Oh man, tell me about it. My aunt's second cousin's dog's sister's father's owner's grandmother's great grand-niece's former roomate was kidnapped by aliens, but then the aliens were spaceship-jacked by a bunch of street thugs before they could even get the anal probe in all the way. She was taken to a secluded shack in Montana where Jimmy Hoffa came out with a rusty scalpel and a copy of "Home Surgery for Dummies". Luckily, a Sasquatch riding on a Chupacabra broke in just in the nick of time and took her off to his treehouse high up in the Rockies. After a few months, though, he kicked her out because apparently she was supposed to be paying half of the rent or something, and she ended up wandering around the forest for several days until she passed out. Anyway, she came to in a back-alley surgery, and there was a big guy in dirty scrubs negotiating with the zombie Jeffrey Dahmer over who got what part of her body. Luckily, she managed to break free, but as soon as she got out the door she was picked up by federal agents who flew her off to Area 51 in a black helicopter and locked her in a closet with some freaky squid looking thing from some planet in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri (or so he claimed). He was just setting out the silverware so he could devour her in a more civilized fashion when a bunch of those weird guys who like to look at Area 51 all day with binoculars in order to find government conspiracies broke in and whisked her off. Unfortunately, they were short on meth and had no cash, but they did have the phone number for the Harvard Medical School, so they knocked her out, and she came to a few days later in the middle of the 405 freeway in a tub of ice.
Anyway, to make a long story short, she was missing three fingers, her left kneecap, three and a half yards of small intestine, three quarters of her right lung, and her spleen. Really scary stuff.
Whoa, that's the exact same number this hot chick gave me at the bar last night. Dammit, I KNEW it was fake. Either that or I had the worst case of beer goggles in history.
Wait until it shows up in auto-update in a month would be my advice. That should give plenty of time for the tech rags to post glowing reviews of how it revolutionizes computing, solves world hunger, and cures male pattern baldness. Likewise, it will give Slashdot plenty of time to report that it makes computers crash, steals peoples' wallets, has sex with their dogs, and sets their house on fire.
You know, the usual Microsoft software update cycle.
Alliteration, obviously. Besides, the lager name has been polluted for too long by the swill that the American macrobreweries call "lagers". Believe it or not, making a tasty lager is not only possible, it's actually done by many small breweries out there.
Defense is a "relatively small" part of the budget? Are you sure we're talking about the same country here?
The 2008 budget calls for total spending of $2.9 trillion (on tax revenues of $2.66 trillion). Of that, $481.4 billion goes to the Department of Defense. That's 16.6% of the entire budget. If you count other defense related areas, such as the "Global War on Terror" ($145.2 billion) and the Department of Homeland Security ($34.3 billion), we're up to $660.9 billion, which is 22.79% of the total budget.
All of this, of course, doesn't even include the cost of the Iraq war, which is financed through separate appropriations. Bush has requested an additional $105 billion for 2008 war costs, which would bring total defense-related spending in 2008 to $765.9 billion, or 26.4% of the total budget.
That's right, more than one quarter of the entire national budget is dedicated to defense spending, including the war in Iraq. By comparison, the next largest budget item, Social Security, comes in at $608 billion, or 20.97% of the total budget. And I'm not even including any military-related spending that may be assigned to other Cabinet departments or other programs.
Sure, people like to throw around meaningless numbers like defense spending is only around 4 or 5% of total GDP. But guess what: we don't pay for it with total GDP, we pay for it with tax dollars. It's absurd to compare budget items to the total GDP, because it implies that spending a giant percentage of our total production on the federal government (around 20.27% assuming a projected $14.31 trillion total GDP in 2008) is somehow okay.
Re:Happy pi day everyone!!
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 5, Funny
Sorry, but we missed Pi day by a longshot. Having Pi day on any old 3/14 lacks sufficient precision. Pi day was on March 14, 1592. Pi second would have been March 14, 1592 at 6:53 and 58 seconds in the morning. I'm sure they were partying like it was 1599 on that day.
