Yes, finding a job when you don't have an address, money, food or means will be a snap!
Throwing him out for his own good differs rather drastically from completely disowning him.
He could still list his parent's address as his own. They could even invite him to join them every day for dinner, to make sure he doesn't starve to death. But he damn sure wouldn't sit around the house all day/night playing video games rather than looking for a job.
Sorry, but I see this as little different than the entire problem we have in the US with "welfare culture", where we have 3rd gen families living entirely off what we intend as a safety net, not a way of life. Dad won't let this kid suffer a bit, so the kid abuses the situation as far as he can. Take away his comfy bed, his warm room, his computer access (except perhaps supervised solely for the purpose of searching for job listings and sending employment-related emails), and let him "enjoy" government cheese and a cot in the Y, and see how quickly he changes his mind about whether or not he "likes" a well-paid desk job.
And if he still chooses to leech rather than work after a few months - Let the ungrateful little bastard starve in the gutter. Simple as that.
Since at least the 70s/80s that filter has been widely studied and debated.
The entire body of that study and debate presupposes the idea that the observed between-group differences don't really exist except on the tests. Again, Occam's Razor provides a much, much simpler explanation.
Now, if you want to address the cultural and socioeconomic issues that might cause a poor urban female minority to perform worse than a wealthy suburban male majority, hey, cool, then we can make real progress rather than denying the problem. But after 30-40 years of trying to disprove something embarrassingly obvious, at some point you have to consider the possibility that the test scores don't lie; at some point, you need to consider the possibility that the fabric of the universe itself doesn't discriminate. If you get the same "bias" every way you test something, maybe, just maybe you have a real difference rather than a "bias".
And I don't really have a problem with that, at face value - We have reams of evidence that an excess of stress reduces performance. When you worry about where your next meal will come from and whether you'll get mugged on the way home from school, it doesn't take much of a stretch to predict that you'll perform worse on a test than a well-fed and secure clone of you. That has nothing to do with bias on the part of the test itself, but rather, bias in everything about your existence leading up to that test.
his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so"
Actually, no.
He posted the application of Occam's Razor to to situation described in TFA. Instead of grasping at straws and coming up with insanely convoluted reasons why girls "look" better but perform worse in school, he bluntly stated the most straightforward explanation.
That doesn't make his explanation correct, but class grades describe performance viewed through the social filter of the professor; test scores have no such filter.
About 6 months ago she got locked out of her account because she started creating a Google+ profile (it prompted her to do it), and put in her real birthday.
Wonderful! And I hope she learned the appropriate lesson - In the online world, Lle lie lie about every personal detail any site asks you.
An extrovert defines his self worth by what other people think of him. Unless you understand this, you'll never become adequately socialized.
An introvert also doesn't give a shit about being "adequately socialized", or about what extroverts think of them. Which, interestingly enough, makes that a somewhat asymmetrical relationship - Because extroverts do care what introverts think about them.
So... leave me alone to read my damned book in the park, and I'll give you a +5 likeable or whatever the hell you "cool" kids use to measure your ePeens these days.
More seriously - I honestly don't "get" what FourSquare even does. Check in? I get the idea of signing a "guest book", but seriously, you can get a billion self-hosted third-party guestbooks, you don't need to sell your soul to Big Data just to see that you had a visitor.
"But but but," I can hear you say, "what about the people who don't sign the guest book? How will you track them?"
Hey, guess who will never ever sign up for FourSquare, either?:)
So you're saying he can choose to do what the government tells hm to do? What a luxury! Where should he send the "thank you" gift?
Nope.
No, I said he can choose to pay whatever the market, not the government, demands for the product he wants.
He could also make his own inefficient light-bulbs, if he so chooses. Of course, using non-UL-approved bulbs will probably void his homeowner's insurance, so he'd better pray his house doesn't burn down all for the sake of wasting 30% more on electricity...
Look, I consider myself basically a libertarian; but some things that work on a small scale simply don't work on a larger one. We have a finite energy budget on this planet, and we've spent the last century heavily "dipping into capital". If the government had outright banned 100W incandescents, I'd stand along side you and tell them where to stick their prohibitions. But setting modest targets for energy efficiency? Sorry, I consider that not only an environmental issue, but a matter of actual national security (not in the BS "Security Theater" sense, but as regards the long term sustainability of our country).
