We all know catholicism is pretty much as peaceful
Yeah, that new Pope guy, always going on about killing Muslims and retribution.
Oh, wait, you're utterly full of shit and building a straw man based on shit that happened hundreds of years ago. Like a complete fucking idiot.
On behalf of atheists everywhere... you fucking people sound like a bunch of squabbling children. Grow up, get out of the dark ages, learn some tolerance, and actually try to live in peace. I'm sure somewhere in your idiotic books that got mentioned.
If you're going to rehash the same shit every week, go to your fucking room, shut up, and leave those of us who have achieved civilization to be free of your bullshit.
Explain the Crusades, if Christians are so brotherly.
And how many people alive had anything to do with the fucking crusades? That's right, not a single person.
The crusades are the opposite side of the same coin -- religious idiots doing terrible shit in the name of their god and acting like it's justified. Nobody looks back on the crusades and says "good times, that". They see it as atrocities committed by zealots.
If you're clinging to something which happened 500+ years ago as an excuse to indiscriminately kill today... you're a fucking moron.
More harm has befallen the world in the name of god than should be allowed. So I conclude the Abrahamic god is either a fucking lie, or a fucking asshole.
If he doesn't like that, he can take it up with me personally. You, however, are not qualified to speak on his behalf.
One set of stone age idiots fighting another set of stone age idiots. And the world never changes.
These things always have had a privacy risk. The only way to win is to not even play.
I don't trust the companies who make these things... neither to competently implement security, nor to adhere to any restrictions on what they collect.
Most apps already collect far more information than they fess up to.
So, I'm sorry, but me and my tinfoil hat will look at all of these devices (as well as the crap which is the 'smart' home) and just simply not buy them or use them.
As much as anything, they're about gathering analytics information for marketing... everything else they do is of little value.
Can I laugh at the people who have Flash enabled and let arbitrary sites run javascript? Or does this spread through some other vectors I don't know about?
I suspect the problem is the idiots who write websites, who demand your browser run in the most insecure possible configuration so you can see their ads and other shit they've hidden behind code which needs to run on your browser.
And I've always said I'm not willing to run my browser wide open just to make web sites work, because these things have been security holes for years.
Browsers need to be a whole lot less trusting, and not default to just running any old thing which comes along. And certainly stop trusting scripts from 3rd parties and running whatever crap pile of Flash comes along.
Unfortunately, users are used to seeing pages which give you detailed directions for re-enabling javascript and cookies.
So to all you web developers out there who have ever written that page... fuck you, you slimy bastard. It's partly your fault the internet is a shit hole.
An unregulated, anonymous (insofar as bitcoin addresses just being a series of numbers not tied to anybody in particular) currency that is stored with unregulated, uninsured entities is immediately a bad idea
But, tell me, how is this not exactly what people should have expected? You can't say "wow, what we really need is an unregulated currency", and then be caught off guard when the lack of regulation and insurance bites you in the ass.
If you want to have an unregulated currency, don't bloody well expect all of the benefits of a regulated and insured banking system.
By definition these are not banks, these are not mature financial players, and they're unregulated and insured -- they're essentially technology startups. Which means you are taking a lot more direct risk.
You say "these incompetent operators is what is causing bitcoin to lose credibility", I say it never had that credibility in the first place. You wanted the wild west of currency, you got it.
So, those of us who have been scratching our head over the whole bitcoin thing aren't suddenly going to feel sorry for you, not even a little. Because what you're complaining about has been touted as a design feature.
You attribute far more long-term thinking to the idiots who run companies than I do.
And are you really saying that if I really wanted to destroy large US companies all I'd have to do is to bomb factories in China? Or sow dissent? Or cut off their electrical supply?
Because that sounds like something out of a Bond film.
Hell, build your own fabrication plant and then bomb the ones who build for your competitor; instant monopoly.:-P
That's why there's still controls to drive it non autonomously.
And if that is the response, that is why autonomous cars will NEVER work on public roads.
Either the car drives itself 100% of the time, or I drive it 100% of the time.