I dunno, string theory always seemed to me like something you would come up with at 3am while smoking a joint after having spent the past 6 hours polishing off a keg with your physicist friends.
"Hey man, you know what would be awesome? What if the whole Universe was really made up of a bunch of vibrating strings?"
"Whoa...I think you just blew my mind man...Hey, don't bogart that!"
I read an article about it earlier where a homeless guy followed him back from the square and started joking with him about it. If this is a major money-making area for these drug dealers, it's only a matter of time before one of them follows him and shoots him. I like that he's trying to clean up the neighborhood, and the idea is novel, but I can certainly imagine someone getting a little stabby or shooty after getting sprayed with ice cold water while trying to conduct "business".
Give them a little credit, buying it from Russia was plan B. Our first source of plutonium was from Libyan nationalists. See, they would ask us to build them a bomb, we would take the plutonium, and then give them a shiny bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts. Unfortunately, the Libyans eventually found out and tried to kill us with RPGs. I swear, if Reagan hadn't managed to get up to 88 mph before he hit that photo kiosk, I don't know what we would have done.
What would Slashdot be without silly car analogies?
If you did all that, your insurance might refuse to pay out on your claim, but in all likelihood the police would still investigate and, if they caught the thief, prosecute the crime. They might call you an idiot, and may even laugh after you leave the station, but they'll still treat it as a real crime, because it is one.
I would say I'll visit you in prison, but I'm not allowed to travel to Cuba.
On the bright side, I hear the conditions there aren't so bad. Rumor has it that they'll give you all the water you can drink, even if you're not thirsty!
Equating the government's relationship with the citizenry with an employee's relationship with his or her employer is inaccurate. Sure, we like to spit out platitudes about how the government "works for the people," but in the strictest sense it isn't really true.
Unlike the employer-employee relationship, where the person who is hiring has a great deal of power over the person who is hired, the government-citizen relationship gives enormous power to the one that is "hired" over the one doing the hiring, including the power, in certain circumstances, to decide whether you live or die. It's more akin to the relationship you would have with someone you gave your power of attorney to. Sure, you "hired" that person, but in doing so you gave them enormous power over your own affairs, including (in certain circumstances) power to make life or death decisions on your behalf. That sort of relationship demands complete transparency so that you can monitor what that person is doing with the great power you've entrusted them with.
As an ordinary employee, I don't have nearly that kind of power over my employers. If I did, I would expect them to monitor any activity that could directly impact the health of the business, but nothing more. The more power someone (or some entity) has over the overall well-being of another individual (or entity), the more openness must be demanded within that relationship.
Trillions spent collecting dust on Mars? Seriously? I doubt NASA has even managed to spend multiple trillions of dollars in its entire history, much less on any Mars missions. The Mars rovers were built, launched, and operated (for the first 90 days anyway) for $820 million. I seriously doubt the additional operating costs up to this point are anywhere near a trillion dollars, unless they've been paying their engineers several billion dollars each per year, in which case I want that job.
This is really no problem at all. I'm sure we'll find a critical flaw in the star that will allow us to destroy it in the nick of time. Possibly an exhaust port or something like that.
It has an even more serious problem than that: Sure, it's effective against human brain cancer in mice, but unfortunately it's only effective against mouse brain cancer in humans. So, not very useful I'm afraid.
United may have a relatively efficient boarding process, but it doesn't help if the plane shows up too late for boarding time to matter. Recently I was in a situation where I had to take 4 flights over the span of two weeks. I flew United each time, and 3 out of the 4 were more than an hour late, and two of them were two or more hours late. If the plane is that late, it really makes no difference if the boarding process takes 10 or 20 minutes.
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I don't know, but I bet they were all making handicapped faces when he did that.
