Does this extend to all behavior that can be shown to be statistically more likely to result in injury, illness, or death?
Ahh, the slippery slope argument. The answer is of course we don't extend it to everything.
So, we apply it to things like vaccinations, but not throwing rocks. Excellent. Except I imagine more kids die each year from reckless behaviour than are killed by chicken pox (the ad promoting the chicken pox vaccine listed between 200 and 300 kids a year dying in the U.S. from chicken pox). That's right, it's less than 1% as risky as the flu, and people blow that vaccination off on a yearly basis. I'm not sure what your risk of negative outcomes is for the chicken pox vaccination, but it can only be slightly lower than the risk of not getting it before the risk is nil. So do we still shut out the kids who didn't get the chicken pox vaccination?
As usual, broad, sweeping statements are usually wrong. Do try to learn something from the bad behaviour of politicians.
Time for some basic science, buddy. NaCl is an ionic compound, and slightly dissociates in solution, into Na+ Cl-. Cl- is much less harmful than Cl2, chlorine gas (but still rather reactive). When you introduce electricity into a saline solution, science happens! And can kill you. Moreover, our bodies aren't designed to handle Cl2, and none of the biochemical reactions in our bodies produce it, yet routinely handle Cl- from a variety of sources, table salt being the most common.
Now, this doesn't have anything to do with how dangerous Thimerosal is or isn't, just in how bad your analogy is (or may be, I'm pretty Thimerosal isn't an ionic compound), and in how much of an uninformed idiot you are.
Well, our lifespans are averaging somewhere in the 70's but it's been increasing over the years.
If you eliminate cooking, candles, vacuum cleaners, fossil fuels (the list goes on)... who knows? Our lifespans could be in the thousands.
Bottom line is, what we don't know CAN hurt us.
This is incorrect, in meaning if not in fact. Life expectancy at birth has increased dramatically. Life expectancy at 5 years old has increased markedly. Life expectancy at adulthood has increased very little.
Yes, average lifespans have been increasing a lot in the last century or so, but that will happen when previously a quarter or more of the population was dying before 5 years old.
Well I am not so sure that the test linked at in the summary is that effective. I personally am pretty good at spatial stuff, and on my first pass of the test it took me a good 15 minutes, scoring 8/9. I thought I did well. But then about 15mn later I showed it to my father in law and went through it again. It took me all of 3 minutes tops, not because I'd done it before but because I'd gotten much better at it. I didn't even need to visualize the cubes any more, I just looked at the flat patterns. I scored 9/9.
I think it would be very difficult to create such spatial tests unless you get into 3D geometry, where you try to visualize the cross section of a cylinder skewering a cone.
I'm not sure you're entirely correct. As with most things, doing them repeatedly makes you better. Wayne Gretzky couldn't do everything he did due to native talent alone - it took practice! This doesn't mean I could practice any amount and ever be as good as he was. Likewise, something that you (or I) could pick up in reasonably short order may be very difficult or impossible for others. Some, like the GPP, may be almost completely lacking in this area, and compensate with other techniques. Some of those techniques may lead to very elegant solutions that spatial reasoning simply wouldn't point to.
I won't say that my completing the test in 20 minutes with some effort means it would be a reasonable test for anyone else. Likewise, it would be interesting to see if more complex levels of testing could be achieved, and so be able to categorize those who are above average, if this even passes that mark.
On a related note, you may be interested in this: Arrowsmith School. The whole premise behind the school is using mental exercises to train up the weaker cognitive capacities of people with cognitive disabilities until they reach normal levels of function. 30 years of practice seems to indicate that it works. It makes me think there could be more possibility for improvement than we think.
The earthquake and the tsunami were neither exceptional nor unanticipated. Low-frequency, yes. But also completely expected. Parts of the coastline not far from the power plant show clear signs of having been hit by a tsunami 10 meters higher than this one, within the last 1000 years.
Ah, so not likely in a given person's lifetime, and also not often in 40 or 50 generations. Exactly how many other buildings are designed for that level of destruction? Whether these ones should be is a slightly different question, I'll grant you, but we're talking very rare events - some few times in 1/10 of humanity's recorded history.
The best way to approach nutrition is to look into the research on the digestive system (which consist of more than just epidemiological studies) and understand what is going on and going to go on in your body when you consume things (it is beneficial to eat sugar when your blood sugar levels are low, I repeat: beneficial). It's not easy (but doable), but it sure beats running around blurting out appeals to nature or evangelizing the Word of some food guru you like, which 99% of the people seem to do.
