That's not an option with many new TVs: they require network connectivity or else they won't even work as a TV or display monitor.
This is probably a good reason to buy your TV from Walmart actually: it's trivially easy to throw stuff back in the box (poorly) and get a full refund at your local Walmart. With Amazon, they'll probably require you to pay for return shipping costs.
Back in your day, people didn't need to do that much maintenance on their transportation because a horse and wagon doesn't need much, just a well-fed horse and maybe a little axle grease on the wagon wheels. Horse-drawn wagons also couldn't do most of the stuff a modern car or truck can, like drive at 75+mph safely, accelerate and brake quickly, work all day long on easily-available gasoline instead of needing to stop every so often for your horse to much grass and rest, blow cold or warm air on you as you travel, play music for you, etc.
Obviously, a watch that does nothing but tell you the time isn't going to have the maintenance needs that a networked microcomputer in a watch case has. As soon as you have a general-purpose computer running software and connected to a network, it needs to be regularly updated to avoid network-based attacks, and also possibly to stay compatible with other devices it communicates to.
Because for every million or so religious people who don't force their beliefs on you there are probably 10 people who are "extremists".
This is provably wrong. Religious people push for laws based on their religion, which equates to "forcing their beliefs on you". Try polling Christians in America about whether they support legalizing gay marriage or not. It's a lot more than 1/100,000 who would want to ban it.
And, frankly, if everyone were armed all the time, pretty soon we would stop shooting each other and probably stop shouting and calling each other bad names. After the initial and saddening culling. But that happens in slow-motion now. I cite Chicago. Give everyone in public housing training, range time, and a functional handgun with ammo, and watch the gang shootings go elsewhere. In time, those public housing residents would pay little attention to where their issued handgun was. It would not be needed.
Honestly, this would be a very interesting (though ethically questionably) sociological experiment. Find two public housing projects that are fairly similar, with similar crime rates (perhaps in the same city but not too close to each other), and in one, do what you suggest here, and in the other, don't do anything different from current policy, and see what happens. It'd be nice to get a real data point since, frankly, the arguments on both sides are really just a bunch of hand-waving with no real evidence, and any comparisons are usually not very valid because the things they're comparing are far too different.
Banning religion isn't the answer. We need to be intelligent enough to distinguish between good religion and bad religion.
And which ones are good? Most of them seem to claim that homosexuality is "evil", so which ones wouldn't support what this guy did? At least Christianity generally (these days) advocates working politically against homosexuality rather than going on a murder spree, unlike Islam. But it wasn't always that way: centuries ago, Christianity advocated burning people at the stake for things like that, or for having the "wrong" Christian beliefs. Jewish people are violent like this too: they throw rocks at women who are "immodest" in Israel, and probably wouldn't treat homosexuals any better.
Whenever you see some religious person trying to pass off religion as a great thing and casting the nasty bits of it as "extremism" or "fundamentalism", it necessarily comes along with them ignoring or dismissing certain non-progressive parts of their own religion somehow: "oh, we don't believe that stuff any more", or "modern interpretations now hold the following view...".
We should all implicitly understand that it's wrong to harm innocent people
Religious people have been doing this for millennia. Crusades, burning people at the stake, etc. The thing is, they don't think of the people they harm as "innocent", because they're "sinners". That's the whole problem with religion: it's easy to find people guilty of some kind of "sin" (which Christians even say that everyone is guilty of to some extent), and then use that as justification to do harm to them.
This is undeniably true. If your religion says otherwise, your religion is wrong.
Wow, I feel sorry for you Europeans. I thought everything over there was generally wonderful, with people peacefully going to cafes and riding bikes everywhere.
Over here in the US, yes, we do have the annoying Superbowl. But it's really not that bad. I honestly can't even tell you right now, off the top of my head, what month the Superbowl is. Unless you happen to work with a bunch of sports fanatics, it's just not something you hear *that* much about, unless you're a big TV watcher. These days, more and more people are "cutting the cord". I don't have a TV, and haven't for years, and more and more people I meet are like this now; everyone's turning to Netflix and just doing stuff online. I'm an engineer, so I never heard much about the Superbowl at work (engineers are typically not big sports fans), I'm not married to a sports fan, I don't live in whatever city hosts it, and since I don't watch live TV, the Superbowl just doesn't register on my radar much. I don't think I'm that unusual these days. 20+ years ago, your point would have been much better, but these days TV-watching has really plummeted as far as I can tell, at least among the more-educated people that I associate with.
