Wish I'd come across this earlier. I've been developing a Raspberry PI hat circuit over the last six weeks and it's been a steep learning curve since I'm not a circuit nerd. Doubtless all the circuit nerds here will find that article overly simplistic but I'm a code monkey and had to piece this together from a number of other tutorials over the last six weeks. The things I have to add is really only the observation that Eagle Cad is the most counterintuitive piece of software I have ever tried to use. I decided to do a schematic and convert it into a PCB using Eagle which worked well enough. However, I have used any number of circuit simulators (eventually selected a href="http://icircuitapp.com">iCircuit, nice simple and available for: OS X, iOS, Android and Windows) and the UI in all of them much worked pretty much the same way but it's like Eagle Cad's developers went out of their way to make the UI of their schematics editor different. That said, Eagle Cad works like a charm one you figure out how the UI works. The component libraries can also be pretty overwhelming. After a lot of searching I came across this PCB prototyping service. No generating Greber files, just hit the "Get Started Now." button, upload the Eagle CAD file and pay the man, $18 for three boards and free shipping, turnaround time is c.a. 3 weeks. I'm still waiting on the boards so I can't judge their quality but I loved the simplicity of their site and I really hope their work is as good as people say it is because the pain of figuring out how to generate Gerber files in Eagle is bound to be as counter intuitive and painful to learn as everything else with Eagle.
True, though there is some precedence. OS-X does not seem to be particularly zippy in the few cross platform app benchmarks that are to be found. A good example is DAW bench's test on Cubase, Protools, and Kontakt: http://dawbench.com/win7-v-osx.... What you see is that Cubase has a much more efficient engine than ProTools (no surprise) and that on Windows either one gets a lot more polyphony than the Mac. At any given buffer size (lower buffers are harder to deal with) Windows did better.
Pretty good test too since you are dealing with tools that have long been cross platform. Kontakt has been cross platform for its entire life, Pro Tools was Mac only until version 5 (1998ish), since when it has been cross platform, and Cubase has been cross platform since back in the DOS and Atari ST days. All the software has long development histories on both platforms, yet Windows gives superior results.
None of this means OS-X is unusable or anything, but it doesn't appear to have the performance Windows does, when pushed.
That benchmark is a bit dated, there must be a newer benchmark than OS X 10.6? Hower, now that I have let fly the obligtory nitpick of your post, the fact that Windows 10 performs well does not surprise me. I have long been aware of the fact that Microsoft quietly sank a lot of resources into rewriting Windows and improving performance so I'm not exactly thunderstruck by news that they succeeded. What I'd like to see is a benchmark shootout between Windows 10 and the most recent OS X AND Linux distros. Something tells me that if Windows 10 also turns out to be faster than Linux the atmosphere around here would shift from shadenfreude to righteous fury and calls for a Jihad.
Pirates are just going to have to suck it up and totally go without Windows 10 now no matter how badly they want it.
I know that some people have to use Windows for work related reasons, but why would anybody want to use Windows? That is like wanting to have a root canal even though you don't need one.
Personally I find it horrific that in places like Norway someone like Brevik can be sentenced to only 21 years in prison for murdering dozens of people. This negates and ignores what he has done, and instead only focuses on rehabilitation, i.e., focusing on what this man can do in the future. The idea being that the past is past, and punishing someone won't bring back the people he killed.
