It's well-understood that the scenarios people perceive as likely are vastly out of touch with reality. The human brain lacks a competent statistical analysis apparatus.
This is seen across the political spectrum. Left-wingers might have an irrational fear that a police officer will shoot them dead, and right-wingers might have an irrational fear that someone will break into their house and shoot them dead. Neither is based on statistics, but rather on sensational media reports of the small number of such incidents. Both of these viewpoints can cause behaviors that really increase overall risk rather than reducing it.
So nightmare fantasies, like an oppressive government that would need to be violently overthrown, have more to do with the person being a gun lover, exposed to other gun lovers' views, etc than reality. People love guns because they are gun lovers, and they want to keep their guns because they like guns.
I wake up in the morning and check my email, which is probably hosted in another state. Then I brush my teeth with toothpaste from another state -- or maybe another country, in which case it probably was shipped across some other state.
Then I drive to work on a freeway that handles tons of interstate commerce. Once I get to my "workplace", all my real work is transmitted electronically to another state. When I eat lunch, some of my food probably comes from my home state, but only a minority.
I can't really take a crap without performing some interstate commerce, so there you go.
Not really... the Constitution requires the incoming President to take the oath "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office". The exact wording of the oath is also stated.
Which makes it all the more surprising that Mr. Strict Constructionist John Roberts would mess it up, but there you go.
Hey, I'm not a lawyer, especially not in Germany. The way the story is told, though, it sounds like an extremely deceptive practice.
Maybe this deceptive practice is legal in Germany. It probably isn't legal in the US. But accusing someone who's tricked by this of "piracy" when they don't pay up goes too far. It's one thing to treat dishonest people with honesty, and another to give them your money.
That's not really a very meaningful point... even 10MP digital cameras have much more resolution than Blu-Ray, and most people like photos to be smaller than they like their TV to be.
If you do want to enlarge photos to ginormous sizes (and look at them close up) you cannot do that with 35mm film. At that scale you need a larger format.
See, I tend to object somewhat to what I see as a misunderstanding of the word "analog" and beneath that, failure to understand the limitations of our own senses. "Analog" in the first place has zilch to do with "infinite" frame rates or infinite detail or what have you. I've seen people say that they think an old audio cassette tape "sounds better than CD" because "it's analog" as if that somehow meant it didn't have a horrible bandwidth deficiency.
In the case of frame rates, the capabilities of the "analog world" (how can the world be an analog of itself anyway?) are silly to even discuss, since we're perceiving that world through a biochemical structure which reacts at a snail's pace. The structure of the poster's argument makes it seem as if he believes you could perceive a difference between a million FPS and a billion FPS. But rather than throw out numbers like "million" or "billion" I went with the reciprocal of the Planck time -- way funnier.
As an aside, I'm not sure who ever believed that 24FPS was "as fast as the eye could see" when it's barely above the flicker fusion threshold.
Dude, read the comment again -- he said right there that it was a "plasma TV". With all that McDonald's there will be plenty of glucose in their plasma to power the TV.
The original poster -- the point I responded to, not the point that somebody else made -- made this statement:
"Maybe you are comfortable with the government taking your hard earned cash to give to someone who doesn't work so hard?"
My response to that, basically, is that I don't agree there's much evidence that progressive taxation (that is, where those with higher incomes pay a higher percentage) falls disproportionately on the harder-working. That's it.
Government money goes a lot of places; a small proportion is distributed as handouts to the lazy. Speaking as if all recipients of all forms of government spending are undeserving simplifies the argument.
I know small business owners work harder than most. I'm not an idiot over here. You're probably well aware that most small business owners do not become wealthy for all their trouble. Do you mean to tell me that those who don't become wealthy didn't work hard?
The guy who makes my sandwich at lunch for minimum wage works harder than I do. Maybe he didn't work as hard in school, or isn't as smart or whatever, but you know, somebody has to make the sandwiches. I personally appreciate the people who do that (or who take out the trash, mow the grass at the park, etc). I don't mind paying 4% higher taxes so that they can be taken care of when they get brain cancer or something.