If someone thinks that you're going to be driving along in your car not paying attention to the road, and suddenly the computer is doing to say "fuck it, I don't know, you do it" they're complete morons.
Human reaction time will not allow a driver who is disengaged to suddenly be in control of the car.
There is no "sometimes the computer drives and sometimes you do", unless it's a complete transition. But when the computer is driving, I should be able to climb in the back and sleep, or read the paper.
Otherwise the entire system is doomed to fail, because it simply won't work in the real world.
I see zero value in an "autonomous" car which is periodically going to decide it isn't responsible. And I'm sure neither Benz nor Google plan on indemnifying you from legal responsibility.
Then maybe I'm misreading what you are saying, because I'm hearing you say that if one is upset about gun laws, we should go out and shoot people who you claim are violating their other rights too. YOU are saying that we should react with violence to such
In fact, I'm saying neither of those things.
I'm saying why are these people so vocally defending this one right and no other?
If your right to keep and bear arms is all important to you, and you refuse to defend any of your other rights which are being eroded, then you don't deserve any of the damned rights in the first place.
If you believe your rights come at the end of a gun, and you sit around bitching about ensuring you have access to guns, and you ignore when they take away the rest of your rights... you're just a bunch of children who want your guns and nothing else. This isn't a principled stand, this is wanting to own guns because they're cool.
So I'm saying: why the hell are these people who bitch so vocally about ensuring they have gun rights completely silent on the rest of them? If you're not going to give a shit about the rest of your rights, why focus on this one?
It seems like the ones defending the right to own guns, as that is allegedly the way to preserve all of the rest of your rights, would ALSO be pissed about other stuff.
And yet they say not a fucking thing on the topic.
And then over time the astronomical meaning of how we keep time goes astray.
AM and PM mean "anti-meridian" and "post-meridian", and at noon on the day of the summer solstice, the sun should sit on the celestial meridian.
I'm pretty sure if we did it your way, eventually the meridian (which is how we derived both navigation and time keeping) would move around, and eventually noon would be in the middle of the night.
This stuff isn't arbitrary, it's actually based in something.
The whole point of the leap second (etc) is to keep those things lined up. Otherwise there is no way we could keep track of things like sunrise and sunset, or when you might see a specific star.
I am not responsible for what nutjobs with guns do. Nutjobs with guns are.
Me, I haven't handled a firearm in 25+ years, and don't see any likelihood of that changing.
But pointing out the hypocrisy of bitching about this one right and ignoring the erosion of every other one? Nope, not gonna stop that.
If you are only prepared to defend (figuratively, rhetorically, and then possibly literally) ONE right, you don't deserve any of the rest of them.
So when these gun advocates ignore the rest of this shit, and bray loudly about the right to open carry and own assault weapons... I conclude these people are either hypocrites, or really only gun nuts who don't care about anything else.
And, at what point will your Constitution have been so thoroughly shat upon that you decide you've reached the level of unjust that merits action?
Civil forfeiture didn't do it. Clearly free speech zones didn't do it. Border stops within 100 miles of a border didn't do it. Warrantless wiretapping hasn't done it. Torture done in secret hasn't done it. A CIA who blatantly lies to Congress didn't do it.
So what will?
If you're going to make loud noises about your right to keep and own guns, and stand quietly while they take away the rest of your rights, at what point should we conclude you're a complete hypocrite who doesn't actually give a damn about your rights?
As I said, what is the point of loudly proclaiming your right to own a gun if you aren't going to at any point be willing to at least loudly say "why should we keep giving up our rights?"
Armed rebellion is, as you say, an option of last resort.
But if you're going to just quietly stand by while they take away the rest of your rights, then your lip service to the second amendment right is just plain bullshit.
But right now we are no longer home of the Brave. Thus we are no longer becoming the land of the free.
Many of us suspect this has been true for a lot longer than people realize. The rot has been going on for a very long time.
If the FBI is openly saying the 4th amendment is meaningless, they've been ignoring it and the rest of the laws for a very long time.
As long as people accept "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide", this will get worse.
Nobody gives a shit about their liberty, they want to know when American Idol is on, and when they can get the next iPhone.
