For example, look at the airline security theater, don't you think that its in American Airlines, United and Delta's best interest to provide enough security to remove the threat of hijackings but not need a full cavity search? Instead, we have the FAA providing asinine rules on what you can and can't take on board a plane, rather than delegating those decisions to the airlines.
True.
Of course, as competitors, the Airlines are(rightly) prohibited by anti-trust law from colluding with each other. So they'd have to form some kind of demi-independent organization to do this. Perhaps it could be entirely funded by skimming a bit of money off of airline tickets. Also, I think the public has a safety interest in what the rules are too, so there should be at least some kind of government input too. Otherwise they are liable to just come up with a bunch of rules that put all the onus on passengers rather than themselves.
I say we call this government agency the Transportation Safety Administration.
Or perhaps it would be simpler to just pressure our politicans to force the existing TSA to behave more sensibly? Voting on that basis, rather than just blindly voting for the guy who promises to "keep America safe", might be much more effective in the long run.
How about this: We don't cut jack shit while trying to recover from the worse recession in nearly 100 years, and while the government can borrow money at a (fixed) lower interest rate than the inflation rate? How about that?
When we've fully recovered, tax receipts will go way up (just like they went way down during the recession), and money will move back into the rest of the market, making the delta between T-Bill interest and inflation something a bit more normal. That will be a great time to start trimming government, as it will keep the economy from overheating and developing another bubble, it will be more nessecary because borrowing will actually cost something, and it will be much less painful to do because we'll have the higher tax receipts to cushion the blow.
This is probably the second stupidest time in US history to be cutting spending. That this is Congress' priority can only be viewed as crass politics, putting some people's political ambitions ahead of the good of the Nation.
The problem with it is that the folks who insisted on cutting the taxes that affect "wealth" (the capital gains tax and the inheritance taxes), and have even been trying to elimnate them entirely, are in fact Republicans. The rich coastal folks who benifit from those cuts? They are mostly in fact Republicans (among the few folks in those parts of the country who are Republicans). However, they bankroll the Republican Party in the rest of the country.
Its good that you've recognized the problem. You even have half the target right. However, those rich folks behind this are Republicans. If you aren't going to try to stop them, you should really quit doing their work for them.
...which requires further energy expenditure on your part. Or you could buy it at the store where that's done on an industrial scale for "only" a significant fraction of what my gasoline costs me right now (about 1/3rd the price today). This adds to the charging cost, the cost of refitting my home electrical system, the difficulty of finding a place to charge outside my home, and the premium I'd pay for this vehicle over getting a perfectly functional used car for less than $5,000.
To quote the great Lucasian philosopher Lando Calrisian, "This deal just keeps getting worse!"
That exact thought had occurred to me. However, its tough to argue with results. City shut down = 20 hours no result, City reopened = 30 minutes.
This same pattern can be seen in other recent manhunts. Even when cops do the finding, like with Timothy McVeigh, it tends to be a routine traffic stop for something else awry, rather than because they were actively out looking for the guy.
To be fair, the video that investigators used to identify the two bombers was never released to the public (AFAIK, it *still* hasn't been released). So its tough to say that crowdsourcing the investigation "failed", when it wasn't really a fair test.
A far better test would be to look at what happened on Friday when the suspects were being hunted for. All day they insisted everybody in town hide indoors to not "hamper" the search. Then at the end of a day of failure they gave a very dejected press conference where they told everyone they'd failed to find the guy, and they could leave their houses.
Within 30 minutes, someone had spotted the guy and he was surrounded.
That's the power of crowd-sourcing. No matter how many cops they flooded the city with, it is no match for half a million ordinary citizens who know what looks out of place in their area and what doesn't.
I would say that in the future it would be a good idea to make it clear from the get-go that only the investigation is being crowdsourced. There are many very good reasons why we prefer to have a single authority performing the actual law enforcement duties of arrest, prosecution, etc. This whole episide does show the limits of crowdsourcing, but also its power if folks would just have the courage to get out of its way.
Actually, I'm pretty sure Slim's got it right. A soccer game is like doing 90 minutes of windsprints, and I can tell you I will most defintitely not get the same feeling from just padding around the field for 90 minutes. It requires something like a good hard tackle, or several great steals that were near run things. Something to stress the body to the point that where it thinks extrodinary measures might be required.