I find it horrific that in the United States prison seems to be a place where people are sent to be exploited for their labour in increasingly privatised prisons and abused by prison gangs for years on end. It says more than many words about the US prison system that Chinese and Indian outsourcing companies do not bother to bid on contracts where a company benefiting from US prison labor is bidding against them and the justice system in the US seems to be rapidly evolving into a place whose primary purpose is to supply a steady stream of inmates (read: slave labour) to this system by slapping draconian mandatory prison sentences on US citizens for offences as trivial as being caught with a few grams too many of Marijuana. The US prison system seems to have become a round-about way of re-introducing slavery. In Norway (warning: liberalism ahead) like the other Nordic countries the purpose of prison is still considered to be to offer prisoners an opportunity to reform their lives. It may not always work but it does not always fail either. Before I became a code monkey with a CS degree I was trained as an electrician. There were a couple of guys in my shcool who were convicts on a reform program. They had both gotten locked up for doing stupid stuff and they deserved their sentences but they also both turned their lives around and became useful citizens. They achieved this partly because of the education the got from the prison system and partly because people gave them a second chance when they came out of prison instead of shunning them and making them unemployable. Breivik on the other hand is no normal convict nor is he a garden variety murderer. While Breivik has been sentenced to 21 years in prison that still only means that he will be released at the end of those 21 years if he is considered to have been rehabilitated. Norwegian law makes provisions for the continued the incarceration of a prisoner if it is thought that his rehabilitation has failed or he/she is suffers from chronic mental health issues and for those reasons still represents a threat.Breivik, given his behaviour and utterances, seems to fit that bill perfectly, i.e. he may be sane but he also will not be considered rehabilitated at the end of his sentence meaning he will never be released.
There are Chinese nationals at Penn State and every other university in America, displacing our own people. Why don't we start revoking student VISAs as a response?
Because the radical left on campuses would say that's racist and 'anti-social.'
Here's a thought... perhaps we should stop this xenophobic whining and retaliate against the culprits rather than applying a shotgun remedy like revoking the student visas of every Chinese person in sight regardless of whether they were involved in these attacks or not? The "drop a 2000lb bomb on it" approach may be intensely satisfying, especially to the political right. However, it causes collateral damage, it is therefore inelegant and it reeks of stupidity and desperation. Just play the old eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth game. If the Chinese can set up 'cyber warfare' units and think they can attack the USA with impunity in times of peace without it being an act of war then surely they will not complain if the USA uses the 'cyber warfare' branch of it's military to launch attacks inside China against the assholes who are doing this?... and if they do complain about being hoisted by their own petard then they'll just look pathetic. The USA does have a credible 'cyber warfare' capability does it not?
Also why are the numbers reversed to quote success rates for Google and Microsoft in the summary on Slashdot - it would have been much clearer if the actual numbers in the article (which were all error rates) were quoted!
Because this is Slashdot and it is required that all stories be written as poorly as possible.
Baidu's new computer was wrong only 4.58 percent of the time. The previous best was 4.82 percent, reported by Google in March.
If Google is only wrong 4.82% of the time then why is it whenever I search for an image I get thousands of pictures that have absolutely nothing to do with what I am searching for?
Try using Bing image search. I won't say the results are always better but there is much less noise.
It is highly unlikely that Apple is going to rewrite all that GPL and BSD code at the heart of iOS with Swift. As long as those core projects are based on 'C', they'll stay in 'C'.
Precisely, that's what wrapper code has been for since I started coding back in the early 90s. It always cracks me up when people let fly gold nuggets like "...the Python implementation of OpenCV...". As far as I am aware, nobody rewrote all of OpenCV in Python, they created Python bindings which is a fancy way of saying they created a Python wrapper for OpenCV. Programmers don't always realise that the API's they are using are actually wrappers. I used to use a C++ Linear Algebra library but because I just installed it with yum or apt-get I didn't pay it much thought. it wasn't until I tried to compile it for an embedded computer that I realised the thing was actually a wrapper for a Fortran 77 library that was ported to Fortran 90 and then given a C++ wrapper and that made it a bit of a bitch to compile (largely due to the fact that I didn't know squat about Fortran). Apple will provide Swift wrappers for at least some of the C/C++ libraries and the ObjC stuff if that's necessary (never used Swift myself so I don't know how well ObjC libraries integrate into Swift). Any other approach would have Apple's developers busy doing nothing but rewriting and debugging ported code for the next decade at least. What interests me is how far up shit creek will a developer be if he/she realises that they need a C/C++/ObjC library for his Swift application?
We're seeing a convergence on exactly three languages: C++, C#, and Swift. Every other language is becoming a minor player compared to these Three Giants.
Well if they do buy it I hope Uber does more with it than Nokia has. It's in terms of the maps it offers Nokia Maps is actually a pretty decent service and has the potential to give Google a hard time if somebody puts some money into it to add features it is missing and improve existing ones like the satelite view feature.
