... or it's an easy way to "Terminate" California's budget problems:
Have California, along with the "underwater" housing literally slide underwater into the ocean, along with the debtors, the expenses of maintaining the infrastructure, the political, social, and financial problems dealing with illegals, etc.
PROFIT! - Get disaster relief funding
Think of it - land that was inland now becomes beach-front property... how much of that land does Google have options on?
Tak about a bogus piece of shit "study" to fudge results - cherry-picking, invalid assumptions that pretty much guarantee you get the results you want, etc.
The simple fact is that, per passenger-mile, airplanes generate 50% more fatalities - and if you want to cherry-pick, I can do the same: if you use only interstate highway travel, aviation generates 300% more fatalities per passenger-mile.
Get over it, and your wrong assumptions, already. You were wrong in your original claim of "by any metric". Just admit it and go troll elsewhere.
It is true that they can't REQUIRE you to provide your SSN, but it is equally as true that they are not REQUIRED to do business with you if you don't.
Actually, they are required to do business without you providing an SSN. Document their request (a mini tape recorder works fine, and, contrary to TV shows, is admissible as evidence), then complain about the abuse and misuse of SSN information, while pulling the tape recorder out and continuing to record. You'd be surprised at how fast people lose their officious self-important little Hitler "we got rulz" attitude when they know you're recording.
Of course, most people are just sheeples and will just give it up, in which case you get what you deserve.
The simple fact is that, per passenger mile, airplanes have a higher, not lower, risk. The footnote is an incorrect interpretation using a wrong-headed definition of "passenger mile", as can be verified elsewhere if you took the time.
Your 2 persons per car and 200 per plane doesn't reduce the risk by 100. In fact, over long drives, cars are much safer than airlines on a per passenger per mile basis (over 4x safer) since most accidents happen on local streets, not highways, which are much safer.
"Is there a cellphone provider that doesn't require you to provide your SSN before signing up for a contract?"
Considering that, by law, only employers, banks (on interest-bearing accounts only), and "the gubbemint" are allowed to REQUIRE that you divulge your SSN...
Point it out, and give other government-issued photo id, like a drivers' license...
BTW, up here in Kanuckistan, you're not asked for your number even for a long-term contract - just a drivers' license is fine - they can do a credit check based solely on that, so yes, there are.
Want your identity stolen? Hand out your SSN to everyone who asks for it like a good little prole^Wcitizen.
And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use."
Plain ASCII. The shorter and faster it is, the more joy it is to use.
What can compare to the joy and speed of, for example, the command "Go fuck yourself!"
Even shorter and faster syntax: the command "F.U.!"
And for conciseness of comments - "SHIT!" and "oops!" and "WTF???"
Looping constructs: "Sit on it and rotate!"
If-else constructs: "Dat so? F.U. 2!"
foreach: "You, your mamma, and the horse you rode into town on!"
It's like those studies that found out that, under the right circumstances, EVERYTHING causes cancer in lab rats.
All the airport food is going to do (by its' high price and low quality) is remind you that you're STUCK IN A DAMN AIRPORT.
In a related survey - "70% of people surveyed prefered New Coke - the other 30% chose airport food, broken glass, or suicide." It all depends on how you ask the question.
How much longer before a chihuahua can't breed with *any* other dog currently listed as the same species? Won't it happen eventually?
Domestic turkeys can't breed without human intervention - but they CAN breed with the help of humans, same as chihuahuas can (and have) been bred with large dogs when given a "helping hand" or "a leg up".
There's no such thing as a "pure-bred dog" - every single so-called "pure breed" is a mutt. The kennel clubs perpetuate the myth of "pure blood lines" because there's $$$ and ego in doing so. It's not like you can't get a phony "pure-bred" registration for a dog - as an experiment, people even registered CATS as "pure-bred dogs." Time magazine published an expose on this a couple of decades ago - your "breeding papers" would be better used to toilet-train the puppy than as any sort of guarantee of anything. And no, nothing has changed in the intervening years... it's still a crock of horse manure that promotes cruelty to animals, puppy mills, reinforcement of bad genes, etc.
... and then there was the court case where a guy had to pay damages because he thought it would be funny to breed his chihuahua with the neighbor's great dane. And no, not all chihuahuas fit in a teacup... feed them and they'll grow to more than 10 pounds - some even to 15 pounds or more.
Our first wolf/dog "cross" (wolf/shepherd) was as friendly as any dog could be - unless you were drunk, in which case, you couldn't enter the house.