And as such, I can suck it up and pay a few cents more if I really hate the thought of saving electricity that much - Though of course, I won't, because I don't have some screwed superstitious crusade against CFLs.
I think he wishes he had the choice to do that. But he doesn't, because that choice was taken from him by government do-gooders and the Federal electron police.
The "ban" doesn't work quite like most people think it does. We can still get crappy old low-efficiency lights, manufacturers just need to make them 30% less inefficient - Which they've known how to do for decades (just make them more insulating so they lose less energy as heat)... But, that costs a bit more (perhaps a buck each rather than a dozen for $1.99). So, everyone hating on the CFLs and now LEDs can still choose to "vote with their wallets".
The fellow to whom I responded, however (along with one amusing AC troll that replied to me), won't bother letting facts get in the way of their ranting. The Man stole their 100W bulbs, Nevar forgit!
I am sick and tired... of the government banning perfectly good items
Then consider yourself in luck! Because, y'know, TFA has nothing to do with anyone banning anything. Don't let me interrupt a good rant, though - Carry on, good sir, you rage against that machine!
Some of us would rather spend our money on more fun things than literally "keeping the lights on". Do whatever you want with your money.
Only in the socially retarded world of/. is this sort of behaviour lauded because the best behaviour that I described above seems too goddamned difficult to manage.
Then you have clearly never worked with someone who just... won't... fucking... get it!
I absolutely follow the rule "Praise in public, Punish in private". You can save a lot of situations with that one simple rule.
But sometimes, you need to resort to "a cat on crack could have randomly landed on keys that typed out better code than you. Hit the showers, you stink", and nothing short of that will get the point across.
In the present situation, I would hope that Linus has already had far, far too many private conversations with Mauro. Given that he doesn't have a reputation for randomly losing his shit and attacking people for no reason, I feel inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. If we hear a similar story three weeks from now, and another two months from now, etc - We may have a problem. For now? I'd call it an overreaction and leave it at that, pending more evidence one way or the other.
Do it again, correctly. In the future, check X, Y and Z to ensure that you don't repeat this mistake.
And the 203rd time you ask nicely, carefully explaining your position? What then? Not like you can non-publicly "fire" the current kernel maintainer.
How many data mining tokens er loyalty cards are in your wallet?
Four. Only one (currently) in my name. Every now and then I randomly swap them with friends to poison the (dis)loyalty well.
We've established the nature of the relationship, we're now just haggling over the cost...
The cost: Give me your best price without playing games, or I'll go to your competition.
Although the "premium" airlines might not get it yet, the likes of JetBlue and SouthWest most assuredly do.
And y'know, I don't always mind the nickel-and-dime approach, within reason. They just need to limit it to what really costs them money, rather than getting petty. Weight costs money, so baggage costs money. I tend to travel light, so by all means, charge an extra $50 to the morons who could sneak Grandma on in their ginormous bags. Soda, OTOH, costs less than fuel. Charge me a buck for a half-can, and you can bet your ass I'll bring my own with me from the terminal (where it only costs half-insane)
I both want to post and read the reviews without forcing the reviewers to reveal the real name. I do not want my real name posted with all reviews -- and I think other reviewers should be extended that same courtesy
Tough. When your "opinion" potentially costs me money buying crap, I want to know if Joe Brown of Anytown, USA recommended it, or Trolly McTrollerson hired by a competing ad agency. If you remember once upon a time when Amazon "accidentally" did show real names on reviews - We learned that about half of the damned things came from either the manufacturer, the seller, or a competing manufacturer/seller. That matters, whatever imaginary right you may believe you have to anonymously post your manifesto on Bronies to every feminine hygiene product you can find.
P.S. Posting anonymously to make my point.
Slashdot works as a news aggregation blog. Not a storefront. If you want to post the latest news from one of Slashdot's regular troll-groups, I really don't give a shit - You'll get modded to -1 almost instantly, no one will read it, and we all move on with our lives. If you want to downmod everything you see as flamebait, the metamods will eventually spank you into never getting mod points again. If you want to post AC, unless you either get to +5 or directly reply to one of my own comments (as in this case) , I'll never even see that you exist. It all works out just fine, and most importantly, none of it really matters anyway.