Yes, it's expected that when you're body is in an abnormal or unhealthy state, that things that would otherwise not be recommended might be beneficial. Don't continue your marathon runs with a broken leg. Use antiseptics on a dirty wound. Have maggots clean dead tissue from a gangrenous wound. Eat simple sugars when your blood sugar is very low (bonking in athletic terms). In a typical healthy state, an expert generally wouldn't recommend any of these.
And so I searched united states broadband subsidy in DDG, and this is the second link. My casual review notes somewhere between $7.2B and $11.7B in stimulus funding, paid since 2006, mentioned in the first three paragraphs, $4.5B of that announced in Nov. 2011. That would be one budget ago. Exactly how much more recently are you looking for? I'm sure if I look, I could find some slated for distribution in 2013, but I think the point is made. That particular trough is still open.
The companies claim they can't compete against the government entity.
This is an issue if the municipal system is subsidized with taxes, or funded through tax-backed municipal bonds, or receives special access to municipal right-of-ways, or any number of other things normal companies don't have access to. The municipality can easily undercut the competition because they don't have to pay for right-of-ways and, if all else fails, they can force people to pay for their service whether they want it or not. It's the same reason you don't see many private roads; given two otherwise equal roads, one private (toll) and the other public (tax-funded), no one is going to choose the toll road when they have to pay the taxes for the public one anyway, even if the tolls are ultimately less expensive.
Note that I'm not arguing against community-provided Internet access, just the government aspects. If the service was provided by a local co-op with no special ties to the municipal government, competing on equal terms, the company would have no cause for complaint.
As the anonymous poster said below, but I'll expand upon. The U.S government paid billions in subsidies to get broadband up and running, and then when they don't do it and a town or city decides to roll their own (after the broadband companies say they have no plan to roll it out soon, nor do they have a timeline for when it will be done) the company sues for unfair competition. Personally, I'd ask them how they plan to compete in a market they don't service, nor have even tentative plans of servicing.
This is beside all the tax breaks, sweetheart contracts, forgivable loans, and bailouts (yep, being rewarded for screwing up!) which these companies get while cities literally go bankrupt with no word of any help from the federal government.
In short, the competing with government on equal terms sailed decades ago. Maybe it's time to either cut off the gravy or laugh in their faces when they whine about having to compete with the government.
Did you notice the much of the government is also up in arms about what the NSA did?
And
Convenient that you forget about the breaking and entering and then illegal access to the computer system.
You idiots needs to realize it is not about the docs, it was about the crimes he committed to gain access to the docs.
Wow, did somebody just learn a new word? Good for you!
I can only assume you're still pretty young, or haven't watched politics very much. Politicians spend a lot of time being very dismayed, concerned, disappointed, and outraged when their opponents do certain things, and then justify those same acts when they're the ones who get caught. When they do something they shouldn't have, they create a law saying they can do that now. If they propose a law and everyone gets upset, they drop it and then propose a slightly watered down version in 6 months or so. If they make a significant promise to get elected, they discover it's just too difficult to keep it once they get elected. If they actually repeal a bad law (or don't renew it), they often find a way to get at least a watered down version in at some later date, or let their opponent re-enact it when they're back in power.
Given all the antics politicians regularly engage in, why should I give any credit to them because they've formed yet another committee? Let's see what the results are. I'll put my money that the TSA will still be around in three years, and will be doing more ground traffic checks.
Gun free zones are free killing zones. Every mass shooting I can recall, except one, happened in a gun free zone. [...] When armed good people are present someone might still get killed but it's also quite certain the murderer will be among the people shot.
The problem with non-uniformed civilians carrying guns is that they cameoflage the bad guys. If you see a person carrying a gun in a place where nobody routinely carries a gun, you call the police because something is wrong. But if lots of people carry guns all the time, you end up either raising a lot of false alarms, or risk allowing a shooter to get to his victims and start shooting before anyone knows to stop him.
IMO if we're going to have people around carrying guns to keep the public safe, those people should be professionally trained and in uniform. That minimizes the "is that armed guy a good guy or a bad guy?" problem.
Lucky for us, the bad guys are happy to follow the requirement that they walk around brandishing their gun so that we know they're one of the bad guys.
