Just the like the millenium bug... it was just a scam to pay all those greedy programmers and consultants to 'fix' all those 2-character date fields that were actually perfectly good, way back in '99 (yes, it was only -88 years ago - it seems much longer!)
Oh yeah, that 3000 foot ice cliff is a worry alright - in those alternative universes in which the world isn't warming. I wish those alternative Earth-dwellers the best of luck in digging up all the fossil fuel they can find, and burning it in enormous bonfires. Meanwhile in our own universe... not so much. Perhaps we should consider saving some of that fossil carbon for when we really do need it.
Why, we could solve crime across the world today if only we lifted the prohibition on theft, rape and murder.
That argument is ludicrously fallacious. I don't know about the United States, but in New Zealand, where I come from, almost half the population are drug criminals. That is a pretty obvious indication of how seriously these crimes are actually regarded by most people in NZ, as opposed to the official legal position enforced by the state apparatus. Even among the slim majority of people who've never used illegal drugs, there are plenty who disapprove of drug use but don't regard it as a big thing, or just aren't into drugs themselves but are tolerant of drug use. As I say, I don't know about the US, but I imagine the situation is similar. You have to wonder about how truly democratic the political systems of these countries are if the state is so out of touch with the people it supposedly represents. Now, ask yourself, what percentage of the population are rapists and murderers? How do people in general regard rape and murder? Isn't it true, actually, that your facetious equation of drug crime and serious crime is entirely spurious, without any logical basis to it at all?
Ending prohibition set a really bad precedent in that it gave people the idea that if they refuse to obey the law that they can get it over turned.
When a socially repressive law which is opposed by the mass of the population is overturned because of that popular opposition, that is a good thing.
But I take your point that once the state starts to bow to the will of the people, they are setting a very dangerous precedent. People might start to take the word "democracy" seriously.
On the other hand, in a few short years we've gone from picoseconds to 16 seconds.
Ha! You Americans with your old-fashioned units of "years" and "hours" and so on... get with the programme people! If you had 28 grammes of sense you would just take 6 dekaseconds to learn the Systeme Internationale - it's not that hard.
Check out this Aussie service "It's Buggered, Mate": http://its-buggered-mate.apps.lpmodules.com/ It's only a demo, though; you can report things that are buggered, but no-one gives a bugger
I'm perplexed why people continue to use XML when there is YAML. What is it that makes XML so attractive as a durable format? it's not human readable in a practicale sense, and YAML very much is. Since it's delimeters are comlicated and variable, It's harder to parse in ad hoc ways than yaml (line and white space) which means that for rapidly extracting things there are no shorcuts to instantiating a whole document. It's hard to grep. And both formats can fully do the other ones job so they are interchangeable.
I would actually dispute all of your comments, but picking up on the last point in bold, one of XML's key features is "mixed content", which is apparently (according to http://yaml.org/xml.html) not possible in YAML.
There are actually many times more capitalist property owners in Cuba now than there were before the revolution.
Almost all of these private businesses are agricultural; in urban areas the state-owned sector is far more dominant. This is the result of the Agrarian Reform that was instigated at the very start of the revolution. Before the revolution, agricultural ownership was concentrated in very few hands. The Reform expropriated those holdings and transferred them to the farm workers themselves. It's true that they are rather constrained in how they can run their businesses, but they nevertheless do have the right to grow crops on their own land for sale direct to their Cuban consumers, so they are at least small capitalist enterprises.
Dude, get off your high horse for a moment and check out the photographic exhibition website where they say that we are talking about 100m (actually they say "320 vertical feet") of ice that's been lost in Rongbuk glacier. That's a lot of ice, and is far more than anything attributable to seasonality.
New Zealand used to have the silly British system but ditched it in favour of the Mixed Member Proportional, which, despite being proportional, still provides for local representation. There have been 3 or 4 elections under MMP in NZ and the system remains fairly popular.
The prosecution has to show that Z's statements were defamation, but even if they do, Z has a defense if he can show that the statements are true - at least that's my understanding, IANAL.