Amazon, by contrast, does serve as a storefront. I go there to buy things. Usually, I already know what I want, I search for it, add it to the cart, and check out. Sometimes, however, I just need a general category of product, and could use some hints as to which ones suck and which ones don't.
Fuck you.
No, sir, fuck you. If you want to risk your own money on random crap, hit Vegas. If you want to post crap on a website, either start a blog or at least stick to moderated sites like Slashdot. If, however, you want to express a real opinion about a product - Have the balls to do it in your own name or STFU. Simple as that.
First, don't let anyone review until they've had an Amazon account for at least six months and made at least three purchases (on different days) in that time.
Second, post the reviewer's name (their real name, not a handle). Don't like that? Don't review anything.
Third, don't allow people to review products they haven't bought through Amazon.
Fourth, if someone has more than ten percent of their reviews deleted as spam or abusive, block that account from any more reviews.
Fourth-and-a-half, if a product has a large percent of its reviews deleted, "lock" it to only allow reviews by much more reputable users.
I would relax those a little for simply giving a star rating rather than writing a review, but not by much. I would also use a weighted rating system, based on the user's average rating. Not only would this get around the "No-star Nancy"s, it would work to avoid the useless inverse-exponential ratings we see on 99% of products, thus moving the "real" average rating to a three - So a five-star product would really mean a five-star product.
You know why? Because time is money. An experienced recording engineer can get you from mic to mixed album in around a week.
First, don't take this the wrong way - I know a few sound engineers, and know what they can do that your average home studio will never manage to pull off. That said...
You phrased it absolutely the right way - But until they make it big, your indie band pays their rent by stocking Wallyworld shelves at night for minimum wage. And as the flip-side of "time is money", if you make shit for wages, you can put an awfully lot of time into a project before you break even money-wise.
As a kid bagging groceries, I changed the oil in my car. Today, you couldn't pay me to do that crap.
It's actually illegal to buy a gun outside your State of legal residence unless: 1) it is a private sale, not innvolving a licensed dealer (you want to buy a gun from your uncle, no problem, you go into a gunshop, no sale)
Huh, thank you, I did not realize that - I learn something new every day!
I'd usually just have anything shipped to a friend of mine with an FFL, so never really looked all that deeply into buying from out-of-state.
I wonder how appealing gun ownership would be if the owners had to turn out a compulsory drill every month.
Actually, Hamilton (in Federalist #29) only suggested an annual inspection - "Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year"
You'll do it in the rain, snow, and sleet, -20; you'll do it in the hot sun, 100+; you'll do it one Saturday
Aside from the pure BS nuisance factor of weather, an indoor range would make it safer and easier (for the testers) to run people through a battery of drills to demonstrate their proficiency. Though make no mistake, I have friends who would pay to spend a weekend crawling through the cold mud on a military obstacle course / rifle range (if doing so didn't require that whole "joining the military" thing).;)
Now, in spirit, I have absolutely nothing against something akin to Hamilton's original suggestion. The slope gets pretty damned slippery, however, when someone in power needs to decide what counts as passing. Banning civilian firearms then requires nothing more than setting the bar absurdly high - "Oh, gee, sorry, you went outside the allowed 4" spread at 100 yards, better luck next year!"
The problem here has nothing to do with the availability of the information - As TFA says, it all comes from public record
The problem involve "inducement", a crime entirely separate from your right to publish things about which you should know better. NY already has a problem with gun crime. So how do we deal with that? Let's put a "respawn/restock here" point on the map for every petty thug in the city looking for a gun but too clueless to drive a few states away and buy one themselves (possibly even legally, depending on what they've gotten busted for up to that point).
Yes, having a gun in the home means you can defend yourself from a random intruder; the situation changes when the gun becomes the target of the home invasion; and I would definitely say we have liability involved when some asshats effectively sent the thieves to your door in a fucked-up attempt to make a point.
