It has nothing to do with Obama's activities. DO keep in mind that Operation "Fast and Furious" was staged mainly to make an incident to make your gun rights a LOT worse than they are now.
Quick, put your tinfoil hat back on, the mind control satellite is about to come overhead!
Two points: 1) Cars kill more people than guns do.
Guns are used as the weapon in far more INTENTIONAL killings than cars are. Lies, Damn Lies, and Twisted Statistics anyone? Or should we go with "Guns don't kill people: I do."
2) The right to keep and bear cars is not a constitutionally recognized right.
Not specifically as such. However, the right to freedom of movement is. Within such, the right to purchase a vehicle is present; the right to OPERATE a vehicle is limited by (a) each state's individual registration requirements and safety inspection requirements (varying from state to state) and (b) the privilege, after passing a driver's test and registering for a driver's license, to operate a vehicle once one has proven that one understands the requirements of safe driving and obedience to traffic laws. This can be taken away should someone be proven incapable of driving safely; HOWEVER, even in circumstances when someone's normal driving privileges are taken away due to abuse (too many accidents, drunk driving convictions, etc), most states allow a legal framework of "limited driving" rights (a restricted license) if someone, say, cannot get to their workplace from their home without the use of a vehicle. Only those physically INCAPABLE - due to senility, blindness, or other physical factors - are barred completely from driving as to allow them into traffic would constitute far too great a danger to them and others sharing the road with them.
The Second Amendment is about hunting as the First Amendment is about singing folk songs.
Actually, no. The mention of a "militia" in the Second Amendment required two things: #1 you REGISTERED as a member of the local militia, #2 you TRAINED as a member of the local militia. You had an organizational structure.
Meanwhile, the "right to keep and bear arms" also included local laws. For instance, law in several of the original 13 states required each able-bodied man to shoot or kill by other means (generally, traps) a certain number of "pest animals" (birds that fed on crops and predator animals that hunted livestock) each year. Hunting was, to much of the population then, a "necessary part of life" in a way that it simply isn't today.
Your rights are limited to the point that they do not infringe of the rights of others. The example of shouting "fire" in a crowed theater is how the grownups explain it to those on the short bus that cannot grasp the magnitude of what our freedoms mean and require. You seem completely ignorant that all of the rights you take for granted today were provided to you by and armed citizenry. Put your helmet back on before you hurt yourself.
I would say it's you who should put your tinfoil bat back on before the eeevil mind control beams get you. Because seriously, the inanity that comes out of the NRA crowd these days - proving they have done no research, no independent analysis, and probably were the ones sleeping through 3rd grade history too - is just incredible. You can support the reasonable right to bear arms, while simultaneously agreeing that weapons of this sort should be registered, and not come off as a complete loon, but I've yet to meet the NRA type who isn't a raving, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist.
No, I'm pointing out that it's an understandable mistake for anyone who isn't a die-hard gun nut.
The "clip" is generally an internal part of the removable magazine. Without the "clip", you don't have the reloading capacity.
Most videogames refer to the "clip size" of a weapon. So it's not surprising that on Slashdot, you'd find someone referring to "clips." Hell, even in the media, the term "clip" is used pretty frequently.
Now, it's not 100% correct usage. But I'm willing to bet most people here knew what the poster was talking about. The fact that Grishnak said he "[hasn't] heard of a rifle that uses a "clip" since World War I" is pretty silly, since just about every gun - rifle or not - that uses a detachable magazine has a clip as part of the mechanism.
Or are you one of the people who insists on using the term "magazine" nonstop instead? Because in normal speak (unless you're in the presence of gun nuts who have a chip on their shoulder), the term "clip" is common parlance for "detachable magazine."
Of course, computer nerds often get upset when someone who doesn't know any better (and really, if you've never taken one apart, why would you know the difference?) refers to their PC's tower case as "the hard drive", so maybe you're just like one of the two types - gun nerds or computer nerds - being overly precise.