This is pretty amazing if they can actually sell those for $9. Definitely one of the better kickstarters I've seen recently, so I am glad to see its successful.
However, once you add the HDMI, it's essentially the same price as a raspberry pi model A.
As long as it has a USB port, digital GPIO and an on board A/D chip. The A/D chip would be optional if the thing has a I2C connector but it would be a nice touch. I don't care about the HDMI. I use these things for all manner of gadget projects because I'm not familiar with the industry standard embedded boards, Arduino is to simple for my needs and I'm a Unix developer so I know Linux and just being able to add a web-server with a single apt-get call is heaven compared to computers in this category. Being able to skip the HDMI and other components would be a plus and built in WiFi + Bluetooth is a bonus since that's an added cost if you buy a Raspberry PI A+, especially if you need any kind of range for the WiFi. An add-on board for connecting and charging a LiPo battery and that gracefully shuts down the computer when the you press an off button or when the battery is low would be a nice too. That is another added cost with the Raspberry PI.
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology.
So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
Tokyo is still no my to-visit list but have you ever been in London or Paris? Neither London nor Paris were gutted and rebuilt to anything like the extent that Tokyo or Berlin were so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by designed and built during the last 50 years. The best you can argue is that London and Paris incrementally improved the part of their infrastructure relevant to this discussion over the last 50 years while New Yorkers sat idle.
Beer made from smoked whale testicles: http://www.i-m.mx/velasala/bru...
The web page is written in such bad English that the spelling nazis will suffer a stroke from reading it but I assure you this is no hoax.
I think his point is that the Republicans in power seems to be reflexively against anything "those liberals" are in favor of.
I know what you mean, there have been several times now that I've been sorely tempted to point out to them that liberals are very much in favour of breathing. Each timeI decided not to because I didn't think we could bury that many bodies quickly enough to prevent the spread of pandemics.
In general the GOP wants to reduce the size of government. She was very successful at reducing the size of HP. Clearly she is the perfect choice.
The GOP has been in control of both congress and the presidency more than once in the past. That equals the ability to do whatever the hell they bloody want. When was the last time you saw them use that situation to reduce the size of government? Republicans are really good at lowering taxes but they suck at reducing the size of government or the extent of government expenditure which is not surprising since they seem to have a pronounced fetish for fighting expensive land wars in Asia.
Well, if you die for Allah fighting the unholy followers of Jehovah you get 72 perpetual virgins with all the incessent female nagging that comes with them. If you die for Jehovah fighting the unholy followers of Allah you get to wear a white man-dress, a hoop hat, a set of wings and then you get to spend a joyful eternity sitting on a cloud and playing a harp. I suppose it your agony of choice boils down to how much you like harp music.
The others aren't just prepared to murder Wilders. They want to abolish democracy and replace it with sharia law, and kill the Untermenschen i.e. the unbelievers. I don't think fighting for freedom and democracy is as deplorable as fighting against it. Of course, there are many useful idiots who think they can live peacefully with islamists in the same country, believing that it we respect them, they'll respect us. Big mistake.
Geert Wilders seems to define every single moslem that walks this earth as a violent Islamist. That's about as stupid as claiming that every US American that walks this earth is a lyncing rope and shotgun carrying racist Ku Klux Klan member who spends his weekends thundering down the highway in a coal rolling pickup. Campaigning to have the Quran banned in the Netherlands because of the actions of a few militant Islamists is about as intelligent as campaigning to have the bible banned in the USA because of the actions of the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. There are and always will be useful morons who lap up the kind of mindless non-sense spouted by the likes of Geert Wilders and his polar opposites in the Islamist movement but they are all wrong. Anybody who takes an entire religion/ethnic-group/nationality and puts it in a drawer marked criminal/terrorist/sub-human/not-chosen-by-god or some other bullshit category like that has taken leave of their senses and that's phrasing it very, very politely.
This has been going on for tens of thousands of years, so while it matters, it isn't news.
Large size makes animals evolutionarily fragile and is often a dead end.
