And BTW, Blackjack is fun for most people; nothing really too mystical here for me when I play it (on rare occasions). Granted their are fools who may think otherwise and lose their lifesavings in turn. The right way is to use a printed table with Perfect Strategy (minimize losses), in Vegas (free drinks!) at the Wynn (fairly small house advantage), outside (fresh air) at the European-sunbathing (boobies!) pool, where there are only 12 tables (see cocktail waitress often = more free drinks!) that are right next to the bar (cocktail waitress travel distance is short = more free drinks!).
The wrong way would be to play "what feels lucky" (maximize losses) in Council Bluffs, IA (no free drinks) on a 6/5 blackjack table (big house advantage) on the floor (stale air, no boobies, senior citizens galor, annoying slot machine sounds, and infrequent cocktail waitress appearances.)
The one downside to the Wynn is you can't get to the pool unless you're a guest, and the rooms there are rather steep (but very very nice). You can mitigate that by losing a bunch of money when you play and then the rooms are not so steep anymore.
You are correct that you can gain a little bit of an advantage by adding a few more rules to basic strategy but I dont think that this makes it substantially harder.
Clearly you're not taking enough advantage of the free beer when playing blackjack. Keeping track of basic strategy is hard!
Fortunately they let you use the chart, which makes life easier, and provides for maximum opportunities for making up for the house advantage with liquor consumption.
Most Vegas games have house advantages in the 0.5% range. So you lose $0.50 of every $100 bet when using perfect strategy. (They make most of their money on people not using perfect strategy.)
You can do better than a 1% advantage, depending on the rules of the game, and if your buddy spent several hours losing at a 0.5% advantage betting the minimum, you can make up for that pretty fast even at a 1% advantage if you're betting the table limit.
But, it's a lot more complicated than just counting +1 / -1 and then betting more when the count is good, at least if you want to be GOOD at card counting. On top of just betting more, when you have good information about what cards are left, that also changes the 'right' actions in certain situations. For example, some hands that you always hit if you don't know what's in the chute may become hands you double-down instead. Some surrenders become stands. Some stands become hits. And looking at the table of 'perfect' blackjack strategy, the counts at which the 'right' move changes are different for each box. At a trivial level, instead of memorizing that you hit a 12 against a dealer's 3, you'd instead have to know that you hit a 12 against a dealers 3 when the count is less than (Whatever).
The REALLY big problems with making money counting cards are three-fold:
1) Counting cards is hard. So there is a big up-front investment in learning how to do it.
2) You have to bet big. When you bet big, you can still go on runs where you lose a LOT of money. Blackjack isn't a game where you bet $1,000 a hand and win $20 a hand. It's a game where you lose $1,000 a hand, sometimes win $1,000 a hand, occasionally win $2,000 a hand, semi-occasionally lose $2,000 a hand, and rarely win $2,500 a hand. But most hands you lose.
Two consequences of that:
- To make enough money to make it worth your time, especially if you're smart enough to count cards and could presumably put those talents towards a real job, you have to bet big. That means you have to have $1,000 a hand to bet.
- To bet big, you have to have enough of a bankroll that you can play over the long haul. At $1,000 a hand, you probably need $50,000 to have a chance, $100,000 to be reasonably sure, and you could STILL have a bad run and lose all of it, even with a 2-3% advantage.
I sometimes play blackjack on vacation, using perfect strategy, where the house has 0.55% advantage. Even betting $20/hand, my bankroll can swing $1,000 in the short term (over a period of hours). That works out to swings of $50,000 betting $1,000 a hand. Losing $50k is a pretty high risk for the money you're going to win counting cards.
3) If you are betting $1k a hand, and have $100,000, you get a lot of attention, and are not going to be around casinos very long if you keep winning. So you have a big initial investment (learning to count cards well) and a limited time to leverage that investment (until the casino figures out who you are)
Most people would be better off putting their money in a nice mutual fund.
But, soon those new machines that reshuffle the cards every hand will replace chutes and it'll be a moot point.
Because it's Wednesday, and the test was on Monday. Give 'em a chance to process the data!
Now, on to the answer you were looking for:
Unfortunately, in the process of transferring a few million dollars left by a distant relative in the State Bank of Nigeria, the soldier responsible for compiling the data allowed his system to be compromised, and all data was lost.
hey, they're up and running around. they're doing their part to fight the looming obesity crisis, in addition to training to combat the looming undead crisis.
