My point wasn't even to argue whether the (mostly cosmetic) gun control measures taken in the past were effective, or whether effective gun control in America is even workable. Short of a massive swing in public opinion, I think not. Yet for over 4 years now I've been seeing articles about how fear of Obama is driving strong gun sales, and I keep thinking, why? He hasn't done anything. More to the point, Congress isn't even close to doing anything.
Um, those assault weapons that flood into Mexico for their drug war are being sent there by our very own ATF for the purpose of ???
Wrong, the ATF didn't send any weapons to Mexico. What they did was try to track a few of the hundreds of thousands of guns purchased every year by individuals with suspicious purchasing patterns. They couldn't track all of them, and some of them in fact ended up being smuggled to mexico or were otherwise used in crimes. That is the "scandal." There would be no scandal if they hadn't bothered trying to track the guns in the first place. It's hard to imagine what an individual who is not a dealer might be doing purchasing hundreds of guns per year, yet that is perfectly legal (just as the NRA likes it) until/unless you later commit a crime with them. Now that the interdiction has become a political football, the flow of guns to Mexico continues as before with, at best, low-level individual purchasers being caught.
What wide range of bans, restrictions and prohibitions? It is a demonstrated fact that any kook can get an assault rifle with a hundred round magazine to shoot up a senator, movie theater, etc. And of course tens of thousands of US weapons flood into Mexico for their drug war every year purchased by people who are curiously buying dozens of weapons every month but oh well, they must be collectors. This is a situation we as a society have apparently decided to accept, and I see no movement away from it. So again, what burdensome restrictions are we actually talking about?
Nobody could seriously claim that culture doesn't affect productivity. Romney's problem is he forgot that other things can affect productivity too... like permanent occupation and brutal economic sanctions imposed by the same government you're holding up as culturally superior, for example.
Maybe the summary was updated after you read it, but that's not what he was arrested for. (I guess that was just the usual flamebait to get the conversation going...)
Why? This is a nonevent (even if it is true.) It's like proving that 80% of TV ads air when people are out of the room. It does nothing to change the basic equation of how advertisers decide whether to place ads, which is: place some ads, see if your sales go up enough to justify the cost; if so, buy more... and so forth. If it's mostly bots, then the amount advertisers are willing to pay will go down in proportion to how much bot "views" go up (or as people simply grow insensitive to the ads, or don't have enough disposable income to buy the product, etc etc).
That is approximately true. A 95% reduction in price over 30 years is pretty darn impressive. Not all at once, of course, but the accumulation of dozens of such advances.
The transience of history 1000 years ago has no relevance to today, nor 1000 years from now. The printing press has only been around for half that time. History is not cyclical, nor continuous. The situation on earth has never been even remotely like it is now, with this huge population. This is a unique moment, where there is such a thing as history (which essentially did not exist before written language), but it is still young. We are in unexplored territory.
It suggests that humanity thrived on a significantly hotter world than any living person has known.
The problem with global warming is not how hot it is now, but how hot it is predicted to become! So, saying it was once hotter than it is now does not address the issue at all.
This is all so arbitrary. Oddly enough google's fine of $22.5 million is exactly 1000 times the fine of $22,500 that US courts recently upheld as a reasonable fine for pirating songs - that's per song. So if we held "stealing" a user's surfing habits to be equivalent to "stealing" a copy of a song, google's fine would only cover the first 1000 affected users.
The ethernet on my MacBook Pro died a few weeks ago and they sent out a tech who fixed it by replacing the entire motherboard, CPU and all. I saw the invoice for the part and it was over $1200. (i7 quad core, about 1 year old). Aren't CPU's even pluggable any more?
Do you think internal competing teams is a dumb idea? I think it sounds, offhand, like a good idea. I'd be interested to hear more about people's experiences with it.
I like to accumulate things in my Amazon "shopping cart" sometimes over a period of weeks until I have enough for free shipping, or finally decide whether I really want something. But I have found this increasingly nonproductive as prices jump all over the place constantly. Most of what I put in my basket is "no longer available from seller" or the price goes up a little a few days later.
