Statically typed? WTF man. If Chuck Norris decides a string is a Date, then _IT'S A FUCKING DATE_. Also, exceptions are not just thrown, they are kicked and punched also. This makes the language pretty safe alone.
"microfacial expressions -- a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt"
Hmm, I am quasi-"middle-eastern" looking (half Indian), have contempt (and possibly surprise and anger) for government agents bothering me with nosy questions, and fear of being secretly whisked away and imprisoned in a legal limbo. So I guess that makes me an immediate suspect. If they asked me where I was going, I would probably say "home". Vague and elusive? Hells yeah.
"early hybrids (2001 models or so) that these sets of data apply to, the data indicates that you can save from $1 to $2 per 50 miles (very rough estimate) or so in unscheduled maintenance costs (ie, unexpected repair costs) over the life of the vehicle for a good hybrid vs. a regular IC vehicle."
I find this fishy. I would think the opposite would be the case: hybrids are more complicated, use newer designs, components and technology, have had less time being vetted on the road, and there is less familiarity with them by mechanics. I would think that they would therefore have a slightly higher unscheduled maintenance cost. What am I missing? Are hybrids just built better because of their novelty, not despite it?
It *doesn't* seem counter-intuitive at all to me (none of the given examples do). Why does this affliction disproportionately affect Americans, and not, say Europeans? I don't buy the argument that people believe Crazy Thing X because they don't understand Scientific Fact Y. There's lots of physics that I don't understand but it doesn't lead me to believe in smurfs or unicorns. If anything this affliction is not due to the "counter-intuitiveness" of the fact, it's due to some predilection to fantasy. How much more "intuitive" are the fantastical notions of religion? Since most of them are entirely unsupported by empirical observation I find them all "counter-intuitive".
I think you're on to something... now, if we could only reduce everybody's salary to $12,000 or below... we... we... COULD SOLVE THE HEALTH CARE PROBLEM! OMG!
Well, we can relax our efforts to "disprove" irrational beliefs when, for instance, their supporters are no longer attempting to overturn existing scientific education curricula with pseudo-scientific hogwash, polluting the waters by positioning their unfounded beliefs as legitimate "science" (or at least legitimate alternative to orthodox scientific views), and overtly influencing national policy, which I certainly view as "antagonization" of long standing liberal (in the classical sense) and secular underpinnings of a free society. I think that this is not a debate between religion and science's ability to explain the world (the former isn't attempting to "explain", and the latter isn't attempting to supply meaning), but instead between reason and irrationality. You're right, one is not going to be able to convince the irrational with reason. But I don't think that means we should just roll over and let the church control public institutions. In fact, I think it would be perfectly consistent for pious people to stand up and defend public institutions from religious control (or other form of dogma), just as I would stand up and prevent the government from interfering with their personal beliefs, no matter how ridiculous I may think they are.
"The Prius uses modern technology to provide similar returns, but without the drawbacks that made the Sprint so unpopular in the first place."
What drawbacks were those? I would actually like to find a geo metro, chevy sprint, suzuki swift, etc. I have an Echo, which is a great car. Unfortunately Toyota DISCONTINUED it. I don't understand this. We CAN make small fuel-efficient cars...why DON'T we? (if I recall correctly American companies do indeed make small cars, they just sell them over in Europe and refuse to sell them domestically) Sure hybrids are neat and maybe there is some net gain after you factor in the extra construction complexity and recycling cost, but wouldn't it make sense to ALSO just make more cars that are freakin fuel efficient? Speaking of the Echo, even THAT is bigger than I actually need. For personal commuting I don't need the back seat or trunk which are completely empty 90% of the time. That car could be 2/3rds the size. Where are these cars?? I would much rather buy a small, simple, fuel-efficient American car and put dollars back in American manufacturing than buy a large foreign over-complicated hybrid with LCD screens and bells and whistles. The US automobile industry needs to get with the program.
"conservatives that don't want to blow up abortion clinics and force religion on people."
Please, please, take your party back over. I am not conservative (I think the world is a lot more complicated, and therefore require solutions that do not necessarily extrapolate directly from the minimal precepts of individual liberties, although I do think individual liberty is a fundamental prerequisite; I am left leaning, but also skew very libertarian), but I believe conservative thought is legitimate and honest. I would much rather have an intellectual debate at that level than somebody who may violently agree with me for all the wrong reasons...sometimes a position informed by my preferred ideology will be the right one, and sometimes not (at which point the ideology is irrelevant). Ideology is only necessary when there aren't enough facts for a clear best solution to be obvious (in fact, I'd like debate to move beyond ideology entirely). Yes there are extremists on the left, but I am much more afraid of apocalyptic militant religious nutjobs (that fundamentally reject the notions of individual liberty the nation was founded on) than I am by annoying nanny-staters that want to make me completely safe from everything.
Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly older people over the age of 45, who don't deal with reality -- ever. So they don't know what day the next blockbuster console will be released; they don't know what temperature it is on a half-hour basis, refreshed automatically in their browser via a forecast plugin; they don't know what their neighbor's avatar looks like. They don't know anything... because they are constantly diverted by a physical mass media. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because a reality of fake authenticity has been manufactured for them...
"If this is correct, then I actually like the DMCA!"
Right. So big media owners can Denial Of Service any and all use via frivolous cease and desists? Since party C is obliged to pre-emptively take it down, the onus is on A to prove it is not infringing, instead of C to prove that it is, which I believe has been the traditional historical role forever (that it is the plaintiff's responsibility to prove their case, not vice versa). I guess it's sort of like an immediate and unconditional injunction you can enforce on anybody at any time, even if you are wrong, because they just have to go through the hassle of asserting their use, which is near-zero cost to the plaintiff.
"Electronic voting machines without a printer attached make it impossible to have a proper recount if claims of ballot tampering are substantiated."
Simply having the printer attached doesn't help either, since your malicious code can just print an incorrect printout. The issue is whether what is counted is actually verifiable. Since the count is not on the printout (which the voter verifies visually), it's just a placebo to keep the public happy. Hell, let's just send out pieces of paper that say "your vote was verified - have a nice day", say, a month before the election...
Yeah this is hilarious. Ignore that man behind the curtain! My god, venture capitalists...profiting...from...government...subs idies. UNIMAGINABLE! I call foul play sir! Will nobody think of the oil industry and their measly record-breaking unprecedented windfall profits?
Use an embedded (or at least small) database like McKoi or Apache Derby, have a script that defines the tables and some test data (which you can grab from a real test system). Then simply create the db once, and use the embedded jdbc url with your unit tests. Clear the database out, or destroy it before or after each unit test (you probably want to do it before each test, because there's no guarantee the last test exited cleanly). Ta da.
Basically, terrorism is just a big Denial Of Service attack. "Terror" isn't what is denying us the freedoms granted by our constitution and a democratic society, it is the political over-reaction that is cravenly exploited by opportunistic politicians that is denying us those freedoms. It's a perfect packet storm of bullshit.
I guess this post only applies to pen-and-paper, due to balancing issues...
Over time I've realized that I'm strongly anti-class. In this postmodern world, I just find it incredibly difficult as a dm to construct, and as a player to believe in, a world where everybody has to fit cookie cutter stereotypes. Where vampires are evil, magicians can't cast healing spells, and clerics must use bludgeoning weapons, just...well...because. Of course this leads to class-system equivocating in the form of "class sprawl". Bards and rangers can cast spells, whuh!? There are literally dozens of "special" classes, excrutiatingly detailed in extra "guidebooks" and campaign tomes I haven't cracked open since I first bought them (dragonlance, dark sun, ravenloft...). This is simplicity? A class system with separate classes for rangers that live in jungles and magicians that are witches? And are monks clerics or fighters anyway!? As science and reason explain the acceleratedly vanishing mysteries of this real world, likewise we have to start making up real (and stupid) rationales for the mysticism of class systems.
As for min/maxers, well, don't play with dolts. We're not trying to balance the international economy here...it's just a game.
I would like to get involved with Mozilla/Firefox and in a couple of cases have earnestly tried, checking out the gigantic repository, and reading up on XPCOM and trying out samples, but the checkout/build procedure is just so teeth gnashingly horrendous, I eventually just run away screaming. Some goes for OpenOffice.
Until a phenomenon is explained, it is de-facto "paranormal", is it not? That would put a large set of current research (all?) in the "paranormal" category.
So, maybe we should start patenting mathematical formulas too? Or archeological research? Or recipes? Just because you did some work doesn't make it an invention. Even if all the work was "lost", it would be non-novel to re-produce the experiment. Even without a patent this is a product people would buy and I'm sure companies would sell. I for one will continue to "manufacture" such chemicals regardless of any patent.
Maybe there are other explanatory reasons that I either missed or weren't mentioned, but how would not letting cops in your house without a warrant, or even video/audio recording them be "obstructing Justice"? Now if they DID have a warrant and he didn't let them in, obviously that would be obstruction.
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Statically typed? WTF man. If Chuck Norris decides a string is a Date, then _IT'S A FUCKING DATE_. Also, exceptions are not just thrown, they are kicked and punched also. This makes the language pretty safe alone.