They say, during the K-T event, no land animal larger than a cat survived.
Yes and it's no big deal either because it's not like it will take thousands of years for new species will evolve to replace the ones we kill off. The interesting thing is that while animals can sometimes wreck the ecosystem that supports them they aren't aware of the consequences of what they are doing. Humans on the other hand are fully aware of the fact that they are heading for a disaster due to heir behaviour but they still don't change their behaviour because they can't live without the short term benefits of their rapaciousness.
And what has Obama done with the national debt? Hmmmm?
I don't recall bringing Obama into this but since you have done that for me he is not what I'd call a competent president. However, ham-handed Obama may be he is also saddled with the legacy of what is arguably the biggest incompetent among a long sequence of incompentents evert to take up residence in the White House: Nixon, the blessed Saint Ronal Reagan, Bush the elder, Clinton, Bush the younger and now Obama. The last president the USA had that was worth his salt was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bush Jr. not only doubled the national debt he violated one of the longest standing axioms of US foreign policy 'never fight a land war in Asia' (and did not do it once, he did that twice), went on record as saying God had told him to do it and openly referred to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as crusades. That man is probably the biggest gift radical militant Islam has ever gotten. A man really has to be a special kind of moron to accomplish all that in his first term of office.
Slashdot Mirror
Wish I'd come across this earlier. I've been developing a Raspberry PI hat circuit over the last six weeks and it's been a steep learning curve since I'm not a circuit nerd. Doubtless all the circuit nerds here will find that article overly simplistic but I'm a code monkey and had to piece this together from a number of other tutorials over the last six weeks. The things I have to add is really only the observation that Eagle Cad is the most counterintuitive piece of software I have ever tried to use. I decided to do a schematic and convert it into a PCB using Eagle which worked well enough. However, I have used any number of circuit simulators (eventually selected a href="http://icircuitapp.com">iCircuit, nice simple and available for: OS X, iOS, Android and Windows) and the UI in all of them much worked pretty much the same way but it's like Eagle Cad's developers went out of their way to make the UI of their schematics editor different. That said, Eagle Cad works like a charm one you figure out how the UI works. The component libraries can also be pretty overwhelming. After a lot of searching I came across this PCB prototyping service. No generating Greber files, just hit the "Get Started Now." button, upload the Eagle CAD file and pay the man, $18 for three boards and free shipping, turnaround time is c.a. 3 weeks. I'm still waiting on the boards so I can't judge their quality but I loved the simplicity of their site and I really hope their work is as good as people say it is because the pain of figuring out how to generate Gerber files in Eagle is bound to be as counter intuitive and painful to learn as everything else with Eagle.
True, though there is some precedence. OS-X does not seem to be particularly zippy in the few cross platform app benchmarks that are to be found. A good example is DAW bench's test on Cubase, Protools, and Kontakt: http://dawbench.com/win7-v-osx.... What you see is that Cubase has a much more efficient engine than ProTools (no surprise) and that on Windows either one gets a lot more polyphony than the Mac. At any given buffer size (lower buffers are harder to deal with) Windows did better.
Pretty good test too since you are dealing with tools that have long been cross platform. Kontakt has been cross platform for its entire life, Pro Tools was Mac only until version 5 (1998ish), since when it has been cross platform, and Cubase has been cross platform since back in the DOS and Atari ST days. All the software has long development histories on both platforms, yet Windows gives superior results.
None of this means OS-X is unusable or anything, but it doesn't appear to have the performance Windows does, when pushed.
That benchmark is a bit dated, there must be a newer benchmark than OS X 10.6? Hower, now that I have let fly the obligtory nitpick of your post, the fact that Windows 10 performs well does not surprise me. I have long been aware of the fact that Microsoft quietly sank a lot of resources into rewriting Windows and improving performance so I'm not exactly thunderstruck by news that they succeeded. What I'd like to see is a benchmark shootout between Windows 10 and the most recent OS X AND Linux distros. Something tells me that if Windows 10 also turns out to be faster than Linux the atmosphere around here would shift from shadenfreude to righteous fury and calls for a Jihad.
