How are they tracking the "laser strikes"? Are there etch markes down the side of the fusilage? Is there some new fangled piece of equipment that detect over saturation of a specific wavelength?
Same way we track any other crime -- by the incidents reported instead of the greater number of actual occurrences. (I swear, some people can say the dumbest things while trying to make themselves look smarter than others.)
If they take "dare" you're $1000 richer. Just make sure you videotape them for proof so it can lead to an arrest. I see a potential to make a lot of money and to widdle down the stupid pool all in one shot here...
I see the potential to be brought up on conspiracy charges for the same offense. So at least the latter part of your statement is true.
I've looked through the Constitution, but I don't see where Congress gets the power to ban telephone calls on planes.
Holy crap! You're right! There's nothing in the Constitution about specific situations and technologies that didn't exist at the time. Those things must be completely impossible to regulate. Someone tell all the justices on the Supreme Court that 0123456 has completely revolutionized Constitutional Law and saved us from a thousand years of tyranny our that our forefathers, in their infinite wisdom, never intended as they saw all laws as being tied to the circumstances of their present and past. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Or, it could fall under the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Foreign Commerce Clause, or the General Welfare Clause. Just sayin'.
I think you are over thinking it, it is just an Americanism. We have war on this war on that, my office is going through a redesign and we're going to have 3 dedicated War Rooms. War simply means shit got real and we need to work on this.
No, that is the problem. War is an ugly situation in which your opponents are "the enemy" and brutal measures may be needed to defeat them and bring victory. You don't compromise until you've either won, lost, or ground both sides down to the point of being unable to continue. War is something to be avoided.
Embracing the war metaphor is a good part of why America is so incredibly screwed up right now. The War on Drugs is probably the foremost example, but the war mentality in politics has been a huge part of why we have a no-compromise legislature that is so enamored with Pyrrhic victories right now. Because war means "winning," and that's all that matters.
I expect it is to save their fellow countrymen. The "change" America got isn't the change that it wants.
As an Obama voter, I'd agree that he's been a bit of a disappointment (though probably for the opposite of many reason you'd think so), but this sort of self-rationalization for partisan political warfare is frankly why politics has gotten so utterly broken and dysfunctional in the past twenty years.
0-100 allows for finer granularity of temperature representation without resorting to fractions or decimals, which, while simple enough, are more cumbersome than integers for the average person to deal with.
People generally can't feel temperature differences that fine over their whole bodies. For purposes of weather, Celsius units are closer to what people can actually feel.
0-100 also is a natural measure of "low" and "high", not the least of which is because we use percentages all the time which are based on a 0-100 scale. For people who have experience rebasing their definitions of low and high (like math-oriented people), it doesn't matter. For the average person, it does.
Only because that's what they're used to. In other measurements, what's "normal" isn't going to be 0-100, and people are used to handling them all the time. Some examples.
- What's a fast and a slow driving speed? Is it in units of 0-100? - What's an average range for human height? Is it in units of 0-100?
You don't think of any of these in terms of anything that makes a relevant percentage any more than we think of weather as a percentage for many of the same reasons. The endpoints are arbitrary, you can exceed them, and the "average" conditions cover a far smaller part of the range.
In that respect Fahrenheit has no advantages over Celsius except the familiarity of its defenders with it.
I hope you realize that your same argument applies to Celsius as well.
True, but both Celsius and Fahrenheit are based on the freezing and boiling points of water. Fahrenheit was just retrofitted to it later to be defined by it based on 32 & 212 degrees to make the original, almost completely arbitrary scale have some logical basis. (It was originally based on chilled brine and human body temperature.) But if we're using the same substance to calibrate the scale, why not base the units on it?
Why is 0-100 a significant number instead of, say, 0-32? Instead of saying, "I'm 80% of the way to freaking hot today," you can say, "I'm 7/8 of the of way to hot today." Wouldn't that be just as nice?
Oh wait, no one thinks of temperature in terms of relative position between some mathematically convenient minimum and maximum temperature!
