In short most of these new superweapons being developed are kinda pointless as we already have a weapon stronger than all of them: nukes.
This statement fails to address the idea that military force requires a broad range of responses. You can't solve every problem you have with a nuke, and nukes can cause more problems than they solve in virtually all uses they could be put to. Therefore, the idea that the design of new systems and means of warfare can stop now that we have The Bomb are foolish. An atom bomb won't stop an insurgency and it's useless for counterterrorism as well. We had nukes during the Korean War and Vietnam, and we didn't use them because it wouldn't have meant a win. If there's a better example of how atom bombs don't solve even a small percentage of warfare problems, I don't know what it is.
This argument doesn't pan out against the parent. There's no sane argument that we don't hold complete air superiority in Afghanistan, so your comment doesn't answer his issue of using such devices in contested airspace.
Do you honestly believe that these devices will never receive any kind of guidance from humans after they're built? The problem is that your "emotional meltdown" guy could program his drones to go out and kill anything that moves, and the drones, unlike human soldiers, will never ever question the ethics of that command. Sure, it happens with humans, but the problem I have with it is that it's more likely the fewer humans are involved, because sanity checks get broader as more people get involved. Nazi Germany is a good example of this, with regular German soldiers being horrified as news of the camps started leaking out. There have been reasonable arguments presented that the Holocaust would have been short-circuited if the entire German military had been aware of it.
One of the most difficult problems we've encountered in prosecuting such wars (starting as far back as Vietnam) is trying to figure out who's "these malevolent folks" and who's a bystander. That's a tough decision in any case, and a very tough decision in the face of fire. But we've found that it's a decision that must be made because we're not fighting the same kind of war that General Sherman fought. The concept of automating killing machines sets my teeth on edge specifically because of your attitude of "tools that will let us take out these malevolent folks without the death of our troops" because it's painfully obvious that you show little concern for the civilians that get caught up with those malevolent folks. It's easy to say that they shouldn't aid or abet the bad guys, but when a bunch of people set up in your house and tell you to keep your mouth shut or they'll shoot your kids, the concept of the greater good goes away in a hurry. Put on top of that the idea that there are Patriots sitting at home who have no problem with an automated drone cutting said house to bits to kill the bad guys (and killing the coerced family at the same time) and I find your view of warfare to be disturbingly myopic. In short, it hurts like Hell to say it but I'd rather see our soldiers suffering casualties by holding their fire until they're absolutely certain who their target is than have our soldiers killing innocent people because they're not concerned with collateral damage. The reason for that is that in the long run, the civilian population sees that they're doing their best not to kill bystanders and that makes them more likely to step up when they can. As Vietnam showed, doing it the other way around does nothing but alienate the population which leads to more American deaths in the long run.
I've never had the encounter that a MENSA group was populated with idiots (unsurprisingly given what MENSA is, I mostly found them to be very intelligent), but most times I found the personalities to be quite odd like Gilmoure above did, and there's virtually always an undercurrent of extreme elitism that completely turned me off to the group dynamic. If MENSA wanted to fix itself, it would certainly have to start with this because it was like being in a room full of twelve-year-old knowitalls. The rampany social immaturity was downright depressing.
The fact that the hard disk was not reformatted could mean that she had no idea it was stolen, or that there was nothing wrong with computer in the first place and she was not aware of the security software.
Or it could indicate that the software is lojack (which it was, in this case), which is BIOS based and reinstalls from the motherboard when the OS is wiped and reinstalled. That fact that you didn't know that is more than sufficient evidence that she shouldn't be expected to know it either.
There is no way in hell that this was not receiving stolen merchandise.
Strange only to you, the judge involved decided that it wasn't a case for prosecution and dismissed the charges against her.
Even if it wasn't, there are strict guidelines on what students can legitimately sell on campus, so if she broke no laws, she likely broke her contract with the district.
Do you have any proof at all that this is the case, or are you just making stuff up as you go? Citation please, or you're just slandering her.
The article gives plenty of information to judge this personal as at least a criminal, if not a stupid one. School laptops tend to be distinctive, often model not widely available to consumers. To get one out of the school, one has to be sneaky, as they are clearly identifiable. She either had to buy outside on the street or sneak it out of school herself. Any defense, that the computer was "messed up" and she paid to fix it, is not only irrelevant but complete here say. Even the story of buying it from a student is hearsay. I find it much more likely she stole the machine from the school and then tried to blame it on the student.
