This guy is thinking about more than your "most people"--by which you mean spoiled Americans, no doubt.
No, that's not what I mean. Surgical vision correction isn't just a vanity-driven procedure. RK, the original surgical correction, was pioneered by Soviet researchers because it was cheaper-- in Soviet Russia, glasses were in short supply. Surgical correction has been around for a long time, and not just to "spoiled americans". I was taking issue with his casting of surgical correction as a "the rich don't want glasses" type procedure.
Most people aren't American, or even living in the first world, and cheap custom glasses would be a wonderful resource for them.
That sentiment is, in fact, the point I was trying to make. There are people (like me) who live in the first world for whom surgery is not an option. People who can barely afford to buy new glasses every 10 years, even though we need new ones about every five years. People for whom the one-time expense of surgical correction would be cheaper than glasses, but for whom it is not an option. This invention has the potential to be a great boon for all people who need glasses, be they a poor dude in Eritrea trying to eke out a living in agriculture, or a lowly american wage-slave like me.
But keep in mind that an eye bolt to the frame of the car could be considered a "gun rack" which is illegal in the state of California.
This is true to some degree, but in my case the judge said the key to the law was "accessability", not "visibility". The rifles were, in fact, no more accessable to the occupants than they'd be if they were locked in the trunk of sedan. Getting the rifles out required unlocking and opening the back hatch and unlocking two padlocks on the eyebolts that were essentially unreachable except through the back hatch. The lesson I learned, however, is that the most important thing isn't to just comply with the letter of the law, but to comply with the law as the average law enforcement officer understands it. Being right is no consolation when have to spend 8 hours in jail and call a cab to get back to your car!:)
If it means that more people who can't afford vision correction can get glasses
Laser vision correction is only viable for a certain subset of lens-correctable conditions, and isn't a good idea if your vision problem isn't static, i.e. you need a different prescription every couple years. Then there's those who don't feel glasses are so bad that they should risk eye surgery to get rid of them
Actually, EW is rather interesting, I can only guess you were unlucky in the specifics of your job.
Yeah, I should have been more specific. What I meant was "EW in a field training exercise 15 years ago was boring". All the real SIGINT work I did was fascinating, and with all the new equipment that's been fielded in the last 10 years it's only gotten better. I was in the army from '87 to '91 and in those days we were still mostly using old crap equipment. Nothing was effectively networked, communication was mostly one-way (up the chain) so even if HUMINT knew that an armored column was coming up the road, COMINT would still be wasting time trying to analyze their radio traffic to see what they were!
And it seems EW is in the focus of RMA these days.
Oh yeah, EW is is central to "the new way". In my day, EW was a mostly immobile asset. Even the tactical EW units had to stop and set up antennas before they could do anything. Nowadays, we've got Electronic Intelligence people riding in GBCS-heavy armored vehicles in front of the combat units! Everything's networked, cross-cued, and realtime now, so ELINT really works. I was unfortunate in that I joined the army at the tail end of the "soviets will come from east germany to invade europe" era of military planning. I spent three years training for World War 3 in Europe-- learning soviet tactics, west german terrain features, and even the Russian language-- and then the Berlin wall came down and 80% of my training suddenly seemed pretty useless. The Revolution in Military Affairs didn't start in earnest until several years after I got out. I may not have been around then, but I like to think that all the complaining I did about the inflexibility of the EW system during Desert Storm contributed to the development of the amazing system that's in service now.
Sounds like it would be worth simply buying a new remote from TiVo rather then go through this time consuming process! Sorry but $35 is a small price compared to an hour or two of fiddling and polishing a remote's internals.
Yeah, I'm a geek but I am not going through this process unless it would cost a $100 otherwise!
I'm with you. There are so many available on eBay that it's not worth the effort. And if you have an original series 1 remote like I did, you get a new one with the better buttons!
There are many state laws mandating exactly that. You can be arrested if you don't have ID.
Please cite some specific state laws requiring ID at all times. How do these supposed laws deal with children? Is a 15 year old required to have ID walking around at the mall? If so, what form of ID?
They found the gun that was being legally transported in a unloaded, locked gun box. The police report said as much, which is why the judge dismissed the case after reading over the police report.