Really, there are two problems here. First, an unequal balance of power. Bad guys can and will get guns. "Good guys without guns" sounds a lot like "victims". Second, lack of police coverage. If police were everywhere, I would be more inclined to say that civilians have no need for guns (except to protect against the police, but that's a philosophical issue), but I'm not interested in paying the taxes to support that.
Also, it's not like there couldn't be a training requirement to have a permit to carry a weapon, as opposed to owning one. Given your sig, you're from Canada. We already have possession permits. Do you really think it's so difficult to have a higher standard for a concealed carry permit? Many places in the states (perhaps all that allow concealed carry) have a licensing requirement, which appears to have a training component.
You can not, but for an entirely different reason that has nothing to do with technicalities of airport-side implementation. In Israel, this kind of thing exists because it had to evolve because of a real existential threat. If you replicate this methodology to an environment that does NOT have such a threat - that is, to any country that isn't Israel - it will not work. How are you going to train airport security personnel if there's no century of experience with specific tactics, and no national security mechanism? Americans seem to think they've got it rough because NSA may have been reading their emails. In Israel, there is a national identity database, which includes references to relative, and every person has a number. Let me give you an example. I went to a bank for a bank-signed deposit for my landlord. The teller asked for the landlord's ID number to be put on the writ. I called him on the cellphone and asked, repeating the number aloud. Then I asked him to repeat it once again to be sure. By the time he finished, the teller had, read this, a printout with his phone number, address, face, and situation in the debt registrar. Remember the assassination of Hamas chief in Dubai? It was blamed on Israel, but nobody in the world paid attention to the fact that the copy of national identity database HAS BEEN LEAKED TO TORRENT SITES EVERY YEAR FOR A DECADE, and it occured to nobody that the stolen identities of Israeli citizens that the assassins used could've easily come from there. And now they are adding a biometric component to the national identity database that so far has failed basic security requirements ("biometric database" here being Excel files over plaintext HTTP).
In Israel, we can tolerate this invasion of privacy, and ethnic/racial profiling, because it would be suicide not to resort to it. But nobody else should marvel at it, and nobody else should try to replicate it. It is something we have by necessity, not because we were sitting around on our collective zionist assess contemplating what to do and somebody was all like "Hey! I know! Let's make the most awesome, invisible and efficient racial profiling system in the world."
I beg you all to not advocate it.
TL;DR The US doesn't need to do what Israel has done because the threat isn't significant.
I recently opened a few documents with Word 2011 on my Mac that were authored with whatever version of Word that was available on Windows 3.1/3.11. After a quick conversion, they loaded perfectly. I regularly send and receive documents with a friend who is still running Office 2003 on XP, again, no problems at all.
Without an idea of what is in the files, it's hard to say how relevant this is. You can effectively use Word as Notepad with a nicer interface. You can also use Word with piles of macros, multi-level formatting, custom styles, and that weird font you downloaded 8 years ago. One will be likelier to convert from one version to another than the other will.
I'm not saying that you're presenting a specious argument, but one of the tricky things in this discussion is determining which feature MS decided to update between one version of Word and another, and whether that will cause a conversion to break. But if I was going to make a work-alike of Word, I'd take special note of the features that tend to fail on conversion, and pay extra attention to them when I make my conversion routines. After all, if the producer of both versions of Word has trouble with conversions between them, I should take that as an indicator that it requires special effort. And it looks good for me.
Well, if you want a good, accurate concealed gun, you use a camera, as that naturally has a scope and it's often acceptable to point it at people. Stuff of spy books forever.
Also, comes with a metal casing around all the working parts. The good ones, anyway.
Yep, printing food is a bad idea. Until you have a von Neumann machine, the big point is to use it to make a von Neumann machine. Once you're there, the exponential benefits of transistor design can be realized on the macro scale. Then making a pizza becomes a trivial process. Of course, then the big trick is not turning the whole world into pizzas.
When I'm in the car and want some cheap, fast, gut-filling goodness, do I say to my wife "Do you want to stop at McDonald's?"
Which is exactly what franchising is all about - leveraging the brand name for marketing. Which absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how a particular business owner handles payroll.
But it should have everything to do with how the franchiser, McDonald's, responds to this PR nightmare. Deal with the current clown, set franchise regulations to make sure it doesn't happen again.
No, the FBI is all over the world. They are the primary criminal investigation unit of the US government. Most of their work occurs in the US, but embassy bombings and the like fall under their purvue. The CIA and NSA, and the millitary are not law enforcement agencies. The FBI has a wide reach. I think it was an FBI agent who questioned Saddam Hussein after his capture.