They're running from ZOMBIES! The slowest of the undead by far. And they're even downing the zombies with guns! If this was REALLY fitness-oriented, they'd instead be taking on something a little faster, like vampires. Or they at least could be felling the zombies with traditional anti-zombie weapons like chain saws instead of projectile weapons.
This is clearly set up to minimize physical effort, not promote it.
Where you ran into trouble is you saw my initial response, and reacted to the fact that it was boorish, boastful, and a fine example of why most normal people don't like scientists and engineers. But what you did not factor in, apparently, is this is Slashdot, where the VAST MAJORITY of readers are scientists and engineers.
My first reply would have been a poor one in most circumstances. But for this audience, it was very good. The audience is scientists and engineers. Absolute logical elitist arguments work best.
You can't expect success using a liberal arts argumentative style on an engineering website.
The trick is not exaggerate, distort, or otherwise spin facts.
The trick is to exaggerate, distort, or otherwise spin facts in a PLAUSIBLE, not-easily-disprovable manner.
You don't, for example, want to exaggerate the danger of a plane landing and photo op when, for example, there is video available showing just how not-dangerous the situation was.
Fortunately, I happen to live in an area of the country where pretty much everyone is trustworthy. But on top of that, we have a whole bunch of security, so you'd have a pretty tough time making it into the building unnoticed.
Condensation occurs when the temperature of an object is below the dew point. Dew points go up with an increase in humidity. But dew points are also generally lower than the atmospheric temperature, otherwise it'd be raining. You get dew when the air warms up faster than the ground warms up, so the moisture in the air condenses onto the ground.
But...
If the only thing in his fridge is his laptop, there won't be any moisture in there anyway.
Even if he puts lettuce or some other unsealed moisture-providing item into the fridge, the HOTTEST thing in the fridge, and thus the last thing to get any condensation, is going to be the laptop.
And, in general...
You don't see condensation IN a fridge. Go open your fridge now and tell me how many items in there have condensation on them. Maybe none?
It's when you take your items OUT of the fridge that moisture condenses onto them, since they are colder than the air they are in.
So, really, no condensation worries, as long as he doesn't take the laptop out of a cold fridge.
I have not locked the door to my office in years. People leave their child's fund raising goodies out on tables and you just put the money you're supposed to in the envelope if you take something.
Where do you work that people are stealing stuff all the time?
because some of them are so dense that they can't write an English sentence about a cup of coffee without using mathematical variables.
Depends what the goal of the class is. If most of the students are pretty much done with that subject area after the class, fine, make it interesting. But if this is the first year class of a four year degree in engineering or physics, it's probably better to use the variable names instead of the coffee cup analogy. If the student can only understand the concept with the coffee cup analogy, it's better they fail out now than three years from now when they get to the physics/math for which no analogy exists.
For a good number of girls in university, they'd probably maximise their income by forgetting about education and be prostitutes and pornographic actors (what was that Eliot Spitzer prostitute making, $5000/hour?
Upside: $5,000/hr.
Downside: Have to screw Eliot Spitzer
Challenge: Have to convince Eliot Spitzer that you enjoyed it.
Given the ease with which you made up and propagated that bullshit, there's a good chance you have or are on your way to having a BA.
But lets try getting you to provide some real information.
List for us World Leaders and CEOs who only have a Bachelor of Arts degree. I'm sure there are a couple. Now figure out (if you ever learned how to do this) the percentage of CEOs and World Leaders (or even members of congress) who just have Bachelor of Arts degrees. To keep the problem manageable, you might consider only looking at Fortune-50, -100, or -500 companies.
Here, let me help you:
Fortune Top 10:
- Wal Mart: Lee Scott, Business degree - Exxon: Rex Tillerson, B.S. in Civil Engineering - General Motors: B.A. in Economics, MBA Harvard - Chevron: David O'Reilly, B.S. Chemical Engineering - Conoco Phillips: JAmes Mulva, BA in Business and MBA - General Electric: BA Applied Mathematics, MBA - Ford: Alan Mulally, BS and MS Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering - Citigroup: Vikram Pandit, BS and MS in Engineering, PhD in finance - Bank of America: Ba Finance - American Intl. Group: MArtin J Sullivan, degree unknown (he's british)
So out of the top 10, you have four engineers, four business/finance, and one applied math guy.