... Damn I wish I had some mod points to give you. This comment is AMAZING. Well stated - I've often been at odds with some of my friends who insist that one "brand" of something is better than another - especially when you look at some of the food products, where 4 different "brands" literally come right from the same factory.
Similar link over here for those who don't want to listen to a recorded audio feed.
Oh and don't forget this one - it may be a Cracked.com article, but it's actually a great read.
The reason to vote then isn't to win, it's to prevent your opponent from winning by a landslide. Landslide victories embolden them to even worse excesses.
Really? Dumbya "won" by less than 50% of the vote both times, and claimed he had an election mandate to do what he wanted anyways. Remember his famous crack about "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it" right before he tried to fuck up Social Security in 2005?
Merely getting into office emboldens them to worse excesses. If they don't have a landslide, they just lie and claim they did.
Better educated, too. Which is little surprise, since the Tea Tards mostly follow the dictates of Rush, Beck, and Fox News agitators as a faked astroturd movement, while the OWS protesters actually come less from the Democrat aisle and mostly from the true Independent center.
In the PC games market, tying games to Steam - I bought Portal 2, and discovered it required me to install Steam to get the install and get the fucking software to run.
What does this mean? Well, I can make it run. But I can't, when done with it, give the copy (serial and all, uninstalled from my computer) to a family member or friend as a gift.
iTunes does much the same thing. You can't buy something and then send it to someone else, in a "deleted from your account, credited to theirs instead" transaction.
The cartels salivate at killing the used market because they think it means more sales.
Britain does this... the US government does this... the fundamental problem would seem to be politicians + businesses + money = corruption, as a definitive formula, no?
What worries me more is that nobody's yet fully commented on whether they finally fixed the leveling system.
What I mean by that: the way to play Morrowind and Oblivion was to build a "custom" character class designed specifically to AVOID leveling up, with certain major skills deliberately left aside to only be used (hand-to-hand, shield, etc) when you were ready to sit down and level. Otherwise, you'd screw your stats by leveling too fast, too hard, with too many skills left in the dust until you found yourself facing enemies that were far too powerful for you to handle.
The reason Fallout 3 and New Vegas worked so well in the Oblivion engine is that they went with an XP-based leveling system. Players didn't have to worry about avoiding leveling, because you can't avoid leveling. You just play the game, play your character, and enjoy.
I bet a lot of this is fudging due to size-of-screen.
Think about it. When the PSX came out, your average homeowner's TV screen was a scant 20 inches (4:3 ratio) diagonal. When the PS2 came out, that was a "whopping" 24".
When the PS3 came out? Yeah. 37" or larger 16:9 widescreens. A lot of them, given initial price tag, to well above 40".
Now play a PS2 or PSX game on that humongous screen. Looks like shit, doesn't it? Load that PSX game up instead in the Popstation version on your PSP, or in an emulator on a 13" or even 15" laptop playing with a USB controller from a few feet away. Suddenly it looks a whole hell of a lot better.
"PS3-level graphics" can be fudged quite a bit when you're dealing in "mobile" devices of a tiny screen and not trying to push massive amounts of AA to get rid of "jaggies" on a bigger screen with bigger pixels.
This right here tells me it's not about your passion for coding. It's the fact that you dread going in to work each morning to face the manipulative jerks.
Either go above the heads of the manipulative jerks and report what's making a hostile work environment, or start brushing up your resume, practice interviewing, and start looking for a new job.
Some people have kids. 5-year-olds are energetic and apt to do certain things. Not all the time will you catch them before it's too late. As well, the "5-year-old with a baseball bat" was meant in a somewhat metaphorical sense, as a stand-in for any number of other situations which could result in this thing breaking and a hive of angry bees invading your house looking for the culprit with intent to sting.
I would presume that there's some form of service contract or services that can be purchased for things like "seeding" a new hive. What I'd be more worried about is the aspect of getting it cleaned out if you had a hive die-off due to infection or mites.