Science doesn't explain how the universe came into being, or why (was there a purpose to it). These are questions beyond what science can answer. Now of course, I also find the idea that some primitive people thousands of years ago figured this stuff out to be rather ridiculous, but it doesn't mean that there's no answer out there somewhere. Science can only tell us about our universe, and is useful for making predictions within it, using some assumptions (such as that universal constants really are constant everywhere in the universe).
Face it: for all we know, we could be living in a Matrix-like simulation that was created by a "god", and we've only been living in it for a few years or less as our memories were all created as part of the simulation. There's no way to disprove that with science.
And any Democrat voter who didn't register as a Republican (if they could in their state) and vote for Carly Fiorina in the primaries is obviously a sexist and misogynist.
And, if he's rich enough not to worry about speaking fees (why the scare quotes?),
They're not "scare quotes", I'm pointing out that "speaking fees" is a euphamism for legalized bribery.
Trump's money has all come from business ventures, not from outright bribery. Hillary's money has all come from bribery. I fail to see why I should worry more about the guy who's never made money by selling out (though he may have scammed some people with a crappy for-profit school) than the woman who's a millionaire a hundred times over solely through bribery, and has every indication that she'll do more of it in the White House.
I fail to see how any of that is any worse than Hillary starting a war with Russia in Syria, or how she's obviously sold out to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs, or the way she treats her Secret Service agents, or how she uses the Clinton Foundation to funnel money to herself and family using arms deals.
No, you don't make any sense at all. Where do you get the idea that Trump is a warmonger like Hillary? Trump said the Iraq war was stupid, that the military has too many bases abroad, and seems to kinda like Putin. Where do you get "warmonger" out of that? The part about bombing ISIS? Everyone wants to bomb ISIS. But not everyone wants to invade other nations and set up all-new governments; Hillary does, she's said it many times, and voted for it too.
And where do you get the idea that Trump wants to enrich the 0.01%? That's just plain stupid. Trump isn't corrupt; he doesn't need to be. He didn't finance his campaign with money from wealthy special-interests like Goldman Sachs. He's rich enough that "speaking fees" aren't really important to him, and being President doesn't really offer him a bigger return than he could get just by doing what he normally does. He's clearly doing this not for money, but for ego. And that's probably a good thing: someone doing it for money (like Hillary) will happily sell us all out. Someone doing it for ego wants to go down in the history books as a great leader, which a sell-out isn't going to get. I think Trump is completely serious and honest when he talks about "making America great again"; I think he really does want to make America a better place. The question is if he can actually do that, or if the policies he pursues would do that or make it worse. Hillary, OTOH, has no such desire at all: she's clearly only interested in her personal bank account. But I fail to see how a possibly incompetent and racist nincompoop is a much worse choice than an evil sociopath who only cares about making herself richer by personally profiting from arms deals.
How's that any worse than the AP telling us that Hillary is the official nominee before California has even voted? Or pushing the idea that Iraq had WMD, which the mainstream media did back then?
We do have evidence that she'd be a *bad* president: she's a well-known warmonger. She pushed for involvement in Libya (which has turned into a disaster), and she pushed for an invasion of Syria, which luckily Obama backed away from.
I predict we'll be invading Syria within 100 days of her being elected.
Hillary is going to be worse than Bush II: she'll be just as much a warmonger as him, but also a far worse crook than Nixon could have dreamt of. Nixon was of course involved in some dirty politics (Watergate), but Hillary is shameless and blatant in her quest to personally enrich herself (speaking fees, speeches to Goldman Sachs, Clinton Foundation involvement in arms sales to middle eastern nations: she approves arms sales, those nations then give "donations" to Clinton Foundation most of which goes to pay generous salaries of CF insiders meaning the Clintons themselves).
Why people outside the US would like Hillary, I have no idea. Do they really want another mid-east war that'll create another huge wave of refugees?
I don't agree 100% with everything Sanders advocates, but like you said, he would honestly try doing his job properly, and for the good of the people, which is unique. But as President, he would be limited by Congress anyway, so it's not like he'd unilaterally implement all his plans; he'd only be able to advocate and push for them, and then sign them into law if he can get Congress to pass legislation he agrees to. Considering he is known as "the Amendment King", I think he'd be able to get some good stuff passed, but anything else that's too out-there would be squelched.
With Hillary, I expect her to pass a few nice-sounding but rather minor things which are basically bones thrown to the dogs, to keep us happy and complacent, while she ratchets up the war machine and invades Syria, possibly getting us into a shooting war with Russia.