Did you get the firearm back? I had a similar situation where a Los Angeles County Sheriff "lit me up" in a parking lot at 1am as I was returning some rented videos. I drove a 280Z at the time, which had no trunk. I was transporting a pair of lever action.30-30 winchester rifles with cable locks throu the actions and fastened to a pair of eye-bolts attached to the car frame. Having seen them trough the back window, he handcuffed me and put me in his car. The cop decided that, since they weren't locked in an actual car trunk or gun case, they were being transported illegally. He confiscated the rifles and held me overnight. Later, in court, the judge stopped just short of calling him an idiot, dismissed the charges, and ordered the return of the rifles. My public defender told me I could try and get them back, but don't hold my breath. They routinely confiscate firearms and simply send them out to be destroyed, he said, regardless of whether they were confiscated legally or not. I just let them go. They were a couple cheap pawn shop rifles anyway.
This is the second time a/. reviewer has put a spoiler in the review. Whats up with these guys?
There's no such thing as a spoiler in a Dan Brown novel. You know what's going to happen three pages before he gets around to telling you. After you catch on to his use of the oldest of all plot twists (the bad guys are good guys and vice-versa), you know how the book will end by the time the secret antagonist is introduced as the protagonists friend. THe mechanics of how the story gets there are so amateurish that it's usually not even worth going through the motions. A predictable plot can be fun if the author is an entertaining writer. Mediocre writing skill can often be ignored when the plot is interesting and unpredictable. All his crap is shit, though. Thin, predictable plot, badly written.
All his books that i've read have the same type of characters, the same story arc, the same 'big twist' at the end.
It's like he's got a template that he fills in names, places, objects, and conflicts.
What, like this?:
-mystery man dies with secret message
-beautiful government code jeenyus teams up with some dude
-they take twice as long as the reader to crack simple problems (EVERYONE knows that Dav Vinci wrote backwards, don't they?)
-the protagonist is followed by an assassin with a deformity of some sort
-the story twists unnecessarily and illogically for pages on end before a trite, ending along the lines of "and that's the end of THAT chapter."
That about right? I only read DaVinci Code and was so unimpressed by the godawful writing and unrealistic situations that I swore to never read another of his books.
In short, raving lunatic with a sword=useful. Raving lunatic with a MLRS !=useful. Any vets care to comment on my thinking?
Indeed correct. A certain amount of...errr..enthusiasm is encouraged in the military, but outright teeth-gnashing fury is frowned upon everywhere except maybe the infantry. Even then, only when appropriate and control is emphasized.
There's a good reason that MREs come with Tobasco sauce
I thought it was because the crap they had in MREs tasted bland as all hell so as not to offend officers delicate palates. Could be multiple motives though...:)
I'd like to have somebody post as AC that has been in a tank for 4 days and taken these drugs. What does meth do for and to you? Exactly?
Never spent four days in a tank but I did spend most of a five-day field exercise in either an EFV or the back of a Hummer while tweaked out on meth. It makes the tedious, repetetive parts (guard duty, radio monitoring, or anything electronic warfare related*) much easier, but it starts to cause problems after a couple days of not drinking enough water or sleeping. The problem is that when you're given time to rest, you can't because you're still wired. The only choice is to not take any speed several hours before a rest break, but then you're tired for those several hours. It's really not a good solution for extended combat. I only did it the once, and swore I never would again. By day 5 I thought I was going to die. I was totally exhausted for three days after. While everyone else was enjoying the time off they gave us afterward, I was sleeping in the barracks. Not very efficient use of chemicals, if you ask me.
* EW is very boring. You have one guy (98J?)trying not to fall asleep while waiting for his radar detector to go bleep. Two or three guys (98G and 05H) listening to static on radios waiting to hear someone say something or use a morse key. Then you have one or two analysts (98C) filling out contact reports and waiting for the Golfs or DitDahs to come to life and start typing so you have something to analyze. I had picked 98C SigInt Analyst because I thought military intelligence would be interesting. Doh.
Yup, I too am glad we traded jobs and a prosperous economy for a president who doesn't engage in consentual sex with a woman who isn't his wife.
It was a good trade.
Pffff.... Forget it, man. If you think it was policy from either occupant of the white house that caused either the economic boom of the late 90's or the subsequent crash of said boom in 2000, you've bought into the whole politics-as-marketing sham already.
AFAIK the germans developed something like this in the last century, they called it the drug of heroes, or HEROIN. It didn't turn out to be awefully useful but still is a commercial success.