As for how bees select their hives... that's an oddity. I would guess that there was some unknown difference between your aunt's two hives - either in the genealogy of the bees themselves, or the location of the hive, like too much or too little shade compared to the other one. As you said, they can be fickle creatures. With the indoor/outdoor aspect, I'd be more worried about them getting fooled by the interior temperature during winter, and sending out all their scouts to die off in freezing temperatures.
In the other side though... you're about one 5-year-old with a baseball bat from having an angry swarm of bees in your apartment and a giant honey mess on the floor with this design. I don't know if that's such a great thought.
It's much, much more complicated than that. The "Palestinians" have had numerous opportunities for statehood from the early 1900's onwards. They've rejected peace option after peace option after peace option, beginning with several offerings from the British (who ruled the Manate of Palestine through 1947) and then launched an all-out war when the original UN partition plan was put into place.
This was AFTER they were already given the nation of Transjordan, into which no Jews were allowed to emigrate.
And of course, those who scream about "Palestinian refugees" ignore the fact that the stolen land intended to become the Nation of Palestine in 1948 was taken over, not by Israel, but by the nations of Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, and Egypt. The "Palestinians" were made "refugees" ON THEIR OWN LAND as a cynical political ploy by the Arab League and the Pan-Arabist factions, nothing more. And they still fail to acknowledge the number of Jews - at least twice the number of so-called "Palestinian refugees" - in Arab states in the years 1948-1955 who were kicked out, their houses and property confiscated, and forced to move "somewhere" (e.g. Israel) by those same Pan-Arabist forces and governments.
But you probably never did the slightest research into the subject. Because to you, it's all about "one side good, other side bad." The Jews have been kicked around and harassed by just about everyone for the past 2000 years. The "Palestinians" of the region have been abused by their so-called "brethren" the Arab Muslims, turned into a group of impoverished and locked-up people in one of the worst and most inhumane cynical political ploys I've ever seen. Meanwhile, the terrorist forces running the "refugee" region have attacked everyone they could find - tried to assassinate the leaders of Transjordan/Jordan numerous times, attacked the Egyptian government so often that the Egyptians said "fuck this" and put up a wall between themselves and Gaza a long time before the Israelis finally caught on to the wisdom of the idea, and of course waging a bloody-ass civil war in the south of Lebanon for the past two decades.
For my money? The Arabs - specifically, the Pan-Arabists, the fundamentalist Arab governments especially - are a bunch of fucking assholes. The leaders of the "Palestinian" movement? Likewise. The leaders of Israel? Probably assholes too, but they are tasked with an incredibly hard position, trying to keep a nation of a few million people safe from a group of hundreds of millions of assholes in nations like Iran who are told at Mosque once a week that the Jews will be "destroyed" in the apocalypse and that the Jews aren't even human. So I can cut them a little slack there.
Oh, and the people stuck in the middle - the few civilians in the "Palestinian territories", the civilians in Israel? Sucks to be them, on both sides.
I don't care what it's called in version number. But for the love of god would they build in SOME form of enterprise level control options?
When your internal training websites break on this crap, but you can't lock out the updates and you have some ditz PHB in a corner office who insists "durr I gotta use Firefox 4 eberything bcuz my 18 year old son sez its tha best", you've got issues. And yes, I know the PHB is the issue, but HIM we can't fix. Firefox could easily allow for some simple group policy-level controls.
Strangely enough, I buy games. And then I wind up getting the "pirated" version anyways simply so I don't have to use a DVD-rom drive as a fucking 5 1/4" DONGLE to play the game on my laptop, and can instead use that bay for an extra battery.
Maybe one of these years the morons will realize that DRM doesn't help their sales one bit. If anything, there are games I have NOT bought because the "always-on DRM" bullcrap meant I can't reliably count on being able to play them while traveling.
"Title V Nightmares" - you've been listening to too much hate Radio haven't you?