Pirates are just going to have to suck it up and totally go without Windows 10 now no matter how badly they want it.
I know that some people have to use Windows for work related reasons, but why would anybody want to use Windows? That is like wanting to have a root canal even though you don't need one.
Personally I find it horrific that in places like Norway someone like Brevik can be sentenced to only 21 years in prison for murdering dozens of people. This negates and ignores what he has done, and instead only focuses on rehabilitation, i.e., focusing on what this man can do in the future. The idea being that the past is past, and punishing someone won't bring back the people he killed.
I find it horrific that in the United States prison seems to be a place where people are sent to be exploited for their labour in increasingly privatised prisons and abused by prison gangs for years on end. It says more than many words about the US prison system that Chinese and Indian outsourcing companies do not bother to bid on contracts where a company benefiting from US prison labor is bidding against them and the justice system in the US seems to be rapidly evolving into a place whose primary purpose is to supply a steady stream of inmates (read: slave labour) to this system by slapping draconian mandatory prison sentences on US citizens for offences as trivial as being caught with a few grams too many of Marijuana. The US prison system seems to have become a round-about way of re-introducing slavery. In Norway (warning: liberalism ahead) like the other Nordic countries the purpose of prison is still considered to be to offer prisoners an opportunity to reform their lives. It may not always work but it does not always fail either. Before I became a code monkey with a CS degree I was trained as an electrician. There were a couple of guys in my shcool who were convicts on a reform program. They had both gotten locked up for doing stupid stuff and they deserved their sentences but they also both turned their lives around and became useful citizens. They achieved this partly because of the education the got from the prison system and partly because people gave them a second chance when they came out of prison instead of shunning them and making them unemployable. Breivik on the other hand is no normal convict nor is he a garden variety murderer. While Breivik has been sentenced to 21 years in prison that still only means that he will be released at the end of those 21 years if he is considered to have been rehabilitated. Norwegian law makes provisions for the continued the incarceration of a prisoner if it is thought that his rehabilitation has failed or he/she is suffers from chronic mental health issues and for those reasons still represents a threat.Breivik, given his behaviour and utterances, seems to fit that bill perfectly, i.e. he may be sane but he also will not be considered rehabilitated at the end of his sentence meaning he will never be released.
There are Chinese nationals at Penn State and every other university in America, displacing our own people. Why don't we start revoking student VISAs as a response?
Because the radical left on campuses would say that's racist and 'anti-social.'
Here's a thought... perhaps we should stop this xenophobic whining and retaliate against the culprits rather than applying a shotgun remedy like revoking the student visas of every Chinese person in sight regardless of whether they were involved in these attacks or not? The "drop a 2000lb bomb on it" approach may be intensely satisfying, especially to the political right. However, it causes collateral damage, it is therefore inelegant and it reeks of stupidity and desperation. Just play the old eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth game. If the Chinese can set up 'cyber warfare' units and think they can attack the USA with impunity in times of peace without it being an act of war then surely they will not complain if the USA uses the 'cyber warfare' branch of it's military to launch attacks inside China against the assholes who are doing this? ... and if they do complain about being hoisted by their own petard then they'll just look pathetic. The USA does have a credible 'cyber warfare' capability does it not?
Also why are the numbers reversed to quote success rates for Google and Microsoft in the summary on Slashdot - it would have been much clearer if the actual numbers in the article (which were all error rates) were quoted!
Because this is Slashdot and it is required that all stories be written as poorly as possible.
Baidu's new computer was wrong only 4.58 percent of the time. The previous best was 4.82 percent, reported by Google in March.
If Google is only wrong 4.82% of the time then why is it whenever I search for an image I get thousands of pictures that have absolutely nothing to do with what I am searching for?
Try using Bing image search. I won't say the results are always better but there is much less noise.
It is highly unlikely that Apple is going to rewrite all that GPL and BSD code at the heart of iOS with Swift. As long as those core projects are based on 'C', they'll stay in 'C'.