9/11 just killed any last pretense of caring about the law and liberty. And that is spilling into the rest of the world, so much so that the US is more or less the enemy of freedom and liberty on the planet.
was under the impression there is a relationship between supply and demand
There's a relationship, but like all commodities it's more complicated than that. But the futures markets and all sorts of stuff completely unrelated to supply and demand also are huge factors.
It is long past the point where these things happen in isolation.
I seriously doubt even this comes close to explaining it:
The oil price is partly determined by actual supply and demand, and partly by expectation. Demand for energy is closely related to economic activity. It also spikes in the winter in the northern hemisphere, and during summers in countries which use air conditioning. Supply can be affected by weather (which prevents tankers loading) and by geopolitical upsets. If producers think the price is staying high, they invest, which after a lag boosts supply. Similarly, low prices lead to an investment drought. OPEC's decisions shape expectations: if it curbs supply sharply, it can send prices spiking. Saudi Arabia produces nearly 10m barrels a day--a third of the OPEC total.
Four things are now affecting the picture. Demand is low because of weak economic activity, increased efficiency, and a growing switch away from oil to other fuels. Second, turmoil in Iraq and Libya--two big oil producers with nearly 4m barrels a day combined--has not affected their output. The market is more sanguine about geopolitical risk. Thirdly, America has become the worldâ(TM)s largest oil producer. Though it does not export crude oil, it now imports much less, creating a lot of spare supply. Finally, the Saudis and their Gulf allies have decided not to sacrifice their own market share to restore the price. They could curb production sharply, but the main benefits would go to countries they detest such as Iran and Russia. Saudi Arabia can tolerate lower oil prices quite easily. It has $900 billion in reserves. Its own oil costs very little (around $5-6 per barrel) to get out of the ground.
I'm not playing with words at all. I'm saying that modern economics is FAR more complex than "when demand goes up price goes up". Modern economics is full of vagaries, speculation, collusion, and other bullshit.
Despite claims to the contrary, economists don't know much more about how the economy works than you or I... because economics is at least 50% ideology.
You look for, and see, the outcomes you believe in.
What economics is not, is an objective natural law. It's a series of observations which may or may not extend as far as people who use it claims, and whose premises may or may not be reliable.
Economics is NOT a real science. There's a lot more voodoo in it that people admit.
The middle east producers are most certainly NOT dropping prices.
The prices are dropping because there's a lot of it around, and because whatever vagaries in the market say the price goes down.
What the middle east producers are doing is refusing to cut outputs in the face of dropping prices, because they have tons of cash and don't care if it puts American producers out of business.
Despite there being no published science about its safety, and despite evidence that it is actually polluting wells and ground water... it will keep happening.
Because government officials are all paid heavily by the oil and gas industry to make damned sure they can do anything they want to, right up to tearing up private property because they want to.
These short sighted clowns only care about profits, and don't give a damn about anything else.
I can't imagine government is going to start reigning in corporations any time soon... which means all laws and policy will continue to be so skewed in favor of corporations as to be laughable.
Oak Island is a real place, off the coast of Nova Scotia.
It's long been rumored to have pirate treasure. There's a show about people looking to find it.
Of course, it leads to a bunch of nutjobs with crazy theories, like it has for decades. But, History Channel is all about nutjobs with crazy theories these days.
History Channel has become a joke with things like Ghost Hunters, Ancient Aliens, and enough crap to make you think they've jumped the shark and become a source you can no longer rely on for actual history.
If you don't plan on using any of these much vaunted gun rights to defend the other rights in your Constitution, WTF is the point?
If you're going to say "well, the 1st amendment is shot, the 4th is being ignored, the 5th is being tramped on, but I have my gun"... why the hell are you even bothering??
Why are none of you gun advocates killing off the NSA officials and the rest of the security people who are shitting all over the rest of your fucking rights? Or are you just a bunch of one trick ponies who only give a crap about your guns?
If so, you should seriously STFU and start worrying about the other rights they've been taking away from you. Otherwise you're just a bunch of children playing cowboy.
