Most toilet clogging happens with toilet paper involved. If there's any trouble to be had with a toilet, this is it and eliminating that last bit of trouble from it sounds like a good thing.
I don't have the cash for it now, but if I did I would definitely look into this sort of device.
How much is it worth to you never to have to use the plunger again?
I think you're defining torture arbitrarily narrowly.
The 12 hours of interrogation my great grandmother endured was designed to make her contradict herself in any small detail in order to wholly give over control of the local bank to the Nazi party. The fact that she came out of it at all, even with lost esteem, was a credit to her ability to BS with the best of them. Does the threat of death or "disappearance" of oneself and one's family constitute torture?
What degree of coercion do you believe is allowable? Obviously the AC doesn't fit your notion of "unbearable" but that line is incredibly arbitrary. How far do we stray from the straight and narrow before we consider a course correction?
If too-cold AC is okay, what about too-cold water? What about too-hot? How long can a given prisoner hold their breath? Is holding them underwater uncomfortably long but well within their survivability torture? Is holding them underwater until they have to be rescusitated torture? What if the water was hot? Or cold? Or dirty?
What, specifically, is torture?
And why aren't our uniformed soldiers bound by the Geneva Accords? You claim it's because the enemy combatants aren't uniformed members of a specific fighting force. Allowing for the peculiar anachronism, does this mean the Confederate conscripts in the American Civil War could be tortured but their officers could not? And why, pray tell, do we believe that these crimes against *humanity* can only be committed against soldiers? Is it truly our aim to abide by the letter of the law only, abandoning the spirit of a humanitarian attempt to enforce some kind of decency in a world where destructive capacities are measured in megatons?
I don't for a minute believe we get to have it both ways on this Geneva Accords issue. Our soldiers are protected by the accords when fighting Al Qaeda or Iraqis but Iraqis and Al Qaeda are *not* protected by the same? We can hold them incommunicado indefinitely under conditions which we cite in other nations as human rights abuses? Even convicted prisoners who have had actual trials and been proven to have committed actual crimes receive better treatment under our law. These men whom our own government has admitted were mostly conscripts with no material or intelligence value are being held in limbo.
And you use cultural relativism to your advantage when it comes to defining our torture methods, to paraphrase "This doesn't constitute torture to them" presumably because Saddam set the standard so high? So it's not torture unless Saddam did it? So we can do anything up to, but not including, public beheadings, rape, cutting, electrocution, etc.?
"Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty."
"We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."
"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately."
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?"
"Let this be the distinctive mark of an American that in cases of commotion, he enlists himself under no man's banner, inquires for no man's name, but repairs to the standard of the laws. Do this, and you need never fear anarchy or tyranny. Your government will be perpetual."
- Thomas Jefferson
This guy seemed pretty on the ball a couple of hundred years back.
Obedience to the law is *not* a moral obligation but in a nation where the leaders are subject to law, no citizen should find want to break them. Should those leaders act as though beyond the scope of the law then it is in fact a moral obligation that we the people should take them to task and force lawful justice upon them as on any other of the citizenry.
Party lines be damned, wake up people! Your labels of Democrat, Republican, Conservative and Liberal are the millstones dragging you into the muck. Do what's right. Vote. Pick the best candidate. Call out those would would commit treason against the spirit of liberty. It *is* this simple. You *are* the power behind the government.
You have fallen for the hype. You are following the script. You are being played for pawns. Just wake up and think! Stop the name calling, stop the labelling and just *think*.
Why doesn't that constitute torture? It's certainly the type of coercion used by the Nazi's to gain intelligence when they "interviewed" my great grandmother for 12 continuous hours.
It's also the type of thing which is frowned upon by our prison system when used against our *legal* prisoners. It's also not the limit of the tactics used against these prisoners, you might recall the phrase "water boarding" used pretty frequently.
You may also recall that Abu Ghraib was under our control at the time of the openly admitted action there. The supposedly rogue agents were trained by our military and intelligence agencies to perform such actions, supposedly that would be for them to *use* such tactics. Whether they did so under direction of our government or not makes little material difference when you consider the fact we trained them to do it under precisely the circumstances they were presented.
You might also consider the US government's insistence that the Red Cross and various other humanitarian groups *not* be allowed to conduct any extensive audit of our facilities at Gitmo and perhaps draw the conclusion that the government is afraid of what might be found there. This is obviously conjecture *but* why do we have to resort to conjecture in a supposedly free and democratic society where transparency is the only guarantee of continued freedom from tyranny? Isn't this precisely the kind of dodgy behavior which supposedly justfied "regime change" in Iraq?
