Even in crippled form, the right to bear arms is still useful.
If the population of New York City decided to go into open revold, holed themselves up in buildings with only small arms and rifles, the government would have a bloody mess of a time doing anything about it.
People underestemate their ability to resist opression.
Seatbelts and helments are required because road injuries cost the government tons of money, and you don't have any sort of constitutional right to a car, and you don't own the road, so the state can set whatever requirements it likes on driving.
Meanwhile, most ways I can choose to hurt myself are perfectly legal. I can stick a razor blade into my leg and the cops won't have anything to say about it.
And the argument that pot impairs judgement and should thus be illegal is silly. Alcohol impairs judegement far worse. Most people who get too stoned just sit on a chair and stare off into space or at the TV, really drunk people attempt far crazier stunts.
So if pot should be illegal because it creates a public nuisance of impaired stoners, then alcohol should be made illegal as well.
certain people are predisposed (for whatever reason) to liking narcotics and not really minding the idea of breaking the law.
a sequential chain of events *does not* mean a causal chain. just because A happens before B does not mean that A causes B, and any argument based on that assumption is very very flawed.
what i'm saying is, the of course the kids who do heroin are smoking weed. but i bet they drink too. hey i bet most of them work in fast food places. i bet they smoke cigarettes. why is pot the cause of the heroin and not anything else in their life.
the only "gateway" aspect to pot is the mental barrier to breaking the law. a pot smoker (and i'm talking from experience here) begins to see the law as an arbitrary social construction that is to be creatively avoided as opposed to blindly obeyed. the mental barrier to doing hard drugs becomes much lower after this realization.
now, i'm smart, i've read up on the side effects of other drugs and i wan't nothing to do with it. the only permanent damage pot does is too your lungs. and trust me after 3 years of smoking (including pretty heavy smoking during the summers) i have no greater desire to do coke than i ever did. pot does not increase cravings for narcotics. that doesn't even make medical sense. it's a cannabinoid, which is a very different chemical from hallucinagins, amphetamines, steroids, alcohols, and opiates (the chemicals in most other drugs) it's like saying that drinking coffee will get you hooked on cigarettes or alcohol.
The drinking age in America was 18 in most places until the Reagan highway bill. He tied highway funding to the drinking age to incourage states to up it to 21. Conceivably a State could get rid of the drinking age alltogether, but the federal government would make up all sorts of unrelated things to penalize them on.
Further proof that the modern American government in *no way* resembles the government described in the constitution.
"To punish people who take liberties with their rights."
Heaven forbid we have liberty!
What you mean is to punish people who act outside of their rights.
To live in a (somewhat) safe and (somewhat) ordered society, we surrender some rights. In an orderless society, I would have the right to kill and steal. I (involuntarily) surrender these rights for the privelidge of living in this society. I see no problem with this. What other rights do I give up, and what further benifits do I gain by doing so? These are the big questions.
Past the first steps of giving up the right to do obviously cruel and harmful things to others, I don't think giving up freedom for safety is ever a very good idea. If a man threatens me, I can deal with him on more or less equal footing (go out and buy a gun, intimidate him, etc.) if the government threatens me, I am powerless within the law. At such a point my friends and I excercise the 2nd amendment and perhaps the greatest lesson of 20th century urban warfare: resistance by an armed populace is frighteningly hard to control. Guerilla warfare, baby, the last tool of the true citizen.
Now I'm a little confused. 200 MhZ and 64 Megs of ram. Wasn't too long ago when that was standard issue for low-end webservers. I think with proper configuration, it should be able to handle a reasonably heavy load (certainly a few thousand hits)
Or is the slowness and dropping just from the small pipe?
isn't HATE a bit strong of a word? What's there to HATE? I mean, we don't even hate windows. We hate it's market dominance, we hate the business tactics used to gain that market dominance, we hate certain features of it that make working with it a chore, but we really just dislike the product itself and would prefer to use something for ourselves.
Why do you hate the iPaq? It's certainly not a dominating market force, Palm OS products still command something like an 85% market share, it is a fairly resonably priced bit of equipment (half as powerful as a low-end laptop, a fraction of the size, and half the price)
I can see where you'd get annoyed about the big deal everyone keeps making about PocketPC devices, but that doesn't mean you hate the products themselves. I mean, as far as I know, an Ipaq has never hurt anyone, no children were born without arms due to the Ipaq, the Ipaq hasn't been found to cause any sort of cancer.