We experience temperature more like a street address that we happen to be on -- it's nice here and maybe a little less nice "further down the block." We don't mathematically weigh a 9 point temperature difference so much as recall from experience what that feels like. For telling how comfortable temperature is, the units don't matter at all so long as they can be related to past experience.
In that respect Fahrenheit has no advantages over Celsius except the familiarity of its defenders with it.
The reaction to these changes demostrates the issues "nerds" have with change.
Change is neither inherently bad, nor is it inherently good. The problems people have been raising with the Beta are many and are legitimate concerns: tone-deaf forcing upon the users, reduced information density and poor use of space, loss of features, more development emphasis on articles (a top-down feature) rather than the comment system (a community-driven feature), etc. Dismissing these concerns as just a "fear of change" is intellectually dishonest and insulting.
I suddenly feel sory for GNOME Designers.
Don't. They are terrible for very similar reasons. A high-handed notion that their "cleaner" design trumps the need for any features that they removed that others might have actually used to work more efficiently. Plus, both cases had an existing community that did not like the changes and were ignored in favor of hopefully appealing to newer users.
Kind of like Spike TV (designed from the beginning to target 18-35 single males) trying their damnedest to get women to stop watching the network, so they could sell ads to the right people. As my sig says, it's because it's the advertisers who are viewed as the "real" customers. We're just the product, and product doesn't get much of a say in how it's used.
Side note: Please, stop with the "fuck beta" campaign; I find this campaign FAR MORE DISRUPTIVE to the enjoyment of/. than the beta itself. Get over Yourselves already.
It will die down on its own eventually as people grow tired of yelling and not being heard. We don't live in an age in which protests are appreciated or encouraged anymore. Unfortunately, this will probably lead the powers to be behind the site design to believe that this meant it was just a vocal minority and that the majority of Slashdot is chill with the redesign or have "come around" on it. That will be wrong, but such self-delusion is inevitable.
There's obviously heavy personal investment in the time and energy (and money) in creating the new Beta site. It isn't going to go away, despite being a terrible idea, because the people behind it won't be able to admit for various personal and professional reasons that they've f'ed up royally. So, in their minds, they'll have to build a fortress of arguments to shore up their position. No doubt they're smart people, so they'll probably be really good at rationalization. In my professional experience, once people have started working on a design they helped create, they get very territorial and hard to move in new directions.
The end result is a train wreck we can all see coming. What people is the equivalent of yelling at someone on a screen not to go in the cabin in the woods where the killer is waiting. They know it isn't going to help, but it helps them deal with an unpleasant situation. The woman, like Slashdot, was dead the moment the scene started.
Huh. Weird. Seems to work for me now that I check it here. It doesn't work at home, where I read AC on Firefox with NoScript, and I'm not sure if any of those three things are to blame. I'd swear I tried it yesterday before posting from work, but it clearly does today. No idea.
The owners have poured money into the hands of legislators and opposition candidates and into ballot initiatives to try to stop the bridge, have run political scare ads, and have tried to tie up the project in the courts for years -- to the point that the head of the company was put in jail for a short while for contempt of court for failing to obey court orders related to the construction contracts. All to protect a bridge that ends in surface streets on the Canadian side over a bridge that would directly link two highways.
Just a modern day baron trying to protect his inefficient little fief at the expense of the public.
Why doesn't Tesla rent little trailers with extra batteries for long trips?
(or some sort of thing you can clip on the back of the car, or on the roof, whatever it takes...use your imagination)
Because the battery is about 1/4 the weight of the car. Just doubling the range would involve towing around an extra 1000+ lbs, plus any added weight for things like wheels, suspension, etc. Have you ever tried towing a trailer that heavy? It isn't something you can just clip on and forget about. Plus, adding more weight increases the amount of power it needs to get around.
Also, there are major safety issues involved. There's a reason the battery pack is armored and a reason why gas tanks are where they are in most sensibly designed normal cars. You don't want to get rear-ended towing around a battery pack (or a generator for that matter). Read up on the legal troubles Jeep has had from leaving their gas tank too exposed in the back (over all the flaming horrible deaths that resulted).
Your knowledge of the world will be a thousand times greater when you are able to learn and understand things without needing 172 separate double blind peer reviewed studies to confirm it first.