Conservatives need to get over this nonsense idea that rich business owners are the hardest-working members of society and the only ones who deserve all the perks. My salary is not determined entirely by how hard I work; a large part involves market forces outside my control. I'd be a moron to not realize that I'm at least a little bit lucky. This argument over who is working the hardest does not favor the wealthy.
I understand the need for clear, credible discpline and I want to be sympathetic to your point of view.
But I must say, every time -- every single time -- that I have seen a parent spank, public or private, the parent has been obviously emotionally agitated and acting out of anger. I'm not saying that these people don't have a right to raise their children the way they choose, and I'm sure there really are parents who spank thinking only of the child's needs (as opposed to the parent's need to express anger). The trouble is, as long as pro-spankers seem to be saying that spanking = good and more spanking = better, instead of discussing the merits of good spanking vs. bad spanking, it becomes more difficult to accept their arguments. Over time I think this erodes the credibility of corporeal punishment as a legitimate means of parenting.
I'm sure that all discpline must inflict pain of some sort (physical or otherwise), and so it's possible for almost any discpline tactic to be abusive if misused. However, humans are strongly wired to hit things when frustrated, and children should not be physical targets of frustration (with discpline as a mere excuse).
You don't quite understand the cause of the problem -- it's not that phones are transmitting on the wrong frequency or "splattering" the spectrum. It's that devices like unshielded speakers are prone to pick up interference like this from all across the spectrum, including the GSM bands.
Cell phone transmitters are much more heavily regulated than consumer electronics like clock radios.
What do you mean? I see both farmers and construction workers with hefty lights working at night all the time. In fact, it really seems like major freeway work is hardly ever done during the day anymore.
Apple has been at the forefront of removing annoying connector sockets since the iMac.
Monitors are a sort of mixed bag -- sometimes Apple seems convinced that people are going to buy their monitors at a huge premium, and makes up new connectors to run a bunch of stuff across one cable. However, for the last few years they seemed to give up on their monitor line and all Macs just came with some version of DVI. Until now, that is, with the new display that doesn't even work with most of the current lineup.
No, FireWire is not coming back on MacBooks any more than it is coming back on iPods.
Look, back in the day on PCs, we had a different port for every single purpose. You plugged your modem into the "serial port", your printer into the "parallel port", your mouse into the "mouse" PS/2 port, your keyboard into the "keyboard" PS/2 port. If you wanted a scanner, you bought a SCSI card and then you plugged the scanner in there.
This sort of thing is lame, lame, lame. Many PC laptops are still sold like this with a profusion of weird ports. For a huge majority of users there is no reason to have more than one type of port for general-purpose peripherals. It's completely uneconomical to ship a consumer laptop with a port that will go unusued almost all of the time.
FireWire is technically great but due to some historical accidents it did not win the battle against USB2. Placing it on a consumer laptop so that a few musicians and the people using older DV cameras can save a few bucks is completely crazy. (I've seen people on Mac forums complain that this affects "millions" of users -- nonsense). It makes perfect sense for a pro line to have special connectors, and this is where FireWire will stay until Apple manages to kill it off.
I know that a bunch of Mac users have everything from FireWire external drives to FireWire webcams, especially since USB performance on PPC Macs was awful. This does not play into Apple's plans any more than users with SCSI scanners did back when Apple dropped SCSI.
The prize was established by the Bank of Sweden but it's important to note that the winner is determined by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, just like all the others except for the Peace Prize.
The line that moved your post from bigoted to just plain stupid was reason D. Your idea of "most laws" is "cars and copyright"? Homeless people have far more interaction with the actually important laws, and far more need for those laws to be reasonable and just, than people whose idea of the "law" is limited to traffic rules and copyright.
I don't know what "propositions" you are talking about (though I don't follow Mississippi politics), but all your "criteria" would be explicitly unconstitutional.
Did you know that most homeless people are not actually homeless for very long? Only a minority would even fall into your batshit-crazy idea that people without land or children have no stake in the future of our society.
More info here
It's well-understood that the scenarios people perceive as likely are vastly out of touch with reality. The human brain lacks a competent statistical analysis apparatus.
This is seen across the political spectrum. Left-wingers might have an irrational fear that a police officer will shoot them dead, and right-wingers might have an irrational fear that someone will break into their house and shoot them dead. Neither is based on statistics, but rather on sensational media reports of the small number of such incidents. Both of these viewpoints can cause behaviors that really increase overall risk rather than reducing it.