You state an awful lot of "facts" here with no evidence that any of it is remotely true, and since the judge reviewed the case and dismissed the charges against her, I have to say that it's rather more likely that you're talking out of your ass than that you have some special insight as to what happened here. Moreover, you make several statements about how the laptop belonged to the school district, and that's factually false. It did belong to a school district, but a different one than the one in which she purchased it, so all of your commentary about "distinctive" is outright crap. As to "model not widely available to consumers", the general public could not be expected to know that, and again, the laptop wasn't from the school district she was teaching in so assuming it matched the laptops in the school is pure speculation.
Where do you people get the idea that it was broken or that she repaired it or paid to have it repaired?
She said it herself.
The seller claimed it was "messed up" as part of his justification for the low price. Maybe. That's what SHE claims. Even if he did say it, that doesn't mean it's true. He also said it was his to sell and we know that was a lie. The "messed up" claim is part of HER justification for the low price. Absolutely no proof of any kind that it had any basis in reality.
Your argument reverses. The fact that he lied about ownership offers no proof that it wasn't actually messed up, nor does it make any sense to accuse her of lying because he lied.
How broken could it be if the tracking software was still intact and functioning while she was using it? Do you think they re-loaded and configured the tracking software during the repair?
Firstly, there are many repairs that don't require changes to the OS (a broken hinge or keyboard, for example). Secondly, The tracking software is lojack, which is BIOS-based and will silently reinstall itself from the motherboard after an OS wipe. Therefore, your argument comes up nonsensical.
And it doesn't make any sense for her to buy a broken laptop if she didn't have the skills to repair it herself. Any visit to a repair shop is going to push the price beyond the price of a brand new low-end laptop.
This precludes the possibility that she knows someone who was capable of the repair who would do it without being paid (perhaps, in exchange for cybersex or something...) so again your argument is nonsense.
The whole "it was broken" think is a red herring with no evidence to back it up and plenty to contradict it.
Both of the arguments you presented are demonstrably meaningless so your accusation is unsupportable.
Counter argument: You cannot conduct "private electronic communication" on MY laptop, especially when you're doing so without my consent.
Not a valid counter, because the "MY laptop" part is the point of fact in dispute. The company argued as you did, and she argued that she had a reasonable belief that it was her laptop, and the judge decided that this dispute of fact was enough to allow the case to proceed. It's up to the jury to decide whether she was reasonable in her belief, and if they decide in her favor, then your counter becomes factually inaccurate to the law.
The laptop is still not hers and, as well as losing the money she spent buying the laptop, it turns out she has also ended up being fooled into putting her priviate photos onto a device where there was (unbeknownst to her) no expectation of privacy.
This makes little sense in legal terms. If she has supportable expectation of privacy, then it's an expectation independent of actual ownership. Deceit on the part of the original thief doesn't nullify that.
If somehow believing that she really was the owner of the laptop means that she suddenly gains all the rights of the real owner then the next thing you know she will be suing the original owner for the $60 she paid for his laptop!
The argument is that reasonable belief of ownership gives her all the privacy rights of a real owner, not all legal rights in general.
Of course the law does not operate on common sense so I've no idea whether she has a legal case or not but if we do follow common sense then surely she should be suing the criminal who caused her to expose these photos to the police and software company in the first place rather than go after the people who were trying to help!
The company that intercepted the photos was in no way helping nor offering to help her, and neither were the police, and her argument is that there was no right nor need to intercept nor pass on these photos in the course of investigating the theft of the laptop. In that, I entirely agree. An argument could be made that intercepted data could be useful in tracking down the laptop and the thief, but there was a violation of privacy in retaining these photos and a lack of due diligence on the part of the security company for not reviewing the data they captured and sending only that which would be reasonable to pursue the theft, and destroying the rest.
I'm still very much an amateur, but uv filters are basically worthless. If you're worried about protecting the lens, a hood helps keep things away from the lens, and if you drop your camera, you might get lucky like plenty others out there and only walk away with a broken hood.
A hood isn't very good at keeping dust off the lens, and I don't feel any qualms about rubbing it off with a shirt tail or dry cloth. I shoot a lot of sports (mostly kid sports) so flying crud and misty/rainy spray is a real concern for me. The UV filter works for me in those conditions.