If you don't see the point, ok. If you'd buy something different for yourself, that's cool. If you think slashdot posted a story that isn't even really news, hey I'm with you. But too HATE the iPaq (all caps no less!) is a little extreme.
I mean, if you HATE a little computer, what do you feel toward Osama Bin Laden? (or George W. Bush, I'll make no assumptions)
I don't like this kind of language, because it devalues the few strong terms that the english language has left. I think there are some words that are meant to express strong feelings and should only be used as such.
redundant? ok so i was making fun of a typo. but "hot hicks" is pretty funny, don't you think? anyway, overrated (because of the +1 karma whore bonus) perhaps, but certainly not redundant.
But there's no evidence that they *don't* either, and there's a strong suggestion that they do.
Look at it this way, suppose you have the choice of drinking two kinds of coffee tomorrow morning, one of which is known to be safe, the other may or may not be deadly. Now there's no proof that the second kind is or is not deadly, but you'll probably go with the first.
Sure we don't know for certain if our actions are destroying the planet, but on the off chance that they are, I'd rather be overcautious now than be sorry later.
four years in middles school: i went to a bizarre private school that started middle school in the 5th grade. elementary was 1-4, middle was 5-8, high was 9-12. the only explanation i can come up with was someone was obsessive compulsive and liked seeing 3 groups of 4.
and while i'm wasting space on silly, off-topic things:
about SimLife and SimEarth. I think it's about time we had an update on these! I would love to see both titles brough up-to-date.
YES!!!! OHMYGOD! I'VE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HAPPENED FOR _YEARS_!!!
God, I couldn't have been older than 11, and I distinctly remember this happening. The robots appeared and within a few thousand years, had covered the *entire* surface of the planet, both land and water. They drove everything else to extinction. Probably powering their civilization on human baby batteries...
Anyway, I'd started to think that I was making up a false memory, or that I had just dreamed that it happened... (what you guys didn't dream about your video games when you were 11?)
hmmm... that could be taken to be extremely offensive, i suppose. i hope i'm only poking gentle fun. east asian-americans speak far better english than i speak korean, japanese, mandarin etc. i know and work with a lot of them, they are by and large wonderful nice people, who sometime pronounce english words in amusing ways. that's all. really. *ducks*
Anyone remember the manuals for the old Maxis games? Those were great. I seem to remember Simlife and Simcity 2000 being particularly good, and the Simearth manual was more education than I got in all four years of middle school science.
I find it disturbing how companies seem to be rushing into Passport like systems that keep a large number of credit card #s and other sensitive data in a central repository, when no such system has ever shown to be reliable enough to justify the risk.
Frankly, I'd prefer to just keep typing in my credit card number, or have the info stored on my computer for my convenience. I don't like the idea of my personal data being permanently stored in a potentially insecure remote location.
if you are simulating on a quark level, then there's no way you could generate a simulation that would result in something as massive as a grain of sand, much less a star.
I don't see how a computer could ever do a perfect model of something more massive than itself. Data storage would require at the theoretical minimum say 1 quark of data storage per bit, so a computer that can simulate a star would have to be at least as massive as that star (and likely many thousands of times more massive)
actually mathematics is it's own universe, it's entirely self contained and can exist without any physical analogy. the *application* of math (such as in physics) to real world phenomena can approximate the way the universe works.
by itself mathematics is the most accurate possible science, and also the least "useful"
no, a Theory in any real science is a guess that has been rigorously tested and is considered the best model of the facts that currently exists. Cosmologists throw this word around with reckless abandon, but in math, physics, chemistry, or (in most cases) biology, a theory is something pretty solid.
however, in the context of the quoted sentence, "theory" means "study" so "Information Theory" is the study of information and information systems, not any particular hypothesis about such systems.
Slashdot Mirror
yep
B-O-O-Z-E
well you also own the bricks, which i guess you could sell
Even in crippled form, the right to bear arms is still useful.
If the population of New York City decided to go into open revold, holed themselves up in buildings with only small arms and rifles, the government would have a bloody mess of a time doing anything about it.
People underestemate their ability to resist opression.
Safety laws are a touchy subject.