When I was in the army there were stories about a Soviet designed "anti-radiation sickness" pill. As the story went, Soviet military planners wanted a way to keep irradiated Red Army soldiers up and fighting in the event of a nuclear attack on the battlefield. Soldiers whose exposure was determined to be lethal or near-lethal were to be administered a pill (or injection) that was a mix of opiates and amphetamines. It didn't actually do anything at all for the radiation sickness, but it did keep them up and fighting rather than lying on a cot in a medical tent for that last week or two before the died from the radiation. Never had this rumor confirmed, but the way the red army worked back then (e.g. periodically practicing with live nerve agent despite consistently losing a few soldiers on every exercise) it wouldn't surprise me.
That makes it better? That he said he loved us before he fucked us, while Bush didn't? My entire point is that popular vote is to a large degree irrelevant because the system has been manipulated such that our choice is to vote "red" or vote "blue". The fact is that the "Red Party" and "Blue Party" have totally dominated politics and no longer have to appeal to important things like our basic rights as humans, but rather just play The Election Game, wherein they bandy about slogans and hold up poster-children and hope their product marketing is better than the other team's. I won't say that individual votes don't count, but they are essentially irrelevant.
Obligatory election year post: No, a minority of the electorate voted for Bush, and a majority of Supreme Court justices finished it off by appointing him president.
Sheesh. Give the minority/majority thing a rest, willya? Presidents are frequently elected with a minority of votes. Clinton won with 43.3% in '92. Electoral politics are pretty much rigged anyway, so the fact that SCOTUS decided to call 2000 for the side that would end electoral uncertainity fastest shouldn't be surprising.
Agreed. I believe in California, you can get a DUI when the officer wakes you up from sleeping on the back seat while the keys are 'under your control'.
Cripes, I'm living here in Los Angeles and *I* didn't know that. It's pretty crappy law if someone acting in a reasonable and prudent manner can be arrested for a crime based on their potential to commit that crime. Good thing I don't drink anywhere but home.
I was one of the folks who stood around scratching his head at the explosion of IPOs for "dot coms" that had no legs to stand on. Why the imposion occurred shouldn't have surprised anyone who was paying attention
You and me both. Back during the boom I'd gotten a job as a telecom technician. My father kept saying "get out of that crappy job. Any monkey who can turn on a PC is making $50K." (this from a guy who worked for one company all his life and always managed to sell his bonus-acquired company stock at its lowest because he feared "losing MORE money"-- but I digress). But nothing I saw looked like it was going to last. Maybe it was just a case of my paranoia prentending to be insight, but 5 years later I'm still working for the same company and most of those dot com freak companies we installed network and telecom equipment for are long gone. I'd rather work 10 years at a steady $40K/yr than play musical jobs for $80K. The stress just isn't worth it.
If you are drunk, you are not in a condition to decide whether or not you can drive. Getting into the car puts you in a position in which you could drive if you wanted to - the only thing stopping you are your inhibitions against drunk driving. And what's the first thing to go when you've been drinking?
Show me a drunk driver who doesn't know he's breaking the law. They may say "I only had a couple" or "I'm not drunk" but that's not what they're thinking. They're thinking "I think I can (or thought I could) get away with it". Taking your logic to it's end would have us arresting peole who drink and have car keys in their pocket. Or people driving with an unopened liquor bottle on the passenger seat. You can't make a blanket declaration that all peopple who have been drinking are too impaired to know they're drunk but only if they sit in their car. Try to justify it any way you like, but the fact remains that no one arrested for DUI while passed out in the drivers seat in a parking lot is, at the time of arrest, driving under the influence. The law has been expanded to make it possible to "proactively police" the crime, but that just means they've criminalized another act that hurts no one.
They also already have a network for the lottery, so why not for checking for DUI convictions at the door or when served ?
"DUI" doesn't necessarily mean "drunk driving". I have an acquaintance who got a DUI for being under the influence of methamphetamine. Putting aside the absurdity of the fact that the US Air Force gives its pilots speed to make them more attentive, but civilians on speed are considered DUI, the real fun came later: the judge ordered him to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. One could argue the applicability of AA to other drug problems (most of the alcoholics at the meetings I've attended dabbled in coke or speed too-- but mostly just to stay awake and drink more), but the primary focus of AA is (surpise) alcohol. This guy, although he was a speed user, never drank. Didn't smoke either. He had to endure weeks of pointless alcohol-centric support before the judge would let him attend meetings that were at least for drug addicts. Alcohol may be the most popular DUI drug, but it certainly can't be assumed. You're saying people should be denied access to a bar for driving to work on speed?