*ZERO* Liberal Arts majors. Maybe we can give you one out of 10 with credit for the math guy, even though it was APPLIED math.
So for CEOs, looks like engineers kick liberal arts major ass. For Heads of State, I think you'll find that the vast majority of Heads of State have MBAs or JDs (or BLs) in developed nations, or are the children of political families in lesser-developed nations, or are former warlords in even less developed nations.
But, with a statement as stupid as "ALL of the heads of state in the world today are, or can be considered Liberal Arts majors", (ALL? Really? Don't make it hard to be proven wrong or anything...) I doubt you're going to have much to say here, even if you did use your Liberal Arts training to insert your 'cover my don't know anything ass' statement of "or can be considered". Can be considered? Either they have liberal arts degrees or they don't!
It must really gall you how you just got trounced by an engineer though.
But what when your parents are wondering why when you coasted through high school on As and all of a sudden you're getting Bs and Cs? Everyone thinks you're slacking off, but it's hard.
They will, however, get better grades with less native ability
Why does that matter? They're getting better grades in film classes. Being mad that students in film classes have an easier time getting high marks than students in engineering classes makes about as much sense as being mad that students in 2nd grade have an easier time getting high marks than students in engineering classes.
This disparity is corrected for in the real world - try getting a job with a 4.0 film degree vs. a 3.0 engineering degree. You'll get any job the film degree candidate can get, with the possible exception of jobs where the film degree's GPA doesn't matter (actual film jobs, where they are evaluated primarily on their portfolio of work, an area where anyone who actually has any talent in film is going to kick your (or my) sorry engineering ass.)
More generally, if you really feel that someone else is getting a better deal than you, stop bitching about it and go do what they're doing! Enroll in the film program, get your easy A's, finish college with a 4.0 in your major, and enjoy your years of paying off your student loans while working as a car salesman/insurance agent/whatever else Liberal Arts majors do to actually feed themselves when you could have gotten that same job not going to school at all!
You have to understand what a Liberal Arts major is. For a very select few people, it's a stepping stone to being a professor, or research, or something else at the top of the field. For the vast majority however, a liberal arts degree is an opportunity to do some partying, find a mate, and prove that you're able to show up on time. So yeah, you can get a 4.0 liberal arts degree much easier than you can get an engineering degree, but you won't be able to be an engineer with one!
And you are a perfect example of why the electorate is at fault.
The quote wasn't pulled out of thin air. It came straight from McCain's lips.
So what? McCain has said MILLIONS of words in his campaign for office. The one quote is, what, 10 or 20 words?
So yeah, I blame the electorate for buying into one quote selected by political opponents out of MILLIONS of words, and hammered into them through the various media by those same political opponents, instead of looking at some of the other MILLIONS of words the candidate has said and understanding what the candidate was actually saying with the quote, instead of what the candidate's political opponents are trying to make you think he said.
And the fact that the electorate is too stupid to look past the 10-20 words selected by political opponents and then reinterpreted by those opponents and actually get grip on what the candidate actually stands for is EXACTLY the problem. Don't understand the issues, just believe the sound bites, right?
What we don't know is whether you are one of the members of the electorate who is gullible enough to blindly believe and repeat select quotes fed to you by people you've decided to blindly accept the opinions of, or whether you're just someone who is trying to foist isolated quotes onto the electorate knowing most of them will buy into them as an accurate reflection of a candidates entire position.
NOBODY says millions of words in the course of a political campaign, especially when millions of those are unscripted words, without having a few quotes whose meaning can be taken one way or another. Yes, McCain said he'd stay in Iraq 100 years if that's what it took to get the job done. But anybody with a brain cell should know that that is NOT the same as saying or believing it's actually going to take 100 years, or that he plans on being there 100 years - McCain is saying he would withdraw from Iraq when, and only when, withdrawal will make America better off than staying.
And you know what's 1,000 times MORE stupid than focusing on 15 words out of MILLIONS of words uttered by a candidate in a campaign?
Focusing on an excerpt from a speech made years ago that a candidate was not even at by someone a candidate knows. Or even knows well. Then you're talking about BILLIONS if not TRILLIONS of words. What Obama's pastor said three years ago - or even what he says most Sundays - doesn't mean anything. We just can't hold people responsible for what other people say. Even people they know well, even people in influential positions. Not people we'd elect for President anyway - I'd hope we're not voting for anyone for President who we don't think is capable of listening to bullshit, recognizing that it's bullshit, and forming their own opinion. Not after the past 8 years anyway.
