Heh - last time I was at my inlaws for a holiday, I was the one holding HER hack from killing them. It wasn't until we got married and saw how my family interacted till she realized how poorly treated she was. If I'd have killed them for her, I'd have gotten laid every night for a month.
Hmmm - looks like Australian girls should be carrying MORE guns, not fewer. Oh, that's right, they aren't allowed to. That's OK - just close your eyes and think of England, honey.
"Except in reality you are twice as likely to shoot a friend or family member than defend your home with your home defense gun."
Not really. Statistically, there are twice as many shootings of friends and family members as actual intruders. Now, that includes accidental as well as intentional shootings, so how one can apply "statistical likelyhood" to voluntary acts is beyond me, but that's the way you are using it - somehow, the presence of a gun in the house makes me more likely to be violent toward my family. Like it's Satan and the apple.
But a bigger point is that one can "defend your home with your home defense gun" WITHOUT shooting the intruder. The statistics you use don't include incidents where firearms are shown, pointed, fired into the air (stupid, BTW)or otherwise used without actually firing on the assailant. So if some drunk breaks into my house and I hold him at gunpoint while the police show up (remember, when seconds count the police are just minutes away), that doesn't show up in your statistics but it is defending my home with a gun.
"If you are mugged at gunpoint and have a gun tucked away, how are you going to reach for it without getting shot?"
That's pretty retarded. By your logic, ALL mugging victims end up shot - unless they walk around carrying their wallet in their hands in plain sight. The idea is to "tuck away" the gun NEAR your money, etc., so you can access it unobtrusively. One guy I knew kept a Colt Mustang+2 in the small of his back right next to his wallet. A daughter of a friend keeps hers in her purse - she won't even bother drawing it before firing (her Dad will buy her a new purse).
Another point is that not all muggers have guns - if someone asks me for my money and he has a knife and I have a gun, why would I be afraid to draw it?
"If there is any justice, the executives and the lawyers are held liable. Why include the lawyers? While it was a frivolous lawsuit brought by the company, the lawyers were the ones executing dirty tactics in the court while getting paid by the millions. They knew well what they were doing."
It's worse than that - part of their compensation was stock. That means that they were a) part owners of the company, and b) they had an inherent conflict of interest as officers of the court. They had a huge incentive to act unethically with the lawsuit - they didn't get paid unless SCOX stayed at a high value, which is substantially different from getting paid if they won the suit.
"Think about that next time one of your family members needs a liver transplant and is told by the Insurance Company that its too 'experimental' and decline to pay, just cos their profits are down for the quarter and someone has a monthly target to meet."
Of course, anecdotes and individual cases are a great way to set health care policy. I mean, look at what happened when Congress decreed that insurance companies pay for the radiation/bone marrow transplant treatment for breast cancer.
Oh, wait a minute - the study (singular) Congress relied on was fradulent, and the treatment outcomes were actually WORSE than conventional treatment. That means lives were SAVED because of the evil policies of the insurance industry - conversely, women died or had their lives shortened because it was an election year.
"On a somewhat related note, Ms. Clinton has always struck me as the kind of person who, if presented with a pistol and a note from that stated if she killed the people on the attached list, she'd be out the door, gun in hand, before checking that the thing was even loaded."
Aside from the sentence construction, I agree, since it already happened. Ask Vince Foster - oh wait, you can't, he killed himself with 2 bullets to the brain.
"For whatever faults she has, she is smart tough and effective"
Smart? Sure.
Tough? Tolerating 20 years of Bill's philandering so she could hold onto power? OK, that's tough.
Effective? Hold on there. Name me one thing, one single program or policy she has been "effective" in getting enacted, BESIDES her program for keeping herself in power. Health care plan?
"Is there any candidate in this race other than Giuliani who has actively supported gun control? "
Well, if you take Hillary at face value in her assertion that she was involved in running the country for 8 years - her "experience" and all that" - then Clinton is the biggest supporter of gun control in the bunch: gun bans, the ATF running rampant, etc.
"issues that require government action: health care costs, global warming, pollution, etc."