Garbage in, garbage out. You should try to make sure your facts are facts before relying on them.
The only restraint is the pro-active efforts be peaceful and not coercive. "Government" is just an artificial distinction we make (artificial because its nature and actions can be good or evil). As understood, a government can engage in peaceful activity just as a corporation can be jack-booted thugs.
Then define "peaceful." Is the arrest power of the police considered peaceful or inherently violent? Gotta start from first principles here. Libertarians often have a very different definition of that from most people, so I don't want to assume here.
Please don't talk of the "Libertarian ideal state" when it is clear your only intent is to lie and undercut the principles of liberty. Instead, tell us about your utopian socialist state or whatever nonsense you believe and maybe we will see more commonality in the underlying principles. Asshole.
I don't believe in utopias. All utopias are founded on a fundamental, unrealistic idealism about human nature. The world is populated by people, and people are an uneven mixture of good and bad traits. Any system that relies on people to be good is doomed to fail, just as any system that assumes all people will be bad is destined to create misery.
The answer is always balance and moderation. We don't live in a perfect system, but the American system of checks and balances is a fundamentally good idea that should be embraced in all aspects of society. Public v. private. Workers v. bosses. Employees v. customers v. shareholders. Competitors v. each other. Police v. the public. The more power you have, the most limits on how you can use that power to potentially harm others there should be, and the more you should be watched in that capacity. The converse is also true.
Indeed: if you look at m-w or any other dictionary then you may notice that the modern use have two opposite meanings. That belongs to the richness and sophistication of modern language.
No, it speaks to a word that has literally lost all useful meaning.
I'll leave it to you to figure out what I meant by that.
What *I* find "interesting" is that even though old grandparents have always been saying things like "It's not that grandma's getting stupid, sweetie, it's just that when you're my age you know so much that it takes awhile to remember what you know", none of that matters if the newest generation hasn't climbed out of their dungeons to announce that they simulated the same thing on a computer. Relevance, anyone? Reverence, maybe?
I was unfamiliar with the principle that whatever an old person says must be considered correct, and that we don't need to do any scientific verification of it.
Quick! Someone tell the national weather service to get on top of caterpillar-based forecasting.
Libertarianism promotes freedom from the majority of government regulation but NOT anarchy. In a Libertarian state there would be strong and effective civil courts to protect the consumers against institutions that aren't "100% honest to students about their chances of passing or even getting a job once they were done."
The main problem with a Libertarian ideal state is that it implicitly argues that all deterrence against fraud and other injuries to the public must be in the form of after-the-fact damage control via the courts (in which case the question of "How much justice can you afford?" frequently comes up) instead of by proactive government action.
The purpose of regulation like this is to prevent people from being injured in the first place, because while they *might* be able to recover damages in court, and it *might* even break even financially, the opportunity costs are forever gone for those people. Worse, damage control is almost always more expensive than prevention, and some forms of damage simply can never be made up by the courts, as with birth defects caused by thalidomide or from Love Canal. It's better to prevent harm than to clean it up after.
Courts simply do not work as a one size fits all means of deterring bad behavior.
But we will patronize you, because you in that region are so incredibly hostile and intolerant of others. You strut and preen especially when the subject turns to your masculinity.
And the clear difference between us is expressed by your application of a strange stereotype to me... how?
Rock your vehicle out if you can't get moving; don't just floor it in D. Try to get it rocking back and forth and eventually you'll move.
Yeah, I figured that trick out pretty quickly too on the second patch of ice. (The first was just a matter of easing slowly onto the gas.) It's not rocket science. Just a skill that needs exposure to develop. Like I said, most people figured things out pretty quickly. I never saw anyone who just couldn't get through the ice (though I did see a couple of idiots just brute force through it).
All season tires are what you need at a minimum. If you run summer tires on pavement below about 45 degrees, you're a complete fool. I suspect that is where the majority of issues came from. Summer tires need HOT pavement to work well. Cold pavement might as well be ice, say nothing about real ice and snow...