Title V, for those uninformed about what the Anonymous Ranter is talking about, is a part of Massachusetts building code concerning the efficacy and design of septic systems. Houses built before the law are grandfathered in with building code, but like any other part of building code, the house or building has to be brought up to code before it can be sold. Additionally, if your septic system FAILS, the new system you replace it with has to be up to code.
In essence, Title V says that your septic system isn't allowed to leach large amounts of human waste directly into the soil.
Strangely enough, the State of Massachusetts offers some pretty hefty benefits to help homeowners who are in situations necessitating septic repair, in the form of major tax deductions and low-interest loan programs. It's also possible (and depending on circumstance, desirable) to have your septic system insured as part of your homeowner's insurance, much as you would insure against flood, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake in other parts of the country.
In short: "Title V Nightmares" are not what the Tea Partying idiot suggests they are. Staying up to building code is a cost of living anywhere, no matter where you are.
Also, the "Nightmares" are pretty rare. From the Title V FAQ:http://www.mass.gov/dep/water/wastewater/faqsgen.htm
Does Title 5 require every cesspool to be replaced?
No. Only those cesspools that exhibit signs of hydraulic failure, are located extremely close to private or public water supplies, or otherwise fail to protect or pose a threat to public health, safety or the environment will need to be upgraded (310 CMR 15.303). Also, cesspools must be upgraded prior to an increase in design flow (e.g., the addition of a bedroom to a home or seats to a restaurant).
But why listen to me when some wack-job on right wing hate radio can get you all flustered about a "regulation" designed to keep the drinking water supply free of raw sewage?
the "corporations" _are_ the government and vice versa - and there's no real elections,
And this differs from the USA how, precisely? At best, we have a smaller minority of honest people left in government doing their best to enforce existing regulations and prevent abuses like - oh hey that big gulf oil spill thing - while being stepped on by the Tea Party "gubmint iz bad 4 bizness" crowd.
In the city I grew up in, the main waterway - which had a history of being used for travel and recreation and fishing and shipping - was so polluted that there WERE no fish left and you only went swimming if you wanted tetanus. These days it's looking much better, but only AFTER heavy duty intervention by the EPA that the Republicans hate so much.
I want my kids to grow up with a safe environment. I want them to grow up not having the air polluted to a degree that people have to walk outside with masks on, I want them to grow up in a world where asthma is declining instead of massively rising due to the concentration of urban airborne pollution.
Meanwhile, to the Tea Partiers/Republicans screaming "waah gubmint is bad regulations kill jobs"... fuck you. I refuse to go back to the 1920s when factories were allowed to dump raw sewage and waste directly into lakes and rivers, I refuse to go back to the 1930s when factories had no regulations forcing them to watch their particulate emissions, and I refuse to even go back to the 1980s when if you landed at JFK or La Guardia, your eyes started to burn as soon as you walked out of the airport.
Funny thing about that... 20 years ago, Wal-Mart was all about "Buy American."
Of course, 20 years ago, American manufacturing meant something. Nowadays, you're right, we'd have to find workers to re-fill the factories. Like, say, the 15-20% of workers unemployed today (if you follow Real Unemployment rather than the government's "officially skewed" numbers that lose a lot of people).
Hey, wait a minute. We could actually employ people in the USA by rebuilding the manufacturing sector. Shocker of shockers... of course, that would require placing tariffs on dumped goods and stringent requirements of quality standards, in order to account for the price discrepancy of Chinese slave labor and complete lack of environmental regulation. Which is the last thing the current group of people running the House want to do, since it would be a popular move and they don't want to share any of the credit with the other side even though it's something probably 90% of the USA can agree to.
Slashdot Mirror
It has nothing to do with Obama's activities. DO keep in mind that Operation "Fast and Furious" was staged mainly to make an incident to make your gun rights a LOT worse than they are now .
Quick, put your tinfoil hat back on, the mind control satellite is about to come overhead!
Two points:
1) Cars kill more people than guns do.
Guns are used as the weapon in far more INTENTIONAL killings than cars are. Lies, Damn Lies, and Twisted Statistics anyone?