So, what differentiates them from dogs? The webbed paws? Newfies and other dogs also have webbed feet. The shyness towards humans? Lots of dogs are afraid of anyone but their owners.
Scientific American should have kept that article for their April Fools edition. Proposing to lie to beat creationists is stooping to their level - it embodies neither the idealism of science or the honesty previous generations of Americans expected as a matter of course.
It's good to see people finally starting to grok that emergent behaviour is to be expected when you take simple systems and combine them in unusual ways. It's been one of those themes in science fiction for decades that has been validated by simulations starting in the 1970s.
Sorry that I can't take much longer to reply - got a ton of stuff to do today (touring a hosting facility that I contracted with at 2 in the morning is just one of those "things" - they answer their phones at 2 am, and they're local - I'm sold).
Fair enough, but if you've ever tried to get a hd caddy for a laptop from the manufacturer, their stance is counter-intuitive. You'd think that they'd want to sell them and make some money, instead of making them impossible to get. Maybe they're thinking that, if people can't throw in a second drive, they'll just buy a new laptop, but it doesn't work that way nowadays. It's easy for anyone to change hard drives, add a second one if there's space for it (flip over the case - if it's a 17" you should see a second drive bay), and upgrade memory.
And any geek should be able to McGiver something that works out of duct tape or a few soda-pop/beer can pull tabs.
How much energy does one obtain from burning a heretic?
A: Are you volunteering?
A2: 20 health points and the cloak of sinister darkness level 4.
A3: Like sex, it depends. Consensual sex, 300-600 calories. Non-consensual, a lot more.
A4: Burning a heretic is an endothermic reaction. It takes more energy for the crowd to burn the heretic than is released by the heretic combining with oxygen.
A5: None. He spontaneously combusts.
A6: None, officer. He spontaneously combusted. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!
A7: Are you saying people don't spontaneously combust, you heretic?
A8: First, you have to make sure he's really a heretic. Weigh him down with chains and cinder blocks, and throw him in the river. If he floats, burn him!
A9: Tell him you don't give a sh*t about what they have to say. This gets them to do a slow burn.
A10: Stick them in a locked room with RMS. He'll set himself on fire.
There is no place for personality in chemistry, and to quote Jacques Barzun, "nor does science touch human beings directly through affirmations about ethics, religion, art, politics, history, and the cosmos--affirmations that must be believed and felt before they can affect life."
Barzun is quite simply wrong. To take the first example - ethics - what we call "right and wrong" have a genetic component. Darwin is at work here. Our sense of right keeps us from doing things that would terminate the species. Picture two sets of parents - one that has more of a sense of "right", and so doesn't kill their offspring the first time they piss them off, or abandon them. Which parents will still have their genes in the gene pool a few generations later? Eventually, almost all the offspring in each generation are genetically programmed to be more "caring".
Here again we agree. I do not see a place for forced acceptance of religious doctrine, nor do I think policies should be written on account of it. Having said that, why is science any less of a crutch than religion? I am not trying to equate the two but merely the drive behind them: I think we can agree that they are both attempts to make sense of existence. You can despise religion all you like and make reasoned arguments against its correctness, but it is wrong to say that what drives men to perform science is any different. This again is not to demean the significant benefits brought to us through scientific practice, only to recognize that it is the self-made purpose and desire for order that drives us in either direction.
Religion is ultimately about power, control over others, even if the practitioners don't realize it in themselves (but boy oh boy, they can sure recognize it in competing religions). There's a survival benefit, because you now have a "clan" that you belong to, so we are genetically self-selected to want to belong to a clan or pack or group - religion is just a dysfunctional response to that, same as allergies are a dysfunctional response of the immune system.
Having said that, science can also be perverted to tell us how to run our lives in ways that are ultimately harmful to us. A good example is how we spend more money on cures than prevention. We know that simple hand-washing would prevent most colds and flus from spreading, but we push drugs instead, because that's where the money is. Consider this - surveys show that 23% of people don't wash their hands after going to the toilet, and 91% pick their noses (just look in the car next to you at red lights). Nice way to spread germs. Maybe if humans weren't pigs, we wouldn't have to worry about the swine flu so much?
But no, it's easier to recommend drugs, travel restrictions, and face masks (the health equivalent of "security theatre"), rather than possibly offend people by running ads saying "STOP PICKING YOUR NOSE!" or "A RUNNY NOSE IS LIKE A ZIT. YOU KEEP PICKING IT, IT WON'T GO AWAY!"