So nightmare fantasies, like an oppressive government that would need to be violently overthrown, have more to do with the person being a gun lover, exposed to other gun lovers' views, etc than reality. People love guns because they are gun lovers, and they want to keep their guns because they like guns.
I've never had nearly as bad an experience with the DMV as I have had with the US healthcare "system".
Well, that isn't a very useful standard.
I wake up in the morning and check my email, which is probably hosted in another state. Then I brush my teeth with toothpaste from another state -- or maybe another country, in which case it probably was shipped across some other state.
Then I drive to work on a freeway that handles tons of interstate commerce. Once I get to my "workplace", all my real work is transmitted electronically to another state. When I eat lunch, some of my food probably comes from my home state, but only a minority.
I can't really take a crap without performing some interstate commerce, so there you go.
Not really... the Constitution requires the incoming President to take the oath "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office". The exact wording of the oath is also stated.
Which makes it all the more surprising that Mr. Strict Constructionist John Roberts would mess it up, but there you go.
Hey, I'm not a lawyer, especially not in Germany. The way the story is told, though, it sounds like an extremely deceptive practice.
Maybe this deceptive practice is legal in Germany. It probably isn't legal in the US. But accusing someone who's tricked by this of "piracy" when they don't pay up goes too far. It's one thing to treat dishonest people with honesty, and another to give them your money.
That's not really a very meaningful point... even 10MP digital cameras have much more resolution than Blu-Ray, and most people like photos to be smaller than they like their TV to be.
If you do want to enlarge photos to ginormous sizes (and look at them close up) you cannot do that with 35mm film. At that scale you need a larger format.
If it's really that necessary (nuclear attack level sort of situation) the VP can always shoot the President in the head.
Welllll...
See, I tend to object somewhat to what I see as a misunderstanding of the word "analog" and beneath that, failure to understand the limitations of our own senses. "Analog" in the first place has zilch to do with "infinite" frame rates or infinite detail or what have you. I've seen people say that they think an old audio cassette tape "sounds better than CD" because "it's analog" as if that somehow meant it didn't have a horrible bandwidth deficiency.
In the case of frame rates, the capabilities of the "analog world" (how can the world be an analog of itself anyway?) are silly to even discuss, since we're perceiving that world through a biochemical structure which reacts at a snail's pace. The structure of the poster's argument makes it seem as if he believes you could perceive a difference between a million FPS and a billion FPS. But rather than throw out numbers like "million" or "billion" I went with the reciprocal of the Planck time -- way funnier.
As an aside, I'm not sure who ever believed that 24FPS was "as fast as the eye could see" when it's barely above the flicker fusion threshold.
See, we live in an analog world which has essentially infinite FPS.
The Planck time allows for only around 1.86x10^43 fps, which is nowhere even close to infinity.
Don't throw it away -- last I checked the iMac supported dual displays.
Dude, read the comment again -- he said right there that it was a "plasma TV". With all that McDonald's there will be plenty of glucose in their plasma to power the TV.
If Spirit loses power for too long and can't run its warmers, fragile components like the batteries will fail permanently due to cold.
I comment that the spanking argument needs some balance, and you accuse me of mental abuse? You're seriously out of line.
The original poster -- the point I responded to, not the point that somebody else made -- made this statement:
"Maybe you are comfortable with the government taking your hard earned cash to give to someone who doesn't work so hard?"
My response to that, basically, is that I don't agree there's much evidence that progressive taxation (that is, where those with higher incomes pay a higher percentage) falls disproportionately on the harder-working. That's it.
Government money goes a lot of places; a small proportion is distributed as handouts to the lazy. Speaking as if all recipients of all forms of government spending are undeserving simplifies the argument.
I know small business owners work harder than most. I'm not an idiot over here. You're probably well aware that most small business owners do not become wealthy for all their trouble. Do you mean to tell me that those who don't become wealthy didn't work hard?
The guy who makes my sandwich at lunch for minimum wage works harder than I do. Maybe he didn't work as hard in school, or isn't as smart or whatever, but you know, somebody has to make the sandwiches. I personally appreciate the people who do that (or who take out the trash, mow the grass at the park, etc). I don't mind paying 4% higher taxes so that they can be taken care of when they get brain cancer or something.