Or should we go with "Guns don't kill people: I do."
2) The right to keep and bear cars is not a constitutionally recognized right.
Not specifically as such. However, the right to freedom of movement is. Within such, the right to purchase a vehicle is present; the right to OPERATE a vehicle is limited by (a) each state's individual registration requirements and safety inspection requirements (varying from state to state) and (b) the privilege, after passing a driver's test and registering for a driver's license, to operate a vehicle once one has proven that one understands the requirements of safe driving and obedience to traffic laws. This can be taken away should someone be proven incapable of driving safely; HOWEVER, even in circumstances when someone's normal driving privileges are taken away due to abuse (too many accidents, drunk driving convictions, etc), most states allow a legal framework of "limited driving" rights (a restricted license) if someone, say, cannot get to their workplace from their home without the use of a vehicle. Only those physically INCAPABLE - due to senility, blindness, or other physical factors - are barred completely from driving as to allow them into traffic would constitute far too great a danger to them and others sharing the road with them.
The Second Amendment is about hunting as the First Amendment is about singing folk songs.
Actually, no. The mention of a "militia" in the Second Amendment required two things: #1 you REGISTERED as a member of the local militia, #2 you TRAINED as a member of the local militia. You had an organizational structure.
Meanwhile, the "right to keep and bear arms" also included local laws. For instance, law in several of the original 13 states required each able-bodied man to shoot or kill by other means (generally, traps) a certain number of "pest animals" (birds that fed on crops and predator animals that hunted livestock) each year. Hunting was, to much of the population then, a "necessary part of life" in a way that it simply isn't today.
Your rights are limited to the point that they do not infringe of the rights of others. The example of shouting "fire" in a crowed theater is how the grownups explain it to those on the short bus that cannot grasp the magnitude of what our freedoms mean and require. You seem completely ignorant that all of the rights you take for granted today were provided to you by and armed citizenry. Put your helmet back on before you hurt yourself.
I would say it's you who should put your tinfoil bat back on before the eeevil mind control beams get you. Because seriously, the inanity that comes out of the NRA crowd these days - proving they have done no research, no independent analysis, and probably were the ones sleeping through 3rd grade history too - is just incredible. You can support the reasonable right to bear arms, while simultaneously agreeing that weapons of this sort should be registered, and not come off as a complete loon, but I've yet to meet the NRA type who isn't a raving, tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist.
No, I'm pointing out that it's an understandable mistake for anyone who isn't a die-hard gun nut.
The "clip" is generally an internal part of the removable magazine. Without the "clip", you don't have the reloading capacity.
Most videogames refer to the "clip size" of a weapon. So it's not surprising that on Slashdot, you'd find someone referring to "clips." Hell, even in the media, the term "clip" is used pretty frequently.
Now, it's not 100% correct usage. But I'm willing to bet most people here knew what the poster was talking about. The fact that Grishnak said he "[hasn't] heard of a rifle that uses a "clip" since World War I" is pretty silly, since just about every gun - rifle or not - that uses a detachable magazine has a clip as part of the mechanism.
Really? It seems to be pretty standard.
Or are you one of the people who insists on using the term "magazine" nonstop instead? Because in normal speak (unless you're in the presence of gun nuts who have a chip on their shoulder), the term "clip" is common parlance for "detachable magazine."
Of course, computer nerds often get upset when someone who doesn't know any better (and really, if you've never taken one apart, why would you know the difference?) refers to their PC's tower case as "the hard drive", so maybe you're just like one of the two types - gun nerds or computer nerds - being overly precise.
... Damn I wish I had some mod points to give you. This comment is AMAZING. Well stated - I've often been at odds with some of my friends who insist that one "brand" of something is better than another - especially when you look at some of the food products, where 4 different "brands" literally come right from the same factory.
Similar link over here for those who don't want to listen to a recorded audio feed.
Oh and don't forget this one - it may be a Cracked.com article, but it's actually a great read.
