Bring your own bags. Yes, I know it doesn't map well to the original question, but investing in three or four canvas grocery bags can save literally hundreds of paper or plastic bags over their lifetime.
So, nyah, there's a good solution to "paper or plastic".
Ah, but if it language-acquisition skills make it easy for kids to learn GUIs, then why don't they all become comfortable with CLIs?
After all, those are definitely a language---cat `locate bob-unique.conf`|grep FOOBAR most certainly expresses and order, unlike GUI elements, some of which may be declarative, not imperative, in function. (Information meant to be declarative in CLIs is nearly always translated into English first.)
True, but there's where the analogy breaks down. I keep seeing conflicting reports about the size of the problem space in question, but it seems to be utterly enormous. Even if the keyspace is searched in a non-overlapping way (e.g., if no two people get the same lottery ticket), it's still orders of magnitude too vast to be cracked, even on a distributed network, even with Moore's law, even with the cleverest algorithms we have.
Like I said, I'm vague about the problem's true size. But "enough participants" here would be more than the number of atoms in the planet...
In the only case where the 4'th amendment came to trial, it was ruled on a technicality that the bureaucrat can make that decision since "no reasonable person" would be aware of the 4'th amendment. (This decision is from the NY State Supreme Court in the 80's.)
That's an amazing claim. Care to back it up with a reference of some sort?
Statatistics[sic] aside, people still win the lottery.
Say we're talking about a state lottery, picking six numbers out of forty-four for the jackpot. That's about seven million possibilities, call that k. Thus, the probability of any one randomly-selected ticket being the winning one is 1/k, which we'll call p.
The probability of at least one ticket hitting the jackpot, with n tickets sold, is 1-(1-p)^n.
One million tickets sold: 13.2% chance of a winner.
Five million: 50.7% chance of a winner.
Ten million: 75.7% chance of a winner.
Twenty million: 94.1% chance of a winner.
These numbers are pretty plausible for a state lottery. To sum up: The chance of you winning the lottery is microscopic. The chance of someone winning the lottery is plausible, and even likely.
(Note that if, for instance, the jackpot is above about seven and a half million dollars, and usually only a million tickets are sold at $1 each, it makes sense to buy all seven million possible combinations. (The expected return value on the investment is greater than zero.) I'm told the Mafia used to do this in New Jersey.)
The US Government does NOT grant freedoms. The people have them by RIGHT. The people have granted (albeit altered by judicial fiat) the *government* limited, enumerated powers. That is all.
It's kind of creepy how no one seems to remember that part of the Declaration of Independence. Parts chopped off to make my point absolutely clear...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [...] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [...] That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
It's all there, in black and white, two hundred and twenty five years old.
Holy shit, that's the most amazing thing I've ever heard!
It's so amazing, in fact, that I'd really, really like to see some sort of evidence to back that up. It's an impressive claim; it deserves impressive proof.
Where thousands of the wealthiest and most powerful pay scads of money to celebrate anti-commercialism and equality. Gag me with a fucking spork; the hypocrisy is going to make my skin peel.
"They come in as newspaper men, trained to get the news and eager to get it; they end as tin-horn statesmen, full of dark secrets and unable to write the truth if they tried."
Ah, you clever boy... scoring a +1, Funny off of me. Good show.
Just in case I was fuzzy back there---I meant that not all smart people are geeks. ("Not all geeks are smart" is also, of course, true.) That the Jargon-file hacker property is, unfortunately, not present in all people with an IQ over 130. It would be nice, really, but it's just not so.
I'm not sure if you're kidding here or not, but the usage of Scoop (see Kuro5hin) tends to get you a much more usable signal-to-noise ration. For something like debating journal articles, I don't think AC posting is really necessary. Heck, comment moderation (apart from friends/foes, perhaps) wouldn't be that useful. But the nested discussion model (as opposed to the god-awful flat model that phpBB has (can someone explain why the hell it's so popular?!)) has its applications.
1) I should point out that if you google for "Ghimli", you get a "Did you mean: gimli". Googling: it ain't that hard.
2) Look, I'm sorry to sound sexist, but geek girls are hot. (Trust me - the smarter the girl, the better they shag.) So... true... but than again, "geek" isn't precisely the same thing as "smart". Correlated, yes, but not identical.
Saying that there are ghosts is meaningless unless you provide a way to disprove your theory. "I propose that x. We can check x by doing y."
If a theory can't be disproven, it's as useless as weapons inspections in Iraq. (No, really, check the analogy. If we find weapons, Saddam is evil. If we don't, he's hiding them, and so Saddam is evil. It's a meaningless exercise.)
This is the problem with parapsychology/ESP people. They put out theories that can't be disproven. I'm sure legit experimentation would be trivial to do if someone would formally define what they're looking for. Of course, then they'd have to deal with getting a null result back...