You realize that embassies are considered to be soil of the nations they are embassies for, right? By definition, any bombing of an American embassy occurred on American soil.
Which is why I have been saying for years America needs to grow the fuck up. America, the country where you can't show a tit unless it has a knife buried in it and where we nearly impeached a POTUS for getting a BJ, it more than time for us to grow the fuck up and stop pretending that Leave It To Beaver was an accurate depiction of the 1950s.
I don't care about seeing tits on TV. I care about other people deciding where and when I or my kids can see tits (or anything else) on TV.
As for propriety in our national leaders, I suggest we go for a more European stance. Oh wait. That said, at least Berlusconi wasn't banging subordinates, and banging someone who was at the age of consent in many western nations (hell, it isn't even illegal in Italy).
So....we'll be expecting more porn from Japan. No, not that freaky tentacle, bondage, or group stuff, just casual nudity. I'm guessing the novelty will make it popular.
6 million packs in a year is 1 out of 50, or 2%, not 0.05%. It's still not a lot, though. Not only that, that Wikipedia article doesn't even say that the sales are US-only. You'd think Twinkies are sold worldwide. The world population is 7 billion, so that's 0.1 percent.
So it's entirely possible that this time 99.9% of the people are right. I'm impressed!
Arrest without bail sounds like an effective solution to this little problem. Oh, that, and keeping the guy in prison costs money for a problem they can just let leave? Now I see.
There seems to be a similar effect in human systems. Namely, failure, such as bankruptcy, seems to be a very effective way to remove businesses that no longer work.
Yes. In fact, it's so effective, it can seriously damage or destroy businesses that do work, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Rumor has it the new thorium reactors will put out 640 kW, which oughta be enough for everybody.
Don't worry, the management tools will leave less then 500 kW for everyday use.
Does this extend to all behavior that can be shown to be statistically more likely to result in injury, illness, or death?
Ahh, the slippery slope argument. The answer is of course we don't extend it to everything.
So, we apply it to things like vaccinations, but not throwing rocks. Excellent. Except I imagine more kids die each year from reckless behaviour than are killed by chicken pox (the ad promoting the chicken pox vaccine listed between 200 and 300 kids a year dying in the U.S. from chicken pox). That's right, it's less than 1% as risky as the flu, and people blow that vaccination off on a yearly basis. I'm not sure what your risk of negative outcomes is for the chicken pox vaccination, but it can only be slightly lower than the risk of not getting it before the risk is nil. So do we still shut out the kids who didn't get the chicken pox vaccination?
As usual, broad, sweeping statements are usually wrong. Do try to learn something from the bad behaviour of politicians.
Time for some basic science, buddy. NaCl is an ionic compound, and slightly dissociates in solution, into Na+ Cl-. Cl- is much less harmful than Cl2, chlorine gas (but still rather reactive). When you introduce electricity into a saline solution, science happens! And can kill you. Moreover, our bodies aren't designed to handle Cl2, and none of the biochemical reactions in our bodies produce it, yet routinely handle Cl- from a variety of sources, table salt being the most common.
Now, this doesn't have anything to do with how dangerous Thimerosal is or isn't, just in how bad your analogy is (or may be, I'm pretty Thimerosal isn't an ionic compound), and in how much of an uninformed idiot you are.
Well, our lifespans are averaging somewhere in the 70's but it's been increasing over the years. If you eliminate cooking, candles, vacuum cleaners, fossil fuels (the list goes on)... who knows? Our lifespans could be in the thousands. Bottom line is, what we don't know CAN hurt us.
This is incorrect, in meaning if not in fact. Life expectancy at birth has increased dramatically. Life expectancy at 5 years old has increased markedly. Life expectancy at adulthood has increased very little.
Yes, average lifespans have been increasing a lot in the last century or so, but that will happen when previously a quarter or more of the population was dying before 5 years old.
A couple references.
Well I am not so sure that the test linked at in the summary is that effective. I personally am pretty good at spatial stuff, and on my first pass of the test it took me a good 15 minutes, scoring 8/9. I thought I did well. But then about 15mn later I showed it to my father in law and went through it again. It took me all of 3 minutes tops, not because I'd done it before but because I'd gotten much better at it. I didn't even need to visualize the cubes any more, I just looked at the flat patterns. I scored 9/9. I think it would be very difficult to create such spatial tests unless you get into 3D geometry, where you try to visualize the cross section of a cylinder skewering a cone.