The reason to vote then isn't to win, it's to prevent your opponent from winning by a landslide. Landslide victories embolden them to even worse excesses.
Really? Dumbya "won" by less than 50% of the vote both times, and claimed he had an election mandate to do what he wanted anyways. Remember his famous crack about "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it" right before he tried to fuck up Social Security in 2005?
Merely getting into office emboldens them to worse excesses. If they don't have a landslide, they just lie and claim they did.
I don't know who modded this down as "troll", but I think the parent comment here deserves a second look. There's some solid information there.
Actually, the Occupy protesters are more gainfully employed and working than the Tea Tardier crowd are.
Better educated, too. Which is little surprise, since the Tea Tards mostly follow the dictates of Rush, Beck, and Fox News agitators as a faked astroturd movement, while the OWS protesters actually come less from the Democrat aisle and mostly from the true Independent center.
They've already been trying to do this.
In the PC games market, tying games to Steam - I bought Portal 2, and discovered it required me to install Steam to get the install and get the fucking software to run.
What does this mean? Well, I can make it run. But I can't, when done with it, give the copy (serial and all, uninstalled from my computer) to a family member or friend as a gift.
iTunes does much the same thing. You can't buy something and then send it to someone else, in a "deleted from your account, credited to theirs instead" transaction.
The cartels salivate at killing the used market because they think it means more sales.
Britain does this... the US government does this... the fundamental problem would seem to be politicians + businesses + money = corruption, as a definitive formula, no?
What worries me more is that nobody's yet fully commented on whether they finally fixed the leveling system.
What I mean by that: the way to play Morrowind and Oblivion was to build a "custom" character class designed specifically to AVOID leveling up, with certain major skills deliberately left aside to only be used (hand-to-hand, shield, etc) when you were ready to sit down and level. Otherwise, you'd screw your stats by leveling too fast, too hard, with too many skills left in the dust until you found yourself facing enemies that were far too powerful for you to handle.
The reason Fallout 3 and New Vegas worked so well in the Oblivion engine is that they went with an XP-based leveling system. Players didn't have to worry about avoiding leveling, because you can't avoid leveling. You just play the game, play your character, and enjoy.
I bet a lot of this is fudging due to size-of-screen.
Think about it. When the PSX came out, your average homeowner's TV screen was a scant 20 inches (4:3 ratio) diagonal. When the PS2 came out, that was a "whopping" 24".
When the PS3 came out? Yeah. 37" or larger 16:9 widescreens. A lot of them, given initial price tag, to well above 40".
Now play a PS2 or PSX game on that humongous screen. Looks like shit, doesn't it? Load that PSX game up instead in the Popstation version on your PSP, or in an emulator on a 13" or even 15" laptop playing with a USB controller from a few feet away. Suddenly it looks a whole hell of a lot better.
"PS3-level graphics" can be fudged quite a bit when you're dealing in "mobile" devices of a tiny screen and not trying to push massive amounts of AA to get rid of "jaggies" on a bigger screen with bigger pixels.
... wow. What could I possible have said to elicit that response?
I work for manipulative jerks.
This right here tells me it's not about your passion for coding. It's the fact that you dread going in to work each morning to face the manipulative jerks.
Either go above the heads of the manipulative jerks and report what's making a hostile work environment, or start brushing up your resume, practice interviewing, and start looking for a new job.
Some people have kids. 5-year-olds are energetic and apt to do certain things. Not all the time will you catch them before it's too late. As well, the "5-year-old with a baseball bat" was meant in a somewhat metaphorical sense, as a stand-in for any number of other situations which could result in this thing breaking and a hive of angry bees invading your house looking for the culprit with intent to sting.
A lot of good questions there.
I would presume that there's some form of service contract or services that can be purchased for things like "seeding" a new hive. What I'd be more worried about is the aspect of getting it cleaned out if you had a hive die-off due to infection or mites.