No, Libertarian philosophy does deal with those types of issues - they simply are NOT the business of government. If, in your opinion, these items need controlling, then the government would be the obvious choice, but libertarians don't believe that things like that need "control".
I'm reminded of the Bren 10, a handgun introduced in the 80's. Sonny Crockett carried one on "Miami Vice", so there was great interest in it. One problem: the manufacturer started selling the handgun without the magazines - they couldn't get them to function correctly. So when you bought it, you got the pistol, a nice plastic case, and a note that said, in essence, "We'll send you magazines when we get around to it." So then the mags finally hit the market - I think a year later. By that point, things were so effed up that the company folded, leaving more handguns then magazines on the market.
"Miami Vice" sucked after the first couple of seasons anyway.
"If you cannot get what you want at a fair price, the market has failed."
Huh? While I agree that the market for "intellectual property" is broken, your criteria baffle me. I thought the price in a market was set by whatever someone was willing to pay? So you are saying that, unless something is offerred for sale at some arbitrarily "fair" price, it's a market failure? I thought a market failure was when, due to forces outside of a free market, prices are set inefficiently, not "unfairly" (whatever that means). I mean, I don't think it's fair that I had to pay what I paid for my car, but that doesn't mean that the car market has failed; it just means that I CHOSE to pay more than I initially wanted to.
If anything, external agencies going around determining the "fair" prices for items is what screws things up - see rent control, black markets due to rationing, etc.
My apologies - the GP comment that referred to jamming was hidden, and I thought you were replying to the "Just confiscate them" comment, not jamming. Of course that is illegal, not to mention dangerous - rioting will ensue when 60k people can't text their BFF.
What federal law in particular would that violate? College sports arenas are, by and large, private property. There are TONS of things I can't bring in there that are perfectly legal to possess - various foods and beverages, recording equipment, etc.
And please don't come up with "publicly funded...shouldn't be allowed...". I don't want to hear "should" - tell me what IS. What existing federal law would barring admittance to people who have certain types of equipment violate?
"Back in the 20's the christian right got the volstead act."
Applying the term "christian right" to a political movement before the 70's is like calling something a "genocide" that happened before WWII - it uses a term that didn't exist at the time of the event, not to describe it, but to leverage current emotional and intellectual trends to get the reaction the writer wishes.
"We dont' want to be the MPAA's bitch; if Congress likes that kind of thing, great for them, but no agent or prosecutor is going to make their career chasing college students and grandmothers. They can do their own dirtywork - we're busy with terrorism and drugs."
"Yugoslavia was a "socialist state" with a very good education and public health system. Minority rights, women's rights, and freedom of religion was tolerated, at least in comparison to Russia East Germany, the Ukraine, and other Soviet Bloc dictatorships with which we are still opposed. Tito was brutal and no doubt corrupt, but he was a bulwark against religious extremism, a counterweight against ethnic fanatics."
Tito died and the whole thing went to shit, giving us "ethnic cleansing", Screbrinicza [sp], and Democrats thumping the table for military action to stop the violence.
History will likely judge the US invasion of Iraq as a mistake - hell, even most republicans, when asked privately, will say that. But pretending that Iraq would have remained stable in the future is to ignore history - RECENT history. You can't make people of other tribes/religions/cultures love one another by pointing a gun at them. The best you get is resentful tolerance - hell, we're STILL living with the aftermath of Reconstruction in the South.
Unfortunately, the world hasn't quite figured out how to make culturally and religiously diverse people live together peacefully. I'd argue that the closest we've come is in the US, where immigrant waves have been incorporated more or less successfully. Europe is getting a taste of the problems associated with having large populations of "different" people trying to function within a monolithic society - Muslims in England, North Africans in France, Turks in Germany. Hell, there's a non-zero possibility that Belgium will decide they don't want to exist anymore, based on ethnic and religious divisions.
I am morally certain that, within 20 years, Iraq will be split into 3 ethnically identified political entities, and that it would have happened REGARDLESS of US military adventurism. Now the US simply won't have the moral high ground when it happens. Not that the US ever really does have the moral high ground in the eyes of the rest of the world - anyone remember when the US was getting blamed for allowing Kossovo to happen in Europe's back yard? And now Darfur, to which the US has never had any ties, colonial or otherwise? Somalia? These were all the US's "fault", and we swallowed that hook whole.