The Venezuelan president has a right a legal defense on unwarranted attacks on his reputation - if he is defamed then he can take the matter to court. This doesn't make him a dictator.
Zuloaga has a defense to the charges against him: if he can prove his statements were true, then he can get off. But if his allegations about Chavez are in fact just inflammatory lies, then he's in some serious legal shit.
I was there when that happened, and from my window the streets were EMPTY. This may come as a surprise to you, but normal people don't go to the streets during a coup. The streets were completely silent, except for some fireworks going off every now and then.
Sure... the streets were empty except for the large crowd of angry people beseiging the presidential palace and demanding the return of the president.
Maybe the streets outside your window were empty. Maybe "normal" people don't protest military coups. In which case thank god Venezuela is blessed with so many "abnormal" people prepared to stand up for their democratic rights and freedoms.
I'm confused. Can someone please explain to me why I was modded troll?
Because you got up some denialists nose?
You are dead right, though: in the past, acid rain and ozone-depletion denialists have made exactly that rhetorical move: acid rain was all a scam, and there's no proof CFCs had any effect on the ozone layer. Every time someone fucks up the atmosphere there'll be someone with an interest in denying that it's fucked up, and whenever the fuck-up is put right there'll be someone to say it never needed fixing.
Why yes, I have. You quite obviously have not or you wouldn't have come up with this bullshit:
He came clean and admitted that there is no evidence of man made global warming.
This can only be described as a blatant lie, given that when the BBC asked him "How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?", his reply was actually:
I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - [...] there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
Yes all true! This is why it was such an outrageous distortion for the denialist "news" website to have misquoted him as saying "there was no warming". Because he would have to have FAR LESS confidence in such a statement than in a statement that there was warming.
So what if 31k people are too stupid to read a simple graph? They expect to be taken seriously just because they claim to be "scientists"? Let them do some science and then I'll listen. Ignorance and prejudice masquerading as skepticism does not impress me.
Slashdot Mirror
only slightly larger than the Lunokhods of 40 years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme
Just the like the millenium bug ... it was just a scam to pay all those greedy programmers and consultants to 'fix' all those 2-character date fields that were actually perfectly good, way back in '99 (yes, it was only -88 years ago - it seems much longer!)
Oh yeah, that 3000 foot ice cliff is a worry alright - in those alternative universes in which the world isn't warming. I wish those alternative Earth-dwellers the best of luck in digging up all the fossil fuel they can find, and burning it in enormous bonfires. Meanwhile in our own universe ... not so much. Perhaps we should consider saving some of that fossil carbon for when we really do need it.
That argument is ludicrously fallacious.
I don't know about the United States, but in New Zealand, where I come from, almost half the population are drug criminals. That is a pretty obvious indication of how seriously these crimes are actually regarded by most people in NZ, as opposed to the official legal position enforced by the state apparatus. Even among the slim majority of people who've never used illegal drugs, there are plenty who disapprove of drug use but don't regard it as a big thing, or just aren't into drugs themselves but are tolerant of drug use. As I say, I don't know about the US, but I imagine the situation is similar. You have to wonder about how truly democratic the political systems of these countries are if the state is so out of touch with the people it supposedly represents.
Now, ask yourself, what percentage of the population are rapists and murderers? How do people in general regard rape and murder?
Isn't it true, actually, that your facetious equation of drug crime and serious crime is entirely spurious, without any logical basis to it at all?
When a socially repressive law which is opposed by the mass of the population is overturned because of that popular opposition, that is a good thing.
But I take your point that once the state starts to bow to the will of the people, they are setting a very dangerous precedent. People might start to take the word "democracy" seriously.
Ha! You Americans with your old-fashioned units of "years" and "hours" and so on ... get with the programme people!
If you had 28 grammes of sense you would just take 6 dekaseconds to learn the Systeme Internationale - it's not that hard.
Check out this Aussie service "It's Buggered, Mate": http://its-buggered-mate.apps.lpmodules.com/
It's only a demo, though; you can report things that are buggered, but no-one gives a bugger
You didn't read the first sentence of his post? Are you blind?!