I for one welcome our new steam-based economy
"microfacial expressions -- a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt"
Hmm, I am quasi-"middle-eastern" looking (half Indian), have contempt (and possibly surprise and anger) for government agents bothering me with nosy questions, and fear of being secretly whisked away and imprisoned in a legal limbo. So I guess that makes me an immediate suspect. If they asked me where I was going, I would probably say "home". Vague and elusive? Hells yeah.
"early hybrids (2001 models or so) that these sets of data apply to, the data indicates that you can save from $1 to $2 per 50 miles (very rough estimate) or so in unscheduled maintenance costs (ie, unexpected repair costs) over the life of the vehicle for a good hybrid vs. a regular IC vehicle."
I find this fishy. I would think the opposite would be the case: hybrids are more complicated, use newer designs, components and technology, have had less time being vetted on the road, and there is less familiarity with them by mechanics. I would think that they would therefore have a slightly higher unscheduled maintenance cost. What am I missing? Are hybrids just built better because of their novelty, not despite it?
"pain and discomfort in his eyes for a couple of hours"
"jail for up to 20 years and earn them a $250,000 fine"
yeah. that seems proportional...
IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT. Are you happy now? I'm ashamed of you. Go to your room.
It *doesn't* seem counter-intuitive at all to me (none of the given examples do). Why does this affliction disproportionately affect Americans, and not, say Europeans? I don't buy the argument that people believe Crazy Thing X because they don't understand Scientific Fact Y. There's lots of physics that I don't understand but it doesn't lead me to believe in smurfs or unicorns. If anything this affliction is not due to the "counter-intuitiveness" of the fact, it's due to some predilection to fantasy. How much more "intuitive" are the fantastical notions of religion? Since most of them are entirely unsupported by empirical observation I find them all "counter-intuitive".
There are pitfalls to using purely monetary compensation as a motivating factor.
> My income is about $12,000 a year
I think you're on to something... now, if we could only reduce everybody's salary to $12,000 or below... we... we... COULD SOLVE THE HEALTH CARE PROBLEM! OMG!
Well, we can relax our efforts to "disprove" irrational beliefs when, for instance, their supporters are no longer attempting to overturn existing scientific education curricula with pseudo-scientific hogwash, polluting the waters by positioning their unfounded beliefs as legitimate "science" (or at least legitimate alternative to orthodox scientific views), and overtly influencing national policy, which I certainly view as "antagonization" of long standing liberal (in the classical sense) and secular underpinnings of a free society. I think that this is not a debate between religion and science's ability to explain the world (the former isn't attempting to "explain", and the latter isn't attempting to supply meaning), but instead between reason and irrationality. You're right, one is not going to be able to convince the irrational with reason. But I don't think that means we should just roll over and let the church control public institutions. In fact, I think it would be perfectly consistent for pious people to stand up and defend public institutions from religious control (or other form of dogma), just as I would stand up and prevent the government from interfering with their personal beliefs, no matter how ridiculous I may think they are.
"The Prius uses modern technology to provide similar returns, but without the drawbacks that made the Sprint so unpopular in the first place."
What drawbacks were those? I would actually like to find a geo metro, chevy sprint, suzuki swift, etc. I have an Echo, which is a great car. Unfortunately Toyota DISCONTINUED it. I don't understand this. We CAN make small fuel-efficient cars...why DON'T we? (if I recall correctly American companies do indeed make small cars, they just sell them over in Europe and refuse to sell them domestically) Sure hybrids are neat and maybe there is some net gain after you factor in the extra construction complexity and recycling cost, but wouldn't it make sense to ALSO just make more cars that are freakin fuel efficient? Speaking of the Echo, even THAT is bigger than I actually need. For personal commuting I don't need the back seat or trunk which are completely empty 90% of the time. That car could be 2/3rds the size. Where are these cars?? I would much rather buy a small, simple, fuel-efficient American car and put dollars back in American manufacturing than buy a large foreign over-complicated hybrid with LCD screens and bells and whistles. The US automobile industry needs to get with the program.
"conservatives that don't want to blow up abortion clinics and force religion on people."
Please, please, take your party back over. I am not conservative (I think the world is a lot more complicated, and therefore require solutions that do not necessarily extrapolate directly from the minimal precepts of individual liberties, although I do think individual liberty is a fundamental prerequisite; I am left leaning, but also skew very libertarian), but I believe conservative thought is legitimate and honest. I would much rather have an intellectual debate at that level than somebody who may violently agree with me for all the wrong reasons...sometimes a position informed by my preferred ideology will be the right one, and sometimes not (at which point the ideology is irrelevant). Ideology is only necessary when there aren't enough facts for a clear best solution to be obvious (in fact, I'd like debate to move beyond ideology entirely). Yes there are extremists on the left, but I am much more afraid of apocalyptic militant religious nutjobs (that fundamentally reject the notions of individual liberty the nation was founded on) than I am by annoying nanny-staters that want to make me completely safe from everything.