If that's really the case, then I'm not very sympathetic to the Improveverywhere folk. Comedy, parody - great. Going onto the subjects premises and at least nominally impersonating employees? That's a tougher sell.
My Physics teacher taught straight out of the book. Verbatim. Since I was a substantially faster reader, I soon got waaay ahead, and bored. Since I was also wresting at the time, and cutting weight, I was also tired and fell asleep often. Inevitably, the teacher tried to "catch" me - I would pop my head up, answer the question, an put my head back down.
Now add my wiseass friend. In a different class, we had some excercises where students "taught", or at least explained the concepts, and I was pretty good at it. So during a particularly trying session, when the physics teacher just wasn't getting the point across, my friend says "Mrs. Teacher, I still don't understand. Can R2.0 explain it?". Irritated, she says "sure, if you think it will help." I did my schtick, and he goes "Ohhh, now I understand it." (No, I don't think I did a better job per se, but he was busting her balls.)
Shortly after that, she asks me to stay after class, and explains to me that she was originally hired to teach sophomore geometry, and that they handed her the senior physics class 2 weeks before term started when another teacher quit. As a result, she was only 2 chapters ahead in preparing lesson plans.
"Oh", I replied, "I'm 4 chapters ahead."
"I know", she says, "So can you cut me a break?" and detente was established, although I was a little confused.
Years later, I found out that she had tried to hand in her resignation after the incident with my friend, and the administration called my Mom in to get her to adjust my attitude. They were a little surprised when the little Italian housewife says "If other students have to ask my son for help, then he's not the problem" and leaving.
So "someone with a House of Representatives IP address" made a change in 2005 which favors the Bush administration. BFD - revert it. The "article" makes it sound as if GWB personally spends his time toying with "whackypedia" (term used in the article), trying to rescue his legacy.
Make up your minds folks - is Bush a borderline retard who can't pronounce nuclear without Cheney's hand up his ass, or is he a machiavellian mastermind with tendrils throughout all aspects of government and our lives? Bubba or black helicopters - can't be both.
I mean, this is the 3rd post with "I'm dating/married/engaged to a librarian" - normally, entire days go by without any evidence that/. readers know what sex with another person is, much less experience it.
Gotta be the eyeglasses. Geeks and girls with eyeglasses...
1) 2003 is signifigant because Iran, seeing what the US did to Saddam the Baathists, decided not to give the US an excuse to keep right on going. Remember, in 2003 Iraq wasn't the total disaster it seems now, and the US effort looked successful enough that the Iranians were worried. So, in effect, seeing "what the US did to Iraq" made them NOT want nukes.
2) (Related to 1) After stopping the program, Iran went to length to hide that fact from the rest of the world - fighting with UN inspectors, etc. Why didn't they throw open the doors and say "Look, see? Nothing here." Possible answers are: - an irrational sense of secrecy (hiding things that would be better to expose), - an overblown sense of sovereignty (they signed the NNPT, which allowed the inspections to which they objected) - a paranoid schizophrenic for a leader (Have you heard the guy talk?) (I know, the meme here is that all the same apply to the US. That's as may be, but if the US is evil because of these traits, how can Iran not be evil with the same traits?)
3) Assuming that the "cancellation" of the weapons program isn't a scam, why do they have a nuclear program at all? They sit atop huge supplies of energy; why go to the effort of a reactor program for electricity generation?
The point I'm trying to make is that there is that, just because Iran may not be actively developing weapons, doesn't mean that they plant daisies and their farts smell like jasmine. There is something going on with their nuclear program that they are not revealing. Is that a good reason to invade? Of course not; but then I always thought the "Invade Iran" thing was more of a Democrat invention to give them another stick to beat Bush with, like the whole "reinstate the draft" thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh - last time I was at my inlaws for a holiday, I was the one holding HER hack from killing them. It wasn't until we got married and saw how my family interacted till she realized how poorly treated she was. If I'd have killed them for her, I'd have gotten laid every night for a month.
