* The New England states form a tight compact and call themselves...New England. Connecticut is a toss-up - the whole state is a suburb of either NY or Boston.
* New York goes it alone. Hell, they barely get along with any other states now, and their ego's are big enough to try it. For that matter, NYC might try to declare itself a city-state. That will work until they need to conquer Staten Island so they can throw away their trash, and then realize that they don't have any guns.
* PA/NJ/DE: medium tight alliance. The big advantage is that ground transport can't get to NY or NE without going through one of those 3 states. Govern independently, share border controls, and get fat off the tolls. Harrisburg tells Phila to get with the program or they'll send a million men with deer rifles to push them into the Schuylkill. They'll comply - that river is nasty.
* Alternately, PA/NJ/MD together with Delaware and the rest of the Eastern Shore seceding to become the Joint Principality of Credit Cards and Chickens - CCC for short.
* VA - this is tricky I think VA will split up unto Northern VA, which will join with MD and DC to form The Alliance of Whiny Bitches (TAWB), with southern VA joining the Confederacy.
* The Confederacy. Well, DUH!. I see FL breaking apart, the Panhandle staying with the Confederacy and the rest of the state joining Cuba. Or NY - hard to tell which exiles have more pull.
* The Rust Belt - OH, IN, IL, MI, WI - will stick together and slowly deteriorate until they realize that bitching about foreign trade to the Federal Government is a double loser - no Feds, and the foreigners are only 50 miles away.
* Mountain West - very loose confederation, with the guiding motto "Every Man has a Manifesto". They meet once every 6 years to declare that they are still independent and no, they are still not accepting immigrants from the West Coast.
* Texas: Go it alone. I mean, they were an independent nation already - it can't be that hard to pick up where they left off. OK will be the sidekick/protectorate.
* The Appalachian states: WV, KY, TN, AR. They will hang tight because they are poor as dirt, and have few resources. Their main export will be soldiers (think Dickson's Dorsai). Will likely maintain close relationships with PA, due to similar topography and culture in the center of the state; will be the most highly armed political unit per capita EVER.
* Midwest farm states: loose collective administered jointly by Monsanto and ADM. Their motto: "You send tractors and fuel, we'll send food"
* Utah: I'm surprised the Mormons haven't declared independence already.
* Nevada: Independent, and they will have no enemies. Their motto: "Blackjack, Hookers, and the Hoover Dam"
* Arizona and NM: "How many peso's for the chalupa?"
* Washington and Oregon: They'll have to stick together, because no one else wants them.
* Alaska: Independent, until the Russians decide they want the oil. Then Palin will be able to see Russia in her mirror.
* Hawaii: See comments on Texas.
* And finally, CA. Split into 3: Northern, Central, and Southern. Northern joins up with WA and OR to form the Alliance of Hippie Nations. Central creates a loose alliance with the Midwest, supplying produce in return for migrant laborers and guns for their southern border (they don't worry about the North - is it even possible to form an army from stoners, much less an invasion?). And Sout
I worked with a civil engineer who was on the Washington Metro construction for a while. One day the unearthed a concrete ductbank that wasn't on any maps, etc. SOP was that, if it's not accounted for, cut it, so they did.
Within 5 minutes the Secret Service was down in the hole, had stopped work and kicked everybody out of the tunnel - apparently, the ductbank housed the "nuclear hotline" and losing contact with the other side could have been interpreted as a prelude to an attack.
"Don't forget that ham geekery also tends toward the low end (doing amazing things with nearly nothing) because of hams' association with emergency preparedness."
I always thought it was because they tend to be cheapskates. In a good way.
"By that time the only two things keeping you in school at all are the fact that there's an awful lot of paperwork involved in having you expelled, and that your professor may still feel sorry for you. Your best bet is to admit everything, tell a mildly sad story about how you were running out of time and panicked, and then never do it again. "
Right on, Brother!
I used to grade homework assignments for an Intro to Practical Logic course, and about 1-2x/semester I'd find 2 assignments that were obviously the product of "collaboration" - and no, it was not encouraged. Typically, I'd be grading a stack and would come on a paper that was not only badly wrong, but idiosyncratically wrong - trains of logic that would take contorted paths to prove "A=-A". I'd grade it, pull the next one, and lo and behold there's the exact same train of convoluted logic. I'd grade that and then paperclip them together and give them to the professor with a note to the effect that I believe the students were cheating. And the consequences to the students were...nothing.