Insanely, it is now generally more economical to shop remotely and have shit delivered than to visit a retail store. This, despite the rising cost of fuel. Video stores are gone. Bookstores have become retro specialty shops. The chain retailers that sell electronics now seem to have to mark everything up to retarded prices.
The thing that makes it a lot less insane is that stocking a brick and mortar store costs a lot of money. Back in Radio Shack's heyday, the reason they could compete is that handling orders from a central location (over the phone, since the web wasn't around then) cost a lot of money, so only bulk orders made sense. As the ubiquity of the Internet and the ease of processing online orders has grown, the cost to do it that way has dropped by a huge amount, while the cost to stock an item on a shelf hasn't changed much. Once the majority of products carried by a store cross that cost barrier, it's no longer competitive to stock the item (that's why video stores have disappeared). As to markups, they've always been there. It's just that online retailers can undercut them because it now costs less to process it online and ship from a warehouse than to stock and track items that sit in a store (which costs money to operate as well).
When they announced the change, my initial thought was why do they only need to add four hours. Out of a 8 hour day you are only educating my kids for four hours?
Cut out lunch period and recess for Friday (they already have those the other four days), class transitions (ten minutes times six classes a day is 50 minutes), homeroom and morning announcements and note that extending some classes like PE doesn't give much benefit, and it's pretty easy to eat up those extra four hours.
the problem with my local district is that the admin to teach ratio is way too high and the admins get paid about 15% above state average and the teachers about 5% below. Once the first local levy was voted down after building a new school (levy to build a new school passed in 2005, the next year they asked to pass a levy because they didn't have the funds to operate it. WTF) the superintendent and school board just seemed to want to stick it to the parents. Their attitude seemed to be; you stuck it to us, now we are going to stick it to you.
In this case, the flip side could very well be "Pay us more to work in your district because you've already proven that the voters will do dumb things like building a school without setting up a way to fund it, and we don't want to suffer for that."
Imagine getting into your car, and driving away, and not coming back.
It's like that. Mr. Malda, you'll be sorely missed. Thanks for all of your efforts. You've made this site a place where geeks of all stripe can find a good story and a good troll.
How is it that Christian people (Catholics in particular; the pope is supposed to be your earthly representative for God) just seem to "forget" this ever happened?
There are quite a few Christians who aren't Roman Catholics, and they don't place any particular weight in statements from the Pope. Most of those from BioLogos who are involved in this story aren't Catholic, for example.
Also, you think fifteen years is "long ago" for a religion that's been around for millenia, discussing a century-old idea?
I prefer not to think of myself as just meat. I prefer to live in a world where suffering has a purpose and it is noble to give up one's life.
The problem you run into is that, for someone who doesn't believe in a soul, the way the world works doesn't care what you prefer. I must say that I'd prefer these things, too, but that doesn't necessarily make them so.
And maybe faith is important.
This can still be true even though your statement about true Christianity isn't.
Thou shalt have no god before me, presupposes the existence of other faiths.
This isn't a strong argument, because that commandment came down in the time of Moses, long after Genesis was supposed to have happened, so it doesn't imply or require people outside of the descendants of Adam and Eve.
What I remember from sunday school, is that Adam and Eve were not the first two humans. This is an american simplification of the bible, like the rapture. Nobody but a handful of inbred hicks believes that.
Not only does my experience counter yours (I was taught in Sunday School that they were literally the first two humans) but polls consistently show that a significant portion of the American public believe in the literal Genesis tale. It's not just a handful of any segment of the population.
There are two problems with your description here. Firstly, there are large swaths of Christianity outside of Catholicism, and many of them do indeed have doctrine that directly contradicts evolution. Secondly, the Catholic church has a storied history with enforcing doctrine over science. See Galileo for that concept. Your description is a comfortable analysis of the very recent Catholic church, but history shows that significant percentages of clergy and laity have seen science and religion as opposites.
Cedar trees are evergreens, and are native to the Middle East. I'll leave it to others to point out any other examples, but that one I know off the top of my head.