We can play the "Somebody this candidate knows said something bad" game from now until November. Everybody can play. It's still a waste of everyone's time.
That wasn't in the articles I'd read, but doesn't mean you're not right.
But, any background check conducted for passport purposes is just going to be to determine whether you're a citizen or not. It's not like they're conducting NSA/CIA-style security clearance checks on every Tom Dick and Harry who gets a passport.
McCain doesn't plan to be or want to be in Iraq for 100 years. But, he plans to be there until the job is done. Why can't we recognize this as the only honest answer to the question? Not "We must leave Iraq immediately no matter what!" but "We will leave Iraq when it makes sense to leave Iraq."
Now, I'm still a fan of getting the hell out of Iraq, but I'm suspicious of anyone who promises to do so no matter what.
On the pastor front, who the hell cares what Obama's pastor says? That makes about as much sense as caring what McCain's mom says, or what Hillary's husband says, you know, the one who got his pole smoked while his wife was in the same building. EVERYBODY knows people who are even good friends of yours who say stuff that you absolutely don't agree with, or that is just downright stupid. If we all refused to associate with people who sometimes said things we didn't like, we'd have a pretty hard time talking to anyone!
If you videotape what someone says for years, you're going to have some tape of somebody saying something stupid.
And in this specific case, I think Obama understands, and tried to communicate, that while he doesn't personally agree with his pastor's decision, he understands why his pastor feels that way, and why a lot of Americans feel that way. It's not that these Americans hate America, it's that they feel that America has not treated them well. Some of their feeling is justified, and some of it is blame transference, but it's important to understand that. Justified or not, it's going to be difficult to resolve what causes opinions like Obama's Pastor's opinion if you don't even understand it.
Anyway, this pastor stuff is going to blow over. McCain doesn't even care about it - as he's an upstanding candidate who wants to campaign on the issues. It's only totally-desperate-Hillary who cares.
Slashdot Mirror
The wrong way would be to play "what feels lucky" (maximize losses) in Council Bluffs, IA (no free drinks) on a 6/5 blackjack table (big house advantage) on the floor (stale air, no boobies, senior citizens galor, annoying slot machine sounds, and infrequent cocktail waitress appearances.)
The one downside to the Wynn is you can't get to the pool unless you're a guest, and the rooms there are rather steep (but very very nice). You can mitigate that by losing a bunch of money when you play and then the rooms are not so steep anymore.
You are correct that you can gain a little bit of an advantage by adding a few more rules to basic strategy but I dont think that this makes it substantially harder.
Clearly you're not taking enough advantage of the free beer when playing blackjack. Keeping track of basic strategy is hard!
Fortunately they let you use the chart, which makes life easier, and provides for maximum opportunities for making up for the house advantage with liquor consumption.
Most Vegas games have house advantages in the 0.5% range. So you lose $0.50 of every $100 bet when using perfect strategy. (They make most of their money on people not using perfect strategy.)
You can do better than a 1% advantage, depending on the rules of the game, and if your buddy spent several hours losing at a 0.5% advantage betting the minimum, you can make up for that pretty fast even at a 1% advantage if you're betting the table limit.
But, it's a lot more complicated than just counting +1 / -1 and then betting more when the count is good, at least if you want to be GOOD at card counting. On top of just betting more, when you have good information about what cards are left, that also changes the 'right' actions in certain situations. For example, some hands that you always hit if you don't know what's in the chute may become hands you double-down instead. Some surrenders become stands. Some stands become hits. And looking at the table of 'perfect' blackjack strategy, the counts at which the 'right' move changes are different for each box. At a trivial level, instead of memorizing that you hit a 12 against a dealer's 3, you'd instead have to know that you hit a 12 against a dealers 3 when the count is less than (Whatever).
The REALLY big problems with making money counting cards are three-fold:
1) Counting cards is hard. So there is a big up-front investment in learning how to do it.
2) You have to bet big. When you bet big, you can still go on runs where you lose a LOT of money. Blackjack isn't a game where you bet $1,000 a hand and win $20 a hand. It's a game where you lose $1,000 a hand, sometimes win $1,000 a hand, occasionally win $2,000 a hand, semi-occasionally lose $2,000 a hand, and rarely win $2,500 a hand. But most hands you lose.