I'm not saying I've being cheated, but I'm enjoying Amazon less as it's becoming less of a storefront and more of a bazaar-type experience, with wildly varying shipping costs and return policies from item to item. I might as well go on ebay, or else a more conventional storefront like newegg if I don't want the hassle.
Ha, I'd like to hear commentary on the nobility of scientific experiments if/when China does this. I'm sure we would have no problem with them bursting nukes over our heads and knocking out our satellites (oops!)
Time-tested? The Wall Street Journal (since it's the subject of the article) has been published continuously since 1889. How many trash tabloids have come and gone in that time?
I hope, and even think likely, that people will wise up to trolling headlines. I know I'm sick of it, and trying not to click on headlines that are a question, or a tease that doesn't indicate what the news actually is. I quit CNN.com over this lately, after reading it since the day it came online.
Are you staying and living in your house without power all this time? Is that what most people are doing? If my workplace were without power I think they would tell us not to bother coming in to work, since we'd just be sitting in the dark doing nothing.
In general, the people who were using computers before the Internet will be the same people still overtly using computers after they're no longer needed to use the Internet.
I was referring more to the topic raised by the parent, which is the challenge of taking 5 or 6 courses at the same time. Instead of working like crazy for 4-8 years and then saying, "OK, I'm educated now!" maybe it would be better to bootstrap for just a couple years, then continue learning throughout life, as career needs evolve. Even if just a course per year. (I don't know if Udacity allows that, but it certainly seems to be more feasible without the inordinate travel time of commuting to a university for a single course).
Yes, self-pacing is a huge advantage of online courses. At university I was always struggling to drink from the firehose, and if I wasn't, then I would feel bad for not taking a heavier load to get through sooner. But I always wished I had more time to absorb the topic and really get into it. Cramming for 4 years and then never cracking a book again (nor an online course) is no way to live an educated life.
The laws you quoted appear to restrict transmitting, not receiving. As written it seems to me you could distribute "approved" software that would allow anybody to receive anything.
So, has anybody been prosecuted for receiving signals, or distributing equipment to receive a signal? (Short of circumventing encryption?)
Slashdot Mirror
My point wasn't even to argue whether the (mostly cosmetic) gun control measures taken in the past were effective, or whether effective gun control in America is even workable. Short of a massive swing in public opinion, I think not. Yet for over 4 years now I've been seeing articles about how fear of Obama is driving strong gun sales, and I keep thinking, why? He hasn't done anything. More to the point, Congress isn't even close to doing anything.
Wrong, the ATF didn't send any weapons to Mexico. What they did was try to track a few of the hundreds of thousands of guns purchased every year by individuals with suspicious purchasing patterns. They couldn't track all of them, and some of them in fact ended up being smuggled to mexico or were otherwise used in crimes. That is the "scandal." There would be no scandal if they hadn't bothered trying to track the guns in the first place. It's hard to imagine what an individual who is not a dealer might be doing purchasing hundreds of guns per year, yet that is perfectly legal (just as the NRA likes it) until/unless you later commit a crime with them. Now that the interdiction has become a political football, the flow of guns to Mexico continues as before with, at best, low-level individual purchasers being caught.
What wide range of bans, restrictions and prohibitions? It is a demonstrated fact that any kook can get an assault rifle with a hundred round magazine to shoot up a senator, movie theater, etc. And of course tens of thousands of US weapons flood into Mexico for their drug war every year purchased by people who are curiously buying dozens of weapons every month but oh well, they must be collectors. This is a situation we as a society have apparently decided to accept, and I see no movement away from it. So again, what burdensome restrictions are we actually talking about?
Nobody could seriously claim that culture doesn't affect productivity. Romney's problem is he forgot that other things can affect productivity too... like permanent occupation and brutal economic sanctions imposed by the same government you're holding up as culturally superior, for example.
Maybe the summary was updated after you read it, but that's not what he was arrested for. (I guess that was just the usual flamebait to get the conversation going...)
Oh boy, don't you remember when goatse was rickrolled into slashdot 100 times every day?
Why? This is a nonevent (even if it is true.) It's like proving that 80% of TV ads air when people are out of the room. It does nothing to change the basic equation of how advertisers decide whether to place ads, which is: place some ads, see if your sales go up enough to justify the cost; if so, buy more... and so forth. If it's mostly bots, then the amount advertisers are willing to pay will go down in proportion to how much bot "views" go up (or as people simply grow insensitive to the ads, or don't have enough disposable income to buy the product, etc etc).