Then there's the question of appropriateness. Is it reasonable to prohibit DUI convicts from purchasing alcohol? They already have their driver's licenses revoked. Why not cut just cut off their hair and tattoo "DUI" on their scalp? That'd make it easy to ID them. Why the fixation on punishment? DUI's don't happen because they aren't punished harshly enough. True, DUI rates would drop if anyone blowing a.08 or higher was just shot in the head there on the side of the road, but is the result worth the cost?
There's also the issue of feasibility. The lottery network doesn't require instant access to a central database which must be able to differentiate between alcohol DUIs and non-alcohol DUIs. Lottery terminals just record numbers and report them back. This doesn't even address the issue of people with DUIs in other states. Is this to be a big national database? Administered by whom? Also, such terminals don't magically appear for free-- their cost is offset by the purchase of lottery tickets. "DUI terminals" would just be another absurd cost piled on businesses to saddle them with the task of enforcing what is ultimately bad law.
That's a perfectly good law (unlike the stupid ignition interlock law described in the story). If you have the keys and are in the car, you've demonstrated your intention to drive.
Nonsense. At most you've demonstrated you're possible intention to drive. It may alternately demonstrate your intention to listen to the radio, roll down the power windows, or plug your cell phone into the cigarette lighter socket to call a cab. Keys in the ignition + seat belt, maybe, but even then the fact that you're not operating a motor vehicle makes calling it a DUI pretty fascist. It may be true that it's a lot easier to arrest drunk drivers if you can nail 'em just for sitting in the driver's seat with their keys in the ignition, but that also means that people who had no intention of driving drunk (but don't know the draconian extent of the law) get DUI's as well. The problem is the whole notion of "proactive law enforcement". By making a whole set of activities that are merely possible precursors to crime themselves illegal, the definition of criminal acts expands to include people who have hurt no one, would not have hurt anyone, and/or never had any intention of doing anything that would have hurt someone. Why not make it a DUI to posess car keys while drunk? It sounds stupid, but it makes as much sense as making it a DUI to listen to the radio or roll down the window from the driver's seat while drunk. More laws won't stop people from being criminals; more laws just creates more criminals.
"While this makes having "a life" difficult, it is what led to America becoming a global economic, military, and political uberpower in, what, a couple mere centuries. "
Oh, and here I thought that it was slavery and having other people do the work for free that led America there. Silly me!
Then explain post-war Japan's successes. Really, the notion that slavery is what brought the US to the front of the pack ignores the fact that slavery ended nearly a century before the US became a global superpower.
The party was an ugly scene that only got uglier as the night dragged on. I never met a bigger bunch of assholes in my life....But not knowing the way out of that place and being in the middle of nowhere, we didn't stomp anybody despite the fact that they deserved it. Instead we got revenge on these assholes in other ways. One friend took a dump in the washing machine. The other friend pissed in the air exchange so the whole house would stink of urine. I pulled the covers back on the bed, vomitted, and then put them back. We got out of there soon after that. I'm sure the assholes were mighty pissed the next day but screw 'em they deserved it.
Dude, I think you and your friends were the assholes, and I'd wager you couldn't produce a non-asshole who'd disagree with that assessment.
My comments were specific to crystal meth, which is marketed differently than other drugs. Nobody is going to give away weed or cocaine as there is no need. Crystal meth is a huge problem in rural areas precisely because of how it is marketed. A drug dealer can set up a production lab in a rural area and create a supply but have no market. They then initiate a demand through the free giveaways. Then there is sufficient demand to meet the supply. Crystal meth is supply side driven and not demand driven in the startup phase, which is unlike other drugs where the demand is pre-existing.
This has mostly to do with the ease of production of meth. Drugs will sell anywhere you can supply them. I find it hard to believe that nobody in rural areas would touch meth if they had to pay for it, but as soon as they're offered a free taste they're all over it. Meth is so damn cheap that the difference between "free" and "full price" isn't enough to keep people away unless they're hooked. Fact is, rural areas are so goddamned boring that there's always a guaranteed market for any sort of chemical diversion. Crystal meth has been continuously available in any decent-sized town from minnesota to texas for 20+ years. I was an on and off meth user for 15 years in places like San Angelo, TX and Iowa City, IA (NOT big towns) and never have I ever even heard second-hand of anyone being offered free meth. I wish it were true (I'd be all over that shit!) but the "first taste free" urban legend has never panned out.