Not a thing. Wasn't even mentioned to them. The professor basically didn't want to be bothered. Keep in mind that I only passed through the most flagrant examples - there were plenty I suspected (correct answers but word-for-word identical) but didn't pass through. I mean, Lord knows I wasn't a saint, but at least TRY to cover your tracks, please. Think of the graders!
Not exactly. The British burned Washington. Canada was still a colony at the time.
I draw a similar distinction between the help the Colonies received from Bourbon France to the help given by the United States to the Republic of France. Same borders, WAY different "nations".
Being of Italian descent, I'm partial to "Caesar." But that's a bit of a mouthful for the one-syllable-only press, so we could shorten it to Cs...wait a minute...uh, nevermind.
Is it really that necessary to appoint a czar fro EVERY issue? I'm waiting for the Toilet Paper Czar, who will coordinate government efforts to regulate both the orientation of the roll in the holder as well as the direction of wipe.
You live in a TV fueled fantasyland - that's the only place where the Good Guys draw on the man holding a gun and say "Drop it" - and he does.
If I have a gun drawn, and you don't, there are 2 possibilities:
1) If I am rational, I have already decided to use deadly force. I have the power to kill you. Why on earth would I give up that power simply because you asked? I'm not even going to let you equalize that power - I would pull the trigger before your motion to pull your gun is complete.
2) If I am irrational, how on earth can you predict what I'm going to do?
Aside from the very, VERY loose metaphor between handguns and nuclear weapons breaking down in details, the basis remains - it's about power. Who has it, who wants it. North Korea has, or will have, the power to destroy a lot of stuff. So do we. If we simply flash our missiles at him and say "Get rid of your nukes or else," why would they? Right now the US and the other nuclear powers ALREADY HAVE the power to wipe NK off the map; if Kim Jong Il gives up his nukes simply because we ask, we still have the power to turn his presidential palace to dust, with only our good faith to guarantee that we won't just nuke his ass anyway.
"My view is that the civilized world, not just the US, should back up nuclear nonproliferation efforts with the threat of both conventional and nuclear force. Ideally an international military force backed with nuclear weapons could implement this nonproliferation effort."
The irony in that statement is so astounding, I can't tell if you are being facetious or not. Well played, sir.
"Toilet plunge my karma, but why is this a/. headliner? Only light that is coming out of this is at least some early 20th century folk have melded into and use technology, as far as the statistic... who cares."
Umm, because most of the rest of us aren't soulless twats?
"Young people need to be able to do stupid things within a context of safety and forgetting in order to learn about themselves and the world. If someone's every action will be on record for the rest of their life, then they will feel unnecessary pressure to stay neatly within the lines and remain naive and unworldly for fear of the consequences. It would stifle their creativity, their adventurousness, and consequently their outlook on the world and everything affected by that."
Your statement is self contradictory. You propose that people should be able to do things without "fear of the consequences". Tell me, how do they learn that some actions are good or bad if they are isolated from the consequences of those actions "within a context of safety and forgetting"?
Your attitude is what is 100% wrong with the recent attitudes toward raising children - protecting them from the consequences of their actions. Have fun raising your kids - you won't know you've fucked up until they are grown and it is too late.
You are trying to have it both ways. You are trying to define "UFO" as the sum of the meanings of the words in the full designation: "Unidentified Flying Objects". And what qualifies? Anything that falls outside of the universe of "Identified Flying Objects". That isn't something subject to "belief", because it is conditional on the knowledge of the person making the determination:
Reporter: "General, what were those lights in the sky?" General: "We don't know."
Does that mean that no one, no being, has knowledge of what those lights really were? By your interpretation, saying "I believe in UFO's" would be equivalent to "I believe in SWS's - sky without sun". No shit - it's called "night", and it happens on a roughly 24 hour cycle.
Now let's take "UFO" the way it is understood by the electorate: alien space ships. Kucinich is a politician, so he knew damned well what the meaning of his remarks were to the public. He didn't mean "I believe there are objects that have flown in the sky that we haven't been able to identify."
Which centuries and which decades? If we are going back to medieval firearms making you are mixing metaphors - firearms advances were stalled by the european guild system, and patent laws have an entirely different effect than guilds.