So why are you reading slashdot instead of the Home Depot circular ad in the Sunday newspaper? It seems to meet your needs perfectly.
That is approximately true. A 95% reduction in price over 30 years is pretty darn impressive. Not all at once, of course, but the accumulation of dozens of such advances.
The transience of history 1000 years ago has no relevance to today, nor 1000 years from now. The printing press has only been around for half that time. History is not cyclical, nor continuous. The situation on earth has never been even remotely like it is now, with this huge population. This is a unique moment, where there is such a thing as history (which essentially did not exist before written language), but it is still young. We are in unexplored territory.
One can never be certain, but whoever you're responding to is most likely human, perhaps even distinctly so. Could that explain their perspective?
The problem with global warming is not how hot it is now, but how hot it is predicted to become! So, saying it was once hotter than it is now does not address the issue at all.
This is all so arbitrary. Oddly enough google's fine of $22.5 million is exactly 1000 times the fine of $22,500 that US courts recently upheld as a reasonable fine for pirating songs - that's per song. So if we held "stealing" a user's surfing habits to be equivalent to "stealing" a copy of a song, google's fine would only cover the first 1000 affected users.
The ethernet on my MacBook Pro died a few weeks ago and they sent out a tech who fixed it by replacing the entire motherboard, CPU and all. I saw the invoice for the part and it was over $1200. (i7 quad core, about 1 year old). Aren't CPU's even pluggable any more?
Do you think internal competing teams is a dumb idea? I think it sounds, offhand, like a good idea. I'd be interested to hear more about people's experiences with it.
I'm not saying I've being cheated, but I'm enjoying Amazon less as it's becoming less of a storefront and more of a bazaar-type experience, with wildly varying shipping costs and return policies from item to item. I might as well go on ebay, or else a more conventional storefront like newegg if I don't want the hassle.
Ha, I'd like to hear commentary on the nobility of scientific experiments if/when China does this. I'm sure we would have no problem with them bursting nukes over our heads and knocking out our satellites (oops!)
Time-tested? The Wall Street Journal (since it's the subject of the article) has been published continuously since 1889. How many trash tabloids have come and gone in that time?
I hope, and even think likely, that people will wise up to trolling headlines. I know I'm sick of it, and trying not to click on headlines that are a question, or a tease that doesn't indicate what the news actually is. I quit CNN.com over this lately, after reading it since the day it came online.
Are you staying and living in your house without power all this time? Is that what most people are doing? If my workplace were without power I think they would tell us not to bother coming in to work, since we'd just be sitting in the dark doing nothing.
In general, the people who were using computers before the Internet will be the same people still overtly using computers after they're no longer needed to use the Internet.
I was referring more to the topic raised by the parent, which is the challenge of taking 5 or 6 courses at the same time. Instead of working like crazy for 4-8 years and then saying, "OK, I'm educated now!" maybe it would be better to bootstrap for just a couple years, then continue learning throughout life, as career needs evolve. Even if just a course per year. (I don't know if Udacity allows that, but it certainly seems to be more feasible without the inordinate travel time of commuting to a university for a single course).
Yes, self-pacing is a huge advantage of online courses. At university I was always struggling to drink from the firehose, and if I wasn't, then I would feel bad for not taking a heavier load to get through sooner. But I always wished I had more time to absorb the topic and really get into it. Cramming for 4 years and then never cracking a book again (nor an online course) is no way to live an educated life.
So, has anybody been prosecuted for receiving signals, or distributing equipment to receive a signal? (Short of circumventing encryption?)
I just googled "walker recall polling" and you are wrong. Here are the first 5 results (after the first one which is about fundraising):
Dem poll: Walker recall battle is a dead heat
Wisconsin Recall Polls: Scott Walker Leads, But The Margin Varies
Scott Walker Recall: Dem's Internal Poll Shows Dead Heat, Growing ...
Walker's lead in Wisconsin recall election tightens in new poll - ABC ...
Late Polls Find Walker Is Still Favored - NYTimes.com