Of course, virtually every item on your list of improvements (with the exception of vehicles) can easily be labeled a luxury. I don't see a single thing (other than the cars) that could reasonably considered a requirement of life, and as you said yourself, for the actual essentials, wages have been stagnant. As for your car argument, I don't see a huge improvement overall. Sure, domestic cars have improved a lot, but Toyota got its reputation on the back of the cars it produced in the '80s, and some of them still show better repair and longevity records than cars today.
Well, most of their (recent) titles run out of the box on WINE, so there's not a ton of motivation to port when Linux users can run the Windows version.
Name one, one Liberal that did one significant thing that made America better!
Abraham Lincoln. He was a Republican when the Republican party was the liberal side of politics, and it's rather hard to say he didn't improve the United States.
Trying to use "liberal" as a swear word doesn't actually make it an insult, by the way, no matter what Sean Hannity wants.
I don't think many would argue against teaching processes such as natural selection i.e. population of birds develops longer beaks over many generations as the short beaks die off - genetic information is lost in effect.
The bolded part is a failed statement, because it's nonsensical. Genetic information isn't lost by the changing size of a bird's beak. There's genetic encoding for beak length in the bird's DNA. It specifies a certain length, with variations due to random chance or mutation. That's it. If a longer beak fits the environment better, then birds with longer beak code will breed more than birds with shorter beak code, and the average length of the bird's beak will get bigger. If the environment changes such that birds with shorter beaks do better, then the short-beak birds will start outbreeding the long-beak birds, and the average length will drop. There's no loss of "information", just a selective change in the bird's physiology to make it fit its environment better.
As to changes in the fossil record, there's a vast display of changes mapped out that demonstrates how life adapts to its environment. The mechanism of natural selection does a good job of explaining how it works. The idea that beneficial information is added by random mutation is a simple concept, just like the idea that detrimental information is added by random mutation. The difference is that detrimental additions drive themselves out and beneficial additions reinforce themselves. If there's only one beneficial mutation among hundreds of detrimental ones, guess which one will pass down through the following generations?
Your quote falls to pieces based on the vast raft of assumptions that increase the probabilities, mixed with a lot of "nobody wins the lottery" ideas. Firstly, why does one need to line up 100 acids? Is the posit that there are no shorter chains that will do anything? Then we add in their idea that any given amino acid is just as likely to bind as any other which simply isn't true in the real world, the fact that successful shorter combinations can combine with other groups, and so on, and the "odds" quickly fall far, far away from the ludicrously high figures that run the whole assumption. Pile on top of that their idea that the last combination is the right one and their further assumption that there's only one chain that "wins" and the declaration of impossibility quickly falls to pieces.
Also, if you honestly think that the cops are your employees, you're a fool. Police exist to protect the state. Protecting people can be a part of that, but legal precedent has already established that police do not have a responsibility to protect you. A cop can stand by and watch you get gang-raped and murdered, if he feels like it, without violating his legal responsibilities. The services that are provided to you, personally, are volunteer work - don't for one second mistake it for an obligation.
Whoops, you fail. The police cannot stand by and watch you get attacked without facing repercussions, because their job is to enforce the law. The thing that drives the whole "the cops have no obligation to protect you" meme is that they can't be held liable if they fail to prevent a crime. That is, if you're gang-raped and murdered, your estate can't hold them to task legally for failing to prevent it, but if an officer sees you being attacked that officer will be very likely to face charges and punishment if he doesn't do anything but watch it happen.
I think that Mechwarrior 2 (on the PC, that is; console versions had little in the way of configurability) was one of the best games I ever encountered when it came to custom configurations. You could attach any function at all to any key, mouse or stick location you had at your disposal. I personally found that I became an absurdly good mech driver when I could manipulate the controls that way, and it really helped with immersion because suddenly the controls weren't between me and the game, they were a part of it like driving in real life.
Just as a note for anyone who wants to try it, I mapped tilt up and down to the vertical stick axis, and torso twist to the horizontal. Then I mapped the mech's forward/backward/turn feet to the directional keys. That way, I could drive the body of the mech with the keys, and my torso (and so my targeting reticle) moved in all four axes with the stick. It took about five minutes to get a feel for it, but after that I was kicking down all of the other players who were underutilizing torso twisting because it was so troublesome for them to do it with the default keymap.
Slashdot Mirror
In short most of these new superweapons being developed are kinda pointless as we already have a weapon stronger than all of them: nukes.