If people die because of this, I sincerely hope we put the owners and editors of this paper on trial for murder; of course, in reality, we'll just hear one more artificially inflated statistic about gun violence.
My 3 week old is fascinated by certain shapes. Is there an app that looks like big tits dripping milk that would be something he could play with?
Oh, you have come to the right place for that, my friend! Welcome to the Internet! You can find breasts doing just about anything you can imagine here, including quite a few things you can't imagine, and some you can't even comprehend.
Yet, when I go shopping for a solar panel, all I get is the same old crap, and it's still crazy expensive.
If you can do the installation yourself, you can get panels for under $2 a watt now. That gives you a payback period, even in the Northern US, of a mere two to three years.
Yes, if you want to go totally off-grid, you need some way to store the power, which gets into the mess of batteries and charge controllers and inverters. But... Just don't do that! You can go with a grid-tie setup, where you just need the panels and the inverter; you can get small-scale plug-and-play inverters (1KW) for around $350, or a whole-house scale 10KW units for $1300.
Also, you need to mount your solar cells on a surface that is at an appropriate angle, and probably have no such surfaces.
We only bother doing that to minimize the number of panels needed (and thus, cost). The amount of light hitting a given surface doesn't actually change based on mounting panels at the "right" angle, nor does even active 2-axis tracking hardware let you capture one Watt more than merely covering the same shadow-footprint with panels.
If the cost of covering every external surface of your house with solar panels wouldn't break the bank, you may as well do that in place of any of the more traditional siding options.
If this article from a local rag is indeed showing a picture of what they found, this may have been warranted.
No, actually, that counts as the entire problem - Not warranted.
Even if this kid planned to blow up something big, the entire chain of events that led to police finding whatever they found make it all the fruit of the poisonous tree.
IANAL, but drawing pictures of guns just doesn't count as sufficient evidence to get a warrant in any sane world.
Fuck, what the hell has this country come to? I used to keep a goddamned "kill list" in junior high - And somehow, I made it through our country's socialized babysitting prisons without going on a murderous rampage. "Wishful thinking" doesn't equal "homicidal intent". Funny, that.
The Newton shooter had almost no online presence at all. So how would this have prevented it? Just sounds like an excuse to spy on us.
He also used guns he couldn't legally own - BUT, the guns themselves came from legal, regulated channels; thus, the fearmongering from the left about more stringent background checks, "waiting periods", or closing the "gun show" loophole wouldn't have changed a single aspect of Newtown.
He also apparently only stopped when he got bored, not because someone physically prevented him from reloading - Meaning you can't blame Newtown on the boogeyman of high-capacity magazines.
You want to prevent "gun crime" in the US, deal with the sources of crime in general, not the tools involved. And in the case of mass murderers, that means real (probably chemical) psych intervention for the actual sickos, not some fluffy "but how do you feel" BS counseling sessions for emo kids.
So they are going to start arresting people for not having an interest in politics?
You joke? Our leaders love people with no interest in politics.
Just pay your taxes, Citizen, and don't bother looking behind the curtain. It gets so messy back there anyway - You just kick back with your permitted intoxicant of choice, enjoy the Monday Night Gladiatorial games, and let the boys in Washington worry about all that nasty, complicated stuff.
but what they'll actually do is hang around on gun nut boards and try to sell illegal automatics to the people hanging around there.
You can legally own a fully automatic ("machine gun") in the US. You need a special permit for it, but it basically takes no more effort than getting a CCW - It just costs more ($200, and you pay that per-gun).
I'm not seeing how this is Apple's fault - it's not as if their usual behaviour is uncommon here. The licensing around the original 30 pin was equally obtuse.
I'd call it Apple's fault for using a proprietary connector in the first place.
Yes, I'd also call it the fault of patent law for allowing something so absurd intended solely to block interoperation with 3rd party devices; but Apple chose to use it.
If it makes you happier, I also condemn Intel for the abomination they call "Thunderbolt" - Though unlike iThings, at least Thunderbolt never really caught on.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, finding a job when you don't have an address, money, food or means will be a snap!
Throwing him out for his own good differs rather drastically from completely disowning him.