"They have never ever in the past been used for anything other than patent trolling and innovation stiffling."
John Browning, prolific firearms designer, had 128 patents. His company produced some of the designs, and he sold or licensed his patents to various other companies. He was the single most dominant force in firearms design at the end of the 19th century, and he profited handsomely from the sale and licensing of his intellectual property.
So by your logic, there were no other firearms designs during that era? I have a Mauser rifle designed in 1898 that disagrees with you.
In addition, since Browning's patents have long expired, ANYBODY is free to build firearms that are exact copies of his designs. there is a multi-million dollar industry built around the design of the 1911 Auto Pistol.
Are patents today being abused? Sure. Just be careful with such sweeping statements.
My objection is similar to open vs. closed source debate. Most of the people who use Ubuntu may never get into the inner workings, but the are not *precluded* from doing so like they are in windows. Likewise, Volvo is right that most of their target market will never lift the hood. But shouldn't they be given the option? Apparently not.
I think I should add to the end of my previous statement the following:
"... when Nextel's network collapsed and first responders couldn't communicate, and they had gotten rid of their old radios because Nextel promised the FCC service capability they were never able to deliver, and which was apparent to everybody, but the FCC bought off on it anyway".
The FCC picks winners and losers all the time. Ask the folks who had private mobile radio licenses when the FCC decided that the frequencies could be better utilized - by Nextel. Most of those licenses were for local emergency services, and we all know how well Nextel worked for them when the time came.
As anyone with a real brother can attest, they may be your brothers; they are not necessarily your friends. What baffles me is why anyone would expect different.
The brought out a "concept car" that was designed by women, for women. So, it had a split headrest for a ponytail, lots of amenities, interchangeable interiors for color and material. But what I thought was most telling (and insulting) was that there was no hood. The only owner serviceable component was the windshield washer fluid reservoir. The engine and transmission could only be accessed by unbolting the front end sheet metal at a dealership. When asked about this "feature", the lead designer, a woman, said that most women really can't be bothered with servicing the car and they'd much rather have someone else do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah - here's the way it's going to break down:
Here's my breakdown for the collapse of the US:
* The New England states form a tight compact and call themselves...New England. Connecticut is a toss-up - the whole state is a suburb of either NY or Boston.
* New York goes it alone. Hell, they barely get along with any other states now, and their ego's are big enough to try it. For that matter, NYC might try to declare itself a city-state. That will work until they need to conquer Staten Island so they can throw away their trash, and then realize that they don't have any guns.
* PA/NJ/DE: medium tight alliance. The big advantage is that ground transport can't get to NY or NE without going through one of those 3 states. Govern independently, share border controls, and get fat off the tolls. Harrisburg tells Phila to get with the program or they'll send a million men with deer rifles to push them into the Schuylkill. They'll comply - that river is nasty.
* Alternately, PA/NJ/MD together with Delaware and the rest of the Eastern Shore seceding to become the Joint Principality of Credit Cards and Chickens - CCC for short.
* VA - this is tricky I think VA will split up unto Northern VA, which will join with MD and DC to form The Alliance of Whiny Bitches (TAWB), with southern VA joining the Confederacy.
* The Confederacy. Well, DUH!. I see FL breaking apart, the Panhandle staying with the Confederacy and the rest of the state joining Cuba. Or NY - hard to tell which exiles have more pull.
* The Rust Belt - OH, IN, IL, MI, WI - will stick together and slowly deteriorate until they realize that bitching about foreign trade to the Federal Government is a double loser - no Feds, and the foreigners are only 50 miles away.
* Mountain West - very loose confederation, with the guiding motto "Every Man has a Manifesto". They meet once every 6 years to declare that they are still independent and no, they are still not accepting immigrants from the West Coast.
* Texas: Go it alone. I mean, they were an independent nation already - it can't be that hard to pick up where they left off. OK will be the sidekick/protectorate.
* The Appalachian states: WV, KY, TN, AR. They will hang tight because they are poor as dirt, and have few resources. Their main export will be soldiers (think Dickson's Dorsai). Will likely maintain close relationships with PA, due to similar topography and culture in the center of the state; will be the most highly armed political unit per capita EVER.