No, daughters with hidden guns fix rapists and muggers. Oh, that's right - rapes don't happen Down Under
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes-per-capita
Hmmm - looks like Australian girls should be carrying MORE guns, not fewer. Oh, that's right, they aren't allowed to. That's OK - just close your eyes and think of England, honey.
"Except in reality you are twice as likely to shoot a friend or family member than defend your home with your home defense gun."
Not really. Statistically, there are twice as many shootings of friends and family members as actual intruders. Now, that includes accidental as well as intentional shootings, so how one can apply "statistical likelyhood" to voluntary acts is beyond me, but that's the way you are using it - somehow, the presence of a gun in the house makes me more likely to be violent toward my family. Like it's Satan and the apple.
But a bigger point is that one can "defend your home with your home defense gun" WITHOUT shooting the intruder. The statistics you use don't include incidents where firearms are shown, pointed, fired into the air (stupid, BTW)or otherwise used without actually firing on the assailant. So if some drunk breaks into my house and I hold him at gunpoint while the police show up (remember, when seconds count the police are just minutes away), that doesn't show up in your statistics but it is defending my home with a gun.
"If you are mugged at gunpoint and have a gun tucked away, how are you going to reach for it without getting shot?"
That's pretty retarded. By your logic, ALL mugging victims end up shot - unless they walk around carrying their wallet in their hands in plain sight. The idea is to "tuck away" the gun NEAR your money, etc., so you can access it unobtrusively. One guy I knew kept a Colt Mustang+2 in the small of his back right next to his wallet. A daughter of a friend keeps hers in her purse - she won't even bother drawing it before firing (her Dad will buy her a new purse).
Another point is that not all muggers have guns - if someone asks me for my money and he has a knife and I have a gun, why would I be afraid to draw it?
"If there is any justice, the executives and the lawyers are held liable. Why include the lawyers? While it was a frivolous lawsuit brought by the company, the lawyers were the ones executing dirty tactics in the court while getting paid by the millions. They knew well what they were doing."
It's worse than that - part of their compensation was stock. That means that they were
a) part owners of the company, and
b) they had an inherent conflict of interest as officers of the court. They had a huge incentive to act unethically with the lawsuit - they didn't get paid unless SCOX stayed at a high value, which is substantially different from getting paid if they won the suit.
"Think about that next time one of your family members needs a liver transplant and is told by the Insurance Company that its too 'experimental' and decline to pay, just cos their profits are down for the quarter and someone has a monthly target to meet."
Of course, anecdotes and individual cases are a great way to set health care policy. I mean, look at what happened when Congress decreed that insurance companies pay for the radiation/bone marrow transplant treatment for breast cancer.
Oh, wait a minute - the study (singular) Congress relied on was fradulent, and the treatment outcomes were actually WORSE than conventional treatment. That means lives were SAVED because of the evil policies of the insurance industry - conversely, women died or had their lives shortened because it was an election year.
"On a somewhat related note, Ms. Clinton has always struck me as the kind of person who, if presented with a pistol and a note from that stated if she killed the people on the attached list, she'd be out the door, gun in hand, before checking that the thing was even loaded."
Aside from the sentence construction, I agree, since it already happened. Ask Vince Foster - oh wait, you can't, he killed himself with 2 bullets to the brain.
"For whatever faults she has, she is smart tough and effective"
Smart? Sure.
Tough? Tolerating 20 years of Bill's philandering so she could hold onto power? OK, that's tough.
Effective? Hold on there. Name me one thing, one single program or policy she has been "effective" in getting enacted, BESIDES her program for keeping herself in power. Health care plan?
"Is there any candidate in this race other than Giuliani who has actively supported gun control? "
Well, if you take Hillary at face value in her assertion that she was involved in running the country for 8 years - her "experience" and all that" - then Clinton is the biggest supporter of gun control in the bunch: gun bans, the ATF running rampant, etc.
"issues that require government action: health care costs, global warming, pollution, etc."
No, Libertarian philosophy does deal with those types of issues - they simply are NOT the business of government. If, in your opinion, these items need controlling, then the government would be the obvious choice, but libertarians don't believe that things like that need "control".