He could still list his parent's address as his own. They could even invite him to join them every day for dinner, to make sure he doesn't starve to death. But he damn sure wouldn't sit around the house all day/night playing video games rather than looking for a job.
Sorry, but I see this as little different than the entire problem we have in the US with "welfare culture", where we have 3rd gen families living entirely off what we intend as a safety net, not a way of life. Dad won't let this kid suffer a bit, so the kid abuses the situation as far as he can. Take away his comfy bed, his warm room, his computer access (except perhaps supervised solely for the purpose of searching for job listings and sending employment-related emails), and let him "enjoy" government cheese and a cot in the Y, and see how quickly he changes his mind about whether or not he "likes" a well-paid desk job.
And if he still chooses to leech rather than work after a few months - Let the ungrateful little bastard starve in the gutter. Simple as that.
Since at least the 70s/80s that filter has been widely studied and debated.
The entire body of that study and debate presupposes the idea that the observed between-group differences don't really exist except on the tests. Again, Occam's Razor provides a much, much simpler explanation.
Now, if you want to address the cultural and socioeconomic issues that might cause a poor urban female minority to perform worse than a wealthy suburban male majority, hey, cool, then we can make real progress rather than denying the problem. But after 30-40 years of trying to disprove something embarrassingly obvious, at some point you have to consider the possibility that the test scores don't lie; at some point, you need to consider the possibility that the fabric of the universe itself doesn't discriminate. If you get the same "bias" every way you test something, maybe, just maybe you have a real difference rather than a "bias".
And I don't really have a problem with that, at face value - We have reams of evidence that an excess of stress reduces performance. When you worry about where your next meal will come from and whether you'll get mugged on the way home from school, it doesn't take much of a stretch to predict that you'll perform worse on a test than a well-fed and secure clone of you. That has nothing to do with bias on the part of the test itself, but rather, bias in everything about your existence leading up to that test.
his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so"
Actually, no.
He posted the application of Occam's Razor to to situation described in TFA. Instead of grasping at straws and coming up with insanely convoluted reasons why girls "look" better but perform worse in school, he bluntly stated the most straightforward explanation.
That doesn't make his explanation correct, but class grades describe performance viewed through the social filter of the professor; test scores have no such filter.
Or... Girls socialize better. Film at 11.
About 6 months ago she got locked out of her account because she started creating a Google+ profile (it prompted her to do it), and put in her real birthday.
Wonderful! And I hope she learned the appropriate lesson - In the online world, Lle lie lie about every personal detail any site asks you.
An extrovert defines his self worth by what other people think of him. Unless you understand this, you'll never become adequately socialized.
:)
An introvert also doesn't give a shit about being "adequately socialized", or about what extroverts think of them. Which, interestingly enough, makes that a somewhat asymmetrical relationship - Because extroverts do care what introverts think about them.
So... leave me alone to read my damned book in the park, and I'll give you a +5 likeable or whatever the hell you "cool" kids use to measure your ePeens these days.
More seriously - I honestly don't "get" what FourSquare even does. Check in? I get the idea of signing a "guest book", but seriously, you can get a billion self-hosted third-party guestbooks, you don't need to sell your soul to Big Data just to see that you had a visitor.
"But but but," I can hear you say, "what about the people who don't sign the guest book? How will you track them?"
Hey, guess who will never ever sign up for FourSquare, either?
So you're saying he can choose to do what the government tells hm to do? What a luxury! Where should he send the "thank you" gift?
Nope.
No, I said he can choose to pay whatever the market, not the government, demands for the product he wants.
He could also make his own inefficient light-bulbs, if he so chooses. Of course, using non-UL-approved bulbs will probably void his homeowner's insurance, so he'd better pray his house doesn't burn down all for the sake of wasting 30% more on electricity...
Look, I consider myself basically a libertarian; but some things that work on a small scale simply don't work on a larger one. We have a finite energy budget on this planet, and we've spent the last century heavily "dipping into capital". If the government had outright banned 100W incandescents, I'd stand along side you and tell them where to stick their prohibitions. But setting modest targets for energy efficiency? Sorry, I consider that not only an environmental issue, but a matter of actual national security (not in the BS "Security Theater" sense, but as regards the long term sustainability of our country).