This statement fails to address the idea that military force requires a broad range of responses. You can't solve every problem you have with a nuke, and nukes can cause more problems than they solve in virtually all uses they could be put to. Therefore, the idea that the design of new systems and means of warfare can stop now that we have The Bomb are foolish. An atom bomb won't stop an insurgency and it's useless for counterterrorism as well. We had nukes during the Korean War and Vietnam, and we didn't use them because it wouldn't have meant a win. If there's a better example of how atom bombs don't solve even a small percentage of warfare problems, I don't know what it is.
Virg
This argument doesn't pan out against the parent. There's no sane argument that we don't hold complete air superiority in Afghanistan, so your comment doesn't answer his issue of using such devices in contested airspace.
Virg
Do you honestly believe that these devices will never receive any kind of guidance from humans after they're built? The problem is that your "emotional meltdown" guy could program his drones to go out and kill anything that moves, and the drones, unlike human soldiers, will never ever question the ethics of that command. Sure, it happens with humans, but the problem I have with it is that it's more likely the fewer humans are involved, because sanity checks get broader as more people get involved. Nazi Germany is a good example of this, with regular German soldiers being horrified as news of the camps started leaking out. There have been reasonable arguments presented that the Holocaust would have been short-circuited if the entire German military had been aware of it.
Virg
One of the most difficult problems we've encountered in prosecuting such wars (starting as far back as Vietnam) is trying to figure out who's "these malevolent folks" and who's a bystander. That's a tough decision in any case, and a very tough decision in the face of fire. But we've found that it's a decision that must be made because we're not fighting the same kind of war that General Sherman fought. The concept of automating killing machines sets my teeth on edge specifically because of your attitude of "tools that will let us take out these malevolent folks without the death of our troops" because it's painfully obvious that you show little concern for the civilians that get caught up with those malevolent folks. It's easy to say that they shouldn't aid or abet the bad guys, but when a bunch of people set up in your house and tell you to keep your mouth shut or they'll shoot your kids, the concept of the greater good goes away in a hurry. Put on top of that the idea that there are Patriots sitting at home who have no problem with an automated drone cutting said house to bits to kill the bad guys (and killing the coerced family at the same time) and I find your view of warfare to be disturbingly myopic. In short, it hurts like Hell to say it but I'd rather see our soldiers suffering casualties by holding their fire until they're absolutely certain who their target is than have our soldiers killing innocent people because they're not concerned with collateral damage. The reason for that is that in the long run, the civilian population sees that they're doing their best not to kill bystanders and that makes them more likely to step up when they can. As Vietnam showed, doing it the other way around does nothing but alienate the population which leads to more American deaths in the long run.
Virg
I've never had the encounter that a MENSA group was populated with idiots (unsurprisingly given what MENSA is, I mostly found them to be very intelligent), but most times I found the personalities to be quite odd like Gilmoure above did, and there's virtually always an undercurrent of extreme elitism that completely turned me off to the group dynamic. If MENSA wanted to fix itself, it would certainly have to start with this because it was like being in a room full of twelve-year-old knowitalls. The rampany social immaturity was downright depressing.
Virg
The fact that the hard disk was not reformatted could mean that she had no idea it was stolen, or that there was nothing wrong with computer in the first place and she was not aware of the security software.
Or it could indicate that the software is lojack (which it was, in this case), which is BIOS based and reinstalls from the motherboard when the OS is wiped and reinstalled. That fact that you didn't know that is more than sufficient evidence that she shouldn't be expected to know it either.
There is no way in hell that this was not receiving stolen merchandise.
Strange only to you, the judge involved decided that it wasn't a case for prosecution and dismissed the charges against her.
Even if it wasn't, there are strict guidelines on what students can legitimately sell on campus, so if she broke no laws, she likely broke her contract with the district.
Do you have any proof at all that this is the case, or are you just making stuff up as you go? Citation please, or you're just slandering her.
The article gives plenty of information to judge this personal as at least a criminal, if not a stupid one. School laptops tend to be distinctive, often model not widely available to consumers. To get one out of the school, one has to be sneaky, as they are clearly identifiable. She either had to buy outside on the street or sneak it out of school herself. Any defense, that the computer was "messed up" and she paid to fix it, is not only irrelevant but complete here say. Even the story of buying it from a student is hearsay. I find it much more likely she stole the machine from the school and then tried to blame it on the student.