It's a common problem in Georgia. Most people I know run all-season tires, but since the weather is generally good, tires don't get changed out until the tread is a bit lower. That bit a lot of people (including myself). I can't remember the tire guy's logic for leaving the older tires on my front wheels when I had to get a new pair last instead of rotating them to the back (something about wanting to keep good grip on the back tires in an emergency lane change), but it turned out to be a bad decision on ice.
You guys would really freak out if you ever came across black ice.
Trust me, we did run across it. Most of the ice I ran into was black ice, since the dense traffic kept the snow itself off the road except at intersections, where it was allowed to freeze in a visible layer. There was a decent amount of it still on the roads today under underpasses. You just had to keep an eye out, let off the power a bit, and maintain your lane, and it was all good. Thankfully didn't run into any around curves, but that's just a matter of not oversteering into a skid.
Personally, I would have gone with this quote, since it's the actual one that matches the research of Monopole Magnets:
I maintain nonetheless that yin-yang dualism can be overcome. With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower, not of physical strength.
Piracy wasn't eliminated, but it was severely curtailed from its heyday, with many people intimidated by threats of lawsuits that could swallow their entire financial future. We lost the right to use some of our media forever with the DMCA and DRM. Carriers of information became collaborators with the content providers and started issuing "three strikes" warnings.
In essence, we lost a lot in terms of personal freedoms to try (and fail) to stop bad behavior -- and yes, refusing to compensate the creator at all for their work is bad behavior, even if parasite distribution companies are siphoning off most of the profit.
What makes you think we'll we won't lose any more when physical goods become freely distributable in the form of 3d blueprints? We already had such strong arguments that pure information and ideas have little justification for permanent monopoly ownership, and that was when only a fraction of the economy was threatened.
The notion that some sort of techno-utopia will override human nature and the desire of wealth to use its wealth to preserve its wealth is hogwash. IP will be strengthened again, like it has with every new media technology since the printed press. Patents and copyrights are the new feudal lands, and the corporate lords will not let go without the masses having something to negotiate with (as the post-black plague European peasants had with their labor). But in the coming world, increased automation is already removing the utility of the average worker and tilting the labor demand curve firmly in favor of the buyers, not the sellers. So, what exactly do we have to negotiate with?
We have the option of a post-work economy in the future. But we will not take that option, because the very people who will be responsible for ushering it in will be the ones who profit most by being above the rest of us. Human nature demands it -- we like our pecking orders and consider our privileges to be our earned due.
The voters could demand otherwise, but they won't. Just like they haven't with any major copyright or patent law change in the past 40 years. It's abstract to them, and they're slowly being conditioned to accept intellectual property as the same as physical property. By the time they actually are, the window to treat them as anything other than exclusive goods will be over.
Which, a more cynical person might argue, is the real reason for the recent drive for "harmonizing" copyright laws between various countries: to ensure no one will have a competitive advantage that would prove the MAFIAA as the obsolete parasites they are.
Of course it is. It's trade protectionism for an obsolete business practice. How could any student of history expect otherwise? The question is one of whether it will stick. As a cynic, I think it will, since the major technological shift that should have eliminated them hasn't. Distribution, as a problem, is essentially solved.
About the only technologies I can see left to give us a window on eliminating copyright are mind-machine interface and the blurring of memory and storage (memory DRM ho!), the creation of strong AIs capable of creating new works on demand such that pre-recorded entertainment becomes obsolete, or some sort of collective intelligence (probably based on MMI) that somehow combines both of the above by eliminating non-"memory" storage and/or allowing artists on-demand. All are very pie-in-the-sky techs we probably won't live to see.
Slashdot Mirror
How are they tracking the "laser strikes"? Are there etch markes down the side of the fusilage? Is there some new fangled piece of equipment that detect over saturation of a specific wavelength?
Same way we track any other crime -- by the incidents reported instead of the greater number of actual occurrences. (I swear, some people can say the dumbest things while trying to make themselves look smarter than others.)
If they take "dare" you're $1000 richer. Just make sure you videotape them for proof so it can lead to an arrest. I see a potential to make a lot of money and to widdle down the stupid pool all in one shot here...
I see the potential to be brought up on conspiracy charges for the same offense. So at least the latter part of your statement is true.