Two consequences of that:
- To make enough money to make it worth your time, especially if you're smart enough to count cards and could presumably put those talents towards a real job, you have to bet big. That means you have to have $1,000 a hand to bet.
- To bet big, you have to have enough of a bankroll that you can play over the long haul. At $1,000 a hand, you probably need $50,000 to have a chance, $100,000 to be reasonably sure, and you could STILL have a bad run and lose all of it, even with a 2-3% advantage.
I sometimes play blackjack on vacation, using perfect strategy, where the house has 0.55% advantage. Even betting $20/hand, my bankroll can swing $1,000 in the short term (over a period of hours). That works out to swings of $50,000 betting $1,000 a hand. Losing $50k is a pretty high risk for the money you're going to win counting cards.
3) If you are betting $1k a hand, and have $100,000, you get a lot of attention, and are not going to be around casinos very long if you keep winning. So you have a big initial investment (learning to count cards well) and a limited time to leverage that investment (until the casino figures out who you are)
Most people would be better off putting their money in a nice mutual fund.
But, soon those new machines that reshuffle the cards every hand will replace chutes and it'll be a moot point.
how long will they remain scared and secure?
As long as you leave up the signs that say "Threat Level: Orange", of course.
Because it's Wednesday, and the test was on Monday. Give 'em a chance to process the data!
Now, on to the answer you were looking for:
Unfortunately, in the process of transferring a few million dollars left by a distant relative in the State Bank of Nigeria, the soldier responsible for compiling the data allowed his system to be compromised, and all data was lost.
hey, they're up and running around. they're doing their part to fight the looming obesity crisis, in addition to training to combat the looming undead crisis.
They're running from ZOMBIES! The slowest of the undead by far. And they're even downing the zombies with guns! If this was REALLY fitness-oriented, they'd instead be taking on something a little faster, like vampires. Or they at least could be felling the zombies with traditional anti-zombie weapons like chain saws instead of projectile weapons.
This is clearly set up to minimize physical effort, not promote it.
Politics 102 is Know Your Audience.
Where you ran into trouble is you saw my initial response, and reacted to the fact that it was boorish, boastful, and a fine example of why most normal people don't like scientists and engineers. But what you did not factor in, apparently, is this is Slashdot, where the VAST MAJORITY of readers are scientists and engineers.
My first reply would have been a poor one in most circumstances. But for this audience, it was very good. The audience is scientists and engineers. Absolute logical elitist arguments work best.
You can't expect success using a liberal arts argumentative style on an engineering website.
You fail politics 101.
The trick is not exaggerate, distort, or otherwise spin facts.
The trick is to exaggerate, distort, or otherwise spin facts in a PLAUSIBLE, not-easily-disprovable manner.
You don't, for example, want to exaggerate the danger of a plane landing and photo op when, for example, there is video available showing just how not-dangerous the situation was.
If my spam filter service did this to me, I would never us them again!
Or you just bring the internal temp of the fridge up to room temp before taking it out.
Fortunately, I happen to live in an area of the country where pretty much everyone is trustworthy. But on top of that, we have a whole bunch of security, so you'd have a pretty tough time making it into the building unnoticed.
Condensation occurs when the temperature of an object is below the dew point. Dew points go up with an increase in humidity. But dew points are also generally lower than the atmospheric temperature, otherwise it'd be raining. You get dew when the air warms up faster than the ground warms up, so the moisture in the air condenses onto the ground.
But...
If the only thing in his fridge is his laptop, there won't be any moisture in there anyway.
Even if he puts lettuce or some other unsealed moisture-providing item into the fridge, the HOTTEST thing in the fridge, and thus the last thing to get any condensation, is going to be the laptop.
And, in general...
You don't see condensation IN a fridge. Go open your fridge now and tell me how many items in there have condensation on them. Maybe none?
It's when you take your items OUT of the fridge that moisture condenses onto them, since they are colder than the air they are in.
So, really, no condensation worries, as long as he doesn't take the laptop out of a cold fridge.
All beers stored in company fridges are from the local (2 miles away) microbrewery.
Somebody who left the company left a beer in the fridge.
6 years ago.
It's still there.
Either that, or someone who does not normally drink has stashed the beer there in the event they do have to leave the company...
I have not locked the door to my office in years. People leave their child's fund raising goodies out on tables and you just put the money you're supposed to in the envelope if you take something.