I think it's from a long-ago USENET post where the poster promised anyone using his sig will get eaten first, so I figure it's OK to use for those "in the know".:)
Yeah, google is real pure and kicks total ass. Ever notice how many spammy search results redirect to ebay and amazon? Why can't they fix that? Oh wait, notice how many of the adwords displayed on the side are for ebay or amazon?
Not really Google's fault there. That just shows how ebay and amazon are agressive marketers. In addition to paying for google ads, amazon has a bizarre affiliate-type program that basically replicates their pages on other people's sites, essentially spamming ALL search engines. How many times have you popped up results for a word combo or phrase that happened to appear in someone's amazon review and gotten the same damn thing, on different sites, over and over? This, for example, is what I got when I was looking for hacks to the REB1200 ebook reader. I'm sure google would kill that crap if there was an easy way. For the time being I suggest just picking an unusual word from the offending amazon review and exclude it, like this.
I want an objective search engine, not one where companies can pay for placement
I agree with you, but that doesn't happen with google?
Not overtly, at least. Google doesn't let people pay for higher placement in their regular search. Paying Google advert money just gets you better placement next to the search results. Google searches do come up with a lot of junk, but you know at least they're trying to minimize it. To create a bizarre, tortured analogy:
Google: "We promise not to crap on your lawn. Others might be following us, and they might crap on your lawn, but we'll try to get rid of them if we can. Any crap we're paid to show you, we'll display it on the sidewalk for you and you can decide whether you want it or not."
Yahoo: "We're gonna crap on your lawn. Good luck trying not to step in it."
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's not what I mean. Surgical vision correction isn't just a vanity-driven procedure. RK, the original surgical correction, was pioneered by Soviet researchers because it was cheaper-- in Soviet Russia, glasses were in short supply. Surgical correction has been around for a long time, and not just to "spoiled americans". I was taking issue with his casting of surgical correction as a "the rich don't want glasses" type procedure.
Most people aren't American, or even living in the first world, and cheap custom glasses would be a wonderful resource for them.
That sentiment is, in fact, the point I was trying to make. There are people (like me) who live in the first world for whom surgery is not an option. People who can barely afford to buy new glasses every 10 years, even though we need new ones about every five years. People for whom the one-time expense of surgical correction would be cheaper than glasses, but for whom it is not an option. This invention has the potential to be a great boon for all people who need glasses, be they a poor dude in Eritrea trying to eke out a living in agriculture, or a lowly american wage-slave like me.
This is true to some degree, but in my case the judge said the key to the law was "accessability", not "visibility". The rifles were, in fact, no more accessable to the occupants than they'd be if they were locked in the trunk of sedan. Getting the rifles out required unlocking and opening the back hatch and unlocking two padlocks on the eyebolts that were essentially unreachable except through the back hatch. The lesson I learned, however, is that the most important thing isn't to just comply with the letter of the law, but to comply with the law as the average law enforcement officer understands it. Being right is no consolation when have to spend 8 hours in jail and call a cab to get back to your car! :)
Laser vision correction is only viable for a certain subset of lens-correctable conditions, and isn't a good idea if your vision problem isn't static, i.e. you need a different prescription every couple years. Then there's those who don't feel glasses are so bad that they should risk eye surgery to get rid of them
"afford" isn't really the issue for most people.
Yeah, I should have been more specific. What I meant was "EW in a field training exercise 15 years ago was boring". All the real SIGINT work I did was fascinating, and with all the new equipment that's been fielded in the last 10 years it's only gotten better. I was in the army from '87 to '91 and in those days we were still mostly using old crap equipment. Nothing was effectively networked, communication was mostly one-way (up the chain) so even if HUMINT knew that an armored column was coming up the road, COMINT would still be wasting time trying to analyze their radio traffic to see what they were!
And it seems EW is in the focus of RMA these days.