I've looked through the Constitution, but I don't see where Congress gets the power to ban telephone calls on planes.
Holy crap! You're right! There's nothing in the Constitution about specific situations and technologies that didn't exist at the time. Those things must be completely impossible to regulate. Someone tell all the justices on the Supreme Court that 0123456 has completely revolutionized Constitutional Law and saved us from a thousand years of tyranny our that our forefathers, in their infinite wisdom, never intended as they saw all laws as being tied to the circumstances of their present and past. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Or, it could fall under the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Foreign Commerce Clause, or the General Welfare Clause. Just sayin'.
I think you are over thinking it, it is just an Americanism. We have war on this war on that, my office is going through a redesign and we're going to have 3 dedicated War Rooms. War simply means shit got real and we need to work on this.
No, that is the problem. War is an ugly situation in which your opponents are "the enemy" and brutal measures may be needed to defeat them and bring victory. You don't compromise until you've either won, lost, or ground both sides down to the point of being unable to continue. War is something to be avoided.
Embracing the war metaphor is a good part of why America is so incredibly screwed up right now. The War on Drugs is probably the foremost example, but the war mentality in politics has been a huge part of why we have a no-compromise legislature that is so enamored with Pyrrhic victories right now. Because war means "winning," and that's all that matters.
I expect it is to save their fellow countrymen. The "change" America got isn't the change that it wants.
As an Obama voter, I'd agree that he's been a bit of a disappointment (though probably for the opposite of many reason you'd think so), but this sort of self-rationalization for partisan political warfare is frankly why politics has gotten so utterly broken and dysfunctional in the past twenty years.
Oddly enough, for the very fear of this, Dick Cheney had wifi access to his pacemaker disabled.
His heart is closed to attackers. Just like it is to empathy and humanity.
0-100 allows for finer granularity of temperature representation without resorting to fractions or decimals, which, while simple enough, are more cumbersome than integers for the average person to deal with.
People generally can't feel temperature differences that fine over their whole bodies. For purposes of weather, Celsius units are closer to what people can actually feel.
0-100 also is a natural measure of "low" and "high", not the least of which is because we use percentages all the time which are based on a 0-100 scale. For people who have experience rebasing their definitions of low and high (like math-oriented people), it doesn't matter. For the average person, it does.
Only because that's what they're used to. In other measurements, what's "normal" isn't going to be 0-100, and people are used to handling them all the time. Some examples.
- What's a fast and a slow driving speed? Is it in units of 0-100?
- What's an average range for human height? Is it in units of 0-100?
You don't think of any of these in terms of anything that makes a relevant percentage any more than we think of weather as a percentage for many of the same reasons. The endpoints are arbitrary, you can exceed them, and the "average" conditions cover a far smaller part of the range.
In that respect Fahrenheit has no advantages over Celsius except the familiarity of its defenders with it.
I hope you realize that your same argument applies to Celsius as well.
True, but both Celsius and Fahrenheit are based on the freezing and boiling points of water. Fahrenheit was just retrofitted to it later to be defined by it based on 32 & 212 degrees to make the original, almost completely arbitrary scale have some logical basis. (It was originally based on chilled brine and human body temperature.) But if we're using the same substance to calibrate the scale, why not base the units on it?
Why is 0-100 a significant number instead of, say, 0-32? Instead of saying, "I'm 80% of the way to freaking hot today," you can say, "I'm 7/8 of the of way to hot today." Wouldn't that be just as nice?
Oh wait, no one thinks of temperature in terms of relative position between some mathematically convenient minimum and maximum temperature!
We experience temperature more like a street address that we happen to be on -- it's nice here and maybe a little less nice "further down the block." We don't mathematically weigh a 9 point temperature difference so much as recall from experience what that feels like. For telling how comfortable temperature is, the units don't matter at all so long as they can be related to past experience.
In that respect Fahrenheit has no advantages over Celsius except the familiarity of its defenders with it.
The reaction to these changes demostrates the issues "nerds" have with change.