We agreed to the Geneva Accords, can we not restrain ourselves from violating treaties we had a hand in drafting and forcing on other nations? Are these not the "crimes against humanity" which we are now prosecuting Saddam Hussein for having committed and now we prefer to opt out when it's our turn to show our cards?
The republic has only one true enemy right now and that is the willfull ignorance and tacit approval of its citizenry. I'm with "V" here, the people should not fear their government, the government should fear the people.
You are aware the shirt you're (presumably) wearing now is constructed of nano-scaled materials, right? They're called "molecules".
Why you're worried about *a* nanofiber when you're inundated with billions and trillions of nanoparticles a day from wind, water and earth I don't quite grasp. Not even touching on the fact that nanotubes are based on buckyballs terrestrially found in smoke which is an ingredient in the smog you breathe every moment of every day, why are you specifically concerned about this shirt?
Any why, pray tell, are you worried about *a* fiber in your *lung* where it alone will cause virtually no damage when a particle this small could just as easily wind up in your brain where a single fiber could conceivably cause a real problem by messing with your synapses?
Doesn't some amount of rubber also soften, even potentially liquify, under those conditions? What's ground off becomes grease/bearings encouraging the wheel (and rest of the vehicle) to continue moving.
I said, and you misunderstood, that the only wrongs we always have the power and obligation to right are our own.
This is a summary of two points. You have no obligation to right the wrongs of your neighbors. You do not necessarily have the power to right the wrongs of your neighbors.
Whether the police may intervene as a proxy providing the power to "right wrongs" on your behalf is irrelevant to the general case of *always* having the power to do so.
You are *not* your brothers' keeper. You have no obligation to look after anyone else. While it is a prosocial and, for that reason, generally encouraged behavior it is *not* an obligation, that is, it is not something for which you would rightfully be considered guilty for not doing.
We have no power over the wrongdoings of other people. The only wrong we always have the power and obligation to set right is that which we do ourselves. It is also the only course of action which ensures that our credibility and honor remain intact.
To attempt to right everyone elses' wrongs without remaining cognizant of our own is a fool's errand. We must remain ever vigilant that we don't unwittingly become that which we purport to despise. There is nothing so hated as a hypocrite.
More importantly and less obviously, what impact does it have on the world when no creature is allowed to cross a border or simply exist in their native environment without being considered a security threat?
Fishing for food is already measurably damaging our environment. What happens when we start fishing for defense? When migratory birds are shot down on sight? When the salmon spawning cycle is a security risk?
Prior discussion was had on the vast difference between "sentience" and "sapience". These animals are sentient, they simply think differently from us and are thus not "sapient".
They are aware and capable of feeling pain, distress and at least rudimentary emotions, the impact and value of which are immeasurable in humans who can tell us what they're thinking. How fair is it to impose these things on creatures who can feel but cannot express?
For local calls I'm unlimited in this area. I'm currently using Vonage so I'm really unlimited anywhere I care to call but only because SBC sucked so bad when I had them before that I had to find a way out of that mess.
She was a member of the local "high society" both before and after the war. When the Nazis took power you became a Nazi or you died. Simple decision, right? As fickle as society is of course being a Nazi became a mark of being part of the "in crowd". If you weren't a "good Nazi", you were not part of that in-crowd. When the Nazis were no longer in power it didn't give you an automatic pass back into the social circles you once ran with...
Picture your community being taken over by a commonly accepted, if aggressive, power. Now rebel against them *without* being branded as a troublemaker. It doesn't work. You might have good reasons but you're still remembered for being a troublemaker rather than for fighting the good fight.
And this type of investor is rewarding the wrong kinds of companies. I worked for one of those companies. We delayed shipments to manipulate quarterly revenues to make it look like business was steady and attract more VCs. It's illegal as hell *if* you're a publicly traded company but largely viewed as just the way business is done.
My fiancee's company recently made some $600,000 in revenue which the managers got bonuses for and the stockholders enjoyed immensely. However, this $600k was, in fact, the fee for a big customer breaking contract. That quarter was great, bonuses were given to the people who bungled it so badly as to lose the customer, the year sucked because the month to month and quarter to quarter revenue wasn't maintained.
This is precisely because companies who consider the stockholders most holy are screwing up on the customer service end of things, not to mention largely mismanaging their internal workings just to please stockholders who judge a company on nothing but the price of their shares.
