesn't seem to make any difference. These aren't those weird links with nothing but a "#" symbol that only IE seems to be able to open. They're perfectly normal links, they just don't work in Firefox.
Anyone else having this problem when you go to ikobo.com? It's incredibly frustrating.
Yeah, amusing, but remember the micro-sized Orange Catholic Bible that Doctor Yueh gave to Paul Atreides in Dune? Thousands of unabridged pages in something the size of a matchbox, with some kind of device in the casing to help you open it to the correct page, and a magnifier to allow you to read the micro-printing. This nano-fabric is one more step to making that little book a reality. In 30 years, not 3,000.
I remember also there was mention of some kind of sheets of superstrong crystal material that they used for long-term archiving of documents. This may also be a step in that direction.
Sometimes life really is amazing. What's next, a working 'thopter?
Ok you wait in line to have your passport checked. I will happily go threw the reader with my passport safely on my person. With a little green light that says it is OK for me to enter the US or even other countries.
Wow. So if I clonk you over the head and take your passport, or even just cut your RFID out of it, I can get into the US without anyone bothering to confirm my identity? Hell, I can just bump into you with an RFID scanner and not even touch your passport, and with the right resources make a copy of your RFID signal and gallavant right through border security checkpoints. No problem, because the electronic signal proves I'm you, so it's perfectly safe for me to be let into any country without any further checks!
Sweet. Why don't you just paint a target on the back of every American's head while you're at it? Put a sign on our back that says, "Steal my passport, it's worth its weight in gold because you won't even have to modify the photo to get into the US!"
Your convenience is not important enough to get me killed. What scares me most is that there's a mod here who actually thought what you said was insightful! I hope to God you were at least trying to be facetious, but you do give the appearance of being serious.
You should have torn up his $20US right in front of him. Then while he's standing there speechless, say "Oh here, let me make it up to you," and pay him back with the equivalent amount in Euros (15.83Eu). Plus one Euro for his trouble, of course. Would have blown his little mind.
Why is it physically impossible to design VGA displays less than 2.4 inches? Too small pixels?
Because current LCD pixels require six lead lines, and we can't make lead lines small enough to shrink the pixels any further.
This is weird to me, because the Konica Minolta Dimage A2 has an electronic viewfinder (EVF, basically a small LCD screen) that's about half an inch diagonal with VGA resolution. That's been out since February or so. But maybe I'm missing something.
The parent is incorrect. The device sends out "off" codes, it will not turn any TV on, ever. It does not "toggle" the on/off state, it ONLY TURNS TVs OFF.
As others have pointed out a hundred times on this page already, most TV remotes have only one button that does toggle the on/off state of the TV, but built into the receiver on the TV are discrete codes for "on" and "off". This device only sends out the "off" codes for hundreds of different TVs. If it toggled the TV, why would they call it TV-B-Gone? They'd call it Fsck-with-the-TV-by-toggling-its-on-off-state.
Thanks, Mom.
When I'm in the airport, sometimes I *[DON'T] like* to watch CNN to catch up on what's been happening while I sit for 6 hours between connections. I was stranded overnight in [someplace], and let me tell you, I would have absolutely *gone off* on some sanctimonious jackass turning [ON] the tv I WASN'T blearily watching [as I tried to read my book/newspaper/sleep some more] to pass the time after sleeping on the floor the night before. I hope people like you carry around big signs to illustrate your pomposity, so I can clear out before being subjected to what you think I should be doing with my time.
Can my one-sided self-centered opinion also be modded insightful please? Seems to work for everyone else.
Your posturing is such a waste of effort - I've yet to meet anyone who's intimidated by words on their monitor.
Whoever modded you insightful should be shot.
I cannot be the only one that finds this very amusing.
Correct except for OS X Server, which has a bigass long serial number that you must enter to use it. But, even that doesn't require "product activation" like every copy of Windows XP. And, I only have experience with the unlimited client edition of Server, the half-price 5-client version may have a different requirement.
Still vastly better than Microsoft. Regular OS X installs require no key, and if you don't set up your internet connection during the install process the survey never gets sent anywhere unless you choose to send it later on.
I admire your disciplined restraint. My trash can will never be the same.
Yeah, their rates might go up, but would the rates for the rest of us go DOWN? Recently there was a law put into place where I live that makes not having proof of insurance in your vehicle an arrestable offence. With more people forced to buy insurance, the rates should have gone down slightly. After that law was passed the insurance companies apparently realized they had a captive audience. The rates soon went up by about 45%.
Insurance companies are thieves. I don't see why anyone should be supporting them getting more invasive access into any information about a person. It never results in rates that are more "fair", just added penalties for certain people, often depending on something totally nonsensical like hair color.
As for your "crime detection systems", apparently you don't realize that everyone and every vehicle doesn't fit in a little square box. What if you have a vehicle that you want to take on a racing track? Obviously you'd want to make it illegal to disable the crime detection equipment in your car, so you'd have to get a specially licensed vehicle for doing any racing even on a private track. Some people happen to own a lot of land, and they use it to take a vehicle out now and then and do crazy stuff. This would result in them getting an automated ticket from Big Brother.
No, sir. You do not have all the answers, and you better stay the hell away from my car. I'm sure I'm not alone in this sentiment. Does this sentiment make me a crazy-speeding-cracksmoking-drunkdriving lunatic driver? No. Most of us do obey the laws, and we don't need an electronic nanny sitting on our dashboard making sure we walk your line every day of our lives. Get over yourself.
And if we were to consider the possiblity of up to every gene interacting with each other, that would give us 20000!, or roughly 1.819e+77337 possibilities. (surprisingly enough, that didn't crash the windows calculator program, although it did take a second or two even on an A64)
Your computer may be fast, but your calculator program gave you the wrong result. I get 1.8192063202303451348276417569e+77337, which is obviously a much larger number.