As for how bees select their hives... that's an oddity. I would guess that there was some unknown difference between your aunt's two hives - either in the genealogy of the bees themselves, or the location of the hive, like too much or too little shade compared to the other one. As you said, they can be fickle creatures. With the indoor/outdoor aspect, I'd be more worried about them getting fooled by the interior temperature during winter, and sending out all their scouts to die off in freezing temperatures.
In the other side though... you're about one 5-year-old with a baseball bat from having an angry swarm of bees in your apartment and a giant honey mess on the floor with this design. I don't know if that's such a great thought.
2 assholes agree another guy is also an asshole. What is new?
There. Fixed that for you.
Rule #1 of politics: all politicians are assholes.
Rule #2 of politics: when in doubt, refer to rule #1.
Sigh.
"And this is why we can't have nice things."
It's much, much more complicated than that. The "Palestinians" have had numerous opportunities for statehood from the early 1900's onwards. They've rejected peace option after peace option after peace option, beginning with several offerings from the British (who ruled the Manate of Palestine through 1947) and then launched an all-out war when the original UN partition plan was put into place.
This was AFTER they were already given the nation of Transjordan, into which no Jews were allowed to emigrate.
And of course, those who scream about "Palestinian refugees" ignore the fact that the stolen land intended to become the Nation of Palestine in 1948 was taken over, not by Israel, but by the nations of Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, and Egypt. The "Palestinians" were made "refugees" ON THEIR OWN LAND as a cynical political ploy by the Arab League and the Pan-Arabist factions, nothing more. And they still fail to acknowledge the number of Jews - at least twice the number of so-called "Palestinian refugees" - in Arab states in the years 1948-1955 who were kicked out, their houses and property confiscated, and forced to move "somewhere" (e.g. Israel) by those same Pan-Arabist forces and governments.
But you probably never did the slightest research into the subject. Because to you, it's all about "one side good, other side bad." The Jews have been kicked around and harassed by just about everyone for the past 2000 years. The "Palestinians" of the region have been abused by their so-called "brethren" the Arab Muslims, turned into a group of impoverished and locked-up people in one of the worst and most inhumane cynical political ploys I've ever seen. Meanwhile, the terrorist forces running the "refugee" region have attacked everyone they could find - tried to assassinate the leaders of Transjordan/Jordan numerous times, attacked the Egyptian government so often that the Egyptians said "fuck this" and put up a wall between themselves and Gaza a long time before the Israelis finally caught on to the wisdom of the idea, and of course waging a bloody-ass civil war in the south of Lebanon for the past two decades.
For my money? The Arabs - specifically, the Pan-Arabists, the fundamentalist Arab governments especially - are a bunch of fucking assholes. The leaders of the "Palestinian" movement? Likewise. The leaders of Israel? Probably assholes too, but they are tasked with an incredibly hard position, trying to keep a nation of a few million people safe from a group of hundreds of millions of assholes in nations like Iran who are told at Mosque once a week that the Jews will be "destroyed" in the apocalypse and that the Jews aren't even human. So I can cut them a little slack there.
Oh, and the people stuck in the middle - the few civilians in the "Palestinian territories", the civilians in Israel? Sucks to be them, on both sides.
It's more the other changes made behind the scenes in each update, thank you very much...
A better question - what sort of idiot would BUY WebOS off of HP at this point? It's basically a dead product, with no usable lifespan left.
I don't care what it's called in version number. But for the love of god would they build in SOME form of enterprise level control options?
When your internal training websites break on this crap, but you can't lock out the updates and you have some ditz PHB in a corner office who insists "durr I gotta use Firefox 4 eberything bcuz my 18 year old son sez its tha best", you've got issues. And yes, I know the PHB is the issue, but HIM we can't fix. Firefox could easily allow for some simple group policy-level controls.
Strangely enough, I buy games. And then I wind up getting the "pirated" version anyways simply so I don't have to use a DVD-rom drive as a fucking 5 1/4" DONGLE to play the game on my laptop, and can instead use that bay for an extra battery.