Probably not accurate into the billions, no. But the instruments were presumably calibrated into an appropriate range for the *expected* yield. Thus any surge that throws it outside of the *expected* yield needs to be investigated, the specific temperature be damned, right? It's not like it's the difference between 3,600,000,000 degrees and 3,599,999,999 they're looking into.
My grandparents and parents were intensely aware of their privacy and its erosion. For their generations though a good deal of that was considered just a side-effect of social or scientific progress.
Microphones became more sensitive? Well, of course some jackass was going to use it to record you against your will, jackasses have been around and will be around.
The government specifically using and developing new technologies and techniques for spying on its own citizens? THAT was something to worry about... 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Fountainhead, Anthem...
My great grandmother was interrogated by the SS for 12 hours on a rumor that she was a sympathizer to the bank president who had been turned in on suspicion of not being a good member of "the party" which later turned out to be entirely false and propogated by the local priest who was a toady to the Nazis and coveted the man's house. His reward for the "information" was of course the house but my great grandmother lost some of her good standing in the community and the president "disappeared".
Privacy matters to my family even if we haven't done anything illegal.
Maybe it can get in on some of that money being thrown around to Halliburton and company.
Furthermore there's plenty of people who contend that any legitimate technological, medical or industrial advances ultimately stem from the spinning off of military technology and maybe some of these people will actually get on board instead of just shouting from the obstructionist bandwagon that all this Linux hippies are just bong smoking pussies.
My intention was to highlight the ideals we purportedly follow. The 14th amendment as quoted says "citizens" a much more specific term which limits the scope markedly from what the Declaration set out for us.
How about writing an accesible and compelling write-up so that those of us who don't already have an interest in or knowledge of SOA might see a point in reading the article?
SOA was utterly opaque to me and I wasn't going to bother to read the article since the write-up doesn't make any meaningful connection to the subject but now having read a definition in the comments I might read the article since it has relevance to something outside itself now.
Slashdot Mirror
Most toilet clogging happens with toilet paper involved. If there's any trouble to be had with a toilet, this is it and eliminating that last bit of trouble from it sounds like a good thing.
I don't have the cash for it now, but if I did I would definitely look into this sort of device.
How much is it worth to you never to have to use the plunger again?
I think you're defining torture arbitrarily narrowly.
The 12 hours of interrogation my great grandmother endured was designed to make her contradict herself in any small detail in order to wholly give over control of the local bank to the Nazi party. The fact that she came out of it at all, even with lost esteem, was a credit to her ability to BS with the best of them. Does the threat of death or "disappearance" of oneself and one's family constitute torture?
What degree of coercion do you believe is allowable? Obviously the AC doesn't fit your notion of "unbearable" but that line is incredibly arbitrary. How far do we stray from the straight and narrow before we consider a course correction?
If too-cold AC is okay, what about too-cold water? What about too-hot? How long can a given prisoner hold their breath? Is holding them underwater uncomfortably long but well within their survivability torture? Is holding them underwater until they have to be rescusitated torture? What if the water was hot? Or cold? Or dirty?
What, specifically, is torture?
And why aren't our uniformed soldiers bound by the Geneva Accords? You claim it's because the enemy combatants aren't uniformed members of a specific fighting force. Allowing for the peculiar anachronism, does this mean the Confederate conscripts in the American Civil War could be tortured but their officers could not? And why, pray tell, do we believe that these crimes against *humanity* can only be committed against soldiers? Is it truly our aim to abide by the letter of the law only, abandoning the spirit of a humanitarian attempt to enforce some kind of decency in a world where destructive capacities are measured in megatons?
I don't for a minute believe we get to have it both ways on this Geneva Accords issue. Our soldiers are protected by the accords when fighting Al Qaeda or Iraqis but Iraqis and Al Qaeda are *not* protected by the same? We can hold them incommunicado indefinitely under conditions which we cite in other nations as human rights abuses? Even convicted prisoners who have had actual trials and been proven to have committed actual crimes receive better treatment under our law. These men whom our own government has admitted were mostly conscripts with no material or intelligence value are being held in limbo.
And you use cultural relativism to your advantage when it comes to defining our torture methods, to paraphrase "This doesn't constitute torture to them" presumably because Saddam set the standard so high? So it's not torture unless Saddam did it? So we can do anything up to, but not including, public beheadings, rape, cutting, electrocution, etc.?
"Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty."
"We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."
"It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately."
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?"
"Let this be the distinctive mark of an American that in cases of commotion, he enlists himself under no man's banner, inquires for no man's name, but repairs to the standard of the laws. Do this, and you need never fear anarchy or tyranny. Your government will be perpetual."
