Sounds about right for a local crisis just before the presidential elections that would require for the president to stay in power for an unspecified amount of time. Bird flu anyone?
Your tinfoil hat's a little too tight, I think. By what mechanism do you think it's even possible for the president to amend the constitution in a "crisis" such that he can stay in office past the end of the second term? Bush is an idiot, sure, easily giving Johnson a run for his money for the "Worst President in Recent History" trophy; but you've been waving your "BUSH = HITLER" sign for so long you're starting to believe it. This isn't Weimar Germany.
I didn't say that merely having 1/10th of the population would solve all of our problems, merely that they would be solvable.
And yet you offer no reason why that would be so, in the face of historical evidence that shows that nothing has substantially changed going back thousands of years. Rational thought over idiotic unsubstantiated assertion FTW!
methinks in the US of A two other major factors are the still sizable agricultural sector (and the large families that traditionally entails)
The "agricultural sector" is largely automated where it can be, and serviced by cheap immigrant labor where it can't. Further, most farms are no longer family concerns, but rather operated by corporations. The "traditional" family farm where Ma, Pa, and eight or nine kids are all hoeing the turnip patch has all but vanished in the last 100 years.
They are printing virtual money with no real limits, and now there appears to be enough connections ( permitted or not ) to real money that they are increasing the real-world money supply ( M1 )
Your understanding of economics is for shit. Unless it can be readily used in place of real money, it's not part of M1. At present you can only exchange it for real money, which makes it merely either a "virtual good" or "promise of service". A glut of virtual dollars drives the price of them, in real dollars, down. Because it's all essentially entertainment, none of the "real world" economy is dependent on these virtual dollars and therefore sees no inflation when they are devalued.
that means players can now deduct ISP costs, game purchase prices, monthly access fees, computer equipment depreciation, etc from their income tax since these are all required to make money in an online world.
Only if it's your primary source of income. They disallowed the deduction of expenses incurred earning a secondary income a couple years ago.
Play as a company and expense all off your equipment and bandwidth purchases.
Can't anymore. IRS has closed that "loophole". You may only deduct expenses incurred in the course of your majority source of income. That is, if you're not earning your living off selling Warcraft accounts, you can't deduct shit. Sucks for people like me who get 40% of our income off freelance work.
It's wrong on a lot of levels:
1) The judge should have said "I don't rule on video game violence"
2) He should have said "I am not qualified to look at a game to decide what is okay"
3) It's not his job to look at a game at decide if it's "Okay" for the rest of the public to play.
No, you're wrong. In an ideal world, yeah, the judge should be able to say the above and everyone would say "yes indeed, it's none of our business". But that's not what would happen. If the judge declared himself unqualified to judge if the game is OK, that philosophically leaves a back door open to find a judge that thinks he IS qualified, because there are PLENTY of people out there who think it IS the government's business whether "violent" media is allowed to be distributed. His answer frames the question in a more practical way, one that addresses the stupid fucks who think that way: "If we (collectively) are willing to tolerate a greater level of violence than this on TV, calling for a ban on this game for violent content makes no sense." See, it's not as effective to say "your method of applying morality is wrong" as it is to say "your argument is wrong even by your own moral standards".
Would you want the world to know that you called an ambulance because you tripped over a garden hose and did a face-plant on your patio?
Stupid question, that. If you want it kept private, call a private ambulance company to take you to the hospital. If you want to call 911 and use public services, you'll just have to put up with the people paying for those services knowing where they're being used. Time of call, address, and nature of call are hardly PHI.
Do you want your boss (and everyone else inthe office) to know that you were a victim of spousal abuse last night? Or would you rather keep that to yourself?
Time of call, address, and service requested (e.g. police, EMT, fire) don't tell anyone that, you dumb sack of shit.
Jesus, are all Americans as stupid as you? Can you really not conceive a world which isn't made better, but is made worse, by your attendence on the scene of a crime,
No mostly we're not a stupid sheep like you, content to wait around and expect a rarefied subset of overworked emergency service personnel do everything. Police and fire service employees are (surprise) just people like us. They don't have magic powers that make their actions "help", while we plebes are only capable of making things worse.
Clandestine activities are part and parcel of some law enforcement and defense activities, and even your local county or municipal agencies have some need of that - especially if they want to be able to retain quality people (who will insist on not having their names splashed all over the internet while they're doing things like infiltrating MS-13 in your kid's school zone, etc).
Gimme an effin' break. You're engaging in the fallacy of citing a clear outlier in an attempt to disprove the obvious curve. Clandestine operations are so exceptional in their rarity compared to mundane emergency services that they are best protected by specifically concentrating on keeping the elements of the operation itself secret. Proposing blanket bans on the dissemination of all information about public safety services to keep a few undercover operations secret is like swatting flies with a 4x8 sheet of plywood.
Unless your grandmother has agreed otherwise, they *are* legally required to keep the nature of her medical emergency bottled up.