And as such, I can suck it up and pay a few cents more if I really hate the thought of saving electricity that much - Though of course, I won't, because I don't have some screwed superstitious crusade against CFLs.
I'll do you the favor, Mr. AC, of linking you to my response on this topic. If you want to troll this topic further, please move here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3347899&cid=42426921
I think he wishes he had the choice to do that. But he doesn't, because that choice was taken from him by government do-gooders and the Federal electron police.
Sorry, could you clarify what, exactly he can't buy? Or did you mean these instead?
The "ban" doesn't work quite like most people think it does. We can still get crappy old low-efficiency lights, manufacturers just need to make them 30% less inefficient - Which they've known how to do for decades (just make them more insulating so they lose less energy as heat)... But, that costs a bit more (perhaps a buck each rather than a dozen for $1.99). So, everyone hating on the CFLs and now LEDs can still choose to "vote with their wallets".
The fellow to whom I responded, however (along with one amusing AC troll that replied to me), won't bother letting facts get in the way of their ranting. The Man stole their 100W bulbs, Nevar forgit!
I am sick and tired... of the government banning perfectly good items
Then consider yourself in luck! Because, y'know, TFA has nothing to do with anyone banning anything. Don't let me interrupt a good rant, though - Carry on, good sir, you rage against that machine!
Some of us would rather spend our money on more fun things than literally "keeping the lights on". Do whatever you want with your money.
Only in the socially retarded world of /. is this sort of behaviour lauded because the best behaviour that I described above seems too goddamned difficult to manage.
Then you have clearly never worked with someone who just... won't... fucking... get it!
I absolutely follow the rule "Praise in public, Punish in private". You can save a lot of situations with that one simple rule.
But sometimes, you need to resort to "a cat on crack could have randomly landed on keys that typed out better code than you. Hit the showers, you stink", and nothing short of that will get the point across.
In the present situation, I would hope that Linus has already had far, far too many private conversations with Mauro. Given that he doesn't have a reputation for randomly losing his shit and attacking people for no reason, I feel inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. If we hear a similar story three weeks from now, and another two months from now, etc - We may have a problem. For now? I'd call it an overreaction and leave it at that, pending more evidence one way or the other.
Do it again, correctly. In the future, check X, Y and Z to ensure that you don't repeat this mistake.
And the 203rd time you ask nicely, carefully explaining your position? What then? Not like you can non-publicly "fire" the current kernel maintainer.
How many data mining tokens er loyalty cards are in your wallet?
Four. Only one (currently) in my name. Every now and then I randomly swap them with friends to poison the (dis)loyalty well.
We've established the nature of the relationship, we're now just haggling over the cost...
The cost: Give me your best price without playing games, or I'll go to your competition.
Although the "premium" airlines might not get it yet, the likes of JetBlue and SouthWest most assuredly do.
And y'know, I don't always mind the nickel-and-dime approach, within reason. They just need to limit it to what really costs them money, rather than getting petty. Weight costs money, so baggage costs money. I tend to travel light, so by all means, charge an extra $50 to the morons who could sneak Grandma on in their ginormous bags. Soda, OTOH, costs less than fuel. Charge me a buck for a half-can, and you can bet your ass I'll bring my own with me from the terminal (where it only costs half-insane)
I both want to post and read the reviews without forcing the reviewers to reveal the real name. I do not want my real name posted with all reviews -- and I think other reviewers should be extended that same courtesy
Tough. When your "opinion" potentially costs me money buying crap, I want to know if Joe Brown of Anytown, USA recommended it, or Trolly McTrollerson hired by a competing ad agency. If you remember once upon a time when Amazon "accidentally" did show real names on reviews - We learned that about half of the damned things came from either the manufacturer, the seller, or a competing manufacturer/seller. That matters, whatever imaginary right you may believe you have to anonymously post your manifesto on Bronies to every feminine hygiene product you can find.
P.S. Posting anonymously to make my point.