You state an awful lot of "facts" here with no evidence that any of it is remotely true, and since the judge reviewed the case and dismissed the charges against her, I have to say that it's rather more likely that you're talking out of your ass than that you have some special insight as to what happened here. Moreover, you make several statements about how the laptop belonged to the school district, and that's factually false. It did belong to a school district, but a different one than the one in which she purchased it, so all of your commentary about "distinctive" is outright crap. As to "model not widely available to consumers", the general public could not be expected to know that, and again, the laptop wasn't from the school district she was teaching in so assuming it matched the laptops in the school is pure speculation.
Virg
Where do you people get the idea that it was broken or that she repaired it or paid to have it repaired?
She said it herself.
The seller claimed it was "messed up" as part of his justification for the low price. Maybe. That's what SHE claims. Even if he did say it, that doesn't mean it's true. He also said it was his to sell and we know that was a lie. The "messed up" claim is part of HER justification for the low price. Absolutely no proof of any kind that it had any basis in reality.
Your argument reverses. The fact that he lied about ownership offers no proof that it wasn't actually messed up, nor does it make any sense to accuse her of lying because he lied.
How broken could it be if the tracking software was still intact and functioning while she was using it? Do you think they re-loaded and configured the tracking software during the repair?
Firstly, there are many repairs that don't require changes to the OS (a broken hinge or keyboard, for example). Secondly, The tracking software is lojack, which is BIOS-based and will silently reinstall itself from the motherboard after an OS wipe. Therefore, your argument comes up nonsensical.
And it doesn't make any sense for her to buy a broken laptop if she didn't have the skills to repair it herself. Any visit to a repair shop is going to push the price beyond the price of a brand new low-end laptop.
This precludes the possibility that she knows someone who was capable of the repair who would do it without being paid (perhaps, in exchange for cybersex or something...) so again your argument is nonsense.
The whole "it was broken" think is a red herring with no evidence to back it up and plenty to contradict it.
Both of the arguments you presented are demonstrably meaningless so your accusation is unsupportable.
Virg
Counter argument: You cannot conduct "private electronic communication" on MY laptop, especially when you're doing so without my consent.
Not a valid counter, because the "MY laptop" part is the point of fact in dispute. The company argued as you did, and she argued that she had a reasonable belief that it was her laptop, and the judge decided that this dispute of fact was enough to allow the case to proceed. It's up to the jury to decide whether she was reasonable in her belief, and if they decide in her favor, then your counter becomes factually inaccurate to the law.
Virg
The laptop is still not hers and, as well as losing the money she spent buying the laptop, it turns out she has also ended up being fooled into putting her priviate photos onto a device where there was (unbeknownst to her) no expectation of privacy.
This makes little sense in legal terms. If she has supportable expectation of privacy, then it's an expectation independent of actual ownership. Deceit on the part of the original thief doesn't nullify that.
If somehow believing that she really was the owner of the laptop means that she suddenly gains all the rights of the real owner then the next thing you know she will be suing the original owner for the $60 she paid for his laptop!
The argument is that reasonable belief of ownership gives her all the privacy rights of a real owner, not all legal rights in general.
Of course the law does not operate on common sense so I've no idea whether she has a legal case or not but if we do follow common sense then surely she should be suing the criminal who caused her to expose these photos to the police and software company in the first place rather than go after the people who were trying to help!
The company that intercepted the photos was in no way helping nor offering to help her, and neither were the police, and her argument is that there was no right nor need to intercept nor pass on these photos in the course of investigating the theft of the laptop. In that, I entirely agree. An argument could be made that intercepted data could be useful in tracking down the laptop and the thief, but there was a violation of privacy in retaining these photos and a lack of due diligence on the part of the security company for not reviewing the data they captured and sending only that which would be reasonable to pursue the theft, and destroying the rest.
Virg
I'm still very much an amateur, but uv filters are basically worthless. If you're worried about protecting the lens, a hood helps keep things away from the lens, and if you drop your camera, you might get lucky like plenty others out there and only walk away with a broken hood.
A hood isn't very good at keeping dust off the lens, and I don't feel any qualms about rubbing it off with a shirt tail or dry cloth. I shoot a lot of sports (mostly kid sports) so flying crud and misty/rainy spray is a real concern for me. The UV filter works for me in those conditions.