Seatbelts and helments are required because road injuries cost the government tons of money, and you don't have any sort of constitutional right to a car, and you don't own the road, so the state can set whatever requirements it likes on driving.
Meanwhile, most ways I can choose to hurt myself are perfectly legal. I can stick a razor blade into my leg and the cops won't have anything to say about it.
And the argument that pot impairs judgement and should thus be illegal is silly. Alcohol impairs judegement far worse. Most people who get too stoned just sit on a chair and stare off into space or at the TV, really drunk people attempt far crazier stunts.
So if pot should be illegal because it creates a public nuisance of impaired stoners, then alcohol should be made illegal as well.
probably not.
certain people are predisposed (for whatever reason) to liking narcotics and not really minding the idea of breaking the law.
a sequential chain of events *does not* mean a causal chain. just because A happens before B does not mean that A causes B, and any argument based on that assumption is very very flawed.
what i'm saying is, the of course the kids who do heroin are smoking weed. but i bet they drink too. hey i bet most of them work in fast food places. i bet they smoke cigarettes. why is pot the cause of the heroin and not anything else in their life.
the only "gateway" aspect to pot is the mental barrier to breaking the law. a pot smoker (and i'm talking from experience here) begins to see the law as an arbitrary social construction that is to be creatively avoided as opposed to blindly obeyed. the mental barrier to doing hard drugs becomes much lower after this realization.
now, i'm smart, i've read up on the side effects of other drugs and i wan't nothing to do with it. the only permanent damage pot does is too your lungs. and trust me after 3 years of smoking (including pretty heavy smoking during the summers) i have no greater desire to do coke than i ever did. pot does not increase cravings for narcotics. that doesn't even make medical sense. it's a cannabinoid, which is a very different chemical from hallucinagins, amphetamines, steroids, alcohols, and opiates (the chemicals in most other drugs) it's like saying that drinking coffee will get you hooked on cigarettes or alcohol.
The drinking age in America was 18 in most places until the Reagan highway bill. He tied highway funding to the drinking age to incourage states to up it to 21. Conceivably a State could get rid of the drinking age alltogether, but the federal government would make up all sorts of unrelated things to penalize them on.
Further proof that the modern American government in *no way* resembles the government described in the constitution.
"To punish people who take liberties with their rights."
Heaven forbid we have liberty!
What you mean is to punish people who act outside of their rights.
To live in a (somewhat) safe and (somewhat) ordered society, we surrender some rights. In an orderless society, I would have the right to kill and steal. I (involuntarily) surrender these rights for the privelidge of living in this society. I see no problem with this. What other rights do I give up, and what further benifits do I gain by doing so? These are the big questions.
Past the first steps of giving up the right to do obviously cruel and harmful things to others, I don't think giving up freedom for safety is ever a very good idea. If a man threatens me, I can deal with him on more or less equal footing (go out and buy a gun, intimidate him, etc.) if the government threatens me, I am powerless within the law. At such a point my friends and I excercise the 2nd amendment and perhaps the greatest lesson of 20th century urban warfare: resistance by an armed populace is frighteningly hard to control. Guerilla warfare, baby, the last tool of the true citizen.
Now I'm a little confused. 200 MhZ and 64 Megs of ram. Wasn't too long ago when that was standard issue for low-end webservers. I think with proper configuration, it should be able to handle a reasonably heavy load (certainly a few thousand hits)
Or is the slowness and dropping just from the small pipe?
isn't HATE a bit strong of a word? What's there to HATE? I mean, we don't even hate windows. We hate it's market dominance, we hate the business tactics used to gain that market dominance, we hate certain features of it that make working with it a chore, but we really just dislike the product itself and would prefer to use something for ourselves.
Why do you hate the iPaq? It's certainly not a dominating market force, Palm OS products still command something like an 85% market share, it is a fairly resonably priced bit of equipment (half as powerful as a low-end laptop, a fraction of the size, and half the price)
I can see where you'd get annoyed about the big deal everyone keeps making about PocketPC devices, but that doesn't mean you hate the products themselves. I mean, as far as I know, an Ipaq has never hurt anyone, no children were born without arms due to the Ipaq, the Ipaq hasn't been found to cause any sort of cancer.
