"It's not a legally recorded crime unless someone is caught and convicted."
On what do you base this? Maybe I'm just misinterpreting, but I don't see how that makes any sense at all. Never heard of the category "legally recorded crime" -- is this a term of art?
I was mugged; I reported the crime. (No fun at all, but at least they didn't shoot me.)
Or you get hurt by a hit-and-run driver, and you report it. Odds are low that the driver will be caught.
Or someone you know is murdered, and the killer is unknown. Not sure of the current closing stats on murders, but surely a lot of murderers are never caught, never mind convicted. They're still crimes, and if I was planning where to live (hint: not North Philly -- once was enough), I'd want to know about them.
The tradeoffs in camping gear are real mind-rippers:)
a) There are astoundingly good pieces of gear out now for prices that reflect their quality, esoteric nature, etc. There are tents now that are incredibly good for their weight and price; when I was small, family camping trips meant getting dripped on, persistently, any place that someone had accidentally brushed against the inside of the tent, and the tent was heavy canvas that smelled like canvas smells when it's kept in the basement most of the year. (Still fun, though.)
b) Even though I feel like 2009 is a nice, modern age, and I have trouble picturing tents, packs, sleeping bags getting all that much lighter or otherwise better, I can remember thinking the same in the 1980s, and a lot of things have improved since then -- as always in a healthy world, the high-end stuff trickles down to become the new middle-ground, and so on.
Today I agonized over buying some stuff on sale from Outdoor Research; I'm by no means an ultralight hiker, but maybe if I got some lightweight gear and tried it more I would be! In the end, I decided against a 19oz bivy sack that would have cost about $70 (incl. tax), since I have a servicable tent, sleeping bag, etc, and don't anticipate any camping for more than a weekend for 6 months at least, and am uncertain about the practicalities of bivy-sack camping.
The Bihn stuff, Yes, is good stuff. Like a lot of other small, specialized businesses, including a lot of bag makers, Bihn takes a an iterative, craft-heavy approach rather than cheap-and-cheerful. (I like a lot of cheap-and-cheerful things, though.)
Thanks to this post and the reply I see that I was wrong, and why.
Those Spectra bags are cool -- I've been reading about those for years, and admire the engineering of them, but am not a serious / frequent / dedicated enough hiker to justify one. If I should one day hike the Appalachian trail, I might, though; ultralight seems the smartest way to go for enjoyable hiking. (A more usual camping adventure for me is car camping in a state or national park and hiking within the park, but I can still drool over the gear for better hikers;))
Those are nice-looking -- though for some reason (against BBP's helpful diagram;)), when I had a small backpack for school (long ago) I liked the way it carried better when it was quite high on my back, rather than low down -- just feels more maneuverable that way.
The bum pad these have is one thing that the Checkpoint Flyer lacks (by design, for size reasons), but that I like on another bag I've got (a Targus -- $5 at Goodwill;)). More bags should have attachment points for one of those to be snapped on!
"DC has very little gun ownership, but has a ridiculously high murder rate. There really isn't much, if any, correlation whatsoever."
You left out the word "legal" before "gun ownership":)
Of course, the politicians often believe that such laws are "for thee and not for me" -- and surprisingly enough, so do some of the other loudmouths who believe that *other* people certainly should not have the means of effective self-defense; I'll never quite get over the Onion-esque story of Carl Rowan (who was an indignant anti-gun editorialist) defending his hot-tub from a teenager trespasser, but shooting him with an illegally possessed gun. In the annals of hypocrisy, this is a doozy! But then, so is Rosie O'Donnell employing armed guards while advocating that other people rely on fists and pepper spray.
I dunno -- nothing flamebaity about it from my side:)
Choosing a seat in a U.S. movie theater is annoying sometimes because of the islands of empty seats blocked by people who don't seem eager to let you by them -- but they chose to sit in a spot where people will have to pass them to get to the empty seats!
The theater where I saw "Slumdog" I think might have been grandfathered out of any recent requirements as to seat / aisle spacing, too -- the rows were very close together, and I was glad no one yelled "Fire!" Would have been hard to get out. (The place was quite old, and this made it actually sort of quaint, but I would not want to sit in those seats very often.)
I like US-style non-assigned seats. But I just took a trip to Israel, and the theater at which I saw Slumdog Millionaire (packed!) assigned seats, and it was actually good in one way -- the people you're squashing on the way to your seat have less growling resentment when they know you're trampling them only to get to the seat you've been assigned, rather than because you're an idiot;)
In my sister's college application essays (one of them, at least), she outlined her reasons for wanting to attend a "four-year collage." Will always make me chuckle.
(But then, my brother teased me for years for pronouncing "pier" identically to "pyre.")
Sorry, those words aren't mine -- they're those of the question's (anonymous) submitter.