Interestingly enough, there's a gender bias around hand-washing. Almost half of all women wash their hands after using the toilet, but almost no men.
"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." There are behaviors of the whole system or organism that are not manifested by any of its constituent parts and cannot be fully understood through the study of those parts."
You don't get the building by studying the individual pieces of wood, the pallets of bricks, and spools of copper wiring either. Or an airplane by studying nuts, bolts, rivets, plastic, and unformed sheet metal panels. Or even the number 42 by studying just the numbers "4" and "2". Consider a hydro dam. The river, by itself, won't generate electricity. Neither will the dam, nor the generators. However, put them all together, and you have something new - electrical power from gravity acting on water.
This the place, because Alienware isn't the only one. How else are you going to find out you don't need the caddy if you don't ask on places like slashdot? I couldn't buy a 2nd hard drive caddy for my HP laptop - the part seems to exist, but nobody can convince HP to sell it - they want to bundle it with a 2nd hard drive or some such nonsense.
However, the fix is $5. Just buy ONLY the connector ($5 from various online suppliers). The drive doesn't need a caddy - the caddy is made out of such thin sheet metal because even the thickness of a piece of electrical tape will be enough to wedge the drive firmly in place in its' bay. I ran with 2 hard drives for months - without even the tape - before tracking down a caddy from a similar model.
The caddy only hold the drive in place - and since it's such a tight fit anyway, you'll find that if you just buy the connector (you can get 2 for $20 pretty much anywhere - even feeBay), you'll be okay.
I ran my 2nd drive in my laptop for months with just the connector. If you're worried about it moving, a piece of electrical tape makes a good shim.
You reference God killing but show him as though he is a HUMAN killing, but he is not he created you he can end you. That is the point with suicide, murder, abortion etc God created you he and he ALONE chooses the time of your death, no human has the power to end his or another's life you do not 'own' you life God your creator does NOT you.
No wonder god is such a jerk - look at the people he hangs around with.
Seriously, get your head out of your god's crotch. Acts of cruelty "in god's name", as depicted in the bible, are never justifiable. Fortunately, it's all just superstition - heaven wouldn't be heaven with asshats like you and your master in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of it - land that was inland now becomes beach-front property ... how much of that land does Google have options on?
"That's not really the same thing, that was classifying human remains via the rough shape of the skull."
Easy enough ... dead man, dead man, dead man, live WHACK oops, dead man, ...
The simple fact is that, per passenger-mile, airplanes generate 50% more fatalities - and if you want to cherry-pick, I can do the same: if you use only interstate highway travel, aviation generates 300% more fatalities per passenger-mile.
Get over it, and your wrong assumptions, already. You were wrong in your original claim of "by any metric". Just admit it and go troll elsewhere.
Actually, they are required to do business without you providing an SSN. Document their request (a mini tape recorder works fine, and, contrary to TV shows, is admissible as evidence), then complain about the abuse and misuse of SSN information, while pulling the tape recorder out and continuing to record. You'd be surprised at how fast people lose their officious self-important little Hitler "we got rulz" attitude when they know you're recording.
Of course, most people are just sheeples and will just give it up, in which case you get what you deserve.
The simple fact is that, per passenger mile, airplanes have a higher, not lower, risk. The footnote is an incorrect interpretation using a wrong-headed definition of "passenger mile", as can be verified elsewhere if you took the time.
Your 2 persons per car and 200 per plane doesn't reduce the risk by 100. In fact, over long drives, cars are much safer than airlines on a per passenger per mile basis (over 4x safer) since most accidents happen on local streets, not highways, which are much safer.
Nyet, comrade citizen - we now implement, with the cooperation of the Department of Motherland^WHomeland Security, much improved system.
No more problems with legal delays, corrupt judges and juries, expensive lawyers, or overcrowded prisons.
Smile, comrade citizen ... in Soviet Amerika, camera shoots YOU!
This is North America ...
"flying is statistically much safer than driving by any metric you care to use (per mile traveled,"
Any metric? Absolutely FALSE! Per passenger-mile:
for those who insist on drinking the aviation industry's safety "kook"-aid:
Per passenger-mile, airplanes are 50% MORE fatal ...
"Is there a cellphone provider that doesn't require you to provide your SSN before signing up for a contract?"
Considering that, by law, only employers, banks (on interest-bearing accounts only), and "the gubbemint" are allowed to REQUIRE that you divulge your SSN ...
Point it out, and give other government-issued photo id, like a drivers' license ...