If you don't see the point, ok. If you'd buy something different for yourself, that's cool. If you think slashdot posted a story that isn't even really news, hey I'm with you. But too HATE the iPaq (all caps no less!) is a little extreme.
I mean, if you HATE a little computer, what do you feel toward Osama Bin Laden? (or George W. Bush, I'll make no assumptions)
I don't like this kind of language, because it devalues the few strong terms that the english language has left. I think there are some words that are meant to express strong feelings and should only be used as such.
redundant? ok so i was making fun of a typo. but "hot hicks" is pretty funny, don't you think? anyway, overrated (because of the +1 karma whore bonus) perhaps, but certainly not redundant.
But there's no evidence that they *don't* either, and there's a strong suggestion that they do.
Look at it this way, suppose you have the choice of drinking two kinds of coffee tomorrow morning, one of which is known to be safe, the other may or may not be deadly. Now there's no proof that the second kind is or is not deadly, but you'll probably go with the first.
Sure we don't know for certain if our actions are destroying the planet, but on the off chance that they are, I'd rather be overcautious now than be sorry later.
Hot hicks do have unusual curves!
Take it as a proof of concept for the "We'll release when we're damn well ready" philosophy.
I've been using the builds since 13 or 14, and I must say, they've done a remarkable job in coming so far.
I can't seem to download it right now, but should it fix the small number of issues I saw with RC3, this should be an amazing product.
But no rest for the weary, the 1.1 branch is allready underway.
four years in middles school: i went to a bizarre private school that started middle school in the 5th grade. elementary was 1-4, middle was 5-8, high was 9-12. the only explanation i can come up with was someone was obsessive compulsive and liked seeing 3 groups of 4.
and while i'm wasting space on silly, off-topic things:
about SimLife and SimEarth. I think it's about time we had an update on these! I would love to see both titles brough up-to-date.
YES!!!! OHMYGOD! I'VE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HAPPENED FOR _YEARS_!!!
God, I couldn't have been older than 11, and I distinctly remember this happening. The robots appeared and within a few thousand years, had covered the *entire* surface of the planet, both land and water. They drove everything else to extinction. Probably powering their civilization on human baby batteries...
Anyway, I'd started to think that I was making up a false memory, or that I had just dreamed that it happened... (what you guys didn't dream about your video games when you were 11?)
hmmm... that could be taken to be extremely offensive, i suppose. i hope i'm only poking gentle fun. east asian-americans speak far better english than i speak korean, japanese, mandarin etc. i know and work with a lot of them, they are by and large wonderful nice people, who sometime pronounce english words in amusing ways. that's all. really. *ducks*
I like to call it "Engrush"
Anyone remember the manuals for the old Maxis games? Those were great. I seem to remember Simlife and Simcity 2000 being particularly good, and the Simearth manual was more education than I got in all four years of middle school science.
If you do this, you will be my god. (and by god, I mean Molloch)
oooh, nice troll.
you should put that in tags to preserve the width though.
I find it disturbing how companies seem to be rushing into Passport like systems that keep a large number of credit card #s and other sensitive data in a central repository, when no such system has ever shown to be reliable enough to justify the risk.
Frankly, I'd prefer to just keep typing in my credit card number, or have the info stored on my computer for my convenience. I don't like the idea of my personal data being permanently stored in a potentially insecure remote location.
if you are simulating on a quark level, then there's no way you could generate a simulation that would result in something as massive as a grain of sand, much less a star.
I don't see how a computer could ever do a perfect model of something more massive than itself. Data storage would require at the theoretical minimum say 1 quark of data storage per bit, so a computer that can simulate a star would have to be at least as massive as that star (and likely many thousands of times more massive)
actually mathematics is it's own universe, it's entirely self contained and can exist without any physical analogy. the *application* of math (such as in physics) to real world phenomena can approximate the way the universe works.
by itself mathematics is the most accurate possible science, and also the least "useful"
no, a Theory in any real science is a guess that has been rigorously tested and is considered the best model of the facts that currently exists. Cosmologists throw this word around with reckless abandon, but in math, physics, chemistry, or (in most cases) biology, a theory is something pretty solid. however, in the context of the quoted sentence, "theory" means "study" so "Information Theory" is the study of information and information systems, not any particular hypothesis about such systems.
no... the universe isn't growing at faster than light, so that's not possible.