On my own Eee, XP didn't last longer than it took to install a few versions of Ubuntu; right now I have 8.10 on there, and find it mostly works, but the glitches can be pretty bothersome. In particular, I find that wireless connections are buggy, even though the wireless *reception* is excellent. (Far better than that of any of the handful of other laptops I have around.)
I have seen Vista casually, just shoulder surfing, haven't used it very much to form an opinion one way or the other; from screenshots etc, I'd say I like the look of it better than I like the look of Windows XP. But really, I don't have enough patience for Windows, and I'd like my computers to run free operating systems unless there's some particular good reason (particularly good to me) otherwise.
Those types will always be around; in the future, video rental stores (if they exist) will have entire wings devoted to various incarnations of "Batman," into which they can be shoved.
The Lord of the Rings movies went way past anything I expected, into the same class of story -- for me, tastes vary -- as L.A. Confidential, where the book and movie have some major disjoint but each is masterful within its realm.
timothy
"But what about Tom Bomba--" CRUNCH. SMACK. CRUNCH.
"Song of the South," at least, is widely, and only semi-clandestinely, available on DVD from online sellers. The quality of the copy I bought is certainly not up to Disney standards wrt quality of transfer, but it does include a bonus that Disney's almost certainly won't, if they ever do release it: a parody of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves performed by the SotS's black cast members called "Coal Black an' De Seben Dwarfs." (Cue David Brent dismissal: "Racist.")
I guess Disney just fears a negative public reaction too much to release the movie, which would be no issue if they hadn't buckled under to protests against it in the first place. It now looks like Disney agrees -- or close -- that the film itself was in some way particularly racist. (More than other films of the time, say, portrayin a similar era.) I was unsurprised that they didn't choose to make their first big Blue Ray film Song of the South;)
That is what the E. German border guards were famous for doing, so... Yes, probably so. Not that this will *actually* happen, but if you meet an especially scrupulous cop (in the sense of scrupulous attention to detail and procedure) then the glasses may come off.
I think it's called a "Lemon Squeezer," though that nickname may have been given to more than one gun; there are definitely revolvers of a certain variety that are also called "lemon squeezers."
You may disagree, but I bet the manufacturer believes it falls under the "Supporting or sustaining life" line.
You can probably imagine situations in which you'd prefer to be armed; even football players sometimes wish for more than their own muscle. (http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/12/02/jlott_guncontrol/)
The Deer Gun was the successor (though never widely produced, as I understand it) to the Liberator pistol of WWII, which itself was never widely distributed to groups like the French Resistance, though that was the original idea. Cheap and nasty guns, for which the use case was "First, approach a Nazi soldier and ask him for a light for your cigarette. Then, after you've killed him, take his much nicer gun."
Well, perhaps legally only in the USA (not sure), but historically, No; there have been palm pistols for quite a while, though this is the only one of recent or current (post '50s) manufacture of which I'm aware, and not counting the CIA's "Deer Gun" which is more the fetal form of a more conventional pistol:)
Perhaps there are many others, besides, but prior to this new one (which has grabbed Google's top spot for "palm pistol" -- drat!), there were several based on patents held by Jaques E. Turbiaux of France, known as "protectors" (Minneapolis Protector, Chicago Protector), and marketed similarly to the way that this one is -- as a last-ditch weapon such that, as the saying doesn't quite go, 98 lb weaklings don't necessarily have to exercise their right to wrestle with 200lb attackers.
You're right, and my apologies -- I've corrected / updated the story, which will take a few minutes to update in the database. In a moment of fuzziness, I expanded on what I think is a typo in Odio's post ("However, before the EFF commits to representing us against Apple, they want to speak to the author of the BluWiki project. I'm posting this public plea hoping that the author, or someone who knows the author, might read it.") and reversed the players based on that.
No, scratch that -- I am annoyed by laugh tracks. Partly because I'm used to them, and when I notice a laugh-track it's often too late.
Please, Pythons -- your sketches are funny (on albums) without the degrading use of laugh tracks. Do you still have the masters from which to make better video clips, without them?
Slashdot Mirror
"It's not a legally recorded crime unless someone is caught and convicted."
On what do you base this? Maybe I'm just misinterpreting, but I don't see how that makes any sense at all. Never heard of the category "legally recorded crime" -- is this a term of art?
I was mugged; I reported the crime. (No fun at all, but at least they didn't shoot me.)
Or you get hurt by a hit-and-run driver, and you report it. Odds are low that the driver will be caught.
Or someone you know is murdered, and the killer is unknown. Not sure of the current closing stats on murders, but surely a lot of murderers are never caught, never mind convicted. They're still crimes, and if I was planning where to live (hint: not North Philly -- once was enough), I'd want to know about them.
timothy
You are correct :)
And I think they truly, non-ironically believe that this is a good outcome.