BTW, up here in Kanuckistan, you're not asked for your number even for a long-term contract - just a drivers' license is fine - they can do a credit check based solely on that, so yes, there are.
Want your identity stolen? Hand out your SSN to everyone who asks for it like a good little prole^Wcitizen.
Certainly a lot more readable than some of the perl I've seen ... :-)
"That might just be the funniest thing I have ever read on slashdot. "
Thanks, but I think I was in better form when I wrote this -> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148847&cid=12478032
And finally, in the bottom left corner you would find probably nothing, since this is the space of the ideal language, the one which is at the same time fast and short and a joy to use."
Plain ASCII. The shorter and faster it is, the more joy it is to use.
What can compare to the joy and speed of, for example, the command "Go fuck yourself!"
Even shorter and faster syntax: the command "F.U.!"
And for conciseness of comments - "SHIT!" and "oops!" and "WTF???"
Looping constructs: "Sit on it and rotate!"
If-else constructs: "Dat so? F.U. 2!"
foreach: "You, your mamma, and the horse you rode into town on!"
Exit statements : Just fuck off!"
c-style assertions: "Eat shit and DIE!"
#defines: "#define YOU One dumb motherfucka"
conditional #includes "#ifdef YO_MAMMA"
real-time peremption: "I OWN you, beotch!"
The "breed standards" and "pedigree" papers are a crock. All dogs are the same breed or race. Same as all humans.
It's like those studies that found out that, under the right circumstances, EVERYTHING causes cancer in lab rats.
All the airport food is going to do (by its' high price and low quality) is remind you that you're STUCK IN A DAMN AIRPORT.
In a related survey - "70% of people surveyed prefered New Coke - the other 30% chose airport food, broken glass, or suicide." It all depends on how you ask the question.
How much longer before a chihuahua can't breed with *any* other dog currently listed as the same species? Won't it happen eventually?
Domestic turkeys can't breed without human intervention - but they CAN breed with the help of humans, same as chihuahuas can (and have) been bred with large dogs when given a "helping hand" or "a leg up".
There's no such thing as a "pure-bred dog" - every single so-called "pure breed" is a mutt. The kennel clubs perpetuate the myth of "pure blood lines" because there's $$$ and ego in doing so. It's not like you can't get a phony "pure-bred" registration for a dog - as an experiment, people even registered CATS as "pure-bred dogs." Time magazine published an expose on this a couple of decades ago - your "breeding papers" would be better used to toilet-train the puppy than as any sort of guarantee of anything. And no, nothing has changed in the intervening years ... it's still a crock of horse manure that promotes cruelty to animals, puppy mills, reinforcement of bad genes, etc.
Our first wolf/dog "cross" (wolf/shepherd) was as friendly as any dog could be - unless you were drunk, in which case, you couldn't enter the house.
So, what differentiates them from dogs? The webbed paws? Newfies and other dogs also have webbed feet. The shyness towards humans? Lots of dogs are afraid of anyone but their owners.
Scientific American should have kept that article for their April Fools edition. Proposing to lie to beat creationists is stooping to their level - it embodies neither the idealism of science or the honesty previous generations of Americans expected as a matter of course.
techno handbag music?
"handbag" - "put your hand on your bags ..." you get the idea. Music that some jerk-off made.
Though "techno handbag" seems kind of redundant ...
Can't I just keep the CD blank?
You can download the whole CD here: ftp://127.0.0.1/blank_dc.mp3
If someone else has already grabbed the copy, you can always recreate the original on that machine.
If you're a Windows user, just open up a command prompt and type "deltree /y c:/*" and press ENTER.
Sorry that I can't take much longer to reply - got a ton of stuff to do today (touring a hosting facility that I contracted with at 2 in the morning is just one of those "things" - they answer their phones at 2 am, and they're local - I'm sold).
And any geek should be able to McGiver something that works out of duct tape or a few soda-pop/beer can pull tabs.
How much energy does one obtain from burning a heretic?
A: Are you volunteering?
A2: 20 health points and the cloak of sinister darkness level 4.
A3: Like sex, it depends. Consensual sex, 300-600 calories. Non-consensual, a lot more.
A4: Burning a heretic is an endothermic reaction. It takes more energy for the crowd to burn the heretic than is released by the heretic combining with oxygen.
A5: None. He spontaneously combusts.
A6: None, officer. He spontaneously combusted. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!
A7: Are you saying people don't spontaneously combust, you heretic?