No more than I want retards to form opinions because of what they read on Slashdot - and yet, here we are.
I'm reminded of the Bren 10, a handgun introduced in the 80's. Sonny Crockett carried one on "Miami Vice", so there was great interest in it. One problem: the manufacturer started selling the handgun without the magazines - they couldn't get them to function correctly. So when you bought it, you got the pistol, a nice plastic case, and a note that said, in essence, "We'll send you magazines when we get around to it." So then the mags finally hit the market - I think a year later. By that point, things were so effed up that the company folded, leaving more handguns then magazines on the market.
"Miami Vice" sucked after the first couple of seasons anyway.
"If you cannot get what you want at a fair price, the market has failed."
Huh? While I agree that the market for "intellectual property" is broken, your criteria baffle me. I thought the price in a market was set by whatever someone was willing to pay? So you are saying that, unless something is offerred for sale at some arbitrarily "fair" price, it's a market failure? I thought a market failure was when, due to forces outside of a free market, prices are set inefficiently, not "unfairly" (whatever that means). I mean, I don't think it's fair that I had to pay what I paid for my car, but that doesn't mean that the car market has failed; it just means that I CHOSE to pay more than I initially wanted to.
If anything, external agencies going around determining the "fair" prices for items is what screws things up - see rent control, black markets due to rationing, etc.
My apologies - the GP comment that referred to jamming was hidden, and I thought you were replying to the "Just confiscate them" comment, not jamming. Of course that is illegal, not to mention dangerous - rioting will ensue when 60k people can't text their BFF.
Insightful? Jeez, mods these days...
What federal law in particular would that violate? College sports arenas are, by and large, private property. There are TONS of things I can't bring in there that are perfectly legal to possess - various foods and beverages, recording equipment, etc.
And please don't come up with "publicly funded...shouldn't be allowed...". I don't want to hear "should" - tell me what IS. What existing federal law would barring admittance to people who have certain types of equipment violate?
"Back in the 20's the christian right got the volstead act."
Applying the term "christian right" to a political movement before the 70's is like calling something a "genocide" that happened before WWII - it uses a term that didn't exist at the time of the event, not to describe it, but to leverage current emotional and intellectual trends to get the reaction the writer wishes.
In other words, trolling.
"We dont' want to be the MPAA's bitch; if Congress likes that kind of thing, great for them, but no agent or prosecutor is going to make their career chasing college students and grandmothers. They can do their own dirtywork - we're busy with terrorism and drugs."
"Yugoslavia was a "socialist state" with a very good education and public health system. Minority rights, women's rights, and freedom of religion was tolerated, at least in comparison to Russia East Germany, the Ukraine, and other Soviet Bloc dictatorships with which we are still opposed. Tito was brutal and no doubt corrupt, but he was a bulwark against religious extremism, a counterweight against ethnic fanatics."
Tito died and the whole thing went to shit, giving us "ethnic cleansing", Screbrinicza [sp], and Democrats thumping the table for military action to stop the violence.
History will likely judge the US invasion of Iraq as a mistake - hell, even most republicans, when asked privately, will say that. But pretending that Iraq would have remained stable in the future is to ignore history - RECENT history. You can't make people of other tribes/religions/cultures love one another by pointing a gun at them. The best you get is resentful tolerance - hell, we're STILL living with the aftermath of Reconstruction in the South.
Unfortunately, the world hasn't quite figured out how to make culturally and religiously diverse people live together peacefully. I'd argue that the closest we've come is in the US, where immigrant waves have been incorporated more or less successfully. Europe is getting a taste of the problems associated with having large populations of "different" people trying to function within a monolithic society - Muslims in England, North Africans in France, Turks in Germany. Hell, there's a non-zero possibility that Belgium will decide they don't want to exist anymore, based on ethnic and religious divisions.
I am morally certain that, within 20 years, Iraq will be split into 3 ethnically identified political entities, and that it would have happened REGARDLESS of US military adventurism. Now the US simply won't have the moral high ground when it happens. Not that the US ever really does have the moral high ground in the eyes of the rest of the world - anyone remember when the US was getting blamed for allowing Kossovo to happen in Europe's back yard? And now Darfur, to which the US has never had any ties, colonial or otherwise? Somalia? These were all the US's "fault", and we swallowed that hook whole.