However, some states have relatively sane gun laws; when I moved out of MD, it wasn't to D.C. :)
timothy
"Smartphones are going to explode in the next two years."
Which ones?!
The tradeoffs in camping gear are real mind-rippers :)
a) There are astoundingly good pieces of gear out now for prices that reflect their quality, esoteric nature, etc. There are tents now that are incredibly good for their weight and price; when I was small, family camping trips meant getting dripped on, persistently, any place that someone had accidentally brushed against the inside of the tent, and the tent was heavy canvas that smelled like canvas smells when it's kept in the basement most of the year. (Still fun, though.)
b) Even though I feel like 2009 is a nice, modern age, and I have trouble picturing tents, packs, sleeping bags getting all that much lighter or otherwise better, I can remember thinking the same in the 1980s, and a lot of things have improved since then -- as always in a healthy world, the high-end stuff trickles down to become the new middle-ground, and so on.
Today I agonized over buying some stuff on sale from Outdoor Research; I'm by no means an ultralight hiker, but maybe if I got some lightweight gear and tried it more I would be! In the end, I decided against a 19oz bivy sack that would have cost about $70 (incl. tax), since I have a servicable tent, sleeping bag, etc, and don't anticipate any camping for more than a weekend for 6 months at least, and am uncertain about the practicalities of bivy-sack camping.
The Bihn stuff, Yes, is good stuff. Like a lot of other small, specialized businesses, including a lot of bag makers, Bihn takes a an iterative, craft-heavy approach rather than cheap-and-cheerful. (I like a lot of cheap-and-cheerful things, though.)
timothy
I blame the product description :)
Thanks to this post and the reply I see that I was wrong, and why.
Those Spectra bags are cool -- I've been reading about those for years, and admire the engineering of them, but am not a serious / frequent / dedicated enough hiker to justify one. If I should one day hike the Appalachian trail, I might, though; ultralight seems the smartest way to go for enjoyable hiking. (A more usual camping adventure for me is car camping in a state or national park and hiking within the park, but I can still drool over the gear for better hikers ;))
timothy
Those are nice-looking -- though for some reason (against BBP's helpful diagram ;)), when I had a small backpack for school (long ago) I liked the way it carried better when it was quite high on my back, rather than low down -- just feels more maneuverable that way.
The bum pad these have is one thing that the Checkpoint Flyer lacks (by design, for size reasons), but that I like on another bag I've got (a Targus -- $5 at Goodwill ;)). More bags should have attachment points for one of those to be snapped on!
timothy
"DC has very little gun ownership, but has a ridiculously high murder rate. There really isn't much, if any, correlation whatsoever."
You left out the word "legal" before "gun ownership" :)
Of course, the politicians often believe that such laws are "for thee and not for me" -- and surprisingly enough, so do some of the other loudmouths who believe that *other* people certainly should not have the means of effective self-defense; I'll never quite get over the Onion-esque story of Carl Rowan (who was an indignant anti-gun editorialist) defending his hot-tub from a teenager trespasser, but shooting him with an illegally possessed gun. In the annals of hypocrisy, this is a doozy! But then, so is Rosie O'Donnell employing armed guards while advocating that other people rely on fists and pepper spray.
(It's briefly treated under "Controversy" at this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rowan)
Also, D.C. evidence rooms are evidence that there are plenty of guns in the District :)
timothy
What sort of response are you talking about?
timothy
I dunno -- nothing flamebaity about it from my side :)
Choosing a seat in a U.S. movie theater is annoying sometimes because of the islands of empty seats blocked by people who don't seem eager to let you by them -- but they chose to sit in a spot where people will have to pass them to get to the empty seats!
The theater where I saw "Slumdog" I think might have been grandfathered out of any recent requirements as to seat / aisle spacing, too -- the rows were very close together, and I was glad no one yelled "Fire!" Would have been hard to get out. (The place was quite old, and this made it actually sort of quaint, but I would not want to sit in those seats very often.)
timothy
I like US-style non-assigned seats. But I just took a trip to Israel, and the theater at which I saw Slumdog Millionaire (packed!) assigned seats, and it was actually good in one way -- the people you're squashing on the way to your seat have less growling resentment when they know you're trampling them only to get to the seat you've been assigned, rather than because you're an idiot ;)
timothy
In my sister's college application essays (one of them, at least), she outlined her reasons for wanting to attend a "four-year collage." Will always make me chuckle.
(But then, my brother teased me for years for pronouncing "pier" identically to "pyre.")
timothy
Sorry, those words aren't mine -- they're those of the question's (anonymous) submitter.
On my own Eee, XP didn't last longer than it took to install a few versions of Ubuntu; right now I have 8.10 on there, and find it mostly works, but the glitches can be pretty bothersome. In particular, I find that wireless connections are buggy, even though the wireless *reception* is excellent. (Far better than that of any of the handful of other laptops I have around.)