Slashdot works as a news aggregation blog. Not a storefront. If you want to post the latest news from one of Slashdot's regular troll-groups, I really don't give a shit - You'll get modded to -1 almost instantly, no one will read it, and we all move on with our lives. If you want to downmod everything you see as flamebait, the metamods will eventually spank you into never getting mod points again. If you want to post AC, unless you either get to +5 or directly reply to one of my own comments (as in this case) , I'll never even see that you exist. It all works out just fine, and most importantly, none of it really matters anyway.
Amazon, by contrast, does serve as a storefront. I go there to buy things. Usually, I already know what I want, I search for it, add it to the cart, and check out. Sometimes, however, I just need a general category of product, and could use some hints as to which ones suck and which ones don't.
Fuck you.
No, sir, fuck you. If you want to risk your own money on random crap, hit Vegas. If you want to post crap on a website, either start a blog or at least stick to moderated sites like Slashdot. If, however, you want to express a real opinion about a product - Have the balls to do it in your own name or STFU. Simple as that.
Simple: Reputation of the reviewer.
First, don't let anyone review until they've had an Amazon account for at least six months and made at least three purchases (on different days) in that time.
Second, post the reviewer's name (their real name, not a handle). Don't like that? Don't review anything.
Third, don't allow people to review products they haven't bought through Amazon.
Fourth, if someone has more than ten percent of their reviews deleted as spam or abusive, block that account from any more reviews.
Fourth-and-a-half, if a product has a large percent of its reviews deleted, "lock" it to only allow reviews by much more reputable users.
I would relax those a little for simply giving a star rating rather than writing a review, but not by much. I would also use a weighted rating system, based on the user's average rating. Not only would this get around the "No-star Nancy"s, it would work to avoid the useless inverse-exponential ratings we see on 99% of products, thus moving the "real" average rating to a three - So a five-star product would really mean a five-star product.
You know why? Because time is money. An experienced recording engineer can get you from mic to mixed album in around a week.
First, don't take this the wrong way - I know a few sound engineers, and know what they can do that your average home studio will never manage to pull off. That said...
You phrased it absolutely the right way - But until they make it big, your indie band pays their rent by stocking Wallyworld shelves at night for minimum wage. And as the flip-side of "time is money", if you make shit for wages, you can put an awfully lot of time into a project before you break even money-wise.
As a kid bagging groceries, I changed the oil in my car. Today, you couldn't pay me to do that crap.
It's actually illegal to buy a gun outside your State of legal residence unless: 1) it is a private sale, not innvolving a licensed dealer (you want to buy a gun from your uncle, no problem, you go into a gunshop, no sale)
Huh, thank you, I did not realize that - I learn something new every day!
I'd usually just have anything shipped to a friend of mine with an FFL, so never really looked all that deeply into buying from out-of-state.
I wonder how appealing gun ownership would be if the owners had to turn out a compulsory drill every month.
;)
Actually, Hamilton (in Federalist #29) only suggested an annual inspection - "Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year"
You'll do it in the rain, snow, and sleet, -20; you'll do it in the hot sun, 100+; you'll do it one Saturday
Aside from the pure BS nuisance factor of weather, an indoor range would make it safer and easier (for the testers) to run people through a battery of drills to demonstrate their proficiency. Though make no mistake, I have friends who would pay to spend a weekend crawling through the cold mud on a military obstacle course / rifle range (if doing so didn't require that whole "joining the military" thing).
Now, in spirit, I have absolutely nothing against something akin to Hamilton's original suggestion. The slope gets pretty damned slippery, however, when someone in power needs to decide what counts as passing. Banning civilian firearms then requires nothing more than setting the bar absurdly high - "Oh, gee, sorry, you went outside the allowed 4" spread at 100 yards, better luck next year!"
Really gun owners.... really?
No, not really.
The problem here has nothing to do with the availability of the information - As TFA says, it all comes from public record
The problem involve "inducement", a crime entirely separate from your right to publish things about which you should know better. NY already has a problem with gun crime. So how do we deal with that? Let's put a "respawn/restock here" point on the map for every petty thug in the city looking for a gun but too clueless to drive a few states away and buy one themselves (possibly even legally, depending on what they've gotten busted for up to that point).
Yes, having a gun in the home means you can defend yourself from a random intruder; the situation changes when the gun becomes the target of the home invasion; and I would definitely say we have liability involved when some asshats effectively sent the thieves to your door in a fucked-up attempt to make a point.