With Trump, I expect him to make a fool of himself, lock horns with Congress, and get almost nothing done, but I think we can look forward to 4 years of peace, though with a bunch of domestic turmoil.
This has described every Presidential election in my lifetime
Mine too, but things aren't black-and-white. This is going to be absolutely the worst choice I've ever seen in a general election, and I'm not that young. Other elections have always been between two not-so-hot choices, but in this one they're both absolutely horrible. I've never seen another election where 1) the party was hijacked by a loud-mouth, bombastic blatant racist who encourages violence, or 2) where the candidate is so completely blatantly corrupt while also an obvious warmonger in a party that claims to be against that kind of thing, and also so blatantly in favor of enriching the 0.01% while again in a party that claims to be against that kind of thing.
In other elections, the candidates were generally party insiders who were fairly mainstream, obviously working for various corporate interests to some degree but not so obviously for their own direct personal enrichment, and never so blatantly stoking xenophobia and racism.
However there have been serious allegations of irregularities at the polls. In Illinois, neutral observers claim to have seen election workers blatantly changing votes in Hillary's favor. In other places, exit polls completely disagree with the official Democratic voting results. In New York, a huge number of people had their voter registrations "magically" changed from Democratic to Independent so they were prevented from voting in the (closed) primary.
AFAIC, the election results are all completely invalid and I'm unwilling to accept them unless we have non-American UN election monitors come and hold all new elections here, using paper ballots. IMO, the whole thing has been rigged.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not an option with many new TVs: they require network connectivity or else they won't even work as a TV or display monitor.
This is probably a good reason to buy your TV from Walmart actually: it's trivially easy to throw stuff back in the box (poorly) and get a full refund at your local Walmart. With Amazon, they'll probably require you to pay for return shipping costs.
Back in your day, people didn't need to do that much maintenance on their transportation because a horse and wagon doesn't need much, just a well-fed horse and maybe a little axle grease on the wagon wheels. Horse-drawn wagons also couldn't do most of the stuff a modern car or truck can, like drive at 75+mph safely, accelerate and brake quickly, work all day long on easily-available gasoline instead of needing to stop every so often for your horse to much grass and rest, blow cold or warm air on you as you travel, play music for you, etc.
Obviously, a watch that does nothing but tell you the time isn't going to have the maintenance needs that a networked microcomputer in a watch case has. As soon as you have a general-purpose computer running software and connected to a network, it needs to be regularly updated to avoid network-based attacks, and also possibly to stay compatible with other devices it communicates to.
Exactly. Personally I look forward to them massively jacking up the prices of Windows and their other software to pay for this acquisition.
As the old saying goes, "a fool and his money are soon parted".
Because for every million or so religious people who don't force their beliefs on you there are probably 10 people who are "extremists".
This is provably wrong. Religious people push for laws based on their religion, which equates to "forcing their beliefs on you". Try polling Christians in America about whether they support legalizing gay marriage or not. It's a lot more than 1/100,000 who would want to ban it.
No. ED-209 was too big; I'm not even sure how that thing fit through regular doorways. It could have a hard time getting into a club.
Robocop is a much better solution, since it's human-sized.
And, frankly, if everyone were armed all the time, pretty soon we would stop shooting each other and probably stop shouting and calling each other bad names. After the initial and saddening culling. But that happens in slow-motion now. I cite Chicago. Give everyone in public housing training, range time, and a functional handgun with ammo, and watch the gang shootings go elsewhere. In time, those public housing residents would pay little attention to where their issued handgun was. It would not be needed.
Honestly, this would be a very interesting (though ethically questionably) sociological experiment. Find two public housing projects that are fairly similar, with similar crime rates (perhaps in the same city but not too close to each other), and in one, do what you suggest here, and in the other, don't do anything different from current policy, and see what happens. It'd be nice to get a real data point since, frankly, the arguments on both sides are really just a bunch of hand-waving with no real evidence, and any comparisons are usually not very valid because the things they're comparing are far too different.
Banning religion isn't the answer. We need to be intelligent enough to distinguish between good religion and bad religion.
And which ones are good? Most of them seem to claim that homosexuality is "evil", so which ones wouldn't support what this guy did? At least Christianity generally (these days) advocates working politically against homosexuality rather than going on a murder spree, unlike Islam. But it wasn't always that way: centuries ago, Christianity advocated burning people at the stake for things like that, or for having the "wrong" Christian beliefs. Jewish people are violent like this too: they throw rocks at women who are "immodest" in Israel, and probably wouldn't treat homosexuals any better.