I have seen Vista casually, just shoulder surfing, haven't used it very much to form an opinion one way or the other; from screenshots etc, I'd say I like the look of it better than I like the look of Windows XP. But really, I don't have enough patience for Windows, and I'd like my computers to run free operating systems unless there's some particular good reason (particularly good to me) otherwise.
timothy
Not even ... the megacolon?!
OK, I guess you're right. But the megacolon guy was at least making an effort ...
timothy
Perhaps you're thinking of this case, though it's far from the only one:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/08/08/2008-08-08_maryland_mayors_dogs_shot_in_swat_team_m.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/07/mayor.warrant/
timothy
Those types will always be around; in the future, video rental stores (if they exist) will have entire wings devoted to various incarnations of "Batman," into which they can be shoved.
The Lord of the Rings movies went way past anything I expected, into the same class of story -- for me, tastes vary -- as L.A. Confidential, where the book and movie have some major disjoint but each is masterful within its realm.
timothy
"But what about Tom Bomba--" CRUNCH. SMACK. CRUNCH.
"I said, what about--" SMACKASMACKASMACKASMACKA!
"Honestly, if only--" RATTATTTAATATATATATAA!!
"Song of the South," at least, is widely, and only semi-clandestinely, available on DVD from online sellers. The quality of the copy I bought is certainly not up to Disney standards wrt quality of transfer, but it does include a bonus that Disney's almost certainly won't, if they ever do release it: a parody of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves performed by the SotS's black cast members called "Coal Black an' De Seben Dwarfs." (Cue David Brent dismissal: "Racist.")
I guess Disney just fears a negative public reaction too much to release the movie, which would be no issue if they hadn't buckled under to protests against it in the first place. It now looks like Disney agrees -- or close -- that the film itself was in some way particularly racist. (More than other films of the time, say, portrayin a similar era.) I was unsurprised that they didn't choose to make their first big Blue Ray film Song of the South ;)
timothy
That is what the E. German border guards were famous for doing, so ... Yes, probably so. Not that this will *actually* happen, but if you meet an especially scrupulous cop (in the sense of scrupulous attention to detail and procedure) then the glasses may come off.
timothy
I think it's called a "Lemon Squeezer," though that nickname may have been given to more than one gun; there are definitely revolvers of a certain variety that are also called "lemon squeezers."
You may disagree, but I bet the manufacturer believes it falls under the "Supporting or sustaining life" line.
You can probably imagine situations in which you'd prefer to be armed; even football players sometimes wish for more than their own muscle. (http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/12/02/jlott_guncontrol/)
timothy
The hand actually belongs to David Duchovny as J.P. Prewitt.
timothy
The Deer Gun was the successor (though never widely produced, as I understand it) to the Liberator pistol of WWII, which itself was never widely distributed to groups like the French Resistance, though that was the original idea. Cheap and nasty guns, for which the use case was "First, approach a Nazi soldier and ask him for a light for your cigarette. Then, after you've killed him, take his much nicer gun."
The Deer Gun was the same concept, different war:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_gun
timothy
Well, perhaps legally only in the USA (not sure), but historically, No; there have been palm pistols for quite a while, though this is the only one of recent or current (post '50s) manufacture of which I'm aware, and not counting the CIA's "Deer Gun" which is more the fetal form of a more conventional pistol :)
Perhaps there are many others, besides, but prior to this new one (which has grabbed Google's top spot for "palm pistol" -- drat!), there were several based on patents held by Jaques E. Turbiaux of France, known as "protectors" (Minneapolis Protector, Chicago Protector), and marketed similarly to the way that this one is -- as a last-ditch weapon such that, as the saying doesn't quite go, 98 lb weaklings don't necessarily have to exercise their right to wrestle with 200lb attackers.
Informative overview: http://www.nfa.ca/content/view/106/197/
timothy
You're right, and my apologies -- I've corrected / updated the story, which will take a few minutes to update in the database. In a moment of fuzziness, I expanded on what I think is a typo in Odio's post ("However, before the EFF commits to representing us against Apple, they want to speak to the author of the BluWiki project. I'm posting this public plea hoping that the author, or someone who knows the author, might read it.") and reversed the players based on that.
timothy
I hate laugh tracks.
No, scratch that -- I am annoyed by laugh tracks. Partly because I'm used to them, and when I notice a laugh-track it's often too late.
Please, Pythons -- your sketches are funny (on albums) without the degrading use of laugh tracks. Do you still have the masters from which to make better video clips, without them?
timothy
"Also, while I'm boarding on flamebait ..."
- how do you spice that? ;)
- Does that give you any heartburn?
- your grocery bills must be amazing!
- the ironing is delicious
timothy