The nature, yes. The simple fact that she called 911 for medical assistance? No. If you want gandma's trip to the hospital to be secret, don't call publicly funded emergency services, stupid.
As for the claim that this is because of the risk of terrorism, I find that quite believable. If I were to bomb the nearest mosque or synagogue, the effect would be better if I could bomb it at a time when I knew all the fire-trucks were busy at the other side of town.
News flash, genius: nothing short of a monumentally huge disaster is going to occupy even a majority of the fire trucks in the city, much less ALL of them. If you are waiting for that before blowing up a mosque or synagogue, better bring a book because you'll be waiting a LONG time.
Happy loving relationships (not pathological ones) bread and raise happy well adjusted children...If the children in a family are misbehaving it is because either than were taught to act that way (directly or indirectly) or they are having trouble coping with certain situations (such as abuse or neglect).
Utter bollocks. Children in their natural state are uncivilized, self-centered animals. It takes diligent application of rules, boundaries, and discipline to make them behave properly. There are plenty of very nice people out there with good marriages who are completely puzzled as to why their screaming, obnoxious brats act that way, when the answer is simply that they never told their children "no". You see them all the time. They try to reason with their 6 year old in the grocery store. They make deals with them to get them to be quiet ("if you stop screaming, I'll buy you [whatever]"). They plug their shrieking pie-holes with food. This sort of slack, evasive child rearing behavior has fuck-all to do with whether their spousal relationship is happy and loving.
Bucky Fuller said: "Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."
Bucky Fuller was being a smartass at the expense of being truthful. We don't let the resources in pollution go unrecovered out of ignorance of their value. They go unrecovered because the cost of recovery exceeds their value.
It is far more interesting, in a relative sense, than the three hundred posts of "haw haw, now utube.com is linked by slashdot and they will get teh slashdoted" that comprise most of the rest of the discussion.
If all people that work in or for "the government" were made to undergo monthly polygraph tests
No good. Polygraphy is a completely subjective pseudo-science, used by government and industry to extract confessions. Exactly the sort of abuses of power we should be preventing. Why do you think a polygraph is completely inadmissible as evidence in any court in the land? When the two possible conclusions from such a test are "possibly deceptive" and "inconclusive", it's pretty obvious it's all crap.
Any astrological events (including asteroid hits on Earth's surface, or possibly on the moon -- big tidal force maybe enough??) that could account for it?
Anything similar in previous historical eras??
Nothing concrete. Problem is, much of "historical record" is religious texts, which are not particularly useful as it's impossible to tell where history ends and fantasy begins. The difficulty with all these little things like shifting calendars, immobile ancient egyptian sun clocks that don't line up with the sun properly, etc. is that while they tend to indicate that something moved within human history, they were latched on to as evidence of humongous catastrophes by unscientific theorists like Immanuel Velikovsky, who were basically just biblical scholars trying to show that the stuff in the bible (rains of frogs, parting the red sea, sun moving backwards, etc.) is actual historical account and not just fairy tales. Carl Sagan was a famous opponent to Velikovsky who loved to tear his theories apart with scientific logic (very easy target, really). Problem is, while the overall theories of catastrophists are clearly nonsense, a lot of people seem to have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Some bits of evidence truly are at odds with the conventional wisdom. The problem is that the debate became so polarizing that you either a) believed Mars nearly hit the earth 2800 years ago and nearly destroyed the earth, or b) you believed nothing at all happened.
Actually, that's just a straightforward lunar year. They use a periodic intercalary month to re-sync with the solar year. Hard to use it to draw any conclusions about any event in the 8th century BCE anyway, given that Islam didn't show up until the 7th century CE.
ah, it's amazing how so many conspiracy theories have been brought to my attention through slashdot postings. Apparently, ithis particular linked in with Christian eschatology or some such nonsense.
Conspiracy theory? Just because a bunch of swirly-eyed christian nuts think there may have been historical evidence of something makes it automatically wrong? These "nearly static world" vs. "violently changing world" arguments go back to the days when you had the religious scholars on one side saying the earth was created in 7 days, plus god did all kinds of crazy stuff like flood the earth and rain fire from the heavens and such; and on the other side, the new rational scientists pulling in the opposite direction, rejecting catastrophism for the gradual, imperceptibly incremental model of the earth. I find it puzzling that even though we've come a long way from that early nearly static model to now accepting things like continental drift and asteroid-collision driven extinctions, whenever someone brings up the possibility that the early "incremental model" scientists may have been wrong about something else as well, it's immediately branded as "religious propaganda".
Might I point out that the Romans used an especially inaccurate calendar, and it was not until 46 BCE that the somewhat more familiar Julian system was adopted?
The fact that the Roman calendar was a total mess, inserting of an intercalary month every other year or so doesn't answer the question of why the need arose to adopt a new calendar at all upon the founding of Rome-- which happened to be right in the middle of the 8th Century BCE.
