I'm pro-gun (or at least anti gun restriction), but it's hardly indisputable disproof.
Guns may be contributing to violent crime; other factors may just be having a greater impact the other way.
It's not my personal belief, but the logic just isn't there for your "indisputable" fact.
Actually, a lot of the most recent attacks have involved knives.
I don't know that any sort of weapon "contributes" to violent crimes, but the more powerful the weapon, the more carnage is likely to ensue, whether it's from rapid automatic-fire weapons or pressure cookers.
What contributes to violent crimes is inability to defuse the violently-inclined person before the crime is committed.
*Whoosh* First, the period of ellipses indicates that he didn't finish the question. I believe this is a commonly accepted punctuation in English.
Secondly, this is a reference to a book by Phllip K. Dick called "Do Androids Dream Electronic Sheep," later made into a movie with Harrison Ford called Blade Runner. The questions are posed to androids (biological robots otherwise resembling humans) to gauge their emotional response to questions. This is the only way to distinguish them from people.
I never did quite get where the Alan E. Norse "Blade Runner" (referencing scalpels and the medical profession) made the leap to Phillip K. Dick, but maybe that just means I flunked some sort of test.
Since androids didn't have the durability of normal humans, you'd think that some sort of genetic or physiological test would have sufficed, but whatever. Dick had stranger things than that in his books.
The Voight-Kampff test attempted to meter minor fluctuations from normal human emotional reactions owing to the fact that androids would have to synthesize their responses rather than have native cultural/instinctive responses. Of course, so do psychopaths, so one would have to wonder how many "retired" androids were really androids.
What!!! After "wait 10-15 years" everything isn't going to be all peace love and understanding? We have to plan for the next war after the next war we deter?
Next you'll be telling me I am not going to get a flying car before I die.
You joke. But you'll sing a different tune when the Canadian invasion of the USA begins!
This world is in a terrible spiral of violence, which escalated with 9/11, but according to the religious nuts, that wasn't the start of this spiral. Since then the whole world is suffering from this. I even think that the economic crisis that started in 2008 is partly due to the huge worldwide economic costs of this still worsening spiral of violence.
My initial gut reaction was also in favor of 'preventive culling' on these nutcases, but I have come to the conclusion that a more effective weapon against them would be education. The world needs to educate the masses where these idiots come from, to prevent them from getting any foothold anywhere. It will take a long time, but the end result will be a lot prettier than the battlefields that we see emerging now. Answering violence with violence means we're playing their game instead of our own.
Actually, according to stats, violence has been going down. It's just that the less of it there is, the more the remaining violence gets played up.
You still have the freedom to be brave and bash your government and the government has the freedom to bash your head for it.
Spoken by an Anonymous Coward.
There's being brave and then there's being suicidal.
The United States of America had many Anonymous Cowards who agitated for Freedom. They were anonymous - or pseudonomous - because they wanted to be able to keep on saying it instead of saying it once, dying, and having no further voice in the matter. Some had to flee the country entirely.
Of course, we are much more civilized today, and we'd never see anyone have to flee just because they spoke up for freedom and the Constitution now.
We are talking about a terrorism trial... There are more than only the defendants at stake.
Invalid passport, copy of a booklet or even possession of illegal weapon are insufficient to prove that someone is a terrorist. There probably need some witnesses. And thoses are at a great risk if their identity goes public... Some may be as good as dead !!!
So, yes, it's not nice, there may be doubt about what really happened behind those closed doors... But in this specific situation, it may be needed.
And it's quite better than to have these "potential terrorists" brought to court than to have then killed^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave an accident during their arrest.
I believe that there are techniques by which a court can take testimony from a witness while obscuring his/her identity. Techniques that, in fact, long predate the War on Terrror and were used against organized crime.
Dropping a birdcage cover over the entire trial should be an action of last resort. Like when the very presentation of evidence could start an international war.
We (natives) built this country, developed the land and the infrastructure, defined its laws and its culture and made it a distinct entity. We pay the taxes that keep it all going and keep it defended from those who would take advantage of us. "We" were not a uniform body of people, but a series of waves of immigrants (or invaders, depending on who you ask) and what we were 20 years ago isn't what we will be 20 years from now, but nevertheless, we are unique among the nations of the world, just like everyone else.