Uh, this is pretty awesome, but I don't understand how I can drive the wrong way down an apparently one way street....BETWEEN BUSES.
How the hell did they pull that one off?
Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly older people over the age of 45, who don't deal with reality -- ever. So they don't know what day the next blockbuster console will be released; they don't know what temperature it is on a half-hour basis, refreshed automatically in their browser via a forecast plugin; they don't know what their neighbor's avatar looks like. They don't know anything... because they are constantly diverted by a physical mass media. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because a reality of fake authenticity has been manufactured for them...
"If this is correct, then I actually like the DMCA!"
Right. So big media owners can Denial Of Service any and all use via frivolous cease and desists? Since party C is obliged to pre-emptively take it down, the onus is on A to prove it is not infringing, instead of C to prove that it is, which I believe has been the traditional historical role forever (that it is the plaintiff's responsibility to prove their case, not vice versa). I guess it's sort of like an immediate and unconditional injunction you can enforce on anybody at any time, even if you are wrong, because they just have to go through the hassle of asserting their use, which is near-zero cost to the plaintiff.
"Electronic voting machines without a printer attached make it impossible to have a proper recount if claims of ballot tampering are substantiated."
Simply having the printer attached doesn't help either, since your malicious code can just print an incorrect printout. The issue is whether what is counted is actually verifiable. Since the count is not on the printout (which the voter verifies visually), it's just a placebo to keep the public happy. Hell, let's just send out pieces of paper that say "your vote was verified - have a nice day", say, a month before the election...
Yeah this is hilarious. Ignore that man behind the curtain! My god, venture capitalists...profiting...from...government...subs idies. UNIMAGINABLE! I call foul play sir! Will nobody think of the oil industry and their measly record-breaking unprecedented windfall profits?
Use an embedded (or at least small) database like McKoi or Apache Derby, have a script that defines the tables and some test data (which you can grab from a real test system). Then simply create the db once, and use the embedded jdbc url with your unit tests. Clear the database out, or destroy it before or after each unit test (you probably want to do it before each test, because there's no guarantee the last test exited cleanly). Ta da.
Basically, terrorism is just a big Denial Of Service attack. "Terror" isn't what is denying us the freedoms granted by our constitution and a democratic society, it is the political over-reaction that is cravenly exploited by opportunistic politicians that is denying us those freedoms. It's a perfect packet storm of bullshit.
I guess this post only applies to pen-and-paper, due to balancing issues...
Over time I've realized that I'm strongly anti-class. In this postmodern world, I just find it incredibly difficult as a dm to construct, and as a player to believe in, a world where everybody has to fit cookie cutter stereotypes. Where vampires are evil, magicians can't cast healing spells, and clerics must use bludgeoning weapons, just...well...because. Of course this leads to class-system equivocating in the form of "class sprawl". Bards and rangers can cast spells, whuh!? There are literally dozens of "special" classes, excrutiatingly detailed in extra "guidebooks" and campaign tomes I haven't cracked open since I first bought them (dragonlance, dark sun, ravenloft...). This is simplicity? A class system with separate classes for rangers that live in jungles and magicians that are witches? And are monks clerics or fighters anyway!? As science and reason explain the acceleratedly vanishing mysteries of this real world, likewise we have to start making up real (and stupid) rationales for the mysticism of class systems.
As for min/maxers, well, don't play with dolts. We're not trying to balance the international economy here...it's just a game.
I would like to get involved with Mozilla/Firefox and in a couple of cases have earnestly tried, checking out the gigantic repository, and reading up on XPCOM and trying out samples, but the checkout/build procedure is just so teeth gnashingly horrendous, I eventually just run away screaming. Some goes for OpenOffice.
Until a phenomenon is explained, it is de-facto "paranormal", is it not? That would put a large set of current research (all?) in the "paranormal" category.
So, maybe we should start patenting mathematical formulas too? Or archeological research? Or recipes? Just because you did some work doesn't make it an invention. Even if all the work was "lost", it would be non-novel to re-produce the experiment. Even without a patent this is a product people would buy and I'm sure companies would sell. I for one will continue to "manufacture" such chemicals regardless of any patent.
"Michael, why won't you answer me?"
-KITT
Maybe there are other explanatory reasons that I either missed or weren't mentioned, but how would not letting cops in your house without a warrant, or even video/audio recording them be "obstructing Justice"? Now if they DID have a warrant and he didn't let them in, obviously that would be obstruction.