...if such a thing passes, am I the only one who sees a potential push for marriage laws to be adapted similarly?
Before you freak out totally, I'm not necessarily referring to anything involving humans in the mix, but think of such things as racehorse/purebred animal breeding and etc.
Could become one hell of a can of worms... (oh, wait, that brings up another thought - are worms eventually getting rights too?)
Metallica's big problem was, as you state, the massive slap-in-the-face they gave to their fanbase, certainly.
But, that little blunder was coupled with a series of albums that started effing awesome (e.g. Master of Puppets), to 'still pretty damned good' (Black/self-titled), to 'a little-bit-sucky-here-and-there' (Load), to wow-an-F5-tornado-couldn't-suck-this-hard (Re-Load), all the way down to 'Holy fuck! A supermassive black hole's event horizon couldn't keep up with this level of suckiness!' (St. Anger, etc).
Drones, on the other hand, are dreamt as a clean way to "do business", and highly likely to get used more and by everybody.
I don't think that many think of it as "clean", so much as they may think of it as "cheap". Instead of strapping a buttload of explosives to one's chest, you strap them to a remote-controlled device, and...
As expensive and technically tough as it is to make a nuclear weapon (and its delivery system!), even a small nuke can do a hell of a lot more damage in one go than even 1,000 drones can accomplish. Quake analogy? multiple blasters versus a given BFG (or rather, one very amped-up BFG).
There is also the fact that drones are still subject to interference, and that there is only so much room in the sky to hold a sufficient number of drones (to do the same damage as a nuke) on a practical level.
I honestly get that there is a huge potential for problems stemming from the use of drones-as-weapons, but unlike a 'fire-and-forget' ICBM/SRBM/SLBM*? The drone still has to call home, most have to get their instructions and updates from somewhere, a higher degree of accuracy is required, and as a practical matter they need sufficient safeguards built in to avoid having it turn around and attack its owner(s).
* note that I'm not even counting a missile (or any type) with a MIRV warhead.
Its worse than this. Many of them are using Mac's.
Devil's Advocate: At least a Mac gives the kid access to a proper UNIX shell ("Terminal") and a free dev kit (to obviously make more than iOS apps). Unless you can sneak a copy of Cygwin onto it, there's no such hope for a default Windows box.
The only thing you get with Windows (assuming it's not the "Home" edition) is PowerShell, which by comparison ain't much.
where you can find people willing to do mercenary work
I suspect that up to half of them are bogus, and the other half are likely scams. What's left is probably well out of Interpol jurisdiction, let alone that of the FBI (or RCMP, or {insert European national police force here} ), since you're probably going to do it in the borders of some craphole nation already torn asunder by civil war or rebellion.
Dunno - given the sheer number of cultures that the Mongols absorbed, there's likely something in there somewhere (even Orthodox or Nestorian if you want to stay Christian about the artifact in question.)
As a bonus, instead of Nazis**, he could hunt it down before the Japanese Army gets it (given that they started invading China and Mongolia as early as the mid-1930s), or if you want to make minds go 'splodey, get it before the Red Army does, and have it be the (way) earliest bit of Cold War action.
** incidentally, the Nazis did launch a real-world expedition into Tibet and roundabouts looking for the whole racial origin thing, so they'd work as bad guys too, depending on what specific region in Asia we're talking about (though Khan's tomb would likely no longer be of much relevance, methinks.)
1) Non-interventionism was US foreign policy for most of its life
Err, the Monroe Doctrine sort of began tearing that apart when the United States was barely 40 years old.
I suspect you were thinking of isolationist policies concerning WWI (and the earliest parts of WWII) - but we already owned the Philippines by then due to the Spanish-American War.:/
The problem is that all of our coastal infrastructure is built around existing sea levels.
Not exactly true... a huge chunk of San Francisco was built up *out* of the water via landfill and similar means; same with parts of Manhattan, Hong Kong, Tokyo's waterfront (and a whole airport), and as you partially mention - huge swaths of Holland.
Overall, all this prediction of doom&gloom over a 2m rise in sea levels just means that those low-lying areas will build up by 2m. Well, that is, if things actually get to that point. Extrapolating from previous measurements, I strongly suspect that you'd be hard-pressed to get even 0.3m of sea-rise.
In many states, if you post a bond ($10k or so I think?), you don't have to carry car insurance. Park the money somewhere that gains steady interest, post it from there, and let it grow instead of paying some entity to say they have you covered?
The total cost is usually the same. We are just splitting the currency of the Cost. There is Cost in United States of America Standard Dollars, and the cost in loss in privacy.
I did notice one other cost...
My wife had one of those devices in her car (the State Farm one, not Progressive) - I borrowed her car for travel (mine gets better mileage, so she used it instead), and I parked it at airport long-term parking. I came back two weeks later to find the battery completely dead. Everything in the car was off, except for that stupid fob sticking out of the under-dash ECM port. I called the company's support number for it, who was nice enough to say (post facto) that yeah, you shouldn't leave it plugged in if your car is parked for more than a couple of days.