Virg
Insanely, it is now generally more economical to shop remotely and have shit delivered than to visit a retail store. This, despite the rising cost of fuel. Video stores are gone. Bookstores have become retro specialty shops. The chain retailers that sell electronics now seem to have to mark everything up to retarded prices.
The thing that makes it a lot less insane is that stocking a brick and mortar store costs a lot of money. Back in Radio Shack's heyday, the reason they could compete is that handling orders from a central location (over the phone, since the web wasn't around then) cost a lot of money, so only bulk orders made sense. As the ubiquity of the Internet and the ease of processing online orders has grown, the cost to do it that way has dropped by a huge amount, while the cost to stock an item on a shelf hasn't changed much. Once the majority of products carried by a store cross that cost barrier, it's no longer competitive to stock the item (that's why video stores have disappeared). As to markups, they've always been there. It's just that online retailers can undercut them because it now costs less to process it online and ship from a warehouse than to stock and track items that sit in a store (which costs money to operate as well).
Virg
When they announced the change, my initial thought was why do they only need to add four hours. Out of a 8 hour day you are only educating my kids for four hours?
Cut out lunch period and recess for Friday (they already have those the other four days), class transitions (ten minutes times six classes a day is 50 minutes), homeroom and morning announcements and note that extending some classes like PE doesn't give much benefit, and it's pretty easy to eat up those extra four hours.
the problem with my local district is that the admin to teach ratio is way too high and the admins get paid about 15% above state average and the teachers about 5% below. Once the first local levy was voted down after building a new school (levy to build a new school passed in 2005, the next year they asked to pass a levy because they didn't have the funds to operate it. WTF) the superintendent and school board just seemed to want to stick it to the parents. Their attitude seemed to be; you stuck it to us, now we are going to stick it to you.
In this case, the flip side could very well be "Pay us more to work in your district because you've already proven that the voters will do dumb things like building a school without setting up a way to fund it, and we don't want to suffer for that."
Virg
Imagine getting into your car, and driving away, and not coming back.
It's like that. Mr. Malda, you'll be sorely missed. Thanks for all of your efforts. You've made this site a place where geeks of all stripe can find a good story and a good troll.
Virg
How is it that Christian people (Catholics in particular; the pope is supposed to be your earthly representative for God) just seem to "forget" this ever happened?
There are quite a few Christians who aren't Roman Catholics, and they don't place any particular weight in statements from the Pope. Most of those from BioLogos who are involved in this story aren't Catholic, for example.
Also, you think fifteen years is "long ago" for a religion that's been around for millenia, discussing a century-old idea?
Virg
I prefer not to think of myself as just meat. I prefer to live in a world where suffering has a purpose and it is noble to give up one's life.
The problem you run into is that, for someone who doesn't believe in a soul, the way the world works doesn't care what you prefer. I must say that I'd prefer these things, too, but that doesn't necessarily make them so.
And maybe faith is important.
This can still be true even though your statement about true Christianity isn't.
Virg
Thou shalt have no god before me, presupposes the existence of other faiths.
This isn't a strong argument, because that commandment came down in the time of Moses, long after Genesis was supposed to have happened, so it doesn't imply or require people outside of the descendants of Adam and Eve.
What I remember from sunday school, is that Adam and Eve were not the first two humans. This is an american simplification of the bible, like the rapture. Nobody but a handful of inbred hicks believes that.
Not only does my experience counter yours (I was taught in Sunday School that they were literally the first two humans) but polls consistently show that a significant portion of the American public believe in the literal Genesis tale. It's not just a handful of any segment of the population.
Virg
There are two problems with your description here. Firstly, there are large swaths of Christianity outside of Catholicism, and many of them do indeed have doctrine that directly contradicts evolution. Secondly, the Catholic church has a storied history with enforcing doctrine over science. See Galileo for that concept. Your description is a comfortable analysis of the very recent Catholic church, but history shows that significant percentages of clergy and laity have seen science and religion as opposites.
Virg
Cedar trees are evergreens, and are native to the Middle East. I'll leave it to others to point out any other examples, but that one I know off the top of my head.