It's only natural that people who know and are related to each other would want first and foremost to support each other over any other randomly selected set of people. Every country does this, and while "everyone else does" is a poor excuse in general, in this particular case, anyone who does not is at a disadvantage relative to those who do.
It is a Conservative axiom that people should be self-sufficient, but outsourcing critical resources is a violation of that axiom, whether it's by offshoring or by imported labor. Putting your assets into the hands of people who have no reason by virtue of shared common interests other than short-term commercial ones is simply foolish. Today's friends may be tomorrow's enemies, or at the least, have found some other country to work for instead.
So slapping a label on it doesn't make it somehow evil. It's simply being prudent. We're not talking xenophobia, putting up a fence around the country or anything of that nature, we're talking about strengthening and supporting our native assets. The people whose paychecks get cycled back into the tax base and local businesses instead of flying off to other lands. And who will still be here in 20 years and know what to do when the temps have all moved on and taken their domain knowledge with them.
Another person that measures wealth in dollar signs....
Let me repeat what you have surely already been told numerous times. Wealth is not measured by the quantity of currency. Wealth is measured by the quantity of goods and services that can be enjoyed.
So you assert that the very instant that people's wages go up, inflation will immediately kick in to negate that? I think that even in Zimbabwe it takes a little time for inflation to happen, and they have "trillion-dollar bills".
We already know that inflation doesn't always happen (or not happen) when it's "supposed to". The purpose of this experiment is to put more dollars in the hands of the people who cannot afford to sit on them so that those dollars will in turn flow to other people who likewise be empowered to go out and buy stuff they couldn't afford and so forth and so on. To let them enjoy goods and services that they were previously denied or rationed. The sideways version of Trickle-Down, if you will, since the vertical one didn't work.
True, all this sloshing back and forth may very well die an entropic death if merchants start raising their prices. But the poorer you are, the more you'll push back against those inflationary tendencies. Most likely the end result will be somewhere in between the extremes, but as a short-term solution, it's an attempt to try and jump-start a system instead of waiting helplessly around for the mystical benevolent Market Fairy to come along and make it all better.
That sounds like more of a problem with economists.
Horation, there's a lot more in Heaven and Earth than see-sawing financial computations. If enough people are in enough economic misery, they will eventually resort to non-economic means as an attempt to remedy their situation.
So for any economic system to work in the real world, it must allow for the fact that there are practical limits to what can be tolerated before people start breaking market curves and jumping up and down on the pieces.
At the moment, the trend has been to leech money out of the masses and into the hands of the few (a/k/a 1%) aided and abetted by productivity gains, the abolishment of many traditional trade barriers and the ability to arbitrage labor costs to countries with lower standards of living. When the many were relatively well-off, that wasn't a concern. However, with all the recent downward pressure on average wage-earner salaries, we're getting some seriously dissatisfied voter/taxpayers. Whereas a minimum-wage job used to be for kids under someone else's support and society's "losers", it's now becoming a nightmare for people used to a superior standard of living and they don't like the idea.
Jacking up the minumum wage may not be the optimal solution, but no one seriously expects to see the wealth come trickling down any more. Poverty definitely bubbles up - I've got home repairs to do and until I get paid, the repair people wont, but the reverse direction has had about 30 years of varying economic conditions and the only trickle has been a thin yellow stream.
It's for certain that someone who makes 400x the average worker's pay isn't going to buy 400x as much toilet paper, 400x as many McDonalds hamburgers or 400x as many Barbie dolls for their kids. So if natural market forces isn't going to do the job you have to expect that people are going to experiment with alternate solutions. Because if 400 people get just a little more in their pockets, they are a lot more likely to buy those hamburgers and Barbie dolls and they won't have to use their paychecks as emergency toilet paper.
Great. Now that you have your IP laws in order, you should probably get around to doing away with your kings and queens. It's been embarrassing to have them for over two hundred years now. While you're at it, drop your official state religions, so you can go from being theocratic monarchies to secular democracies.
But yeah, super great that your trademark laws are so flexible.
Hey, what's wrong with a theocratic monarchy? We've been building one in the USA for the last 30 years!
Djelibeybi was my first thought, too. What could possibly go wrong?