Tim McVeigh: YEAAARGH!! [explosion] The Left: Clearly, this is an indication that Tim McVeigh was a crazy asshole; his beliefs aren't even worth mentioning.
Now, eight years later...
Osama bin Laden: YEAAARGH!! [explosion] The Left: Clearly, this is an indication that the US drastically needs to rethink its foreign policy.
Wait, I'm confused. Why weren't McVeigh's actions reason enough to rethink our tax policy? Maybe if his goals were the same as the Left's, it'd be okay to run around backing his ideas.
(The correctness of these ideas is immaterial. I'm pointing out lies and hypocrisy in dealing with two analogous situations.)
Absolutely. I've tried to explain this to actual Trek fans who loved the movie, and failed miserably. "But... but they don't have a queen!" Heck, Q himself said it best in TNG 2x16, "Q Who":
You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them the essence of what they are still remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. They are relentless.
And while I'm at it, from the same episode, same character, maybe the best quote of the whole series:
If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go home and crawl under you bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous. With treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.
In my little world, the story of the Borg ended with "Descent". Nope, nothing after that. "First Contact" never bloody happened.
No, no, you get fucked on the shipping if you use eBay. Go to your local computer chop shop, or (better yet) a computer show---Cogan Fairs in New England, for instance---and pick them up for one or two bucks each.
Though, a buck each, including shipping, ain't bad.
The point is not about guns used as self-defense weapons, and I'm sorry I didn't make that clear. The point is that if every murder (remember, we're not talking self-defense here) that took place with a gun had to be done by beating the victim to death with a baseball bat, it would take a great deal more resolve to do it.
Guns, as weapons, cheapen death. When not used aggressively, it makes no difference how easily they kill, only how well they work to frighten, deter or (in the worst case) stop an assailant.
Slashdot Mirror
Bring your own bags. Yes, I know it doesn't map well to the original question, but investing in three or four canvas grocery bags can save literally hundreds of paper or plastic bags over their lifetime.
So, nyah, there's a good solution to "paper or plastic".
--grendel drago
Now we have premiscuous sex
I, Senator Horace W. Flywheel, promise to make our hot, slutty teenage daughters wait until after their first miscuous for sex!
Ah, but if it language-acquisition skills make it easy for kids to learn GUIs, then why don't they all become comfortable with CLIs?
After all, those are definitely a language---cat `locate bob-unique.conf`|grep FOOBAR most certainly expresses and order, unlike GUI elements, some of which may be declarative, not imperative, in function. (Information meant to be declarative in CLIs is nearly always translated into English first.)
--grendel drago
What the balls is an anger-based crime system?!
--grendel drago
Oh, we exist. And there are far, far too many of us to control, or to arrest, or to demonize.
Where have you been? It's like this on every college campus in the nation.
--grendel drago
True, but there's where the analogy breaks down. I keep seeing conflicting reports about the size of the problem space in question, but it seems to be utterly enormous. Even if the keyspace is searched in a non-overlapping way (e.g., if no two people get the same lottery ticket), it's still orders of magnitude too vast to be cracked, even on a distributed network, even with Moore's law, even with the cleverest algorithms we have.
Like I said, I'm vague about the problem's true size. But "enough participants" here would be more than the number of atoms in the planet...
--grendel drago
In the only case where the 4'th amendment came to trial, it was ruled on a technicality that the bureaucrat can make that decision since "no reasonable person" would be aware of the 4'th amendment. (This decision is from the NY State Supreme Court in the 80's.)
That's an amazing claim. Care to back it up with a reference of some sort?
--grendel drago
Statatistics[sic] aside, people still win the lottery.
Say we're talking about a state lottery, picking six numbers out of forty-four for the jackpot. That's about seven million possibilities, call that k. Thus, the probability of any one randomly-selected ticket being the winning one is 1/k, which we'll call p.
The probability of at least one ticket hitting the jackpot, with n tickets sold, is 1-(1-p)^n.
One million tickets sold: 13.2% chance of a winner.
Five million: 50.7% chance of a winner.
Ten million: 75.7% chance of a winner.
Twenty million: 94.1% chance of a winner.
These numbers are pretty plausible for a state lottery. To sum up: The chance of you winning the lottery is microscopic. The chance of someone winning the lottery is plausible, and even likely.
(Note that if, for instance, the jackpot is above about seven and a half million dollars, and usually only a million tickets are sold at $1 each, it makes sense to buy all seven million possible combinations. (The expected return value on the investment is greater than zero.) I'm told the Mafia used to do this in New Jersey.)
--grendel drago
The US Government does NOT grant freedoms. The people have them by RIGHT. The people have granted (albeit altered by judicial fiat) the *government* limited, enumerated powers. That is all.
It's kind of creepy how no one seems to remember that part of the Declaration of Independence. Parts chopped off to make my point absolutely clear...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [...] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [...] That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
It's all there, in black and white, two hundred and twenty five years old.
--grendel drago
Did the whole Whitewater nonsense result in a single felony conviction of any sort, on anyone?