Or should we conclude gun advocates are totally OK with tyranny and the erosion of your other rights?
If you won't defend the rest of your Constitutional rights, you don't deserve this one either.
Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia
the law says they are never fully autonomous, and you could be on the hook.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm .... suddenly I'm picturing Louis Wu with his droud attached.
I shall pass on this.
Because I'm sure nobody can actually tell you this is safe and have any science to back it up.
Given the body of your post ... and the content of your sig ... the mind reels.
Not a link I'll be clicking.
Yeah, that new Pope guy, always going on about killing Muslims and retribution.
Oh, wait, you're utterly full of shit and building a straw man based on shit that happened hundreds of years ago. Like a complete fucking idiot.
On behalf of atheists everywhere ... you fucking people sound like a bunch of squabbling children. Grow up, get out of the dark ages, learn some tolerance, and actually try to live in peace. I'm sure somewhere in your idiotic books that got mentioned.
If you're going to rehash the same shit every week, go to your fucking room, shut up, and leave those of us who have achieved civilization to be free of your bullshit.
And how many people alive had anything to do with the fucking crusades? That's right, not a single person.
The crusades are the opposite side of the same coin -- religious idiots doing terrible shit in the name of their god and acting like it's justified. Nobody looks back on the crusades and says "good times, that". They see it as atrocities committed by zealots.
If you're clinging to something which happened 500+ years ago as an excuse to indiscriminately kill today ... you're a fucking moron.
More harm has befallen the world in the name of god than should be allowed. So I conclude the Abrahamic god is either a fucking lie, or a fucking asshole.
If he doesn't like that, he can take it up with me personally. You, however, are not qualified to speak on his behalf.
One set of stone age idiots fighting another set of stone age idiots. And the world never changes.
These things always have had a privacy risk. The only way to win is to not even play.
I don't trust the companies who make these things ... neither to competently implement security, nor to adhere to any restrictions on what they collect.
Most apps already collect far more information than they fess up to.
So, I'm sorry, but me and my tinfoil hat will look at all of these devices (as well as the crap which is the 'smart' home) and just simply not buy them or use them.
As much as anything, they're about gathering analytics information for marketing ... everything else they do is of little value.
How is this crap spread?
Can I laugh at the people who have Flash enabled and let arbitrary sites run javascript? Or does this spread through some other vectors I don't know about?
I suspect the problem is the idiots who write websites, who demand your browser run in the most insecure possible configuration so you can see their ads and other shit they've hidden behind code which needs to run on your browser.
And I've always said I'm not willing to run my browser wide open just to make web sites work, because these things have been security holes for years.
Browsers need to be a whole lot less trusting, and not default to just running any old thing which comes along. And certainly stop trusting scripts from 3rd parties and running whatever crap pile of Flash comes along.
Unfortunately, users are used to seeing pages which give you detailed directions for re-enabling javascript and cookies.
So to all you web developers out there who have ever written that page ... fuck you, you slimy bastard. It's partly your fault the internet is a shit hole.
But, tell me, how is this not exactly what people should have expected? You can't say "wow, what we really need is an unregulated currency", and then be caught off guard when the lack of regulation and insurance bites you in the ass.
If you want to have an unregulated currency, don't bloody well expect all of the benefits of a regulated and insured banking system.
By definition these are not banks, these are not mature financial players, and they're unregulated and insured -- they're essentially technology startups. Which means you are taking a lot more direct risk.
You say "these incompetent operators is what is causing bitcoin to lose credibility", I say it never had that credibility in the first place. You wanted the wild west of currency, you got it.
So, those of us who have been scratching our head over the whole bitcoin thing aren't suddenly going to feel sorry for you, not even a little. Because what you're complaining about has been touted as a design feature.
LOL, yes on both, and I wasn't advocating it ... I was comparing it to a Bond Movie because it sounds so damned crazy.
You attribute far more long-term thinking to the idiots who run companies than I do.
And are you really saying that if I really wanted to destroy large US companies all I'd have to do is to bomb factories in China? Or sow dissent? Or cut off their electrical supply?