Precisely, that's what wrapper code has been for since I started coding back in the early 90s. It always cracks me up when people let fly gold nuggets like "...the Python implementation of OpenCV...". As far as I am aware, nobody rewrote all of OpenCV in Python, they created Python bindings which is a fancy way of saying they created a Python wrapper for OpenCV. Programmers don't always realise that the API's they are using are actually wrappers. I used to use a C++ Linear Algebra library but because I just installed it with yum or apt-get I didn't pay it much thought. it wasn't until I tried to compile it for an embedded computer that I realised the thing was actually a wrapper for a Fortran 77 library that was ported to Fortran 90 and then given a C++ wrapper and that made it a bit of a bitch to compile (largely due to the fact that I didn't know squat about Fortran). Apple will provide Swift wrappers for at least some of the C/C++ libraries and the ObjC stuff if that's necessary (never used Swift myself so I don't know how well ObjC libraries integrate into Swift). Any other approach would have Apple's developers busy doing nothing but rewriting and debugging ported code for the next decade at least. What interests me is how far up shit creek will a developer be if he/she realises that they need a C/C++/ObjC library for his Swift application?
We're seeing a convergence on exactly three languages: C++, C#, and Swift. Every other language is becoming a minor player compared to these Three Giants.
..."Dead" languages like ML and Pascal...
Has Netcraft confirmed that?
One more reason to use Mint. That's the best they could do out of this situation.
The thing about staying neutral in a war of religion is that you run the risk of being branded a heretic by both sides.
Fair is fair, so let's make sure it cuts both ways, all the way up the management chain.....
COMMUNIST!!!!
Can't decide whether to mod your post Funny or Insightful. Guess I'll owe you one.
It was intended to be: +1 Sarcastic
Well if they do buy it I hope Uber does more with it than Nokia has. It's in terms of the maps it offers Nokia Maps is actually a pretty decent service and has the potential to give Google a hard time if somebody puts some money into it to add features it is missing and improve existing ones like the satelite view feature.
You can't just do this without insider help. And by insiders, I mean government officials.
Wouldn't happen here. In Soviet America; Bank robs you!
Why are you guys complaining? This is just the free market at work, imaginative businessmen bypassing the onerous tyranny of regulators.
This is pretty amazing if they can actually sell those for $9. Definitely one of the better kickstarters I've seen recently, so I am glad to see its successful.
However, once you add the HDMI, it's essentially the same price as a raspberry pi model A.
As long as it has a USB port, digital GPIO and an on board A/D chip. The A/D chip would be optional if the thing has a I2C connector but it would be a nice touch. I don't care about the HDMI. I use these things for all manner of gadget projects because I'm not familiar with the industry standard embedded boards, Arduino is to simple for my needs and I'm a Unix developer so I know Linux and just being able to add a web-server with a single apt-get call is heaven compared to computers in this category. Being able to skip the HDMI and other components would be a plus and built in WiFi + Bluetooth is a bonus since that's an added cost if you buy a Raspberry PI A+, especially if you need any kind of range for the WiFi. An add-on board for connecting and charging a LiPo battery and that gracefully shuts down the computer when the you press an off button or when the battery is low would be a nice too. That is another added cost with the Raspberry PI.
Okay, what do you expect? NYC (in one form or another) has been there for FOUR HUNDRED YEARS (the area was first settled in 1624). It's been a massive metropolitan settlement for the better part of the last two hundred.
It's not as if someone went back to 1700 or so and started out with a city planning commission and 2015-level civil engineering technology. So yes, the city's going to be ANYTHING but efficiently run, plumbed, or laid out.
As opposed to London, Paris, and Tokyo, which were designed and built during the last 50 years, and thus are more efficient.
Tokyo is still no my to-visit list but have you ever been in London or Paris? Neither London nor Paris were gutted and rebuilt to anything like the extent that Tokyo or Berlin were so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by designed and built during the last 50 years. The best you can argue is that London and Paris incrementally improved the part of their infrastructure relevant to this discussion over the last 50 years while New Yorkers sat idle.
Better than bull testicles.
Beer made from smoked whale testicles: http://www.i-m.mx/velasala/bru... The web page is written in such bad English that the spelling nazis will suffer a stroke from reading it but I assure you this is no hoax.