A8: First, you have to make sure he's really a heretic. Weigh him down with chains and cinder blocks, and throw him in the river. If he floats, burn him!
A9: Tell him you don't give a sh*t about what they have to say. This gets them to do a slow burn.
A10: Stick them in a locked room with RMS. He'll set himself on fire.
There is no place for personality in chemistry, and to quote Jacques Barzun, "nor does science touch human beings directly through affirmations about ethics, religion, art, politics, history, and the cosmos--affirmations that must be believed and felt before they can affect life."
Barzun is quite simply wrong. To take the first example - ethics - what we call "right and wrong" have a genetic component. Darwin is at work here. Our sense of right keeps us from doing things that would terminate the species. Picture two sets of parents - one that has more of a sense of "right", and so doesn't kill their offspring the first time they piss them off, or abandon them. Which parents will still have their genes in the gene pool a few generations later? Eventually, almost all the offspring in each generation are genetically programmed to be more "caring".
Here again we agree. I do not see a place for forced acceptance of religious doctrine, nor do I think policies should be written on account of it. Having said that, why is science any less of a crutch than religion? I am not trying to equate the two but merely the drive behind them: I think we can agree that they are both attempts to make sense of existence. You can despise religion all you like and make reasoned arguments against its correctness, but it is wrong to say that what drives men to perform science is any different. This again is not to demean the significant benefits brought to us through scientific practice, only to recognize that it is the self-made purpose and desire for order that drives us in either direction.
Religion is ultimately about power, control over others, even if the practitioners don't realize it in themselves (but boy oh boy, they can sure recognize it in competing religions). There's a survival benefit, because you now have a "clan" that you belong to, so we are genetically self-selected to want to belong to a clan or pack or group - religion is just a dysfunctional response to that, same as allergies are a dysfunctional response of the immune system.
Having said that, science can also be perverted to tell us how to run our lives in ways that are ultimately harmful to us. A good example is how we spend more money on cures than prevention. We know that simple hand-washing would prevent most colds and flus from spreading, but we push drugs instead, because that's where the money is. Consider this - surveys show that 23% of people don't wash their hands after going to the toilet, and 91% pick their noses (just look in the car next to you at red lights). Nice way to spread germs. Maybe if humans weren't pigs, we wouldn't have to worry about the swine flu so much?
But no, it's easier to recommend drugs, travel restrictions, and face masks (the health equivalent of "security theatre"), rather than possibly offend people by running ads saying "STOP PICKING YOUR NOSE!" or "A RUNNY NOSE IS LIKE A ZIT. YOU KEEP PICKING IT, IT WON'T GO AWAY!"
Interestingly enough, there's a gender bias around hand-washing. Almost half of all women wash their hands after using the toilet, but almost no men.
"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." There are behaviors of the whole system or organism that are not manifested by any of its constituent parts and cannot be fully understood through the study of those parts."
You don't get the building by studying the individual pieces of wood, the pallets of bricks, and spools of copper wiring either. Or an airplane by studying nuts, bolts, rivets, plastic, and unformed sheet metal panels. Or even the number 42 by studying just the numbers "4" and "2". Consider a hydro dam. The river, by itself, won't generate electricity. Neither will the dam, nor the generators. However, put them all together, and you have something new - electrical power from gravity acting on water.
When you study a system, you look not only at
However, the fix is $5. Just buy ONLY the connector ($5 from various online suppliers). The drive doesn't need a caddy - the caddy is made out of such thin sheet metal because even the thickness of a piece of electrical tape will be enough to wedge the drive firmly in place in its' bay. I ran with 2 hard drives for months - without even the tape - before tracking down a caddy from a similar model.
The caddy only hold the drive in place - and since it's such a tight fit anyway, you'll find that if you just buy the connector (you can get 2 for $20 pretty much anywhere - even feeBay), you'll be okay.
I ran my 2nd drive in my laptop for months with just the connector. If you're worried about it moving, a piece of electrical tape makes a good shim.
You reference God killing but show him as though he is a HUMAN killing, but he is not he created you he can end you. That is the point with suicide, murder, abortion etc God created you he and he ALONE chooses the time of your death, no human has the power to end his or another's life you do not 'own' you life God your creator does NOT you.
No wonder god is such a jerk - look at the people he hangs around with.
Seriously, get your head out of your god's crotch. Acts of cruelty "in god's name", as depicted in the bible, are never justifiable. Fortunately, it's all just superstition - heaven wouldn't be heaven with asshats like you and your master in it.