Maybe one of these years the morons will realize that DRM doesn't help their sales one bit. If anything, there are games I have NOT bought because the "always-on DRM" bullcrap meant I can't reliably count on being able to play them while traveling.
"Title V Nightmares" - you've been listening to too much hate Radio haven't you?
Title V, for those uninformed about what the Anonymous Ranter is talking about, is a part of Massachusetts building code concerning the efficacy and design of septic systems. Houses built before the law are grandfathered in with building code, but like any other part of building code, the house or building has to be brought up to code before it can be sold. Additionally, if your septic system FAILS, the new system you replace it with has to be up to code.
In essence, Title V says that your septic system isn't allowed to leach large amounts of human waste directly into the soil.
http://www.sellmyhomeinmetrowestma.com/Title_V_Septic_System/page_2245492.html
Strangely enough, the State of Massachusetts offers some pretty hefty benefits to help homeowners who are in situations necessitating septic repair, in the form of major tax deductions and low-interest loan programs. It's also possible (and depending on circumstance, desirable) to have your septic system insured as part of your homeowner's insurance, much as you would insure against flood, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake in other parts of the country.
In short: "Title V Nightmares" are not what the Tea Partying idiot suggests they are. Staying up to building code is a cost of living anywhere, no matter where you are.
Also, the "Nightmares" are pretty rare. From the Title V FAQ:http://www.mass.gov/dep/water/wastewater/faqsgen.htm
Does Title 5 require every cesspool to be replaced?
No. Only those cesspools that exhibit signs of hydraulic failure, are located extremely close to private or public water supplies, or otherwise fail to protect or pose a threat to public health, safety or the environment will need to be upgraded (310 CMR 15.303). Also, cesspools must be upgraded prior to an increase in design flow (e.g., the addition of a bedroom to a home or seats to a restaurant).
But why listen to me when some wack-job on right wing hate radio can get you all flustered about a "regulation" designed to keep the drinking water supply free of raw sewage?
the "corporations" _are_ the government and vice versa - and there's no real elections,
And this differs from the USA how, precisely? At best, we have a smaller minority of honest people left in government doing their best to enforce existing regulations and prevent abuses like - oh hey that big gulf oil spill thing - while being stepped on by the Tea Party "gubmint iz bad 4 bizness" crowd.
In the city I grew up in, the main waterway - which had a history of being used for travel and recreation and fishing and shipping - was so polluted that there WERE no fish left and you only went swimming if you wanted tetanus. These days it's looking much better, but only AFTER heavy duty intervention by the EPA that the Republicans hate so much.
I want my kids to grow up with a safe environment. I want them to grow up not having the air polluted to a degree that people have to walk outside with masks on, I want them to grow up in a world where asthma is declining instead of massively rising due to the concentration of urban airborne pollution.
Meanwhile, to the Tea Partiers/Republicans screaming "waah gubmint is bad regulations kill jobs"... fuck you. I refuse to go back to the 1920s when factories were allowed to dump raw sewage and waste directly into lakes and rivers, I refuse to go back to the 1930s when factories had no regulations forcing them to watch their particulate emissions, and I refuse to even go back to the 1980s when if you landed at JFK or La Guardia, your eyes started to burn as soon as you walked out of the airport.
Funny thing about that... 20 years ago, Wal-Mart was all about "Buy American."
Of course, 20 years ago, American manufacturing meant something. Nowadays, you're right, we'd have to find workers to re-fill the factories. Like, say, the 15-20% of workers unemployed today (if you follow Real Unemployment rather than the government's "officially skewed" numbers that lose a lot of people).
Hey, wait a minute. We could actually employ people in the USA by rebuilding the manufacturing sector. Shocker of shockers... of course, that would require placing tariffs on dumped goods and stringent requirements of quality standards, in order to account for the price discrepancy of Chinese slave labor and complete lack of environmental regulation. Which is the last thing the current group of people running the House want to do, since it would be a popular move and they don't want to share any of the credit with the other side even though it's something probably 90% of the USA can agree to.