Oh yeah, EW is is central to "the new way". In my day, EW was a mostly immobile asset. Even the tactical EW units had to stop and set up antennas before they could do anything. Nowadays, we've got Electronic Intelligence people riding in GBCS-heavy armored vehicles in front of the combat units! Everything's networked, cross-cued, and realtime now, so ELINT really works. I was unfortunate in that I joined the army at the tail end of the "soviets will come from east germany to invade europe" era of military planning. I spent three years training for World War 3 in Europe-- learning soviet tactics, west german terrain features, and even the Russian language-- and then the Berlin wall came down and 80% of my training suddenly seemed pretty useless. The Revolution in Military Affairs didn't start in earnest until several years after I got out. I may not have been around then, but I like to think that all the complaining I did about the inflexibility of the EW system during Desert Storm contributed to the development of the amazing system that's in service now.
I'm with you. There are so many available on eBay that it's not worth the effort. And if you have an original series 1 remote like I did, you get a new one with the better buttons!
Please cite some specific state laws requiring ID at all times. How do these supposed laws deal with children? Is a 15 year old required to have ID walking around at the mall? If so, what form of ID?
Did you get the firearm back? I had a similar situation where a Los Angeles County Sheriff "lit me up" in a parking lot at 1am as I was returning some rented videos. I drove a 280Z at the time, which had no trunk. I was transporting a pair of lever action .30-30 winchester rifles with cable locks throu the actions and fastened to a pair of eye-bolts attached to the car frame. Having seen them trough the back window, he handcuffed me and put me in his car. The cop decided that, since they weren't locked in an actual car trunk or gun case, they were being transported illegally. He confiscated the rifles and held me overnight. Later, in court, the judge stopped just short of calling him an idiot, dismissed the charges, and ordered the return of the rifles. My public defender told me I could try and get them back, but don't hold my breath. They routinely confiscate firearms and simply send them out to be destroyed, he said, regardless of whether they were confiscated legally or not. I just let them go. They were a couple cheap pawn shop rifles anyway.
There's no such thing as a spoiler in a Dan Brown novel. You know what's going to happen three pages before he gets around to telling you. After you catch on to his use of the oldest of all plot twists (the bad guys are good guys and vice-versa), you know how the book will end by the time the secret antagonist is introduced as the protagonists friend. THe mechanics of how the story gets there are so amateurish that it's usually not even worth going through the motions. A predictable plot can be fun if the author is an entertaining writer. Mediocre writing skill can often be ignored when the plot is interesting and unpredictable. All his crap is shit, though. Thin, predictable plot, badly written.
What, like this?:
-mystery man dies with secret message
-beautiful government code jeenyus teams up with some dude
-they take twice as long as the reader to crack simple problems (EVERYONE knows that Dav Vinci wrote backwards, don't they?)
-the protagonist is followed by an assassin with a deformity of some sort
-the story twists unnecessarily and illogically for pages on end before a trite, ending along the lines of "and that's the end of THAT chapter."
That about right? I only read DaVinci Code and was so unimpressed by the godawful writing and unrealistic situations that I swore to never read another of his books.
Indeed correct. A certain amount of...errr..enthusiasm is encouraged in the military, but outright teeth-gnashing fury is frowned upon everywhere except maybe the infantry. Even then, only when appropriate and control is emphasized.
There's a good reason that MREs come with Tobasco sauce
I thought it was because the crap they had in MREs tasted bland as all hell so as not to offend officers delicate palates. Could be multiple motives though... :)
I'd like to have somebody post as AC that has been in a tank for 4 days and taken these drugs. What does meth do for and to you? Exactly?
Never spent four days in a tank but I did spend most of a five-day field exercise in either an EFV or the back of a Hummer while tweaked out on meth. It makes the tedious, repetetive parts (guard duty, radio monitoring, or anything electronic warfare related*) much easier, but it starts to cause problems after a couple days of not drinking enough water or sleeping. The problem is that when you're given time to rest, you can't because you're still wired. The only choice is to not take any speed several hours before a rest break, but then you're tired for those several hours. It's really not a good solution for extended combat. I only did it the once, and swore I never would again. By day 5 I thought I was going to die. I was totally exhausted for three days after. While everyone else was enjoying the time off they gave us afterward, I was sleeping in the barracks. Not very efficient use of chemicals, if you ask me.
* EW is very boring. You have one guy (98J?)trying not to fall asleep while waiting for his radar detector to go bleep. Two or three guys (98G and 05H) listening to static on radios waiting to hear someone say something or use a morse key. Then you have one or two analysts (98C) filling out contact reports and waiting for the Golfs or DitDahs to come to life and start typing so you have something to analyze. I had picked 98C SigInt Analyst because I thought military intelligence would be interesting. Doh.