Solves the energy problem, too. Every morning you haul barrels of oil out of the pyramids and burn them. Every evening, you roll them back. No need for drilling or fracking! Oh wait...
I worked in a shop where circuit breakers were beginning to blow owing to the increasing number of physical boxes running at under 15% capacity.
Virtualization was obviously the first step, since we'd have more physical rackspace, and less idle hardware pulling power.
But the problem with virtualization is that if a host box breaks down or one of the virtual guests suddenly gets hungrier, you have to manually reconfigure stuff.
Cloud software takes care of a lot of that stuff automatically.
"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
To me, "the cloud" is just a buzz word which corresponds roughly to the thin client rage of yesteryear.
That's because you see it from the outside in, and that's what you're supposed to see.
From the inside out, there's a whole lot of support infrastructure.
Well, I'm not sexually passive/inert, and I really doubt that there are that many people who are who are conforming. It's not like there's a big scoreboard out there. Until recently, we were more worried about whether they were gay.
There never were as many choices in anything as Americans have deluded themselves into believing there are. Hence the old saw about "quiet desperation".
Sounds like you're a bad typist. I've entered text into a Palm using Graffiti, and I found that if I approached a reasonable typing speed it choked up and started missing things. Even given a superfast Palm, Graffiti requires more and more complex finger movement than a typewriter.
I bet you can play piano, too. No, I'm not a touch typist, although I'm beyond simple hunt-and-peck. For me writing and typing are about equally complex. I've never managed to write so fast that Grafitti was a bottleneck.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pro-gun (or at least anti gun restriction), but it's hardly indisputable disproof.
Guns may be contributing to violent crime; other factors may just be having a greater impact the other way.
It's not my personal belief, but the logic just isn't there for your "indisputable" fact.
Actually, a lot of the most recent attacks have involved knives.
I don't know that any sort of weapon "contributes" to violent crimes, but the more powerful the weapon, the more carnage is likely to ensue, whether it's from rapid automatic-fire weapons or pressure cookers.
What contributes to violent crimes is inability to defuse the violently-inclined person before the crime is committed.
a real bank, which will adhere to actual banking laws instead of "whatever we decide we want to do", and actually have some stake in fraud prevention.
Snicker. Snicker. Oh, stop. Stop! Oh, hahahahahaha!
*Whoosh*
First, the period of ellipses indicates that he didn't finish the question. I believe this is a commonly accepted punctuation in English.
Secondly, this is a reference to a book by Phllip K. Dick called "Do Androids Dream Electronic Sheep," later made into a movie with Harrison Ford called Blade Runner. The questions are posed to androids (biological robots otherwise resembling humans) to gauge their emotional response to questions. This is the only way to distinguish them from people.
I never did quite get where the Alan E. Norse "Blade Runner" (referencing scalpels and the medical profession) made the leap to Phillip K. Dick, but maybe that just means I flunked some sort of test.
Since androids didn't have the durability of normal humans, you'd think that some sort of genetic or physiological test would have sufficed, but whatever. Dick had stranger things than that in his books.
The Voight-Kampff test attempted to meter minor fluctuations from normal human emotional reactions owing to the fact that androids would have to synthesize their responses rather than have native cultural/instinctive responses. Of course, so do psychopaths, so one would have to wonder how many "retired" androids were really androids.
Will the Madame Curie set glow in the dark?
I didn't see a Madame Curie, but it lools like there's a Susan Calvin!
why not get a Male Scientist package and just give it another head.
Calm down, Doctor Frankenstein.
What!!! After "wait 10-15 years" everything isn't going to be all peace love and understanding? We have to plan for the next war after the next war we deter?
Next you'll be telling me I am not going to get a flying car before I die.
You joke. But you'll sing a different tune when the Canadian invasion of the USA begins!
This world is in a terrible spiral of violence, which escalated with 9/11, but according to the religious nuts, that wasn't the start of this spiral. Since then the whole world is suffering from this. I even think that the economic crisis that started in 2008 is partly due to the huge worldwide economic costs of this still worsening spiral of violence.
My initial gut reaction was also in favor of 'preventive culling' on these nutcases, but I have come to the conclusion that a more effective weapon against them would be education. The world needs to educate the masses where these idiots come from, to prevent them from getting any foothold anywhere. It will take a long time, but the end result will be a lot prettier than the battlefields that we see emerging now. Answering violence with violence means we're playing their game instead of our own.