Because that sounds like something out of a Bond film.
Hell, build your own fabrication plant and then bomb the ones who build for your competitor; instant monopoly. :-P
And if that is the response, that is why autonomous cars will NEVER work on public roads.
Either the car drives itself 100% of the time, or I drive it 100% of the time.
If someone thinks that you're going to be driving along in your car not paying attention to the road, and suddenly the computer is doing to say "fuck it, I don't know, you do it" they're complete morons.
Human reaction time will not allow a driver who is disengaged to suddenly be in control of the car.
There is no "sometimes the computer drives and sometimes you do", unless it's a complete transition. But when the computer is driving, I should be able to climb in the back and sleep, or read the paper.
Otherwise the entire system is doomed to fail, because it simply won't work in the real world.
I see zero value in an "autonomous" car which is periodically going to decide it isn't responsible. And I'm sure neither Benz nor Google plan on indemnifying you from legal responsibility.
In which case this will always simply be a toy.
In fact, I'm saying neither of those things.
I'm saying why are these people so vocally defending this one right and no other?
If your right to keep and bear arms is all important to you, and you refuse to defend any of your other rights which are being eroded, then you don't deserve any of the damned rights in the first place.
If you believe your rights come at the end of a gun, and you sit around bitching about ensuring you have access to guns, and you ignore when they take away the rest of your rights ... you're just a bunch of children who want your guns and nothing else. This isn't a principled stand, this is wanting to own guns because they're cool.
So I'm saying: why the hell are these people who bitch so vocally about ensuring they have gun rights completely silent on the rest of them? If you're not going to give a shit about the rest of your rights, why focus on this one?
It seems like the ones defending the right to own guns, as that is allegedly the way to preserve all of the rest of your rights, would ALSO be pissed about other stuff.
And yet they say not a fucking thing on the topic.
Well, then it's a good thing there's only two of them.
A third company who owned some fabrication facilities would completely screw things up.
Pretty much this.
The people who own that fabrication capacity are selling it to the highest bidder. Or the one who invested the money to build it.
If you don't control your own production, don't be surprised when you have to wait in line.
But don't act all shocked that the 3rd party who actually builds your products can't guarantee your stuff gets built.
This gets a big "duh".
And then over time the astronomical meaning of how we keep time goes astray.
AM and PM mean "anti-meridian" and "post-meridian", and at noon on the day of the summer solstice, the sun should sit on the celestial meridian.
I'm pretty sure if we did it your way, eventually the meridian (which is how we derived both navigation and time keeping) would move around, and eventually noon would be in the middle of the night.
This stuff isn't arbitrary, it's actually based in something.
The whole point of the leap second (etc) is to keep those things lined up. Otherwise there is no way we could keep track of things like sunrise and sunset, or when you might see a specific star.
I am not responsible for what nutjobs with guns do. Nutjobs with guns are.
Me, I haven't handled a firearm in 25+ years, and don't see any likelihood of that changing.
But pointing out the hypocrisy of bitching about this one right and ignoring the erosion of every other one? Nope, not gonna stop that.
If you are only prepared to defend (figuratively, rhetorically, and then possibly literally) ONE right, you don't deserve any of the rest of them.
So when these gun advocates ignore the rest of this shit, and bray loudly about the right to open carry and own assault weapons ... I conclude these people are either hypocrites, or really only gun nuts who don't care about anything else.
Neither deserves my respect.
LOL, just how hard can it be to live up to Syence Fyction?
At that point you can pretty much broadcast anything.
And, at what point will your Constitution have been so thoroughly shat upon that you decide you've reached the level of unjust that merits action?
Civil forfeiture didn't do it. Clearly free speech zones didn't do it. Border stops within 100 miles of a border didn't do it. Warrantless wiretapping hasn't done it. Torture done in secret hasn't done it. A CIA who blatantly lies to Congress didn't do it.
So what will?
If you're going to make loud noises about your right to keep and own guns, and stand quietly while they take away the rest of your rights, at what point should we conclude you're a complete hypocrite who doesn't actually give a damn about your rights?