Oh man, tell me about it. My aunt's second cousin's dog's sister's father's owner's grandmother's great grand-niece's former roomate was kidnapped by aliens, but then the aliens were spaceship-jacked by a bunch of street thugs before they could even get the anal probe in all the way. She was taken to a secluded shack in Montana where Jimmy Hoffa came out with a rusty scalpel and a copy of "Home Surgery for Dummies". Luckily, a Sasquatch riding on a Chupacabra broke in just in the nick of time and took her off to his treehouse high up in the Rockies. After a few months, though, he kicked her out because apparently she was supposed to be paying half of the rent or something, and she ended up wandering around the forest for several days until she passed out. Anyway, she came to in a back-alley surgery, and there was a big guy in dirty scrubs negotiating with the zombie Jeffrey Dahmer over who got what part of her body. Luckily, she managed to break free, but as soon as she got out the door she was picked up by federal agents who flew her off to Area 51 in a black helicopter and locked her in a closet with some freaky squid looking thing from some planet in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri (or so he claimed). He was just setting out the silverware so he could devour her in a more civilized fashion when a bunch of those weird guys who like to look at Area 51 all day with binoculars in order to find government conspiracies broke in and whisked her off. Unfortunately, they were short on meth and had no cash, but they did have the phone number for the Harvard Medical School, so they knocked her out, and she came to a few days later in the middle of the 405 freeway in a tub of ice.
Anyway, to make a long story short, she was missing three fingers, her left kneecap, three and a half yards of small intestine, three quarters of her right lung, and her spleen. Really scary stuff.
Whoa, that's the exact same number this hot chick gave me at the bar last night. Dammit, I KNEW it was fake. Either that or I had the worst case of beer goggles in history.
Wait until it shows up in auto-update in a month would be my advice. That should give plenty of time for the tech rags to post glowing reviews of how it revolutionizes computing, solves world hunger, and cures male pattern baldness. Likewise, it will give Slashdot plenty of time to report that it makes computers crash, steals peoples' wallets, has sex with their dogs, and sets their house on fire.
You know, the usual Microsoft software update cycle.
Alliteration, obviously. Besides, the lager name has been polluted for too long by the swill that the American macrobreweries call "lagers". Believe it or not, making a tasty lager is not only possible, it's actually done by many small breweries out there.
Defense is a "relatively small" part of the budget? Are you sure we're talking about the same country here?
The 2008 budget calls for total spending of $2.9 trillion (on tax revenues of $2.66 trillion). Of that, $481.4 billion goes to the Department of Defense. That's 16.6% of the entire budget. If you count other defense related areas, such as the "Global War on Terror" ($145.2 billion) and the Department of Homeland Security ($34.3 billion), we're up to $660.9 billion, which is 22.79% of the total budget.
All of this, of course, doesn't even include the cost of the Iraq war, which is financed through separate appropriations. Bush has requested an additional $105 billion for 2008 war costs, which would bring total defense-related spending in 2008 to $765.9 billion, or 26.4% of the total budget.
That's right, more than one quarter of the entire national budget is dedicated to defense spending, including the war in Iraq. By comparison, the next largest budget item, Social Security, comes in at $608 billion, or 20.97% of the total budget. And I'm not even including any military-related spending that may be assigned to other Cabinet departments or other programs.
Sure, people like to throw around meaningless numbers like defense spending is only around 4 or 5% of total GDP. But guess what: we don't pay for it with total GDP, we pay for it with tax dollars. It's absurd to compare budget items to the total GDP, because it implies that spending a giant percentage of our total production on the federal government (around 20.27% assuming a projected $14.31 trillion total GDP in 2008) is somehow okay.
Sources:
GDP Estimate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_future_GDP_estimates_(nominal)
2008 Budget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget%2C_2008
2008 Iraq war appropriations: http://middleeast.about.com/od/iraq/f/me080225b.htm
Sorry, 22/7 is only approximately pi day.
Sorry, but we missed Pi day by a longshot. Having Pi day on any old 3/14 lacks sufficient precision. Pi day was on March 14, 1592. Pi second would have been March 14, 1592 at 6:53 and 58 seconds in the morning. I'm sure they were partying like it was 1599 on that day.