Pffff.... Forget it, man. If you think it was policy from either occupant of the white house that caused either the economic boom of the late 90's or the subsequent crash of said boom in 2000, you've bought into the whole politics-as-marketing sham already.
When I was in the army there were stories about a Soviet designed "anti-radiation sickness" pill. As the story went, Soviet military planners wanted a way to keep irradiated Red Army soldiers up and fighting in the event of a nuclear attack on the battlefield. Soldiers whose exposure was determined to be lethal or near-lethal were to be administered a pill (or injection) that was a mix of opiates and amphetamines. It didn't actually do anything at all for the radiation sickness, but it did keep them up and fighting rather than lying on a cot in a medical tent for that last week or two before the died from the radiation. Never had this rumor confirmed, but the way the red army worked back then (e.g. periodically practicing with live nerve agent despite consistently losing a few soldiers on every exercise) it wouldn't surprise me.
That makes it better? That he said he loved us before he fucked us, while Bush didn't? My entire point is that popular vote is to a large degree irrelevant because the system has been manipulated such that our choice is to vote "red" or vote "blue". The fact is that the "Red Party" and "Blue Party" have totally dominated politics and no longer have to appeal to important things like our basic rights as humans, but rather just play The Election Game, wherein they bandy about slogans and hold up poster-children and hope their product marketing is better than the other team's. I won't say that individual votes don't count, but they are essentially irrelevant.
Sheesh. Give the minority/majority thing a rest, willya? Presidents are frequently elected with a minority of votes. Clinton won with 43.3% in '92. Electoral politics are pretty much rigged anyway, so the fact that SCOTUS decided to call 2000 for the side that would end electoral uncertainity fastest shouldn't be surprising.
Cripes, I'm living here in Los Angeles and *I* didn't know that. It's pretty crappy law if someone acting in a reasonable and prudent manner can be arrested for a crime based on their potential to commit that crime. Good thing I don't drink anywhere but home.
You and me both. Back during the boom I'd gotten a job as a telecom technician. My father kept saying "get out of that crappy job. Any monkey who can turn on a PC is making $50K." (this from a guy who worked for one company all his life and always managed to sell his bonus-acquired company stock at its lowest because he feared "losing MORE money"-- but I digress). But nothing I saw looked like it was going to last. Maybe it was just a case of my paranoia prentending to be insight, but 5 years later I'm still working for the same company and most of those dot com freak companies we installed network and telecom equipment for are long gone. I'd rather work 10 years at a steady $40K/yr than play musical jobs for $80K. The stress just isn't worth it.
Show me a drunk driver who doesn't know he's breaking the law. They may say "I only had a couple" or "I'm not drunk" but that's not what they're thinking. They're thinking "I think I can (or thought I could) get away with it". Taking your logic to it's end would have us arresting peole who drink and have car keys in their pocket. Or people driving with an unopened liquor bottle on the passenger seat. You can't make a blanket declaration that all peopple who have been drinking are too impaired to know they're drunk but only if they sit in their car. Try to justify it any way you like, but the fact remains that no one arrested for DUI while passed out in the drivers seat in a parking lot is, at the time of arrest, driving under the influence. The law has been expanded to make it possible to "proactively police" the crime, but that just means they've criminalized another act that hurts no one.
"DUI" doesn't necessarily mean "drunk driving". I have an acquaintance who got a DUI for being under the influence of methamphetamine. Putting aside the absurdity of the fact that the US Air Force gives its pilots speed to make them more attentive, but civilians on speed are considered DUI, the real fun came later: the judge ordered him to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. One could argue the applicability of AA to other drug problems (most of the alcoholics at the meetings I've attended dabbled in coke or speed too-- but mostly just to stay awake and drink more), but the primary focus of AA is (surpise) alcohol. This guy, although he was a speed user, never drank. Didn't smoke either. He had to endure weeks of pointless alcohol-centric support before the judge would let him attend meetings that were at least for drug addicts. Alcohol may be the most popular DUI drug, but it certainly can't be assumed. You're saying people should be denied access to a bar for driving to work on speed?