As I said, what is the point of loudly proclaiming your right to own a gun if you aren't going to at any point be willing to at least loudly say "why should we keep giving up our rights?"
Armed rebellion is, as you say, an option of last resort.
But if you're going to just quietly stand by while they take away the rest of your rights, then your lip service to the second amendment right is just plain bullshit .
Many of us suspect this has been true for a lot longer than people realize. The rot has been going on for a very long time.
If the FBI is openly saying the 4th amendment is meaningless, they've been ignoring it and the rest of the laws for a very long time.
As long as people accept "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide", this will get worse.
Nobody gives a shit about their liberty, they want to know when American Idol is on, and when they can get the next iPhone.
9/11 just killed any last pretense of caring about the law and liberty. And that is spilling into the rest of the world, so much so that the US is more or less the enemy of freedom and liberty on the planet.
There's a relationship, but like all commodities it's more complicated than that. But the futures markets and all sorts of stuff completely unrelated to supply and demand also are huge factors.
It is long past the point where these things happen in isolation.
I seriously doubt even this comes close to explaining it:
I'm not playing with words at all. I'm saying that modern economics is FAR more complex than "when demand goes up price goes up". Modern economics is full of vagaries, speculation, collusion, and other bullshit.
Despite claims to the contrary, economists don't know much more about how the economy works than you or I ... because economics is at least 50% ideology.
You look for, and see, the outcomes you believe in.
What economics is not, is an objective natural law. It's a series of observations which may or may not extend as far as people who use it claims, and whose premises may or may not be reliable.
Economics is NOT a real science. There's a lot more voodoo in it that people admit.
The middle east producers are most certainly NOT dropping prices.
The prices are dropping because there's a lot of it around, and because whatever vagaries in the market say the price goes down.
What the middle east producers are doing is refusing to cut outputs in the face of dropping prices, because they have tons of cash and don't care if it puts American producers out of business.
OPEC doesn't set the price, just output levels.
Despite there being no published science about its safety, and despite evidence that it is actually polluting wells and ground water ... it will keep happening.
Because government officials are all paid heavily by the oil and gas industry to make damned sure they can do anything they want to, right up to tearing up private property because they want to.
These short sighted clowns only care about profits, and don't give a damn about anything else.
I can't imagine government is going to start reigning in corporations any time soon ... which means all laws and policy will continue to be so skewed in favor of corporations as to be laughable.
America is nothing but an oligarchy these days.
Oak Island is a real place, off the coast of Nova Scotia.
It's long been rumored to have pirate treasure. There's a show about people looking to find it.
Of course, it leads to a bunch of nutjobs with crazy theories, like it has for decades. But, History Channel is all about nutjobs with crazy theories these days.
History Channel has become a joke with things like Ghost Hunters, Ancient Aliens, and enough crap to make you think they've jumped the shark and become a source you can no longer rely on for actual history.
Yeah, History Channel has turned into a rather pathetic shell of its former self.
It's aliens, ghosts, and various other bits of crap and conjecture.
They should really stop calling themselves "History", and move onto "speculative fiction".
History is facts and reality, most of the crap on History Channel is anything but.
If you don't plan on using any of these much vaunted gun rights to defend the other rights in your Constitution, WTF is the point?
If you're going to say "well, the 1st amendment is shot, the 4th is being ignored, the 5th is being tramped on, but I have my gun" ... why the hell are you even bothering??
Why are none of you gun advocates killing off the NSA officials and the rest of the security people who are shitting all over the rest of your fucking rights? Or are you just a bunch of one trick ponies who only give a crap about your guns?
If so, you should seriously STFU and start worrying about the other rights they've been taking away from you. Otherwise you're just a bunch of children playing cowboy.
Or should we conclude gun advocates are totally OK with tyranny and the erosion of your other rights?
If you won't defend the rest of your Constitutional rights, you don't deserve this one either.
Pathetic.
Well, given that parents can be liable for the debts of their adult children, I would argue in those states, they will never be fully autonomous.
So, if you live in any of these states:
the law says they are never fully autonomous, and you could be on the hook.
Grand, aint it?