Currently, the damned thing is sitting in the glove box, where it belongs - I'll send it back later.
TL;DR: I'd rather pay the extra $5/mo on the insurance than pony up $75 for a battery jump at a near-empty airport parking lot late on a Tuesday night.
Are you kidding? With the right lawyer (or DA, or even consumer protection agency), it's a great way for her to eviscerate kleargear.com for fraudulent practice.
The stupid 'you can't say we ripped you off even if we do, nyah nyah' clause that kleargear.com chucked into their site is patently unenforceable. It's like my dumbassed last employer who tried to force everyone laid off to sign a 'non-disparagement' clause, holding their severence pay ransom unless they did. (one phone call to my own lawyer right there in the office stopped that BS cold.)
By the way, it wouldn't take much to dispute the "fine" with the reporting agencies, either.
As for the negative publicity? Is the old fuckedcompany.com still running? I don't feel much like tickling the company proxy here to find out...
"Connected to incest is any sexual abuse perpetrated by adults on children or adolescents entrusted to their care. The offense is compounded by the scandalous harm done to the physical and moral integrity of the young, who will remain scarred by it all their lives; and the violation of responsibility for their upbringing."
Also, consider that even without that specific prohibition, child marriage is (and has pretty much always been) prohibited, as is sex outside of marriage. Combined, it covers things neatly.
"Religion does not cause poverty and misery." telling people to keep copulating and having children or they won't get a place in their heaven causes a lot of poverty and misery.
Wow - did you read the Bible while standing on your head or something? Nowhere outside of one Old Testament reference ("be fruitful and multiply", which was a *blessing*, not a commandment) can you find any such thing.
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...if such a thing passes, am I the only one who sees a potential push for marriage laws to be adapted similarly?
Before you freak out totally, I'm not necessarily referring to anything involving humans in the mix, but think of such things as racehorse/purebred animal breeding and etc.
Could become one hell of a can of worms... (oh, wait, that brings up another thought - are worms eventually getting rights too?)
This, right here, with one addendum:
Metallica's big problem was, as you state, the massive slap-in-the-face they gave to their fanbase, certainly.
But, that little blunder was coupled with a series of albums that started effing awesome (e.g. Master of Puppets), to 'still pretty damned good' (Black/self-titled), to 'a little-bit-sucky-here-and-there' (Load), to wow-an-F5-tornado-couldn't-suck-this-hard (Re-Load), all the way down to 'Holy fuck! A supermassive black hole's event horizon couldn't keep up with this level of suckiness!' (St. Anger, etc).
Drones, on the other hand, are dreamt as a clean way to "do business", and highly likely to get used more and by everybody.
I don't think that many think of it as "clean", so much as they may think of it as "cheap". Instead of strapping a buttload of explosives to one's chest, you strap them to a remote-controlled device, and...
Well, there is one other small difference:
As expensive and technically tough as it is to make a nuclear weapon (and its delivery system!), even a small nuke can do a hell of a lot more damage in one go than even 1,000 drones can accomplish. Quake analogy? multiple blasters versus a given BFG (or rather, one very amped-up BFG).
There is also the fact that drones are still subject to interference, and that there is only so much room in the sky to hold a sufficient number of drones (to do the same damage as a nuke) on a practical level.
I honestly get that there is a huge potential for problems stemming from the use of drones-as-weapons, but unlike a 'fire-and-forget' ICBM/SRBM/SLBM*? The drone still has to call home, most have to get their instructions and updates from somewhere, a higher degree of accuracy is required, and as a practical matter they need sufficient safeguards built in to avoid having it turn around and attack its owner(s).
* note that I'm not even counting a missile (or any type) with a MIRV warhead.
Its worse than this. Many of them are using Mac's.
Devil's Advocate: At least a Mac gives the kid access to a proper UNIX shell ("Terminal") and a free dev kit (to obviously make more than iOS apps). Unless you can sneak a copy of Cygwin onto it, there's no such hope for a default Windows box.
The only thing you get with Windows (assuming it's not the "Home" edition) is PowerShell, which by comparison ain't much.
where you can find people willing to do mercenary work
I suspect that up to half of them are bogus, and the other half are likely scams. What's left is probably well out of Interpol jurisdiction, let alone that of the FBI (or RCMP, or {insert European national police force here} ), since you're probably going to do it in the borders of some craphole nation already torn asunder by civil war or rebellion.
If you believe you are safe, think again.
Oh, it gets worse than that... much, much worse...
Is that something similar to Bitcoins?
One day it may well be - but with the individual being his/her own bank instead of paying for some other entity to store the stuff.
Dunno - given the sheer number of cultures that the Mongols absorbed, there's likely something in there somewhere (even Orthodox or Nestorian if you want to stay Christian about the artifact in question.)
As a bonus, instead of Nazis**, he could hunt it down before the Japanese Army gets it (given that they started invading China and Mongolia as early as the mid-1930s), or if you want to make minds go 'splodey, get it before the Red Army does, and have it be the (way) earliest bit of Cold War action.