Virg
Of course, virtually every item on your list of improvements (with the exception of vehicles) can easily be labeled a luxury. I don't see a single thing (other than the cars) that could reasonably considered a requirement of life, and as you said yourself, for the actual essentials, wages have been stagnant. As for your car argument, I don't see a huge improvement overall. Sure, domestic cars have improved a lot, but Toyota got its reputation on the back of the cars it produced in the '80s, and some of them still show better repair and longevity records than cars today.
Virg
Well, most of their (recent) titles run out of the box on WINE, so there's not a ton of motivation to port when Linux users can run the Windows version.
Virg
Name one, one Liberal that did one significant thing that made America better!
Abraham Lincoln. He was a Republican when the Republican party was the liberal side of politics, and it's rather hard to say he didn't improve the United States.
Trying to use "liberal" as a swear word doesn't actually make it an insult, by the way, no matter what Sean Hannity wants.
Virg
I don't think many would argue against teaching processes such as natural selection i.e. population of birds develops longer beaks over many generations as the short beaks die off - genetic information is lost in effect.
The bolded part is a failed statement, because it's nonsensical. Genetic information isn't lost by the changing size of a bird's beak. There's genetic encoding for beak length in the bird's DNA. It specifies a certain length, with variations due to random chance or mutation. That's it. If a longer beak fits the environment better, then birds with longer beak code will breed more than birds with shorter beak code, and the average length of the bird's beak will get bigger. If the environment changes such that birds with shorter beaks do better, then the short-beak birds will start outbreeding the long-beak birds, and the average length will drop. There's no loss of "information", just a selective change in the bird's physiology to make it fit its environment better.
As to changes in the fossil record, there's a vast display of changes mapped out that demonstrates how life adapts to its environment. The mechanism of natural selection does a good job of explaining how it works. The idea that beneficial information is added by random mutation is a simple concept, just like the idea that detrimental information is added by random mutation. The difference is that detrimental additions drive themselves out and beneficial additions reinforce themselves. If there's only one beneficial mutation among hundreds of detrimental ones, guess which one will pass down through the following generations?
Virg
Your quote falls to pieces based on the vast raft of assumptions that increase the probabilities, mixed with a lot of "nobody wins the lottery" ideas. Firstly, why does one need to line up 100 acids? Is the posit that there are no shorter chains that will do anything? Then we add in their idea that any given amino acid is just as likely to bind as any other which simply isn't true in the real world, the fact that successful shorter combinations can combine with other groups, and so on, and the "odds" quickly fall far, far away from the ludicrously high figures that run the whole assumption. Pile on top of that their idea that the last combination is the right one and their further assumption that there's only one chain that "wins" and the declaration of impossibility quickly falls to pieces.
You're going to have to do better than this.
Virg
Also, if you honestly think that the cops are your employees, you're a fool. Police exist to protect the state. Protecting people can be a part of that, but legal precedent has already established that police do not have a responsibility to protect you. A cop can stand by and watch you get gang-raped and murdered, if he feels like it, without violating his legal responsibilities. The services that are provided to you, personally, are volunteer work - don't for one second mistake it for an obligation.
Whoops, you fail. The police cannot stand by and watch you get attacked without facing repercussions, because their job is to enforce the law. The thing that drives the whole "the cops have no obligation to protect you" meme is that they can't be held liable if they fail to prevent a crime. That is, if you're gang-raped and murdered, your estate can't hold them to task legally for failing to prevent it, but if an officer sees you being attacked that officer will be very likely to face charges and punishment if he doesn't do anything but watch it happen.
Virg
I think that Mechwarrior 2 (on the PC, that is; console versions had little in the way of configurability) was one of the best games I ever encountered when it came to custom configurations. You could attach any function at all to any key, mouse or stick location you had at your disposal. I personally found that I became an absurdly good mech driver when I could manipulate the controls that way, and it really helped with immersion because suddenly the controls weren't between me and the game, they were a part of it like driving in real life.
Just as a note for anyone who wants to try it, I mapped tilt up and down to the vertical stick axis, and torso twist to the horizontal. Then I mapped the mech's forward/backward/turn feet to the directional keys. That way, I could drive the body of the mech with the keys, and my torso (and so my targeting reticle) moved in all four axes with the stick. It took about five minutes to get a feel for it, but after that I was kicking down all of the other players who were underutilizing torso twisting because it was so troublesome for them to do it with the default keymap.
Virg