Whenever you see some religious person trying to pass off religion as a great thing and casting the nasty bits of it as "extremism" or "fundamentalism", it necessarily comes along with them ignoring or dismissing certain non-progressive parts of their own religion somehow: "oh, we don't believe that stuff any more", or "modern interpretations now hold the following view...".
We should all implicitly understand that it's wrong to harm innocent people
Religious people have been doing this for millennia. Crusades, burning people at the stake, etc. The thing is, they don't think of the people they harm as "innocent", because they're "sinners". That's the whole problem with religion: it's easy to find people guilty of some kind of "sin" (which Christians even say that everyone is guilty of to some extent), and then use that as justification to do harm to them.
This is undeniably true. If your religion says otherwise, your religion is wrong.
Then it seems that they're all wrong.
Wow, I feel sorry for you Europeans. I thought everything over there was generally wonderful, with people peacefully going to cafes and riding bikes everywhere.
Over here in the US, yes, we do have the annoying Superbowl. But it's really not that bad. I honestly can't even tell you right now, off the top of my head, what month the Superbowl is. Unless you happen to work with a bunch of sports fanatics, it's just not something you hear *that* much about, unless you're a big TV watcher. These days, more and more people are "cutting the cord". I don't have a TV, and haven't for years, and more and more people I meet are like this now; everyone's turning to Netflix and just doing stuff online. I'm an engineer, so I never heard much about the Superbowl at work (engineers are typically not big sports fans), I'm not married to a sports fan, I don't live in whatever city hosts it, and since I don't watch live TV, the Superbowl just doesn't register on my radar much. I don't think I'm that unusual these days. 20+ years ago, your point would have been much better, but these days TV-watching has really plummeted as far as I can tell, at least among the more-educated people that I associate with.
Science doesn't explain how the universe came into being, or why (was there a purpose to it). These are questions beyond what science can answer. Now of course, I also find the idea that some primitive people thousands of years ago figured this stuff out to be rather ridiculous, but it doesn't mean that there's no answer out there somewhere. Science can only tell us about our universe, and is useful for making predictions within it, using some assumptions (such as that universal constants really are constant everywhere in the universe).
Face it: for all we know, we could be living in a Matrix-like simulation that was created by a "god", and we've only been living in it for a few years or less as our memories were all created as part of the simulation. There's no way to disprove that with science.
Exactly.
And any Democrat voter who didn't register as a Republican (if they could in their state) and vote for Carly Fiorina in the primaries is obviously a sexist and misogynist.
And, if he's rich enough not to worry about speaking fees (why the scare quotes?),
They're not "scare quotes", I'm pointing out that "speaking fees" is a euphamism for legalized bribery.
Trump's money has all come from business ventures, not from outright bribery. Hillary's money has all come from bribery. I fail to see why I should worry more about the guy who's never made money by selling out (though he may have scammed some people with a crappy for-profit school) than the woman who's a millionaire a hundred times over solely through bribery, and has every indication that she'll do more of it in the White House.
Are you really that dense? Hillary voted for Bush's war in Iraq. She also pushed for war in Libya and Syria. She's a warmongering neo-con.
That's a pile of crap. The US has a few advantages, until some corporation disagrees with something.
There's only one nation I can think of that can be really be trusted with this job: Switzerland.
Why shouldn't Switzerland be the ONE government in charge, if the argument is that the most free and open one should have stewardship?
Sounds good to me. The copyright cartels wouldn't like that though.
I fail to see how any of that is any worse than Hillary starting a war with Russia in Syria, or how she's obviously sold out to Wall Street and Goldman Sachs, or the way she treats her Secret Service agents, or how she uses the Clinton Foundation to funnel money to herself and family using arms deals.
The one in Illinois was reported to the press, who decided not to publicize it. The MSM is working for Hillary, as is DailyKos.
Remember, the MSM is the one that told us that Saddam had WMD.
Well for starters:
Illinois:
http://www.inquisitr.com/30220...
https://electionfraud2016.word...
New York:
https://news.vice.com/article/...
http://www.inquisitr.com/30113...
http://usuncut.com/politics/so...
Feel free to look up Arizona on your own.
No, you don't make any sense at all. Where do you get the idea that Trump is a warmonger like Hillary? Trump said the Iraq war was stupid, that the military has too many bases abroad, and seems to kinda like Putin. Where do you get "warmonger" out of that? The part about bombing ISIS? Everyone wants to bomb ISIS. But not everyone wants to invade other nations and set up all-new governments; Hillary does, she's said it many times, and voted for it too.