Change is neither inherently bad, nor is it inherently good. The problems people have been raising with the Beta are many and are legitimate concerns: tone-deaf forcing upon the users, reduced information density and poor use of space, loss of features, more development emphasis on articles (a top-down feature) rather than the comment system (a community-driven feature), etc. Dismissing these concerns as just a "fear of change" is intellectually dishonest and insulting.
I suddenly feel sory for GNOME Designers.
Don't. They are terrible for very similar reasons. A high-handed notion that their "cleaner" design trumps the need for any features that they removed that others might have actually used to work more efficiently. Plus, both cases had an existing community that did not like the changes and were ignored in favor of hopefully appealing to newer users.
Kind of like Spike TV (designed from the beginning to target 18-35 single males) trying their damnedest to get women to stop watching the network, so they could sell ads to the right people. As my sig says, it's because it's the advertisers who are viewed as the "real" customers. We're just the product, and product doesn't get much of a say in how it's used.
Side note: Please, stop with the "fuck beta" campaign; I find this campaign FAR MORE DISRUPTIVE to the enjoyment of /. than the beta itself. Get over Yourselves already.
It will die down on its own eventually as people grow tired of yelling and not being heard. We don't live in an age in which protests are appreciated or encouraged anymore. Unfortunately, this will probably lead the powers to be behind the site design to believe that this meant it was just a vocal minority and that the majority of Slashdot is chill with the redesign or have "come around" on it. That will be wrong, but such self-delusion is inevitable.
There's obviously heavy personal investment in the time and energy (and money) in creating the new Beta site. It isn't going to go away, despite being a terrible idea, because the people behind it won't be able to admit for various personal and professional reasons that they've f'ed up royally. So, in their minds, they'll have to build a fortress of arguments to shore up their position. No doubt they're smart people, so they'll probably be really good at rationalization. In my professional experience, once people have started working on a design they helped create, they get very territorial and hard to move in new directions.
The end result is a train wreck we can all see coming. What people is the equivalent of yelling at someone on a screen not to go in the cabin in the woods where the killer is waiting. They know it isn't going to help, but it helps them deal with an unpleasant situation. The woman, like Slashdot, was dead the moment the scene started.
Huh. Weird. Seems to work for me now that I check it here. It doesn't work at home, where I read AC on Firefox with NoScript, and I'm not sure if any of those three things are to blame. I'd swear I tried it yesterday before posting from work, but it clearly does today. No idea.
you can't click a username to visit somebody's profile
You can do that now? I haven't been able to do that since the last redesign. All I get is a link to slashdot.org/~ (no user name after the tilde).
I have a 5 digit userid (of course the beta won't display that anymore).
I didn't even notice that. Geez, it's like they really are just trying to kick all the old users in the teeth with this design.
After all, we don't allow corporations to own real bridges to important places.
I know that a lot of people diss both Detroit and Canada, but I think any bridge that transports 25% of all merchandise trade between two first-world nations is pretty important.
Now, the Ambassador Bridge is a good illustration of your point in spite of this, since it's a good example of why we shouldn't. While it has some competition from a tunnel which is owned (via a shared LLC) by the two city governments that it connects, that hasn't stopped it from fighting tooth and nail to prevent any other, better bridges from being built to compete with it.
The owners have poured money into the hands of legislators and opposition candidates and into ballot initiatives to try to stop the bridge, have run political scare ads, and have tried to tie up the project in the courts for years -- to the point that the head of the company was put in jail for a short while for contempt of court for failing to obey court orders related to the construction contracts. All to protect a bridge that ends in surface streets on the Canadian side over a bridge that would directly link two highways.
Just a modern day baron trying to protect his inefficient little fief at the expense of the public.
Why doesn't Tesla rent little trailers with extra batteries for long trips?
(or some sort of thing you can clip on the back of the car, or on the roof, whatever it takes...use your imagination)
Because the battery is about 1/4 the weight of the car. Just doubling the range would involve towing around an extra 1000+ lbs, plus any added weight for things like wheels, suspension, etc. Have you ever tried towing a trailer that heavy? It isn't something you can just clip on and forget about. Plus, adding more weight increases the amount of power it needs to get around.