I know there are others out there like me (why else do people play defence after all? Certianly not for the glory), but I also know it isn't common, even among my fellow soccer players.
Another way to look at it is to talk to people who suffer from depression, or some kind of ADHD. If our body chemistry's all worked the same, every such person would just be put on the standard "meds" package for their condition, and that would be that. Instead, its a constant struggle for people to find the right meds and med levels that keep their particular brains on kilter.
Yes, we are in fact all unique snowflakes. However, we are also all just spongy meatbags, so don't go getting ahead of yourself, Frosty.
Check out the movie Every Which Way but Loose; it was somewhat about this. When you are actively in danger your body starts pumping chemicals (eg: adreneline) which some people find rather enjoyable. Even moreso when you get injured a bit.
I play a lot of soccer as a defender, and frankly don't really feel like I'm in the game properly until I've taken a good hit. I had a big forward cheap-shot me to the ground early in the game once when he saw the ref wasn't looking, and I got up laughing and thanking him. Perhaps he didn't intend to, but he'd helped me.:-)
Were I doing such a thing, the following would be in there for sure.
Restoration of Copyright terms to where they were before 1976. (You have to register for it. Copyright is good for 28 years, with a possible 28 year extension).
Software and "business methods" are not, and never should be, patentable
A condition of being allowed to incorporate is that you agree to not make political contributions as a corporation.
No visa slavery. Congress can come up with some other kind of special work visa, but there will never be an H1B-ish visa where the poor sap holding one can be effectively deported at the whim of their employer.
That would be a good start. But of course any attempt to make a narrow third party in the USA is a waste of time. You have to aim to take out one of the big two, or don't bother.
"at least 10% of the workforce m ust be x% female". This means that people will be hired according to their gender - sexism
When you get down to a point where you have trouble getting 10% of a group of people who are a majority of the population at large, isn't it a wee bit late to suddenly get all upset about discrimination?
Is this really common enough to require an app? Average household size is only 2.5 people, so large estranged families have to be pretty rare.
It seems far more likely to have an issue due to your mother not admitting (or not knowing) who your actual genetic father is, or in the case of an adoptee perhaps not knowing who either parent is. I have a good friend who found he had a half-brother and a whole exteded half-family he didn't know about after taking a genetic test ("Um, mom...we gotta talk..."). As a half adoptee, I suppose that would be useful to me too (but I'm not "on the market".)
Getting some kind of mutual genetic relation percentage would be useful both for solving the *real* issue this app is trying to solve, and to give the two people in question something of mutual interest to talk about, no matter what the result. A "are you my cousin or can be bump uglies" app just would be awkward.
The one I just stated. He was living with his mother. He "stole" those guns in the exact same way he "stole" eggs and orange juice from her every morning when he ate breakfast.
The "14-year-old" crack is of course code for "the complainers don't count becase they don't donate money to anybody". IMHO, that's even more aggrevating.
So are you little angry about being insulted by this corporate puppet? Well, there is a way you can get back at him. Show your displeasure in a way he understand.
There's a Democrat trying to challenge Mike Rogers, by the name of Lance Enderle. I don't know too much about the guy, but he has apparently pledged to take no PAC money. So he may be a drooling pinhead, but if you donate he'll at least be your drooling pinhead, and not the RIAA's.
All that would be required here is checking the purcharser's address against the addresses in our already existing database of "people who should not own guns". No new database are required, just sensible use of the one we already have.
The owner of the guns in the CT killings would have passed any of the newly proposed background checks.
Actually, a "you don't get to buy assault weapons if you live with a crazy person" rule would have stopped the owner from getting those guns. You are correct that the current legislation wouldn't do that, but its a step in that direction, and it still may not be able to get the votes to pass. I'll agree it would be better to do the whole thing in one step, but taking small steps one at a time appears to be the best we are possibly capable of doing with our current crew of chuckleheads in Congress.
I think he really meant TV series, not movies. Short stories often adapt well to a 2-hour movie, but for the most part that really isn't enough time to properly treat an entire novel. If someone tried with those two works, I'd be willing to bet rather a lot that you'd be sorely disappointed with the results.