I'm not sure you're entirely correct. As with most things, doing them repeatedly makes you better. Wayne Gretzky couldn't do everything he did due to native talent alone - it took practice! This doesn't mean I could practice any amount and ever be as good as he was. Likewise, something that you (or I) could pick up in reasonably short order may be very difficult or impossible for others. Some, like the GPP, may be almost completely lacking in this area, and compensate with other techniques. Some of those techniques may lead to very elegant solutions that spatial reasoning simply wouldn't point to.
I won't say that my completing the test in 20 minutes with some effort means it would be a reasonable test for anyone else. Likewise, it would be interesting to see if more complex levels of testing could be achieved, and so be able to categorize those who are above average, if this even passes that mark.
On a related note, you may be interested in this: Arrowsmith School. The whole premise behind the school is using mental exercises to train up the weaker cognitive capacities of people with cognitive disabilities until they reach normal levels of function. 30 years of practice seems to indicate that it works. It makes me think there could be more possibility for improvement than we think.
The earthquake and the tsunami were neither exceptional nor unanticipated. Low-frequency, yes. But also completely expected. Parts of the coastline not far from the power plant show clear signs of having been hit by a tsunami 10 meters higher than this one, within the last 1000 years.
Ah, so not likely in a given person's lifetime, and also not often in 40 or 50 generations. Exactly how many other buildings are designed for that level of destruction? Whether these ones should be is a slightly different question, I'll grant you, but we're talking very rare events - some few times in 1/10 of humanity's recorded history.
The best way to approach nutrition is to look into the research on the digestive system (which consist of more than just epidemiological studies) and understand what is going on and going to go on in your body when you consume things (it is beneficial to eat sugar when your blood sugar levels are low, I repeat: beneficial). It's not easy (but doable), but it sure beats running around blurting out appeals to nature or evangelizing the Word of some food guru you like, which 99% of the people seem to do.
Yes, it's expected that when you're body is in an abnormal or unhealthy state, that things that would otherwise not be recommended might be beneficial. Don't continue your marathon runs with a broken leg. Use antiseptics on a dirty wound. Have maggots clean dead tissue from a gangrenous wound. Eat simple sugars when your blood sugar is very low (bonking in athletic terms). In a typical healthy state, an expert generally wouldn't recommend any of these.
Plan B, if the airport is locked down auto-detonate all of my bombers.
This seems like it would be reasonably effective with just one potential bomber. Why waste them all in one place?
And so I searched united states broadband subsidy in DDG, and this is the second link. My casual review notes somewhere between $7.2B and $11.7B in stimulus funding, paid since 2006, mentioned in the first three paragraphs, $4.5B of that announced in Nov. 2011. That would be one budget ago. Exactly how much more recently are you looking for? I'm sure if I look, I could find some slated for distribution in 2013, but I think the point is made. That particular trough is still open.
The companies claim they can't compete against the government entity.
This is an issue if the municipal system is subsidized with taxes, or funded through tax-backed municipal bonds, or receives special access to municipal right-of-ways, or any number of other things normal companies don't have access to. The municipality can easily undercut the competition because they don't have to pay for right-of-ways and, if all else fails, they can force people to pay for their service whether they want it or not. It's the same reason you don't see many private roads; given two otherwise equal roads, one private (toll) and the other public (tax-funded), no one is going to choose the toll road when they have to pay the taxes for the public one anyway, even if the tolls are ultimately less expensive.
Note that I'm not arguing against community-provided Internet access, just the government aspects. If the service was provided by a local co-op with no special ties to the municipal government, competing on equal terms, the company would have no cause for complaint.
As the anonymous poster said below, but I'll expand upon. The U.S government paid billions in subsidies to get broadband up and running, and then when they don't do it and a town or city decides to roll their own (after the broadband companies say they have no plan to roll it out soon, nor do they have a timeline for when it will be done) the company sues for unfair competition. Personally, I'd ask them how they plan to compete in a market they don't service, nor have even tentative plans of servicing.
This is beside all the tax breaks, sweetheart contracts, forgivable loans, and bailouts (yep, being rewarded for screwing up!) which these companies get while cities literally go bankrupt with no word of any help from the federal government.