(joke)
I'm just going by what I saw a Swiss guy say here a couple years back, and it's the only thing that makes sense to me, which is that they have both the weapons and the ammo to go with it in their homes during their military terms. But of course both are regulated very closely by the government/military so they know at the end of your term that you haven't used them inappropriately for shooting up the neighborhood or hunting or something like that. They do have the guns, that much we know, but a gun without ammo is a very expensive paperweight. That just doesn't jive. If the Swiss want their people ready to fight, they will give them all the necessary tools, not half the necessary tools. I also get the feeling that he said they even keep things like tanks at home, but I can't confirm that. It wouldn't surprise me since that goes along with the Swiss idea of having every man ready to fight immediately. Also a great way to decentralize your weak points, kind of like the Internet.
;)
You aren't a Constitutional Scholar, but your votes affect the way this country operates, so if you think what I've said is insightful please take it to heart and vote accordingly in the future. If not, well, it is a free country after all. When the war comes I'll be fighting by your side to protect your right to have a differing opinion.
Good points, but a couple of nitpicks:
[...] every adult male Swiss is required to have not only a gun, but something quite capable like an H-K stashed away in their closet. They don't get to keep the ammunition, but they are required to have that automatic weapon at the ready.
Exactly what use is a gun without bullets? Do you think if someone is going to attempt to overrun the Swiss they will give adequate warning for the citizenry to take their guns (paperweights) and line up at some central facility for bullet rationing? Wouldn't it be just as easy to hand out the guns at the same time? No, I don't think it works that way. I once read a post from a Swiss that mentioned that they do actually have ammunition in their homes along with the firearm. Anything else would make no sense. Of course they are in sealed packages and the military keeps close track on exactly how many cartridges you were given. If you give back less than that or an open package, you better have a damn good reason.
Can we restrict where you can take a gun? Why not -- the 2nd Amendment protects the right to own guns, not the right to wave them around.
The exact language is "keep and bear arms", I don't see how that can be interpreted except as giving the right to both own and carry a firearm. Private establishments of course will always have the right to refuse to let individuals onto the premesis with a firearm (or for any other reason they deem fit). But in public and on your own land --according to the Constitution-- there should be no laws restricting the owning, purchasing or carrying of a firearm.
Your other point is very good. A narrow interpretation of the 2nd Amendment can reflect negatively on the other amendments.
Can we bar felons from guns? We bar them from voting.
This part is offtopic and shouldn't have been included in the conversation. Restricting the rights of felons to vote has been left up to the states by the 14th Amendment, it's not a federal thing. There are many people who would class this activity as cruel and unusual punishment. Why should we punish a person for the rest of their lives, after they've served their sentence?
Most importantly, relating the restriction of voting with the restriction of gun ownership is exactly the kind of slippery-slope argument and false tying interpretation that you are arguing against. "We can already do this thing, so obviously it's acceptable do this other unrelated thing." Very dangerous thinking.
When it comes right down to it, there is nothing in the 2nd Amendment saying that felons can't own firearms. The language is very clear and simple. Felons are still people (they're even full citizens!) and "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". So unless you want to make them non-persons, I don't see how it can be interpreted as legal to restrict gun ownership by ex-felons, who have served out their punishment.
And secondarily, does not a felon still have an inalienable human right to self-defense? It makes no sense to continue punishing people after they have served the debt that society assigned to them. Punish the action, not the person. Give them some kind of hope for the future, so they don't just give up and continually revert to the criminal activities that are easiest for many of them to fall back on in hard times. Our treatment of ex-convicts throughout society is partially responsible for their lack of successful rehabilitation. I said "partially". People of course make their own choices, but they should always be assisted into making the right ones if possible.
Can we restrict the kind of gun? In my opinion, we can restrict the type of gun to what is reasonable to use in training and practicing shooting skills.
Exactly what good would that do? I'm honestly wondering how you can have this opinion. Do you really think the founders meant for the well regulated militia to carry around practice weapons? Then
You should save words like "asinine" for people who deserve it. This person's conclusion that "tabs are problematic" was merely a misunderstanding. This is quite common and a sign of ignorance of the underlying issue, but not asinine. Unless he sticks to his conclusion in the face of all arguments to the contrary, in which case he would be acting "stupid and obstinate" like an ass (of the four-legged variety). There are plenty of folks here for which the word is very fitting... don't waste it.
That doesn't solve anything unless you don't use tabs at all. Firefox already uses sheets. But sheets come out of the window, not the tab. Therefore you can't tell which tab called it up. It's the same as a detached dialog box, but cuter. Might solve things if you always use a separate window, but how many of us do that?
Last I checked the Firefox development numbers went batsh_t when 1.0PR came out. On the surface it's called 1.0, but apparently the developers are calling it 0.10.1 (you know, because 0.10 comes after 0.9, which makes oh so much sense).
You'll actually see that goofy number in some spots when you go looking for extensions. As if people weren't confused enough about the whole Firebird/Firefox/Thunderbird thing.
How is user education going to solve the problem? You saw how it worked. If you're not paying close attention how will you know which website popped up the dialog? You can't. They simply need to disable those kind of displays and use some other method to alert the user that a background window or tab wants something.
The other problem is just as bad. Several times now I've caught myself before typing in my username or password or a search into a field in a background tab, after the background tab finished loading and grabbed the focus away from the front tab with some Javascript. EBay does that a lot. Not good. The tabs just need to be more isolated from each other. Even the most technically "educated" of us have lapses in attention, and that's when these things can happen. I'm looking forward to seeing the Firefox people fixing this within a short time frame.