Actually, according to stats, violence has been going down. It's just that the less of it there is, the more the remaining violence gets played up.
Same thing with crime stats.
Spoken by an Anonymous Coward.
There's being brave and then there's being suicidal.
The United States of America had many Anonymous Cowards who agitated for Freedom. They were anonymous - or pseudonomous - because they wanted to be able to keep on saying it instead of saying it once, dying, and having no further voice in the matter. Some had to flee the country entirely.
Of course, we are much more civilized today, and we'd never see anyone have to flee just because they spoke up for freedom and the Constitution now.
We are talking about a terrorism trial... There are more than only the defendants at stake.
Invalid passport, copy of a booklet or even possession of illegal weapon are insufficient to prove that someone is a terrorist. There probably need some witnesses. And thoses are at a great risk if their identity goes public... Some may be as good as dead !!!
So, yes, it's not nice, there may be doubt about what really happened behind those closed doors... But in this specific situation, it may be needed.
And it's quite better than to have these "potential terrorists" brought to court than to have then killed^H^H^H^H^H^Hhave an accident during their arrest.
I believe that there are techniques by which a court can take testimony from a witness while obscuring his/her identity. Techniques that, in fact, long predate the War on Terrror and were used against organized crime.
Dropping a birdcage cover over the entire trial should be an action of last resort. Like when the very presentation of evidence could start an international war.
Short of a bloody revolt, what exactly can the citizens do about it?
They can stop voting for people who pander to their fears.
Whoosh! ...
Wait, is Whoosh snarky? I can't even tell.
A Boojum.
Charity begins at home.
We (natives) built this country, developed the land and the infrastructure, defined its laws and its culture and made it a distinct entity. We pay the taxes that keep it all going and keep it defended from those who would take advantage of us. "We" were not a uniform body of people, but a series of waves of immigrants (or invaders, depending on who you ask) and what we were 20 years ago isn't what we will be 20 years from now, but nevertheless, we are unique among the nations of the world, just like everyone else.
It's only natural that people who know and are related to each other would want first and foremost to support each other over any other randomly selected set of people. Every country does this, and while "everyone else does" is a poor excuse in general, in this particular case, anyone who does not is at a disadvantage relative to those who do.
It is a Conservative axiom that people should be self-sufficient, but outsourcing critical resources is a violation of that axiom, whether it's by offshoring or by imported labor. Putting your assets into the hands of people who have no reason by virtue of shared common interests other than short-term commercial ones is simply foolish. Today's friends may be tomorrow's enemies, or at the least, have found some other country to work for instead.
So slapping a label on it doesn't make it somehow evil. It's simply being prudent. We're not talking xenophobia, putting up a fence around the country or anything of that nature, we're talking about strengthening and supporting our native assets. The people whose paychecks get cycled back into the tax base and local businesses instead of flying off to other lands. And who will still be here in 20 years and know what to do when the temps have all moved on and taken their domain knowledge with them.
Another person that measures wealth in dollar signs....
Let me repeat what you have surely already been told numerous times. Wealth is not measured by the quantity of currency. Wealth is measured by the quantity of goods and services that can be enjoyed.
So you assert that the very instant that people's wages go up, inflation will immediately kick in to negate that? I think that even in Zimbabwe it takes a little time for inflation to happen, and they have "trillion-dollar bills".
We already know that inflation doesn't always happen (or not happen) when it's "supposed to". The purpose of this experiment is to put more dollars in the hands of the people who cannot afford to sit on them so that those dollars will in turn flow to other people who likewise be empowered to go out and buy stuff they couldn't afford and so forth and so on. To let them enjoy goods and services that they were previously denied or rationed. The sideways version of Trickle-Down, if you will, since the vertical one didn't work.
True, all this sloshing back and forth may very well die an entropic death if merchants start raising their prices. But the poorer you are, the more you'll push back against those inflationary tendencies. Most likely the end result will be somewhere in between the extremes, but as a short-term solution, it's an attempt to try and jump-start a system instead of waiting helplessly around for the mystical benevolent Market Fairy to come along and make it all better.
That sounds like more of a problem with economists.