* Midwest farm states: loose collective administered jointly by Monsanto and ADM. Their motto: "You send tractors and fuel, we'll send food"
* Utah: I'm surprised the Mormons haven't declared independence already.
* Nevada: Independent, and they will have no enemies. Their motto: "Blackjack, Hookers, and the Hoover Dam"
* Arizona and NM: "How many peso's for the chalupa?"
* Washington and Oregon: They'll have to stick together, because no one else wants them.
* Alaska: Independent, until the Russians decide they want the oil. Then Palin will be able to see Russia in her mirror.
* Hawaii: See comments on Texas.
* And finally, CA. Split into 3: Northern, Central, and Southern. Northern joins up with WA and OR to form the Alliance of Hippie Nations. Central creates a loose alliance with the Midwest, supplying produce in return for migrant laborers and guns for their southern border (they don't worry about the North - is it even possible to form an army from stoners, much less an invasion?). And Sout
[maniacal laughter followed by gentle sobbing]
Poor guy. The first part of recovery is admitting you have a problem. So say it with me:
"Bush beat Gore."
That wasn't so hard now, was it?
"Wikipedia has a lot of de facto power. We gave them this power by using the service and promoting it among our acquaintances. "
More fool you, then. Sucker.
I worked with a civil engineer who was on the Washington Metro construction for a while. One day the unearthed a concrete ductbank that wasn't on any maps, etc. SOP was that, if it's not accounted for, cut it, so they did.
Within 5 minutes the Secret Service was down in the hole, had stopped work and kicked everybody out of the tunnel - apparently, the ductbank housed the "nuclear hotline" and losing contact with the other side could have been interpreted as a prelude to an attack.
Puckered assholes all around, that day.
"Don't forget that ham geekery also tends toward the low end (doing amazing things with nearly nothing) because of hams' association with emergency preparedness."
I always thought it was because they tend to be cheapskates. In a good way.
Yep, and my best friend humiliated me in front of my wife. I forgave him. Friends do that.
"By that time the only two things keeping you in school at all are the fact that there's an awful lot of paperwork involved in having you expelled, and that your professor may still feel sorry for you. Your best bet is to admit everything, tell a mildly sad story about how you were running out of time and panicked, and then never do it again. "
Right on, Brother!
I used to grade homework assignments for an Intro to Practical Logic course, and about 1-2x/semester I'd find 2 assignments that were obviously the product of "collaboration" - and no, it was not encouraged. Typically, I'd be grading a stack and would come on a paper that was not only badly wrong, but idiosyncratically wrong - trains of logic that would take contorted paths to prove "A=-A". I'd grade it, pull the next one, and lo and behold there's the exact same train of convoluted logic. I'd grade that and then paperclip them together and give them to the professor with a note to the effect that I believe the students were cheating. And the consequences to the students were...nothing.
Not a thing. Wasn't even mentioned to them. The professor basically didn't want to be bothered. Keep in mind that I only passed through the most flagrant examples - there were plenty I suspected (correct answers but word-for-word identical) but didn't pass through. I mean, Lord knows I wasn't a saint, but at least TRY to cover your tracks, please. Think of the graders!
Not exactly. The British burned Washington. Canada was still a colony at the time.
I draw a similar distinction between the help the Colonies received from Bourbon France to the help given by the United States to the Republic of France. Same borders, WAY different "nations".
"You mean something like a king?"
Being of Italian descent, I'm partial to "Caesar." But that's a bit of a mouthful for the one-syllable-only press, so we could shorten it to Cs...wait a minute...uh, nevermind.
Is it really that necessary to appoint a czar fro EVERY issue? I'm waiting for the Toilet Paper Czar, who will coordinate government efforts to regulate both the orientation of the roll in the holder as well as the direction of wipe.
You live in a TV fueled fantasyland - that's the only place where the Good Guys draw on the man holding a gun and say "Drop it" - and he does.
If I have a gun drawn, and you don't, there are 2 possibilities:
1) If I am rational, I have already decided to use deadly force. I have the power to kill you. Why on earth would I give up that power simply because you asked? I'm not even going to let you equalize that power - I would pull the trigger before your motion to pull your gun is complete.
2) If I am irrational, how on earth can you predict what I'm going to do?