--grendel drago
One-third of all US aid goes to Israel.
Holy shit, that's the most amazing thing I've ever heard!
It's so amazing, in fact, that I'd really, really like to see some sort of evidence to back that up. It's an impressive claim; it deserves impressive proof.
--grendel drago
Where thousands of the wealthiest and most powerful pay scads of money to celebrate anti-commercialism and equality. Gag me with a fucking spork; the hypocrisy is going to make my skin peel.
--grendel drago
"They come in as newspaper men, trained to get the news and eager to get it; they end as tin-horn statesmen, full of dark secrets and unable to write the truth if they tried."
--H.L. Mencken
Ah, you clever boy... scoring a +1, Funny off of me. Good show.
Just in case I was fuzzy back there---I meant that not all smart people are geeks. ("Not all geeks are smart" is also, of course, true.) That the Jargon-file hacker property is, unfortunately, not present in all people with an IQ over 130. It would be nice, really, but it's just not so.
--grendel drago
Slashdot as a model?
I'm not sure if you're kidding here or not, but the usage of Scoop (see Kuro5hin) tends to get you a much more usable signal-to-noise ration. For something like debating journal articles, I don't think AC posting is really necessary. Heck, comment moderation (apart from friends/foes, perhaps) wouldn't be that useful. But the nested discussion model (as opposed to the god-awful flat model that phpBB has (can someone explain why the hell it's so popular?!)) has its applications.
--grendel drago
1) I should point out that if you google for "Ghimli", you get a "Did you mean: gimli". Googling: it ain't that hard.
2) Look, I'm sorry to sound sexist, but geek girls are hot. (Trust me - the smarter the girl, the better they shag.) So... true... but than again, "geek" isn't precisely the same thing as "smart". Correlated, yes, but not identical.
--grendel drago
In his flowing white gowns and beard, Mr. Lee's warlock is a force to be reckoned with because he alone has a voice as commanding as Mr. McKellen's.
See, it's funny because it's true.
--grendel drago
Saying that there are ghosts is meaningless unless you provide a way to disprove your theory. "I propose that x. We can check x by doing y."
If a theory can't be disproven, it's as useless as weapons inspections in Iraq. (No, really, check the analogy. If we find weapons, Saddam is evil. If we don't, he's hiding them, and so Saddam is evil. It's a meaningless exercise.)
This is the problem with parapsychology/ESP people. They put out theories that can't be disproven. I'm sure legit experimentation would be trivial to do if someone would formally define what they're looking for. Of course, then they'd have to deal with getting a null result back...
--grendel drago
I think I'd want Ramanujan over Newton.
I thought he worked at a university with Thomas Hardy, anyway?
--grendel drago
The time: 1993. The place: America.
Tim McVeigh: YEAAARGH!!
[explosion]
The Left: Clearly, this is an indication that Tim McVeigh was a crazy asshole; his beliefs aren't even worth mentioning.
Now, eight years later...
Osama bin Laden: YEAAARGH!!
[explosion]
The Left: Clearly, this is an indication that the US drastically needs to rethink its foreign policy.
Wait, I'm confused. Why weren't McVeigh's actions reason enough to rethink our tax policy? Maybe if his goals were the same as the Left's, it'd be okay to run around backing his ideas.
(The correctness of these ideas is immaterial. I'm pointing out lies and hypocrisy in dealing with two analogous situations.)
--grendel drago
Enron execs have a hell of a lot more in common with James Taggart than with Hand Rearden.
Or maybe you were busy sniffing glue when Rand was trashing government-subsidized crony corporations for being a poor parody of an actual free market.
--grendel drago
There is no South Vietnam. Really. Try and show me it on the map.
--grendel drago
Absolutely. I've tried to explain this to actual Trek fans who loved the movie, and failed miserably. "But... but they don't have a queen!" Heck, Q himself said it best in TNG 2x16, "Q Who":
You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them the essence of what they are still remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. They are relentless.
And while I'm at it, from the same episode, same character, maybe the best quote of the whole series:
If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go home and crawl under you bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous. With treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.
In my little world, the story of the Borg ended with "Descent". Nope, nothing after that. "First Contact" never bloody happened.
--grendel drago
No, no, you get fucked on the shipping if you use eBay. Go to your local computer chop shop, or (better yet) a computer show---Cogan Fairs in New England, for instance---and pick them up for one or two bucks each.
Though, a buck each, including shipping, ain't bad.
--grendel drago
The point is not about guns used as self-defense weapons, and I'm sorry I didn't make that clear. The point is that if every murder (remember, we're not talking self-defense here) that took place with a gun had to be done by beating the victim to death with a baseball bat, it would take a great deal more resolve to do it.
Guns, as weapons, cheapen death. When not used aggressively, it makes no difference how easily they kill, only how well they work to frighten, deter or (in the worst case) stop an assailant.
--grendel drago