If that's really the case, then I'm not very sympathetic to the Improveverywhere folk. Comedy, parody - great. Going onto the subjects premises and at least nominally impersonating employees? That's a tougher sell.
On the blogger, though, BB are just being idjits.
"skipping ahead"
Flashback to High School.
My Physics teacher taught straight out of the book. Verbatim. Since I was a substantially faster reader, I soon got waaay ahead, and bored. Since I was also wresting at the time, and cutting weight, I was also tired and fell asleep often. Inevitably, the teacher tried to "catch" me - I would pop my head up, answer the question, an put my head back down.
Now add my wiseass friend. In a different class, we had some excercises where students "taught", or at least explained the concepts, and I was pretty good at it. So during a particularly trying session, when the physics teacher just wasn't getting the point across, my friend says "Mrs. Teacher, I still don't understand. Can R2.0 explain it?". Irritated, she says "sure, if you think it will help." I did my schtick, and he goes "Ohhh, now I understand it." (No, I don't think I did a better job per se, but he was busting her balls.)
Shortly after that, she asks me to stay after class, and explains to me that she was originally hired to teach sophomore geometry, and that they handed her the senior physics class 2 weeks before term started when another teacher quit. As a result, she was only 2 chapters ahead in preparing lesson plans.
"Oh", I replied, "I'm 4 chapters ahead."
"I know", she says, "So can you cut me a break?" and detente was established, although I was a little confused.
Years later, I found out that she had tried to hand in her resignation after the incident with my friend, and the administration called my Mom in to get her to adjust my attitude. They were a little surprised when the little Italian housewife says "If other students have to ask my son for help, then he's not the problem" and leaving.
You missed the "definitions" page, where "everyone" is limited to "only good people."
Even better - the article presupposes that helpdesk folks are definitely going to Hell.
So "someone with a House of Representatives IP address" made a change in 2005 which favors the Bush administration. BFD - revert it. The "article" makes it sound as if GWB personally spends his time toying with "whackypedia" (term used in the article), trying to rescue his legacy.
Make up your minds folks - is Bush a borderline retard who can't pronounce nuclear without Cheney's hand up his ass, or is he a machiavellian mastermind with tendrils throughout all aspects of government and our lives? Bubba or black helicopters - can't be both.
I mean, this is the 3rd post with "I'm dating/married/engaged to a librarian" - normally, entire days go by without any evidence that /. readers know what sex with another person is, much less experience it.
Gotta be the eyeglasses. Geeks and girls with eyeglasses...
3 points:
1) 2003 is signifigant because Iran, seeing what the US did to Saddam the Baathists, decided not to give the US an excuse to keep right on going. Remember, in 2003 Iraq wasn't the total disaster it seems now, and the US effort looked successful enough that the Iranians were worried. So, in effect, seeing "what the US did to Iraq" made them NOT want nukes.
2) (Related to 1) After stopping the program, Iran went to length to hide that fact from the rest of the world - fighting with UN inspectors, etc. Why didn't they throw open the doors and say "Look, see? Nothing here." Possible answers are:
- an irrational sense of secrecy (hiding things that would be better to expose),
- an overblown sense of sovereignty (they signed the NNPT, which allowed the inspections to which they objected)
- a paranoid schizophrenic for a leader (Have you heard the guy talk?)
(I know, the meme here is that all the same apply to the US. That's as may be, but if the US is evil because of these traits, how can Iran not be evil with the same traits?)
3) Assuming that the "cancellation" of the weapons program isn't a scam, why do they have a nuclear program at all? They sit atop huge supplies of energy; why go to the effort of a reactor program for electricity generation?
The point I'm trying to make is that there is that, just because Iran may not be actively developing weapons, doesn't mean that they plant daisies and their farts smell like jasmine. There is something going on with their nuclear program that they are not revealing. Is that a good reason to invade? Of course not; but then I always thought the "Invade Iran" thing was more of a Democrat invention to give them another stick to beat Bush with, like the whole "reinstate the draft" thing.