Also, there are major safety issues involved. There's a reason the battery pack is armored and a reason why gas tanks are where they are in most sensibly designed normal cars. You don't want to get rear-ended towing around a battery pack (or a generator for that matter). Read up on the legal troubles Jeep has had from leaving their gas tank too exposed in the back (over all the flaming horrible deaths that resulted).
Your knowledge of the world will be a thousand times greater when you are able to learn and understand things without needing 172 separate double blind peer reviewed studies to confirm it first.
Garbage in, garbage out. You should try to make sure your facts are facts before relying on them.
The only restraint is the pro-active efforts be peaceful and not coercive. "Government" is just an artificial distinction we make (artificial because its nature and actions can be good or evil). As understood, a government can engage in peaceful activity just as a corporation can be jack-booted thugs.
Then define "peaceful." Is the arrest power of the police considered peaceful or inherently violent? Gotta start from first principles here. Libertarians often have a very different definition of that from most people, so I don't want to assume here.
Please don't talk of the "Libertarian ideal state" when it is clear your only intent is to lie and undercut the principles of liberty. Instead, tell us about your utopian socialist state or whatever nonsense you believe and maybe we will see more commonality in the underlying principles. Asshole.
I don't believe in utopias. All utopias are founded on a fundamental, unrealistic idealism about human nature. The world is populated by people, and people are an uneven mixture of good and bad traits. Any system that relies on people to be good is doomed to fail, just as any system that assumes all people will be bad is destined to create misery.
The answer is always balance and moderation. We don't live in a perfect system, but the American system of checks and balances is a fundamentally good idea that should be embraced in all aspects of society. Public v. private. Workers v. bosses. Employees v. customers v. shareholders. Competitors v. each other. Police v. the public. The more power you have, the most limits on how you can use that power to potentially harm others there should be, and the more you should be watched in that capacity. The converse is also true.
Indeed: if you look at m-w or any other dictionary then you may notice that the modern use have two opposite meanings. That belongs to the richness and sophistication of modern language.
No, it speaks to a word that has literally lost all useful meaning.
I'll leave it to you to figure out what I meant by that.
What *I* find "interesting" is that even though old grandparents have always been saying things like "It's not that grandma's getting stupid, sweetie, it's just that when you're my age you know so much that it takes awhile to remember what you know", none of that matters if the newest generation hasn't climbed out of their dungeons to announce that they simulated the same thing on a computer. Relevance, anyone? Reverence, maybe?
I was unfamiliar with the principle that whatever an old person says must be considered correct, and that we don't need to do any scientific verification of it.
Quick! Someone tell the national weather service to get on top of caterpillar-based forecasting.
Libertarianism promotes freedom from the majority of government regulation but NOT anarchy. In a Libertarian state there would be strong and effective civil courts to protect the consumers against institutions that aren't "100% honest to students about their chances of passing or even getting a job once they were done."
The main problem with a Libertarian ideal state is that it implicitly argues that all deterrence against fraud and other injuries to the public must be in the form of after-the-fact damage control via the courts (in which case the question of "How much justice can you afford?" frequently comes up) instead of by proactive government action.
The purpose of regulation like this is to prevent people from being injured in the first place, because while they *might* be able to recover damages in court, and it *might* even break even financially, the opportunity costs are forever gone for those people. Worse, damage control is almost always more expensive than prevention, and some forms of damage simply can never be made up by the courts, as with birth defects caused by thalidomide or from Love Canal. It's better to prevent harm than to clean it up after.
Courts simply do not work as a one size fits all means of deterring bad behavior.
Hack Reactor claims 99% placement?
If true, maybe this really is an innovative education environment that aggressive regulation should stay away from.
To quote the Spartans: "If."
But we will patronize you, because you in that region are so incredibly hostile and intolerant of others. You strut and preen especially when the subject turns to your masculinity.
And the clear difference between us is expressed by your application of a strange stereotype to me... how?
Rock your vehicle out if you can't get moving; don't just floor it in D. Try to get it rocking back and forth and eventually you'll move.
Yeah, I figured that trick out pretty quickly too on the second patch of ice. (The first was just a matter of easing slowly onto the gas.) It's not rocket science. Just a skill that needs exposure to develop. Like I said, most people figured things out pretty quickly. I never saw anyone who just couldn't get through the ice (though I did see a couple of idiots just brute force through it).