If people die because of this, I sincerely hope we put the owners and editors of this paper on trial for murder; of course, in reality, we'll just hear one more artificially inflated statistic about gun violence.
My 3 week old is fascinated by certain shapes. Is there an app that looks like big tits dripping milk that would be something he could play with?
;)
Oh, you have come to the right place for that, my friend! Welcome to the Internet! You can find breasts doing just about anything you can imagine here, including quite a few things you can't imagine, and some you can't even comprehend.
Enjoy your stay!
Yet, when I go shopping for a solar panel, all I get is the same old crap, and it's still crazy expensive.
If you can do the installation yourself, you can get panels for under $2 a watt now. That gives you a payback period, even in the Northern US, of a mere two to three years.
Yes, if you want to go totally off-grid, you need some way to store the power, which gets into the mess of batteries and charge controllers and inverters. But... Just don't do that! You can go with a grid-tie setup, where you just need the panels and the inverter; you can get small-scale plug-and-play inverters (1KW) for around $350, or a whole-house scale 10KW units for $1300.
Also, you need to mount your solar cells on a surface that is at an appropriate angle, and probably have no such surfaces.
We only bother doing that to minimize the number of panels needed (and thus, cost). The amount of light hitting a given surface doesn't actually change based on mounting panels at the "right" angle, nor does even active 2-axis tracking hardware let you capture one Watt more than merely covering the same shadow-footprint with panels.
If the cost of covering every external surface of your house with solar panels wouldn't break the bank, you may as well do that in place of any of the more traditional siding options.
If this article from a local rag is indeed showing a picture of what they found, this may have been warranted.
No, actually, that counts as the entire problem - Not warranted.
Even if this kid planned to blow up something big, the entire chain of events that led to police finding whatever they found make it all the fruit of the poisonous tree.
IANAL, but drawing pictures of guns just doesn't count as sufficient evidence to get a warrant in any sane world.
Fuck, what the hell has this country come to? I used to keep a goddamned "kill list" in junior high - And somehow, I made it through our country's socialized babysitting prisons without going on a murderous rampage. "Wishful thinking" doesn't equal "homicidal intent". Funny, that.
The Newton shooter had almost no online presence at all. So how would this have prevented it? Just sounds like an excuse to spy on us.
He also used guns he couldn't legally own - BUT, the guns themselves came from legal, regulated channels; thus, the fearmongering from the left about more stringent background checks, "waiting periods", or closing the "gun show" loophole wouldn't have changed a single aspect of Newtown.
He also apparently only stopped when he got bored, not because someone physically prevented him from reloading - Meaning you can't blame Newtown on the boogeyman of high-capacity magazines.
You want to prevent "gun crime" in the US, deal with the sources of crime in general, not the tools involved. And in the case of mass murderers, that means real (probably chemical) psych intervention for the actual sickos, not some fluffy "but how do you feel" BS counseling sessions for emo kids.
So they are going to start arresting people for not having an interest in politics?
You joke? Our leaders love people with no interest in politics.
Just pay your taxes, Citizen, and don't bother looking behind the curtain. It gets so messy back there anyway - You just kick back with your permitted intoxicant of choice, enjoy the Monday Night Gladiatorial games, and let the boys in Washington worry about all that nasty, complicated stuff.
but what they'll actually do is hang around on gun nut boards and try to sell illegal automatics to the people hanging around there.
You can legally own a fully automatic ("machine gun") in the US. You need a special permit for it, but it basically takes no more effort than getting a CCW - It just costs more ($200, and you pay that per-gun).
think crime isn't enough
Ahahahahaaha... How cute.
I'm not seeing how this is Apple's fault - it's not as if their usual behaviour is uncommon here. The licensing around the original 30 pin was equally obtuse.
I'd call it Apple's fault for using a proprietary connector in the first place.
Yes, I'd also call it the fault of patent law for allowing something so absurd intended solely to block interoperation with 3rd party devices; but Apple chose to use it.
If it makes you happier, I also condemn Intel for the abomination they call "Thunderbolt" - Though unlike iThings, at least Thunderbolt never really caught on.