- Thomas Jefferson
This guy seemed pretty on the ball a couple of hundred years back.
Obedience to the law is *not* a moral obligation but in a nation where the leaders are subject to law, no citizen should find want to break them. Should those leaders act as though beyond the scope of the law then it is in fact a moral obligation that we the people should take them to task and force lawful justice upon them as on any other of the citizenry.
Party lines be damned, wake up people! Your labels of Democrat, Republican, Conservative and Liberal are the millstones dragging you into the muck. Do what's right. Vote. Pick the best candidate. Call out those would would commit treason against the spirit of liberty. It *is* this simple. You *are* the power behind the government.
You have fallen for the hype. You are following the script. You are being played for pawns. Just wake up and think! Stop the name calling, stop the labelling and just *think*.
Long live the anonymous troll!
Why doesn't that constitute torture? It's certainly the type of coercion used by the Nazi's to gain intelligence when they "interviewed" my great grandmother for 12 continuous hours.
It's also the type of thing which is frowned upon by our prison system when used against our *legal* prisoners. It's also not the limit of the tactics used against these prisoners, you might recall the phrase "water boarding" used pretty frequently.
You may also recall that Abu Ghraib was under our control at the time of the openly admitted action there. The supposedly rogue agents were trained by our military and intelligence agencies to perform such actions, supposedly that would be for them to *use* such tactics. Whether they did so under direction of our government or not makes little material difference when you consider the fact we trained them to do it under precisely the circumstances they were presented.
You might also consider the US government's insistence that the Red Cross and various other humanitarian groups *not* be allowed to conduct any extensive audit of our facilities at Gitmo and perhaps draw the conclusion that the government is afraid of what might be found there. This is obviously conjecture *but* why do we have to resort to conjecture in a supposedly free and democratic society where transparency is the only guarantee of continued freedom from tyranny? Isn't this precisely the kind of dodgy behavior which supposedly justfied "regime change" in Iraq?
We agreed to the Geneva Accords, can we not restrain ourselves from violating treaties we had a hand in drafting and forcing on other nations? Are these not the "crimes against humanity" which we are now prosecuting Saddam Hussein for having committed and now we prefer to opt out when it's our turn to show our cards?
The republic has only one true enemy right now and that is the willfull ignorance and tacit approval of its citizenry. I'm with "V" here, the people should not fear their government, the government should fear the people.
You are aware the shirt you're (presumably) wearing now is constructed of nano-scaled materials, right? They're called "molecules".
Why you're worried about *a* nanofiber when you're inundated with billions and trillions of nanoparticles a day from wind, water and earth I don't quite grasp. Not even touching on the fact that nanotubes are based on buckyballs terrestrially found in smoke which is an ingredient in the smog you breathe every moment of every day, why are you specifically concerned about this shirt?
Any why, pray tell, are you worried about *a* fiber in your *lung* where it alone will cause virtually no damage when a particle this small could just as easily wind up in your brain where a single fiber could conceivably cause a real problem by messing with your synapses?
Thus leaving the rubber "bearings" I described alongside the comment on liquefaction.
Doesn't some amount of rubber also soften, even potentially liquify, under those conditions? What's ground off becomes grease/bearings encouraging the wheel (and rest of the vehicle) to continue moving.
I said, and you misunderstood, that the only wrongs we always have the power and obligation to right are our own.
This is a summary of two points. You have no obligation to right the wrongs of your neighbors. You do not necessarily have the power to right the wrongs of your neighbors.
Whether the police may intervene as a proxy providing the power to "right wrongs" on your behalf is irrelevant to the general case of *always* having the power to do so.
You are *not* your brothers' keeper. You have no obligation to look after anyone else. While it is a prosocial and, for that reason, generally encouraged behavior it is *not* an obligation, that is, it is not something for which you would rightfully be considered guilty for not doing.
Are we done with this non-sequiter?
We have no power over the wrongdoings of other people. The only wrong we always have the power and obligation to set right is that which we do ourselves. It is also the only course of action which ensures that our credibility and honor remain intact.
To attempt to right everyone elses' wrongs without remaining cognizant of our own is a fool's errand. We must remain ever vigilant that we don't unwittingly become that which we purport to despise. There is nothing so hated as a hypocrite.
More importantly and less obviously, what impact does it have on the world when no creature is allowed to cross a border or simply exist in their native environment without being considered a security threat?
Fishing for food is already measurably damaging our environment. What happens when we start fishing for defense? When migratory birds are shot down on sight? When the salmon spawning cycle is a security risk?