Then there's the question of appropriateness. Is it reasonable to prohibit DUI convicts from purchasing alcohol? They already have their driver's licenses revoked. Why not cut just cut off their hair and tattoo "DUI" on their scalp? That'd make it easy to ID them. Why the fixation on punishment? DUI's don't happen because they aren't punished harshly enough. True, DUI rates would drop if anyone blowing a .08 or higher was just shot in the head there on the side of the road, but is the result worth the cost?
There's also the issue of feasibility. The lottery network doesn't require instant access to a central database which must be able to differentiate between alcohol DUIs and non-alcohol DUIs. Lottery terminals just record numbers and report them back. This doesn't even address the issue of people with DUIs in other states. Is this to be a big national database? Administered by whom? Also, such terminals don't magically appear for free-- their cost is offset by the purchase of lottery tickets. "DUI terminals" would just be another absurd cost piled on businesses to saddle them with the task of enforcing what is ultimately bad law.
Nonsense. At most you've demonstrated you're possible intention to drive. It may alternately demonstrate your intention to listen to the radio, roll down the power windows, or plug your cell phone into the cigarette lighter socket to call a cab. Keys in the ignition + seat belt, maybe, but even then the fact that you're not operating a motor vehicle makes calling it a DUI pretty fascist. It may be true that it's a lot easier to arrest drunk drivers if you can nail 'em just for sitting in the driver's seat with their keys in the ignition, but that also means that people who had no intention of driving drunk (but don't know the draconian extent of the law) get DUI's as well. The problem is the whole notion of "proactive law enforcement". By making a whole set of activities that are merely possible precursors to crime themselves illegal, the definition of criminal acts expands to include people who have hurt no one, would not have hurt anyone, and/or never had any intention of doing anything that would have hurt someone. Why not make it a DUI to posess car keys while drunk? It sounds stupid, but it makes as much sense as making it a DUI to listen to the radio or roll down the window from the driver's seat while drunk. More laws won't stop people from being criminals; more laws just creates more criminals.
Oh, and here I thought that it was slavery and having other people do the work for free that led America there. Silly me!
Then explain post-war Japan's successes. Really, the notion that slavery is what brought the US to the front of the pack ignores the fact that slavery ended nearly a century before the US became a global superpower.
Dude, I think you and your friends were the assholes, and I'd wager you couldn't produce a non-asshole who'd disagree with that assessment.
This has mostly to do with the ease of production of meth. Drugs will sell anywhere you can supply them. I find it hard to believe that nobody in rural areas would touch meth if they had to pay for it, but as soon as they're offered a free taste they're all over it. Meth is so damn cheap that the difference between "free" and "full price" isn't enough to keep people away unless they're hooked. Fact is, rural areas are so goddamned boring that there's always a guaranteed market for any sort of chemical diversion. Crystal meth has been continuously available in any decent-sized town from minnesota to texas for 20+ years. I was an on and off meth user for 15 years in places like San Angelo, TX and Iowa City, IA (NOT big towns) and never have I ever even heard second-hand of anyone being offered free meth. I wish it were true (I'd be all over that shit!) but the "first taste free" urban legend has never panned out.
I think it's from a long-ago USENET post where the poster promised anyone using his sig will get eaten first, so I figure it's OK to use for those "in the know". :)
Not really Google's fault there. That just shows how ebay and amazon are agressive marketers. In addition to paying for google ads, amazon has a bizarre affiliate-type program that basically replicates their pages on other people's sites, essentially spamming ALL search engines. How many times have you popped up results for a word combo or phrase that happened to appear in someone's amazon review and gotten the same damn thing, on different sites, over and over? This, for example, is what I got when I was looking for hacks to the REB1200 ebook reader. I'm sure google would kill that crap if there was an easy way. For the time being I suggest just picking an unusual word from the offending amazon review and exclude it, like this.
I agree with you, but that doesn't happen with google?
Not overtly, at least. Google doesn't let people pay for higher placement in their regular search. Paying Google advert money just gets you better placement next to the search results. Google searches do come up with a lot of junk, but you know at least they're trying to minimize it. To create a bizarre, tortured analogy:
Google: "We promise not to crap on your lawn. Others might be following us, and they might crap on your lawn, but we'll try to get rid of them if we can. Any crap we're paid to show you, we'll display it on the sidewalk for you and you can decide whether you want it or not."
Yahoo: "We're gonna crap on your lawn. Good luck trying not to step in it."