I think his point is that the Republicans in power seems to be reflexively against anything "those liberals" are in favor of.
I know what you mean, there have been several times now that I've been sorely tempted to point out to them that liberals are very much in favour of breathing. Each timeI decided not to because I didn't think we could bury that many bodies quickly enough to prevent the spread of pandemics.
In general the GOP wants to reduce the size of government. She was very successful at reducing the size of HP. Clearly she is the perfect choice.
The GOP has been in control of both congress and the presidency more than once in the past. That equals the ability to do whatever the hell they bloody want. When was the last time you saw them use that situation to reduce the size of government? Republicans are really good at lowering taxes but they suck at reducing the size of government or the extent of government expenditure which is not surprising since they seem to have a pronounced fetish for fighting expensive land wars in Asia.
Anybody who wants a virgin has never had one.
Well, if you die for Allah fighting the unholy followers of Jehovah you get 72 perpetual virgins with all the incessent female nagging that comes with them. If you die for Jehovah fighting the unholy followers of Allah you get to wear a white man-dress, a hoop hat, a set of wings and then you get to spend a joyful eternity sitting on a cloud and playing a harp. I suppose it your agony of choice boils down to how much you like harp music.
Surely you can understand the difference between someone protesting, and someone trying to kill someone?
You would be amazed at how quickly one can morph into the other.
The others aren't just prepared to murder Wilders. They want to abolish democracy and replace it with sharia law, and kill the Untermenschen i.e. the unbelievers. I don't think fighting for freedom and democracy is as deplorable as fighting against it. Of course, there are many useful idiots who think they can live peacefully with islamists in the same country, believing that it we respect them, they'll respect us. Big mistake.
Geert Wilders seems to define every single moslem that walks this earth as a violent Islamist. That's about as stupid as claiming that every US American that walks this earth is a lyncing rope and shotgun carrying racist Ku Klux Klan member who spends his weekends thundering down the highway in a coal rolling pickup. Campaigning to have the Quran banned in the Netherlands because of the actions of a few militant Islamists is about as intelligent as campaigning to have the bible banned in the USA because of the actions of the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. There are and always will be useful morons who lap up the kind of mindless non-sense spouted by the likes of Geert Wilders and his polar opposites in the Islamist movement but they are all wrong. Anybody who takes an entire religion/ethnic-group/nationality and puts it in a drawer marked criminal/terrorist/sub-human/not-chosen-by-god or some other bullshit category like that has taken leave of their senses and that's phrasing it very, very politely.
This has been going on for tens of thousands of years, so while it matters, it isn't news.
Large size makes animals evolutionarily fragile and is often a dead end. They say, during the K-T event, no land animal larger than a cat survived.
Yes and it's no big deal either because it's not like it will take thousands of years for new species will evolve to replace the ones we kill off. The interesting thing is that while animals can sometimes wreck the ecosystem that supports them they aren't aware of the consequences of what they are doing. Humans on the other hand are fully aware of the fact that they are heading for a disaster due to heir behaviour but they still don't change their behaviour because they can't live without the short term benefits of their rapaciousness.
As a consequence this country is a withered husk of what it used to be.
That's a very good description ...
And what has Obama done with the national debt? Hmmmm?
I don't recall bringing Obama into this but since you have done that for me he is not what I'd call a competent president. However, ham-handed Obama may be he is also saddled with the legacy of what is arguably the biggest incompetent among a long sequence of incompentents evert to take up residence in the White House: Nixon, the blessed Saint Ronal Reagan, Bush the elder, Clinton, Bush the younger and now Obama. The last president the USA had that was worth his salt was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bush Jr. not only doubled the national debt he violated one of the longest standing axioms of US foreign policy 'never fight a land war in Asia' (and did not do it once, he did that twice), went on record as saying God had told him to do it and openly referred to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as crusades. That man is probably the biggest gift radical militant Islam has ever gotten. A man really has to be a special kind of moron to accomplish all that in his first term of office.
Does Sanders have any chance to become president? Bush and Clinton... been there, done that, both long term disasters.
At least Clinton left a balanced budget, Bush doubled the national debt.