Prior discussion was had on the vast difference between "sentience" and "sapience". These animals are sentient, they simply think differently from us and are thus not "sapient".
They are aware and capable of feeling pain, distress and at least rudimentary emotions, the impact and value of which are immeasurable in humans who can tell us what they're thinking. How fair is it to impose these things on creatures who can feel but cannot express?
For local calls I'm unlimited in this area. I'm currently using Vonage so I'm really unlimited anywhere I care to call but only because SBC sucked so bad when I had them before that I had to find a way out of that mess.
Do telemarketers pay higher rates for the same services I receive on my phone plan?
They're making money on the infrastructure Ma-Bell built.
She was a member of the local "high society" both before and after the war. When the Nazis took power you became a Nazi or you died. Simple decision, right? As fickle as society is of course being a Nazi became a mark of being part of the "in crowd". If you weren't a "good Nazi", you were not part of that in-crowd. When the Nazis were no longer in power it didn't give you an automatic pass back into the social circles you once ran with...
Picture your community being taken over by a commonly accepted, if aggressive, power. Now rebel against them *without* being branded as a troublemaker. It doesn't work. You might have good reasons but you're still remembered for being a troublemaker rather than for fighting the good fight.
And this type of investor is rewarding the wrong kinds of companies. I worked for one of those companies. We delayed shipments to manipulate quarterly revenues to make it look like business was steady and attract more VCs. It's illegal as hell *if* you're a publicly traded company but largely viewed as just the way business is done.
My fiancee's company recently made some $600,000 in revenue which the managers got bonuses for and the stockholders enjoyed immensely. However, this $600k was, in fact, the fee for a big customer breaking contract. That quarter was great, bonuses were given to the people who bungled it so badly as to lose the customer, the year sucked because the month to month and quarter to quarter revenue wasn't maintained.
This is precisely because companies who consider the stockholders most holy are screwing up on the customer service end of things, not to mention largely mismanaging their internal workings just to please stockholders who judge a company on nothing but the price of their shares.
Probably not accurate into the billions, no. But the instruments were presumably calibrated into an appropriate range for the *expected* yield. Thus any surge that throws it outside of the *expected* yield needs to be investigated, the specific temperature be damned, right? It's not like it's the difference between 3,600,000,000 degrees and 3,599,999,999 they're looking into.
My grandparents and parents were intensely aware of their privacy and its erosion. For their generations though a good deal of that was considered just a side-effect of social or scientific progress.
Microphones became more sensitive? Well, of course some jackass was going to use it to record you against your will, jackasses have been around and will be around.
The government specifically using and developing new technologies and techniques for spying on its own citizens? THAT was something to worry about... 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Fountainhead, Anthem...
My great grandmother was interrogated by the SS for 12 hours on a rumor that she was a sympathizer to the bank president who had been turned in on suspicion of not being a good member of "the party" which later turned out to be entirely false and propogated by the local priest who was a toady to the Nazis and coveted the man's house. His reward for the "information" was of course the house but my great grandmother lost some of her good standing in the community and the president "disappeared".
Privacy matters to my family even if we haven't done anything illegal.
Maybe it can get in on some of that money being thrown around to Halliburton and company.
Furthermore there's plenty of people who contend that any legitimate technological, medical or industrial advances ultimately stem from the spinning off of military technology and maybe some of these people will actually get on board instead of just shouting from the obstructionist bandwagon that all this Linux hippies are just bong smoking pussies.
My intention was to highlight the ideals we purportedly follow. The 14th amendment as quoted says "citizens" a much more specific term which limits the scope markedly from what the Declaration set out for us.
"...all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."
Not all whites, all American citizens, not even strictly speaking men...
How about writing an accesible and compelling write-up so that those of us who don't already have an interest in or knowledge of SOA might see a point in reading the article?
SOA was utterly opaque to me and I wasn't going to bother to read the article since the write-up doesn't make any meaningful connection to the subject but now having read a definition in the comments I might read the article since it has relevance to something outside itself now.
I don't think "Spring Water" will be such an issue as "Filtered Water". Patent your filtration process and then you might have something.
You can't patent a spring but I suppose you could patent the harvesting method.
Isn't the studio leak the precursor to the 9,999,999 copies?
Do you stop a leak in the old dam or do you wait for it to collapse and then try to build a new dam?
Nastiest Sanity Trick:
Paused, cursor went nuts, navigated the menus to "Erase Saved Game", screen goes blank...
And pops right back on to where you left it, saves intact.