All season tires are what you need at a minimum. If you run summer tires on pavement below about 45 degrees, you're a complete fool. I suspect that is where the majority of issues came from. Summer tires need HOT pavement to work well. Cold pavement might as well be ice, say nothing about real ice and snow...
It's a common problem in Georgia. Most people I know run all-season tires, but since the weather is generally good, tires don't get changed out until the tread is a bit lower. That bit a lot of people (including myself). I can't remember the tire guy's logic for leaving the older tires on my front wheels when I had to get a new pair last instead of rotating them to the back (something about wanting to keep good grip on the back tires in an emergency lane change), but it turned out to be a bad decision on ice.
You guys would really freak out if you ever came across black ice.
Trust me, we did run across it. Most of the ice I ran into was black ice, since the dense traffic kept the snow itself off the road except at intersections, where it was allowed to freeze in a visible layer. There was a decent amount of it still on the roads today under underpasses. You just had to keep an eye out, let off the power a bit, and maintain your lane, and it was all good. Thankfully didn't run into any around curves, but that's just a matter of not oversteering into a skid.
It's a quote from the leader of the turbo-capitalist faction in the game being referenced in the post it was a reply to.
Personally, I would have gone with this quote, since it's the actual one that matches the research of Monopole Magnets:
I maintain nonetheless that yin-yang dualism can be overcome. With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower, not of physical strength.
So how did that work out?
Piracy wasn't eliminated, but it was severely curtailed from its heyday, with many people intimidated by threats of lawsuits that could swallow their entire financial future. We lost the right to use some of our media forever with the DMCA and DRM. Carriers of information became collaborators with the content providers and started issuing "three strikes" warnings.
In essence, we lost a lot in terms of personal freedoms to try (and fail) to stop bad behavior -- and yes, refusing to compensate the creator at all for their work is bad behavior, even if parasite distribution companies are siphoning off most of the profit.
What makes you think we'll we won't lose any more when physical goods become freely distributable in the form of 3d blueprints? We already had such strong arguments that pure information and ideas have little justification for permanent monopoly ownership, and that was when only a fraction of the economy was threatened.
The notion that some sort of techno-utopia will override human nature and the desire of wealth to use its wealth to preserve its wealth is hogwash. IP will be strengthened again, like it has with every new media technology since the printed press. Patents and copyrights are the new feudal lands, and the corporate lords will not let go without the masses having something to negotiate with (as the post-black plague European peasants had with their labor). But in the coming world, increased automation is already removing the utility of the average worker and tilting the labor demand curve firmly in favor of the buyers, not the sellers. So, what exactly do we have to negotiate with?
We have the option of a post-work economy in the future. But we will not take that option, because the very people who will be responsible for ushering it in will be the ones who profit most by being above the rest of us. Human nature demands it -- we like our pecking orders and consider our privileges to be our earned due.
The voters could demand otherwise, but they won't. Just like they haven't with any major copyright or patent law change in the past 40 years. It's abstract to them, and they're slowly being conditioned to accept intellectual property as the same as physical property. By the time they actually are, the window to treat them as anything other than exclusive goods will be over.
Which, a more cynical person might argue, is the real reason for the recent drive for "harmonizing" copyright laws between various countries: to ensure no one will have a competitive advantage that would prove the MAFIAA as the obsolete parasites they are.
Of course it is. It's trade protectionism for an obsolete business practice. How could any student of history expect otherwise? The question is one of whether it will stick. As a cynic, I think it will, since the major technological shift that should have eliminated them hasn't. Distribution, as a problem, is essentially solved.
About the only technologies I can see left to give us a window on eliminating copyright are mind-machine interface and the blurring of memory and storage (memory DRM ho!), the creation of strong AIs capable of creating new works on demand such that pre-recorded entertainment becomes obsolete, or some sort of collective intelligence (probably based on MMI) that somehow combines both of the above by eliminating non-"memory" storage and/or allowing artists on-demand. All are very pie-in-the-sky techs we probably won't live to see.