Aside from the very, VERY loose metaphor between handguns and nuclear weapons breaking down in details, the basis remains - it's about power. Who has it, who wants it. North Korea has, or will have, the power to destroy a lot of stuff. So do we. If we simply flash our missiles at him and say "Get rid of your nukes or else," why would they? Right now the US and the other nuclear powers ALREADY HAVE the power to wipe NK off the map; if Kim Jong Il gives up his nukes simply because we ask, we still have the power to turn his presidential palace to dust, with only our good faith to guarantee that we won't just nuke his ass anyway.
South Korea has been our friend for many years. You don't just abandon your friends.
Same with Israel, same with Taiwan.
The irony in that statement is so astounding, I can't tell if you are being facetious or not. Well played, sir.
Umm, because most of the rest of us aren't soulless twats?
Your statement is self contradictory. You propose that people should be able to do things without "fear of the consequences". Tell me, how do they learn that some actions are good or bad if they are isolated from the consequences of those actions "within a context of safety and forgetting"?
Your attitude is what is 100% wrong with the recent attitudes toward raising children - protecting them from the consequences of their actions. Have fun raising your kids - you won't know you've fucked up until they are grown and it is too late.
Somebody, an actual person, decided not to reopen the account to help the police. That individual is who is at fault.
You are trying to have it both ways. You are trying to define "UFO" as the sum of the meanings of the words in the full designation: "Unidentified Flying Objects". And what qualifies? Anything that falls outside of the universe of "Identified Flying Objects". That isn't something subject to "belief", because it is conditional on the knowledge of the person making the determination:
Reporter: "General, what were those lights in the sky?"
General: "We don't know."
Does that mean that no one, no being, has knowledge of what those lights really were? By your interpretation, saying "I believe in UFO's" would be equivalent to "I believe in SWS's - sky without sun". No shit - it's called "night", and it happens on a roughly 24 hour cycle.
Now let's take "UFO" the way it is understood by the electorate: alien space ships. Kucinich is a politician, so he knew damned well what the meaning of his remarks were to the public. He didn't mean "I believe there are objects that have flown in the sky that we haven't been able to identify."
"Let me rephrase that: can we fork him?"
I think that depends on whether he works on both sides of the aisle.
Which centuries and which decades? If we are going back to medieval firearms making you are mixing metaphors - firearms advances were stalled by the european guild system, and patent laws have an entirely different effect than guilds.
"They have never ever in the past been used for anything other than patent trolling and innovation stiffling."
John Browning, prolific firearms designer, had 128 patents. His company produced some of the designs, and he sold or licensed his patents to various other companies. He was the single most dominant force in firearms design at the end of the 19th century, and he profited handsomely from the sale and licensing of his intellectual property.
So by your logic, there were no other firearms designs during that era? I have a Mauser rifle designed in 1898 that disagrees with you.
In addition, since Browning's patents have long expired, ANYBODY is free to build firearms that are exact copies of his designs. there is a multi-million dollar industry built around the design of the 1911 Auto Pistol.
Are patents today being abused? Sure. Just be careful with such sweeping statements.
My objection is similar to open vs. closed source debate. Most of the people who use Ubuntu may never get into the inner workings, but the are not *precluded* from doing so like they are in windows. Likewise, Volvo is right that most of their target market will never lift the hood. But shouldn't they be given the option? Apparently not.
I think I should add to the end of my previous statement the following:
"... when Nextel's network collapsed and first responders couldn't communicate, and they had gotten rid of their old radios because Nextel promised the FCC service capability they were never able to deliver, and which was apparent to everybody, but the FCC bought off on it anyway".
The FCC picks winners and losers all the time. Ask the folks who had private mobile radio licenses when the FCC decided that the frequencies could be better utilized - by Nextel. Most of those licenses were for local emergency services, and we all know how well Nextel worked for them when the time came.
"rent a friend, join a frat."
As anyone with a real brother can attest, they may be your brothers; they are not necessarily your friends. What baffles me is why anyone would expect different.
The brought out a "concept car" that was designed by women, for women. So, it had a split headrest for a ponytail, lots of amenities, interchangeable interiors for color and material. But what I thought was most telling (and insulting) was that there was no hood. The only owner serviceable component was the windshield washer fluid reservoir. The engine and transmission could only be accessed by unbolting the front end sheet metal at a dealership. When asked about this "feature", the lead designer, a woman, said that most women really can't be bothered with servicing the car and they'd much rather have someone else do it.