I mentioned this in a comment last week. Manned spaceflight in the USA is essentially a matter of history, not something we know how to do today. If we wanted (for whatever reason) to go back to the moon, we'd bascially have to start over from scratch. It would probably take as at least as long as the original Apollo program, and cost far more.
After the fall of the Roman empire, knowledge of concrete was lost, and for about 500 years Europeans were walking around Roman buildings and upon Roman roads that they had no idea how to recreate. Right now all our Apollo engineers are dead or dying, and the Astronauts will soon follow suit. Soon there will be no living human who has set foot on another world. Then we will know just how those Medieval Europeans felt when we go look at our old Apollo relics in the museums.
Recognizing gay marriage perpetuates the problem; the real solution is to de-recognize marriage as a special state of being. Just let people make their own decisions.
Ah. So in your scenario anybody who wants can hang out in the hopsiptal room of a horribly injured person and perhaps even make medical decisions for them, because for all you know that person may be the most important person in said injured person's self-designated "family"? When a person dies without a will (as most of us do), the entire USA splits their estate? Their small children (particularly babies), go to whom? State homes? Handed out first-come-first served? Joint custody with every adult who wants it? And I could put anyone I want on my "family" medical insurance? So I could perhaps start subletting my family medical coverage to people on ebay?
Seriously dude, think this through. There's thousands of very good reasons why the state recognizes marraige that have nothing whatsoever to do with procreation or religon.
An email address that T-Platforms listed for its German office bounced, and Slashdot was unable to reach executives at its Russian headquarters for comment."
That's because T-Platforms has gone out of business. Most unfortunate.
However, there's somebody here from a new supercomputer company "U-Platforms", that would like to speak with you about purchasing some HPC microprocessors...
Serious question here: Why is anything redacted? These are things like emails between Microsoft and government anti-trust lawyers. There is no possible issue of National Security here. So what's the excuse for blacking anything out?
Slashdot Mirror
For example, look at the airline security theater, don't you think that its in American Airlines, United and Delta's best interest to provide enough security to remove the threat of hijackings but not need a full cavity search? Instead, we have the FAA providing asinine rules on what you can and can't take on board a plane, rather than delegating those decisions to the airlines.
True.
Of course, as competitors, the Airlines are(rightly) prohibited by anti-trust law from colluding with each other. So they'd have to form some kind of demi-independent organization to do this. Perhaps it could be entirely funded by skimming a bit of money off of airline tickets. Also, I think the public has a safety interest in what the rules are too, so there should be at least some kind of government input too. Otherwise they are liable to just come up with a bunch of rules that put all the onus on passengers rather than themselves.
I say we call this government agency the Transportation Safety Administration.
Or perhaps it would be simpler to just pressure our politicans to force the existing TSA to behave more sensibly? Voting on that basis, rather than just blindly voting for the guy who promises to "keep America safe", might be much more effective in the long run.
How about this: We don't cut jack shit while trying to recover from the worse recession in nearly 100 years, and while the government can borrow money at a (fixed) lower interest rate than the inflation rate? How about that?
When we've fully recovered, tax receipts will go way up (just like they went way down during the recession), and money will move back into the rest of the market, making the delta between T-Bill interest and inflation something a bit more normal. That will be a great time to start trimming government, as it will keep the economy from overheating and developing another bubble, it will be more nessecary because borrowing will actually cost something, and it will be much less painful to do because we'll have the higher tax receipts to cushion the blow.
This is probably the second stupidest time in US history to be cutting spending. That this is Congress' priority can only be viewed as crass politics, putting some people's political ambitions ahead of the good of the Nation.
Actually, that isn't a bad point at all.
The problem with it is that the folks who insisted on cutting the taxes that affect "wealth" (the capital gains tax and the inheritance taxes), and have even been trying to elimnate them entirely, are in fact Republicans. The rich coastal folks who benifit from those cuts? They are mostly in fact Republicans (among the few folks in those parts of the country who are Republicans). However, they bankroll the Republican Party in the rest of the country.
Its good that you've recognized the problem. You even have half the target right. However, those rich folks behind this are Republicans. If you aren't going to try to stop them, you should really quit doing their work for them.
you could make your own distilled water.