I'm perplexed why people continue to use XML when there is YAML. What is it that makes XML so attractive as a durable format? it's not human readable in a practicale sense, and YAML very much is. Since it's delimeters are comlicated and variable, It's harder to parse in ad hoc ways than yaml (line and white space) which means that for rapidly extracting things there are no shorcuts to instantiating a whole document. It's hard to grep. And both formats can fully do the other ones job so they are interchangeable.
I would actually dispute all of your comments, but picking up on the last point in bold, one of XML's key features is "mixed content", which is apparently (according to http://yaml.org/xml.html) not possible in YAML.
probably prefers to pick a peck of pickled peppers
That must be awkward ... most file extensions do begin with . after all.
There are actually many times more capitalist property owners in Cuba now than there were before the revolution.
Almost all of these private businesses are agricultural; in urban areas the state-owned sector is far more dominant. This is the result of the Agrarian Reform that was instigated at the very start of the revolution. Before the revolution, agricultural ownership was concentrated in very few hands. The Reform expropriated those holdings and transferred them to the farm workers themselves. It's true that they are rather constrained in how they can run their businesses, but they nevertheless do have the right to grow crops on their own land for sale direct to their Cuban consumers, so they are at least small capitalist enterprises.
Dude, get off your high horse for a moment and check out the photographic exhibition website where they say that we are talking about 100m (actually they say "320 vertical feet") of ice that's been lost in Rongbuk glacier. That's a lot of ice, and is far more than anything attributable to seasonality.
http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/comparative-photography
It's the platypuses you really have to watch out for - the place is crawling with the venomous bastards
New Zealand used to have the silly British system but ditched it in favour of the Mixed Member Proportional, which, despite being proportional, still provides for local representation. There have been 3 or 4 elections under MMP in NZ and the system remains fairly popular.
It's "hotel" (backwards)
The prosecution has to show that Z's statements were defamation, but even if they do, Z has a defense if he can show that the statements are true - at least that's my understanding, IANAL.
Yes, how convenient for the Venezuelans that their country was colonised by the Spanish rather than the English. Your point?
The Venezuelan president has a right a legal defense on unwarranted attacks on his reputation - if he is defamed then he can take the matter to court. This doesn't make him a dictator.
Zuloaga has a defense to the charges against him: if he can prove his statements were true, then he can get off. But if his allegations about Chavez are in fact just inflammatory lies, then he's in some serious legal shit.
Sure ... the streets were empty except for the large crowd of angry people beseiging the presidential palace and demanding the return of the president.
See it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5832390545689805144# though no doubt the machiavellian Chavez somehow faked this documentary from his prison cell in Fort Tiuna.
Maybe the streets outside your window were empty. Maybe "normal" people don't protest military coups. In which case thank god Venezuela is blessed with so many "abnormal" people prepared to stand up for their democratic rights and freedoms.
Because you got up some denialists nose?
You are dead right, though: in the past, acid rain and ozone-depletion denialists have made exactly that rhetorical move: acid rain was all a scam, and there's no proof CFCs had any effect on the ozone layer. Every time someone fucks up the atmosphere there'll be someone with an interest in denying that it's fucked up, and whenever the fuck-up is put right there'll be someone to say it never needed fixing.
You mean this one?
Why yes, I have. You quite obviously have not or you wouldn't have come up with this bullshit:
This can only be described as a blatant lie, given that when the BBC asked him "How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?", his reply was actually:
Another one who can't read a simple graph! Your facetious graph actually purports to show that pirates prevent global warming.
Yes all true! This is why it was such an outrageous distortion for the denialist "news" website to have misquoted him as saying "there was no warming". Because he would have to have FAR LESS confidence in such a statement than in a statement that there was warming.
So what if 31k people are too stupid to read a simple graph? They expect to be taken seriously just because they claim to be "scientists"? Let them do some science and then I'll listen. Ignorance and prejudice masquerading as skepticism does not impress me.