In short, the competing with government on equal terms sailed decades ago. Maybe it's time to either cut off the gravy or laugh in their faces when they whine about having to compete with the government.
You're an idiot.
Did you notice the much of the government is also up in arms about what the NSA did?
And
Convenient that you forget about the breaking and entering and then illegal access to the computer system.
You idiots needs to realize it is not about the docs, it was about the crimes he committed to gain access to the docs.
Wow, did somebody just learn a new word? Good for you!
I can only assume you're still pretty young, or haven't watched politics very much. Politicians spend a lot of time being very dismayed, concerned, disappointed, and outraged when their opponents do certain things, and then justify those same acts when they're the ones who get caught. When they do something they shouldn't have, they create a law saying they can do that now. If they propose a law and everyone gets upset, they drop it and then propose a slightly watered down version in 6 months or so. If they make a significant promise to get elected, they discover it's just too difficult to keep it once they get elected. If they actually repeal a bad law (or don't renew it), they often find a way to get at least a watered down version in at some later date, or let their opponent re-enact it when they're back in power.
Given all the antics politicians regularly engage in, why should I give any credit to them because they've formed yet another committee? Let's see what the results are. I'll put my money that the TSA will still be around in three years, and will be doing more ground traffic checks.
Gun free zones are free killing zones. Every mass shooting I can recall, except one, happened in a gun free zone. [...] When armed good people are present someone might still get killed but it's also quite certain the murderer will be among the people shot.
The problem with non-uniformed civilians carrying guns is that they cameoflage the bad guys. If you see a person carrying a gun in a place where nobody routinely carries a gun, you call the police because something is wrong. But if lots of people carry guns all the time, you end up either raising a lot of false alarms, or risk allowing a shooter to get to his victims and start shooting before anyone knows to stop him.
IMO if we're going to have people around carrying guns to keep the public safe, those people should be professionally trained and in uniform. That minimizes the "is that armed guy a good guy or a bad guy?" problem.
Lucky for us, the bad guys are happy to follow the requirement that they walk around brandishing their gun so that we know they're one of the bad guys.
Really, there are two problems here. First, an unequal balance of power. Bad guys can and will get guns. "Good guys without guns" sounds a lot like "victims". Second, lack of police coverage. If police were everywhere, I would be more inclined to say that civilians have no need for guns (except to protect against the police, but that's a philosophical issue), but I'm not interested in paying the taxes to support that.
Also, it's not like there couldn't be a training requirement to have a permit to carry a weapon, as opposed to owning one. Given your sig, you're from Canada. We already have possession permits. Do you really think it's so difficult to have a higher standard for a concealed carry permit? Many places in the states (perhaps all that allow concealed carry) have a licensing requirement, which appears to have a training component.
You can not, but for an entirely different reason that has nothing to do with technicalities of airport-side implementation. In Israel, this kind of thing exists because it had to evolve because of a real existential threat. If you replicate this methodology to an environment that does NOT have such a threat - that is, to any country that isn't Israel - it will not work. How are you going to train airport security personnel if there's no century of experience with specific tactics, and no national security mechanism? Americans seem to think they've got it rough because NSA may have been reading their emails. In Israel, there is a national identity database, which includes references to relative, and every person has a number. Let me give you an example. I went to a bank for a bank-signed deposit for my landlord. The teller asked for the landlord's ID number to be put on the writ. I called him on the cellphone and asked, repeating the number aloud. Then I asked him to repeat it once again to be sure. By the time he finished, the teller had, read this, a printout with his phone number, address, face, and situation in the debt registrar. Remember the assassination of Hamas chief in Dubai? It was blamed on Israel, but nobody in the world paid attention to the fact that the copy of national identity database HAS BEEN LEAKED TO TORRENT SITES EVERY YEAR FOR A DECADE, and it occured to nobody that the stolen identities of Israeli citizens that the assassins used could've easily come from there. And now they are adding a biometric component to the national identity database that so far has failed basic security requirements ("biometric database" here being Excel files over plaintext HTTP).
In Israel, we can tolerate this invasion of privacy, and ethnic/racial profiling, because it would be suicide not to resort to it. But nobody else should marvel at it, and nobody else should try to replicate it. It is something we have by necessity, not because we were sitting around on our collective zionist assess contemplating what to do and somebody was all like "Hey! I know! Let's make the most awesome, invisible and efficient racial profiling system in the world."
I beg you all to not advocate it.