...which requires further energy expenditure on your part. Or you could buy it at the store where that's done on an industrial scale for "only" a significant fraction of what my gasoline costs me right now (about 1/3rd the price today). This adds to the charging cost, the cost of refitting my home electrical system, the difficulty of finding a place to charge outside my home, and the premium I'd pay for this vehicle over getting a perfectly functional used car for less than $5,000.
To quote the great Lucasian philosopher Lando Calrisian, "This deal just keeps getting worse!"
That exact thought had occurred to me. However, its tough to argue with results. City shut down = 20 hours no result, City reopened = 30 minutes.
This same pattern can be seen in other recent manhunts. Even when cops do the finding, like with Timothy McVeigh, it tends to be a routine traffic stop for something else awry, rather than because they were actively out looking for the guy.
To be fair, the video that investigators used to identify the two bombers was never released to the public (AFAIK, it *still* hasn't been released). So its tough to say that crowdsourcing the investigation "failed", when it wasn't really a fair test.
A far better test would be to look at what happened on Friday when the suspects were being hunted for. All day they insisted everybody in town hide indoors to not "hamper" the search. Then at the end of a day of failure they gave a very dejected press conference where they told everyone they'd failed to find the guy, and they could leave their houses.
Within 30 minutes, someone had spotted the guy and he was surrounded.
That's the power of crowd-sourcing. No matter how many cops they flooded the city with, it is no match for half a million ordinary citizens who know what looks out of place in their area and what doesn't.
I would say that in the future it would be a good idea to make it clear from the get-go that only the investigation is being crowdsourced. There are many very good reasons why we prefer to have a single authority performing the actual law enforcement duties of arrest, prosecution, etc. This whole episide does show the limits of crowdsourcing, but also its power if folks would just have the courage to get out of its way.
Actually, I'm pretty sure Slim's got it right. A soccer game is like doing 90 minutes of windsprints, and I can tell you I will most defintitely not get the same feeling from just padding around the field for 90 minutes. It requires something like a good hard tackle, or several great steals that were near run things. Something to stress the body to the point that where it thinks extrodinary measures might be required.
I know there are others out there like me (why else do people play defence after all? Certianly not for the glory), but I also know it isn't common, even among my fellow soccer players.
Another way to look at it is to talk to people who suffer from depression, or some kind of ADHD. If our body chemistry's all worked the same, every such person would just be put on the standard "meds" package for their condition, and that would be that. Instead, its a constant struggle for people to find the right meds and med levels that keep their particular brains on kilter.
Yes, we are in fact all unique snowflakes. However, we are also all just spongy meatbags, so don't go getting ahead of yourself, Frosty.
Check out the movie Every Which Way but Loose; it was somewhat about this. When you are actively in danger your body starts pumping chemicals (eg: adreneline) which some people find rather enjoyable. Even moreso when you get injured a bit.
I play a lot of soccer as a defender, and frankly don't really feel like I'm in the game properly until I've taken a good hit. I had a big forward cheap-shot me to the ground early in the game once when he saw the ref wasn't looking, and I got up laughing and thanking him. Perhaps he didn't intend to, but he'd helped me. :-)
Were I doing such a thing, the following would be in there for sure.
That would be a good start. But of course any attempt to make a narrow third party in the USA is a waste of time. You have to aim to take out one of the big two, or don't bother.
Perhaps they do Warp factors the same way cellphone carriers do "G" speeds; more as marketing terms than actual measurments of anything.
"at least 10% of the workforce m ust be x% female". This means that people will be hired according to their gender - sexism
When you get down to a point where you have trouble getting 10% of a group of people who are a majority of the population at large, isn't it a wee bit late to suddenly get all upset about discrimination?
I wonder if they could remaster old films to use this technology. I can't wait to experience the Bog of Eternal Stench from Labyrinth in 4DX
Is this really common enough to require an app? Average household size is only 2.5 people, so large estranged families have to be pretty rare.
It seems far more likely to have an issue due to your mother not admitting (or not knowing) who your actual genetic father is, or in the case of an adoptee perhaps not knowing who either parent is. I have a good friend who found he had a half-brother and a whole exteded half-family he didn't know about after taking a genetic test ("Um, mom...we gotta talk..."). As a half adoptee, I suppose that would be useful to me too (but I'm not "on the market".)