360 happens to be an easy number to use. It's not especially accurate, but correcting the error requires some knowledge of astronomy, as well a certain amount of political power. Now, it may be that a number of civilizations adopted a 365 day year at approximately the same time. Perhaps some of them were trading partners.
The Chinese and Babylonians were probably trading partners to some degree, but I seriously doubt the Mayans were taking cues from either of them when they created the 365 day Haab calendar because the 360-day divisible long count calendar had been rendered agriculturally useless. All three were highly skilled at astronomical observation. Additionally, consider the Egyptians, who grimly adhered to a 360 day calendar, despite the fact that their three seasons of Akhet (Inundation), Proyet (Emergence), and Shomu (Harvest) failed to coincide with the events they describe-- this after having the calendar since before 4000BCE. Occam's Razor again. Which is more likely, that they invented a calendar for purposes of agriculture which got screwy within a few decades, but then stuck with it for 3500 years anyway; or that it was just fine for 3000+ years until something happened to throw it off, leaving them stuck between maintaining observational accuracy or adhering to thirty centuries of tradition?
Historians know these 360 day calendars were used because-- get ready for it-- they fit the lunar cycle. Ancients knew this, and that is why cultures made adjustments such as adding weeks or months at various intervals.
The lunar year is 355.3-odd days. No more accurate counted at 360 than the solar year. Historians "know" only because they have retroactively tried to apply a static model based on current condition to the past. The problem is, it fails to explain why the Babylonians, who (as early as 3000-2500BCE) had mapped out the zodiac so accurately that they could predict planetary movement with accuracy of less than one degree, would use a calendar that neither matched the movement of the moon OR the stars for 2000 years before abandoning it. Further, even if you accept that it was just a hack calendar based on the new moon showing up, they handwave the curious fact that the entire planet abandoned similar 360 day calendars at about the same time-- right around the 8th century BCE. I think there's a serious argument for Occam's Razor here. Did the Mayans, Chinese, and Babylonians all just happen to switch from a 360-day system to a 365-day system at roughly the same time by random chance, or were these peoples (all of them skilled at astrological measurement) reacting to a change in the observed year?
Can somebody explain why so many people think copyrights were originally 14+14 years? I hear this erroneous assertion frequently. From the copyright office: "Under the law in effect before 1978... the copyright lasted for a first term of 28 years from the date it was secured. The copyright was eligible for renewal during the last (28th) year of the first term. If renewed, the copyright was extended for a second term of 28 years." In other words, 28+28.
It's not an erroneous assertion. The Copyright Act of 1790 set copyright terms at 14 years, renewable for 14 more. The 28+28 terms were enacted by the Copyright Act of 1909. Current copyright law came into effect with the Copyright Act of 1976. See, when the copyright office says "the law in effect before 1978", they're talking about the Copyright Act of 1909. Note how they do not say that the "before 1978" law goes all the way back to the forming of the nation.
Slashdot Mirror
Much cooler than Dick Saucer. "Sauuuuuuuceeeeeeer!"
Happy loving relationships (not pathological ones) bread and raise happy well adjusted children...If the children in a family are misbehaving it is because either than were taught to act that way (directly or indirectly) or they are having trouble coping with certain situations (such as abuse or neglect). Utter bollocks. Children in their natural state are uncivilized, self-centered animals. It takes diligent application of rules, boundaries, and discipline to make them behave properly. There are plenty of very nice people out there with good marriages who are completely puzzled as to why their screaming, obnoxious brats act that way, when the answer is simply that they never told their children "no". You see them all the time. They try to reason with their 6 year old in the grocery store. They make deals with them to get them to be quiet ("if you stop screaming, I'll buy you [whatever]"). They plug their shrieking pie-holes with food. This sort of slack, evasive child rearing behavior has fuck-all to do with whether their spousal relationship is happy and loving.
Actually, that's just a straightforward lunar year. They use a periodic intercalary month to re-sync with the solar year. Hard to use it to draw any conclusions about any event in the 8th century BCE anyway, given that Islam didn't show up until the 7th century CE.
The fact that the Roman calendar was a total mess, inserting of an intercalary month every other year or so doesn't answer the question of why the need arose to adopt a new calendar at all upon the founding of Rome-- which happened to be right in the middle of the 8th Century BCE.
The Chinese and Babylonians were probably trading partners to some degree, but I seriously doubt the Mayans were taking cues from either of them when they created the 365 day Haab calendar because the 360-day divisible long count calendar had been rendered agriculturally useless. All three were highly skilled at astronomical observation. Additionally, consider the Egyptians, who grimly adhered to a 360 day calendar, despite the fact that their three seasons of Akhet (Inundation), Proyet (Emergence), and Shomu (Harvest) failed to coincide with the events they describe-- this after having the calendar since before 4000BCE. Occam's Razor again. Which is more likely, that they invented a calendar for purposes of agriculture which got screwy within a few decades, but then stuck with it for 3500 years anyway; or that it was just fine for 3000+ years until something happened to throw it off, leaving them stuck between maintaining observational accuracy or adhering to thirty centuries of tradition?