Do you feel strongly about Any sufficiently advanced chatbot is indistinguishable from an intelligent being?
At this rate, it's only a matter of time before Open Source achieves sentience and turns on its creators.
I don't see why you're putting all this pressure on GM to get all of this done. Surely Ford or even, God help us, Chrysler could pitch in too?
I dunno, string theory always seemed to me like something you would come up with at 3am while smoking a joint after having spent the past 6 hours polishing off a keg with your physicist friends.
"Hey man, you know what would be awesome? What if the whole Universe was really made up of a bunch of vibrating strings?"
"Whoa...I think you just blew my mind man...Hey, don't bogart that!"
I read an article about it earlier where a homeless guy followed him back from the square and started joking with him about it. If this is a major money-making area for these drug dealers, it's only a matter of time before one of them follows him and shoots him. I like that he's trying to clean up the neighborhood, and the idea is novel, but I can certainly imagine someone getting a little stabby or shooty after getting sprayed with ice cold water while trying to conduct "business".
Give them a little credit, buying it from Russia was plan B. Our first source of plutonium was from Libyan nationalists. See, they would ask us to build them a bomb, we would take the plutonium, and then give them a shiny bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts. Unfortunately, the Libyans eventually found out and tried to kill us with RPGs. I swear, if Reagan hadn't managed to get up to 88 mph before he hit that photo kiosk, I don't know what we would have done.
What would Slashdot be without silly car analogies?
If you did all that, your insurance might refuse to pay out on your claim, but in all likelihood the police would still investigate and, if they caught the thief, prosecute the crime. They might call you an idiot, and may even laugh after you leave the station, but they'll still treat it as a real crime, because it is one.
I would say I'll visit you in prison, but I'm not allowed to travel to Cuba.
On the bright side, I hear the conditions there aren't so bad. Rumor has it that they'll give you all the water you can drink, even if you're not thirsty!
Equating the government's relationship with the citizenry with an employee's relationship with his or her employer is inaccurate. Sure, we like to spit out platitudes about how the government "works for the people," but in the strictest sense it isn't really true.
Unlike the employer-employee relationship, where the person who is hiring has a great deal of power over the person who is hired, the government-citizen relationship gives enormous power to the one that is "hired" over the one doing the hiring, including the power, in certain circumstances, to decide whether you live or die. It's more akin to the relationship you would have with someone you gave your power of attorney to. Sure, you "hired" that person, but in doing so you gave them enormous power over your own affairs, including (in certain circumstances) power to make life or death decisions on your behalf. That sort of relationship demands complete transparency so that you can monitor what that person is doing with the great power you've entrusted them with.
As an ordinary employee, I don't have nearly that kind of power over my employers. If I did, I would expect them to monitor any activity that could directly impact the health of the business, but nothing more. The more power someone (or some entity) has over the overall well-being of another individual (or entity), the more openness must be demanded within that relationship.
Trillions spent collecting dust on Mars? Seriously? I doubt NASA has even managed to spend multiple trillions of dollars in its entire history, much less on any Mars missions. The Mars rovers were built, launched, and operated (for the first 90 days anyway) for $820 million. I seriously doubt the additional operating costs up to this point are anywhere near a trillion dollars, unless they've been paying their engineers several billion dollars each per year, in which case I want that job.
This is really no problem at all. I'm sure we'll find a critical flaw in the star that will allow us to destroy it in the nick of time. Possibly an exhaust port or something like that.
That's hot.
Those were for my lunch, you insensitive clod!
It has an even more serious problem than that: Sure, it's effective against human brain cancer in mice, but unfortunately it's only effective against mouse brain cancer in humans. So, not very useful I'm afraid.
United may have a relatively efficient boarding process, but it doesn't help if the plane shows up too late for boarding time to matter. Recently I was in a situation where I had to take 4 flights over the span of two weeks. I flew United each time, and 3 out of the 4 were more than an hour late, and two of them were two or more hours late. If the plane is that late, it really makes no difference if the boarding process takes 10 or 20 minutes.