Getting some kind of mutual genetic relation percentage would be useful both for solving the *real* issue this app is trying to solve, and to give the two people in question something of mutual interest to talk about, no matter what the result. A "are you my cousin or can be bump uglies" app just would be awkward.
The one I just stated. He was living with his mother. He "stole" those guns in the exact same way he "stole" eggs and orange juice from her every morning when he ate breakfast.
By "the whole thing," I presume you mean confiscation, right?
No.
But its really impressive the way you beat the crap out of that strawman over there. Go ahead and hit it once in the groin for me, while you're at it.
The "14-year-old" crack is of course code for "the complainers don't count becase they don't donate money to anybody". IMHO, that's even more aggrevating.
So are you little angry about being insulted by this corporate puppet? Well, there is a way you can get back at him. Show your displeasure in a way he understand.
Donate money to his opponent.
There's a Democrat trying to challenge Mike Rogers, by the name of Lance Enderle. I don't know too much about the guy, but he has apparently pledged to take no PAC money. So he may be a drooling pinhead, but if you donate he'll at least be your drooling pinhead, and not the RIAA's.
All that would be required here is checking the purcharser's address against the addresses in our already existing database of "people who should not own guns". No new database are required, just sensible use of the one we already have.
The owner of the guns in the CT killings would have passed any of the newly proposed background checks.
Actually, a "you don't get to buy assault weapons if you live with a crazy person" rule would have stopped the owner from getting those guns. You are correct that the current legislation wouldn't do that, but its a step in that direction, and it still may not be able to get the votes to pass. I'll agree it would be better to do the whole thing in one step, but taking small steps one at a time appears to be the best we are possibly capable of doing with our current crew of chuckleheads in Congress.
So how much more money is Microsoft making off of Android than they are off of their own phones?
I think he really meant TV series, not movies. Short stories often adapt well to a 2-hour movie, but for the most part that really isn't enough time to properly treat an entire novel. If someone tried with those two works, I'd be willing to bet rather a lot that you'd be sorely disappointed with the results.
I mentioned this in a comment last week. Manned spaceflight in the USA is essentially a matter of history, not something we know how to do today. If we wanted (for whatever reason) to go back to the moon, we'd bascially have to start over from scratch. It would probably take as at least as long as the original Apollo program, and cost far more.
After the fall of the Roman empire, knowledge of concrete was lost, and for about 500 years Europeans were walking around Roman buildings and upon Roman roads that they had no idea how to recreate. Right now all our Apollo engineers are dead or dying, and the Astronauts will soon follow suit. Soon there will be no living human who has set foot on another world. Then we will know just how those Medieval Europeans felt when we go look at our old Apollo relics in the museums.
Recognizing gay marriage perpetuates the problem; the real solution is to de-recognize marriage as a special state of being. Just let people make their own decisions.
Ah. So in your scenario anybody who wants can hang out in the hopsiptal room of a horribly injured person and perhaps even make medical decisions for them, because for all you know that person may be the most important person in said injured person's self-designated "family"? When a person dies without a will (as most of us do), the entire USA splits their estate? Their small children (particularly babies), go to whom? State homes? Handed out first-come-first served? Joint custody with every adult who wants it? And I could put anyone I want on my "family" medical insurance? So I could perhaps start subletting my family medical coverage to people on ebay?
Seriously dude, think this through. There's thousands of very good reasons why the state recognizes marraige that have nothing whatsoever to do with procreation or religon.
An email address that T-Platforms listed for its German office bounced, and Slashdot was unable to reach executives at its Russian headquarters for comment."
That's because T-Platforms has gone out of business. Most unfortunate.
However, there's somebody here from a new supercomputer company "U-Platforms", that would like to speak with you about purchasing some HPC microprocessors...
Serious question here: Why is anything redacted? These are things like emails between Microsoft and government anti-trust lawyers. There is no possible issue of National Security here. So what's the excuse for blacking anything out?
Here's an example from TFA:
"Skip: your Thursday email stated:"
REDACTED
"To which GeneB replied:"
REDACTED
"Skip Stritter wrote:"
REDACTED
That's not information. It's routing data
News Flash: "A recent study has determined that Democrat administrations in Washington
Apparently it was a Fox News Flash