** incidentally, the Nazis did launch a real-world expedition into Tibet and roundabouts looking for the whole racial origin thing, so they'd work as bad guys too, depending on what specific region in Asia we're talking about (though Khan's tomb would likely no longer be of much relevance, methinks.)
1) Non-interventionism was US foreign policy for most of its life
Err, the Monroe Doctrine sort of began tearing that apart when the United States was barely 40 years old.
I suspect you were thinking of isolationist policies concerning WWI (and the earliest parts of WWII) - but we already owned the Philippines by then due to the Spanish-American War. :/
"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"
"Your winnings, Sir..."
The problem is that all of our coastal infrastructure is built around existing sea levels.
Not exactly true... a huge chunk of San Francisco was built up *out* of the water via landfill and similar means; same with parts of Manhattan, Hong Kong, Tokyo's waterfront (and a whole airport), and as you partially mention - huge swaths of Holland.
Overall, all this prediction of doom&gloom over a 2m rise in sea levels just means that those low-lying areas will build up by 2m. Well, that is, if things actually get to that point. Extrapolating from previous measurements, I strongly suspect that you'd be hard-pressed to get even 0.3m of sea-rise.
The concept on Android of listing app permissions is a good one - although it needs to be MUCH more detailed...
Considering that way too many of them seem to want access to damned near everything...
In many states, if you post a bond ($10k or so I think?), you don't have to carry car insurance. Park the money somewhere that gains steady interest, post it from there, and let it grow instead of paying some entity to say they have you covered?
The total cost is usually the same. We are just splitting the currency of the Cost.
There is Cost in United States of America Standard Dollars, and the cost in loss in privacy.
I did notice one other cost...
My wife had one of those devices in her car (the State Farm one, not Progressive) - I borrowed her car for travel (mine gets better mileage, so she used it instead), and I parked it at airport long-term parking. I came back two weeks later to find the battery completely dead. Everything in the car was off, except for that stupid fob sticking out of the under-dash ECM port. I called the company's support number for it, who was nice enough to say (post facto) that yeah, you shouldn't leave it plugged in if your car is parked for more than a couple of days.
Currently, the damned thing is sitting in the glove box, where it belongs - I'll send it back later.
TL;DR: I'd rather pay the extra $5/mo on the insurance than pony up $75 for a battery jump at a near-empty airport parking lot late on a Tuesday night.
Are you kidding? With the right lawyer (or DA, or even consumer protection agency), it's a great way for her to eviscerate kleargear.com for fraudulent practice.
The stupid 'you can't say we ripped you off even if we do, nyah nyah' clause that kleargear.com chucked into their site is patently unenforceable. It's like my dumbassed last employer who tried to force everyone laid off to sign a 'non-disparagement' clause, holding their severence pay ransom unless they did. (one phone call to my own lawyer right there in the office stopped that BS cold.)
By the way, it wouldn't take much to dispute the "fine" with the reporting agencies, either.
As for the negative publicity? Is the old fuckedcompany.com still running? I don't feel much like tickling the company proxy here to find out...
An eyesore to ruin the moon with ads that you can't avoid and can be seen by everyone on Earth and can't be removed because...they own it.
You have no idea how frickin' BIG the Moon is, do you?
The amount of material and energy required to make something on it big enough to be visible from Earth would be way too prohibitive.
Here: let me help you a bit...
I also don't think Ayn Rand was talking about Venezuela, or that most of her detractors would support a government take over of Best Buy...
Why take over BestBuy when they're too busy at the moment trying to consume the entire US healthcare (and related insurance) industry?
It's usually the first that comes to mind (and is the largest globally by population), but very few others actually require one to pump out kids.
I'm curious where this actually comes up in Catholic dogma.
It's in the catechism itself (look for item 2389, halfway down the page) :
"Connected to incest is any sexual abuse perpetrated by adults on children or adolescents entrusted to their care. The offense is compounded by the scandalous harm done to the physical and moral integrity of the young, who will remain scarred by it all their lives; and the violation of responsibility for their upbringing."
Also, consider that even without that specific prohibition, child marriage is (and has pretty much always been) prohibited, as is sex outside of marriage. Combined, it covers things neatly.
Mao Zedong's One Child Policy and the resultant selective abortion of girls (due to cultural preference towards boys) stands out as an example...
This is what I keyed off of (which is, incidentally, what your Wikipedia cite refers to).
I'm thinking that someone at Wikipedia was more or less asleep at the switch. ;)
Try again. He's shed a large chunk of his wealth into charity.
Tax write-offs are beautiful things, ain't they?
I'll believe the philanthropy when he puts all but a maybe one or two million bucks into charity (and even then only to live off that as a pension).
Until then he's no different from any other human who craves headlines, relevance, and most of all, influence.
"Religion does not cause poverty and misery."
telling people to keep copulating and having children or they won't get a place in their heaven causes a lot of poverty and misery.
Wow - did you read the Bible while standing on your head or something? Nowhere outside of one Old Testament reference ("be fruitful and multiply", which was a *blessing*, not a commandment) can you find any such thing.
Actually...
The KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) did the external spying, while the NKVD (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del) did the internal stuff.