TL;DR The US doesn't need to do what Israel has done because the threat isn't significant.
Poor backward and forwards compatibility? Really?
I recently opened a few documents with Word 2011 on my Mac that were authored with whatever version of Word that was available on Windows 3.1/3.11. After a quick conversion, they loaded perfectly. I regularly send and receive documents with a friend who is still running Office 2003 on XP, again, no problems at all.
Without an idea of what is in the files, it's hard to say how relevant this is. You can effectively use Word as Notepad with a nicer interface. You can also use Word with piles of macros, multi-level formatting, custom styles, and that weird font you downloaded 8 years ago. One will be likelier to convert from one version to another than the other will.
I'm not saying that you're presenting a specious argument, but one of the tricky things in this discussion is determining which feature MS decided to update between one version of Word and another, and whether that will cause a conversion to break. But if I was going to make a work-alike of Word, I'd take special note of the features that tend to fail on conversion, and pay extra attention to them when I make my conversion routines. After all, if the producer of both versions of Word has trouble with conversions between them, I should take that as an indicator that it requires special effort. And it looks good for me.
Well, if you want a good, accurate concealed gun, you use a camera, as that naturally has a scope and it's often acceptable to point it at people. Stuff of spy books forever.
Also, comes with a metal casing around all the working parts. The good ones, anyway.
Yep, printing food is a bad idea. Until you have a von Neumann machine, the big point is to use it to make a von Neumann machine. Once you're there, the exponential benefits of transistor design can be realized on the macro scale. Then making a pizza becomes a trivial process. Of course, then the big trick is not turning the whole world into pizzas.
Yet no one has designed an industrial pump that can perform at the level the heart does ... with the energy usage a heart has, for as long as it has.
So in short, no, no they haven't made something 'better' than a human heart in any way.
Show me a 120 year old unserviced pump please.
Better to say: So in short, no, no they haven't made something 'better' than a human heart in every way. Which really is what matters for us.
When I'm in the car and want some cheap, fast, gut-filling goodness, do I say to my wife "Do you want to stop at McDonald's?"
Which is exactly what franchising is all about - leveraging the brand name for marketing. Which absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how a particular business owner handles payroll.
But it should have everything to do with how the franchiser, McDonald's, responds to this PR nightmare. Deal with the current clown, set franchise regulations to make sure it doesn't happen again.
No, the FBI is all over the world. They are the primary criminal investigation unit of the US government. Most of their work occurs in the US, but embassy bombings and the like fall under their purvue. The CIA and NSA, and the millitary are not law enforcement agencies. The FBI has a wide reach. I think it was an FBI agent who questioned Saddam Hussein after his capture.
You realize that embassies are considered to be soil of the nations they are embassies for, right? By definition, any bombing of an American embassy occurred on American soil.
Which is why I have been saying for years America needs to grow the fuck up. America, the country where you can't show a tit unless it has a knife buried in it and where we nearly impeached a POTUS for getting a BJ, it more than time for us to grow the fuck up and stop pretending that Leave It To Beaver was an accurate depiction of the 1950s.
I don't care about seeing tits on TV. I care about other people deciding where and when I or my kids can see tits (or anything else) on TV.
As for propriety in our national leaders, I suggest we go for a more European stance. Oh wait. That said, at least Berlusconi wasn't banging subordinates, and banging someone who was at the age of consent in many western nations (hell, it isn't even illegal in Italy).
So....we'll be expecting more porn from Japan. No, not that freaky tentacle, bondage, or group stuff, just casual nudity. I'm guessing the novelty will make it popular.
6 million packs in a year is 1 out of 50, or 2%, not 0.05%. It's still not a lot, though. Not only that, that Wikipedia article doesn't even say that the sales are US-only. You'd think Twinkies are sold worldwide. The world population is 7 billion, so that's 0.1 percent.
So it's entirely possible that this time 99.9% of the people are right. I'm impressed!
Arrest without bail sounds like an effective solution to this little problem. Oh, that, and keeping the guy in prison costs money for a problem they can just let leave? Now I see.
What does it feel like to see a threat in every shadow?
It's a little unnerving, but it's reassuring to know that other people see them too every now and then. ;)
There seems to be a similar effect in human systems. Namely, failure, such as bankruptcy, seems to be a very effective way to remove businesses that no longer work.
Yes. In fact, it's so effective, it can seriously damage or destroy businesses that do work, too.