Conservatives need to get over this nonsense idea that rich business owners are the hardest-working members of society and the only ones who deserve all the perks. My salary is not determined entirely by how hard I work; a large part involves market forces outside my control. I'd be a moron to not realize that I'm at least a little bit lucky. This argument over who is working the hardest does not favor the wealthy.
I understand the need for clear, credible discpline and I want to be sympathetic to your point of view.
But I must say, every time -- every single time -- that I have seen a parent spank, public or private, the parent has been obviously emotionally agitated and acting out of anger. I'm not saying that these people don't have a right to raise their children the way they choose, and I'm sure there really are parents who spank thinking only of the child's needs (as opposed to the parent's need to express anger). The trouble is, as long as pro-spankers seem to be saying that spanking = good and more spanking = better, instead of discussing the merits of good spanking vs. bad spanking, it becomes more difficult to accept their arguments. Over time I think this erodes the credibility of corporeal punishment as a legitimate means of parenting.
I'm sure that all discpline must inflict pain of some sort (physical or otherwise), and so it's possible for almost any discpline tactic to be abusive if misused. However, humans are strongly wired to hit things when frustrated, and children should not be physical targets of frustration (with discpline as a mere excuse).
Maybe their business plan is to sue tinyurl?
You don't quite understand the cause of the problem -- it's not that phones are transmitting on the wrong frequency or "splattering" the spectrum. It's that devices like unshielded speakers are prone to pick up interference like this from all across the spectrum, including the GSM bands.
Cell phone transmitters are much more heavily regulated than consumer electronics like clock radios.
What do you mean? I see both farmers and construction workers with hefty lights working at night all the time. In fact, it really seems like major freeway work is hardly ever done during the day anymore.
Apple has been at the forefront of removing annoying connector sockets since the iMac.
Monitors are a sort of mixed bag -- sometimes Apple seems convinced that people are going to buy their monitors at a huge premium, and makes up new connectors to run a bunch of stuff across one cable. However, for the last few years they seemed to give up on their monitor line and all Macs just came with some version of DVI. Until now, that is, with the new display that doesn't even work with most of the current lineup.
No, FireWire is not coming back on MacBooks any more than it is coming back on iPods.
Look, back in the day on PCs, we had a different port for every single purpose. You plugged your modem into the "serial port", your printer into the "parallel port", your mouse into the "mouse" PS/2 port, your keyboard into the "keyboard" PS/2 port. If you wanted a scanner, you bought a SCSI card and then you plugged the scanner in there.
This sort of thing is lame, lame, lame. Many PC laptops are still sold like this with a profusion of weird ports. For a huge majority of users there is no reason to have more than one type of port for general-purpose peripherals. It's completely uneconomical to ship a consumer laptop with a port that will go unusued almost all of the time.
FireWire is technically great but due to some historical accidents it did not win the battle against USB2. Placing it on a consumer laptop so that a few musicians and the people using older DV cameras can save a few bucks is completely crazy. (I've seen people on Mac forums complain that this affects "millions" of users -- nonsense). It makes perfect sense for a pro line to have special connectors, and this is where FireWire will stay until Apple manages to kill it off.
I know that a bunch of Mac users have everything from FireWire external drives to FireWire webcams, especially since USB performance on PPC Macs was awful. This does not play into Apple's plans any more than users with SCSI scanners did back when Apple dropped SCSI.
The prize was established by the Bank of Sweden but it's important to note that the winner is determined by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, just like all the others except for the Peace Prize.
No, that's an excuse. Do you think they really needed armed police to send that "reminder"?
The line that moved your post from bigoted to just plain stupid was reason D. Your idea of "most laws" is "cars and copyright"? Homeless people have far more interaction with the actually important laws, and far more need for those laws to be reasonable and just, than people whose idea of the "law" is limited to traffic rules and copyright.
I don't know what "propositions" you are talking about (though I don't follow Mississippi politics), but all your "criteria" would be explicitly unconstitutional.
Did you know that most homeless people are not actually homeless for very long? Only a minority would even fall into your batshit-crazy idea that people without land or children have no stake in the future of our society.