Where do you work that people are stealing stuff all the time?
Or are you just mega-paranoid?
because some of them are so dense that they can't write an English sentence about a cup of coffee without using mathematical variables.
Depends what the goal of the class is. If most of the students are pretty much done with that subject area after the class, fine, make it interesting. But if this is the first year class of a four year degree in engineering or physics, it's probably better to use the variable names instead of the coffee cup analogy. If the student can only understand the concept with the coffee cup analogy, it's better they fail out now than three years from now when they get to the physics/math for which no analogy exists.
For a good number of girls in university, they'd probably maximise their income by forgetting about education and be prostitutes and pornographic actors (what was that Eliot Spitzer prostitute making, $5000/hour?
Upside: $5,000/hr.
Downside: Have to screw Eliot Spitzer
Challenge: Have to convince Eliot Spitzer that you enjoyed it.
Given the ease with which you made up and propagated that bullshit, there's a good chance you have or are on your way to having a BA.
But lets try getting you to provide some real information.
List for us World Leaders and CEOs who only have a Bachelor of Arts degree. I'm sure there are a couple. Now figure out (if you ever learned how to do this) the percentage of CEOs and World Leaders (or even members of congress) who just have Bachelor of Arts degrees. To keep the problem manageable, you might consider only looking at Fortune-50, -100, or -500 companies.
Here, let me help you:
Fortune Top 10:
- Wal Mart: Lee Scott, Business degree
- Exxon: Rex Tillerson, B.S. in Civil Engineering
- General Motors: B.A. in Economics, MBA Harvard
- Chevron: David O'Reilly, B.S. Chemical Engineering
- Conoco Phillips: JAmes Mulva, BA in Business and MBA
- General Electric: BA Applied Mathematics, MBA
- Ford: Alan Mulally, BS and MS Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering
- Citigroup: Vikram Pandit, BS and MS in Engineering, PhD in finance
- Bank of America: Ba Finance
- American Intl. Group: MArtin J Sullivan, degree unknown (he's british)
So out of the top 10, you have four engineers, four business/finance, and one applied math guy.
*ZERO* Liberal Arts majors. Maybe we can give you one out of 10 with credit for the math guy, even though it was APPLIED math.
So for CEOs, looks like engineers kick liberal arts major ass. For Heads of State, I think you'll find that the vast majority of Heads of State have MBAs or JDs (or BLs) in developed nations, or are the children of political families in lesser-developed nations, or are former warlords in even less developed nations.
But, with a statement as stupid as "ALL of the heads of state in the world today are, or can be considered Liberal Arts majors", (ALL? Really? Don't make it hard to be proven wrong or anything...) I doubt you're going to have much to say here, even if you did use your Liberal Arts training to insert your 'cover my don't know anything ass' statement of "or can be considered". Can be considered? Either they have liberal arts degrees or they don't!
It must really gall you how you just got trounced by an engineer though.
Can't even log into the site.
Did a good job harvesting my email though! Now I'm sure to get 1,000,010 spams a day instead of just 1,000,000!
But what when your parents are wondering why when you coasted through high school on As and all of a sudden you're getting Bs and Cs? Everyone thinks you're slacking off, but it's hard.
Uh, you grow a sack and tell them why?
They will, however, get better grades with less native ability
Why does that matter? They're getting better grades in film classes. Being mad that students in film classes have an easier time getting high marks than students in engineering classes makes about as much sense as being mad that students in 2nd grade have an easier time getting high marks than students in engineering classes.
This disparity is corrected for in the real world - try getting a job with a 4.0 film degree vs. a 3.0 engineering degree. You'll get any job the film degree candidate can get, with the possible exception of jobs where the film degree's GPA doesn't matter (actual film jobs, where they are evaluated primarily on their portfolio of work, an area where anyone who actually has any talent in film is going to kick your (or my) sorry engineering ass.)
More generally, if you really feel that someone else is getting a better deal than you, stop bitching about it and go do what they're doing! Enroll in the film program, get your easy A's, finish college with a 4.0 in your major, and enjoy your years of paying off your student loans while working as a car salesman/insurance agent/whatever else Liberal Arts majors do to actually feed themselves when you could have gotten that same job not going to school at all!