And where do you get the idea that Trump wants to enrich the 0.01%? That's just plain stupid. Trump isn't corrupt; he doesn't need to be. He didn't finance his campaign with money from wealthy special-interests like Goldman Sachs. He's rich enough that "speaking fees" aren't really important to him, and being President doesn't really offer him a bigger return than he could get just by doing what he normally does. He's clearly doing this not for money, but for ego. And that's probably a good thing: someone doing it for money (like Hillary) will happily sell us all out. Someone doing it for ego wants to go down in the history books as a great leader, which a sell-out isn't going to get. I think Trump is completely serious and honest when he talks about "making America great again"; I think he really does want to make America a better place. The question is if he can actually do that, or if the policies he pursues would do that or make it worse. Hillary, OTOH, has no such desire at all: she's clearly only interested in her personal bank account. But I fail to see how a possibly incompetent and racist nincompoop is a much worse choice than an evil sociopath who only cares about making herself richer by personally profiting from arms deals.
How's that any worse than the AP telling us that Hillary is the official nominee before California has even voted? Or pushing the idea that Iraq had WMD, which the mainstream media did back then?
Notice that Hillary changes her accent when she's talking in front of crowds of southern black people.
We do have evidence that she'd be a *bad* president: she's a well-known warmonger. She pushed for involvement in Libya (which has turned into a disaster), and she pushed for an invasion of Syria, which luckily Obama backed away from.
I predict we'll be invading Syria within 100 days of her being elected.
Hillary is going to be worse than Bush II: she'll be just as much a warmonger as him, but also a far worse crook than Nixon could have dreamt of. Nixon was of course involved in some dirty politics (Watergate), but Hillary is shameless and blatant in her quest to personally enrich herself (speaking fees, speeches to Goldman Sachs, Clinton Foundation involvement in arms sales to middle eastern nations: she approves arms sales, those nations then give "donations" to Clinton Foundation most of which goes to pay generous salaries of CF insiders meaning the Clintons themselves).
Why people outside the US would like Hillary, I have no idea. Do they really want another mid-east war that'll create another huge wave of refugees?
I don't agree 100% with everything Sanders advocates, but like you said, he would honestly try doing his job properly, and for the good of the people, which is unique. But as President, he would be limited by Congress anyway, so it's not like he'd unilaterally implement all his plans; he'd only be able to advocate and push for them, and then sign them into law if he can get Congress to pass legislation he agrees to. Considering he is known as "the Amendment King", I think he'd be able to get some good stuff passed, but anything else that's too out-there would be squelched.
With Hillary, I expect her to pass a few nice-sounding but rather minor things which are basically bones thrown to the dogs, to keep us happy and complacent, while she ratchets up the war machine and invades Syria, possibly getting us into a shooting war with Russia.
With Trump, I expect him to make a fool of himself, lock horns with Congress, and get almost nothing done, but I think we can look forward to 4 years of peace, though with a bunch of domestic turmoil.
This has described every Presidential election in my lifetime
Mine too, but things aren't black-and-white. This is going to be absolutely the worst choice I've ever seen in a general election, and I'm not that young. Other elections have always been between two not-so-hot choices, but in this one they're both absolutely horrible. I've never seen another election where 1) the party was hijacked by a loud-mouth, bombastic blatant racist who encourages violence, or 2) where the candidate is so completely blatantly corrupt while also an obvious warmonger in a party that claims to be against that kind of thing, and also so blatantly in favor of enriching the 0.01% while again in a party that claims to be against that kind of thing.
In other elections, the candidates were generally party insiders who were fairly mainstream, obviously working for various corporate interests to some degree but not so obviously for their own direct personal enrichment, and never so blatantly stoking xenophobia and racism.
However there have been serious allegations of irregularities at the polls. In Illinois, neutral observers claim to have seen election workers blatantly changing votes in Hillary's favor. In other places, exit polls completely disagree with the official Democratic voting results. In New York, a huge number of people had their voter registrations "magically" changed from Democratic to Independent so they were prevented from voting in the (closed) primary.
AFAIC, the election results are all completely invalid and I'm unwilling to accept them unless we have non-American UN election monitors come and hold all new elections here, using paper ballots. IMO, the whole thing has been rigged.
Hillary's already had a stroke. Bernie's in good health.