Horation, there's a lot more in Heaven and Earth than see-sawing financial computations. If enough people are in enough economic misery, they will eventually resort to non-economic means as an attempt to remedy their situation.
So for any economic system to work in the real world, it must allow for the fact that there are practical limits to what can be tolerated before people start breaking market curves and jumping up and down on the pieces.
At the moment, the trend has been to leech money out of the masses and into the hands of the few (a/k/a 1%) aided and abetted by productivity gains, the abolishment of many traditional trade barriers and the ability to arbitrage labor costs to countries with lower standards of living. When the many were relatively well-off, that wasn't a concern. However, with all the recent downward pressure on average wage-earner salaries, we're getting some seriously dissatisfied voter/taxpayers. Whereas a minimum-wage job used to be for kids under someone else's support and society's "losers", it's now becoming a nightmare for people used to a superior standard of living and they don't like the idea.
Jacking up the minumum wage may not be the optimal solution, but no one seriously expects to see the wealth come trickling down any more. Poverty definitely bubbles up - I've got home repairs to do and until I get paid, the repair people wont, but the reverse direction has had about 30 years of varying economic conditions and the only trickle has been a thin yellow stream.
It's for certain that someone who makes 400x the average worker's pay isn't going to buy 400x as much toilet paper, 400x as many McDonalds hamburgers or 400x as many Barbie dolls for their kids. So if natural market forces isn't going to do the job you have to expect that people are going to experiment with alternate solutions. Because if 400 people get just a little more in their pockets, they are a lot more likely to buy those hamburgers and Barbie dolls and they won't have to use their paychecks as emergency toilet paper.
Why doesn't Walmart just up it's wages, if it's such an obviously good idea? It still has to compete with others who probably won't follow suit.
Ordinarily. But Walmart is the 900-lb gorilla. It's more like their competitors have to drop expenses to compete with Walmart.
Great. Now that you have your IP laws in order, you should probably get around to doing away with your kings and queens. It's been embarrassing to have them for over two hundred years now. While you're at it, drop your official state religions, so you can go from being theocratic monarchies to secular democracies.
But yeah, super great that your trademark laws are so flexible.
Hey, what's wrong with a theocratic monarchy? We've been building one in the USA for the last 30 years!
Djelibeybi was my first thought, too. What could possibly go wrong?
Solves the energy problem, too. Every morning you haul barrels of oil out of the pyramids and burn them. Every evening, you roll them back. No need for drilling or fracking! Oh wait...
Nobody ever talks about Methusaleh's twin, Rodney Shortlife.
oh, *that* Scott Adams...I thought it was the guy who made the text-based adventure games in the 80's
I was hoping more for Terry Pratchett's space/time warping pyramids, myself.
I worked in a shop where circuit breakers were beginning to blow owing to the increasing number of physical boxes running at under 15% capacity.
Virtualization was obviously the first step, since we'd have more physical rackspace, and less idle hardware pulling power.
But the problem with virtualization is that if a host box breaks down or one of the virtual guests suddenly gets hungrier, you have to manually reconfigure stuff.
Cloud software takes care of a lot of that stuff automatically.
"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
To me, "the cloud" is just a buzz word which corresponds roughly to the thin client rage of yesteryear.
That's because you see it from the outside in, and that's what you're supposed to see.
From the inside out, there's a whole lot of support infrastructure.
So like... mainframes and dummy terminals all over again?
Why did we stop using those?
Round and round we go...
In IT, it really is true. What goes around, comes around. Over and over and over and over and over.
Well, I'm not sexually passive/inert, and I really doubt that there are that many people who are who are conforming. It's not like there's a big scoreboard out there. Until recently, we were more worried about whether they were gay.
There never were as many choices in anything as Americans have deluded themselves into believing there are. Hence the old saw about "quiet desperation".
Sounds like you're a bad typist. I've entered text into a Palm using Graffiti, and I found that if I approached a reasonable typing speed it choked up and started missing things. Even given a superfast Palm, Graffiti requires more and more complex finger movement than a typewriter.
I bet you can play piano, too. No, I'm not a touch typist, although I'm beyond simple hunt-and-peck. For me writing and typing are about equally complex. I've never managed to write so fast that Grafitti was a bottleneck.
When there's a choice to not chase after a mate, people won't get so desperate.
Apparently you have no sex drive.