You have to understand what a Liberal Arts major is. For a very select few people, it's a stepping stone to being a professor, or research, or something else at the top of the field. For the vast majority however, a liberal arts degree is an opportunity to do some partying, find a mate, and prove that you're able to show up on time. So yeah, you can get a 4.0 liberal arts degree much easier than you can get an engineering degree, but you won't be able to be an engineer with one!
And you are a perfect example of why the electorate is at fault.
The quote wasn't pulled out of thin air. It came straight from McCain's lips.
So what? McCain has said MILLIONS of words in his campaign for office. The one quote is, what, 10 or 20 words?
So yeah, I blame the electorate for buying into one quote selected by political opponents out of MILLIONS of words, and hammered into them through the various media by those same political opponents, instead of looking at some of the other MILLIONS of words the candidate has said and understanding what the candidate was actually saying with the quote, instead of what the candidate's political opponents are trying to make you think he said.
And the fact that the electorate is too stupid to look past the 10-20 words selected by political opponents and then reinterpreted by those opponents and actually get grip on what the candidate actually stands for is EXACTLY the problem. Don't understand the issues, just believe the sound bites, right?
What we don't know is whether you are one of the members of the electorate who is gullible enough to blindly believe and repeat select quotes fed to you by people you've decided to blindly accept the opinions of, or whether you're just someone who is trying to foist isolated quotes onto the electorate knowing most of them will buy into them as an accurate reflection of a candidates entire position.
NOBODY says millions of words in the course of a political campaign, especially when millions of those are unscripted words, without having a few quotes whose meaning can be taken one way or another. Yes, McCain said he'd stay in Iraq 100 years if that's what it took to get the job done. But anybody with a brain cell should know that that is NOT the same as saying or believing it's actually going to take 100 years, or that he plans on being there 100 years - McCain is saying he would withdraw from Iraq when, and only when, withdrawal will make America better off than staying.
And you know what's 1,000 times MORE stupid than focusing on 15 words out of MILLIONS of words uttered by a candidate in a campaign?
Focusing on an excerpt from a speech made years ago that a candidate was not even at by someone a candidate knows. Or even knows well. Then you're talking about BILLIONS if not TRILLIONS of words. What Obama's pastor said three years ago - or even what he says most Sundays - doesn't mean anything. We just can't hold people responsible for what other people say. Even people they know well, even people in influential positions. Not people we'd elect for President anyway - I'd hope we're not voting for anyone for President who we don't think is capable of listening to bullshit, recognizing that it's bullshit, and forming their own opinion. Not after the past 8 years anyway.
We can play the "Somebody this candidate knows said something bad" game from now until November. Everybody can play. It's still a waste of everyone's time.
That wasn't in the articles I'd read, but doesn't mean you're not right.
But, any background check conducted for passport purposes is just going to be to determine whether you're a citizen or not. It's not like they're conducting NSA/CIA-style security clearance checks on every Tom Dick and Harry who gets a passport.
Oh come on...
The electorate is so stupid about some things.
McCain doesn't plan to be or want to be in Iraq for 100 years. But, he plans to be there until the job is done. Why can't we recognize this as the only honest answer to the question? Not "We must leave Iraq immediately no matter what!" but "We will leave Iraq when it makes sense to leave Iraq."
Now, I'm still a fan of getting the hell out of Iraq, but I'm suspicious of anyone who promises to do so no matter what.
On the pastor front, who the hell cares what Obama's pastor says? That makes about as much sense as caring what McCain's mom says, or what Hillary's husband says, you know, the one who got his pole smoked while his wife was in the same building. EVERYBODY knows people who are even good friends of yours who say stuff that you absolutely don't agree with, or that is just downright stupid. If we all refused to associate with people who sometimes said things we didn't like, we'd have a pretty hard time talking to anyone!
If you videotape what someone says for years, you're going to have some tape of somebody saying something stupid.
And in this specific case, I think Obama understands, and tried to communicate, that while he doesn't personally agree with his pastor's decision, he understands why his pastor feels that way, and why a lot of Americans feel that way. It's not that these Americans hate America, it's that they feel that America has not treated them well. Some of their feeling is justified, and some of it is blame transference, but it's important to understand that. Justified or not, it's going to be difficult to resolve what causes opinions like Obama's Pastor's opinion if you don't even understand it.
Anyway, this pastor stuff is going to blow over. McCain doesn't even care about it - as he's an upstanding candidate who wants to campaign on the issues. It's only totally-desperate-Hillary who cares.
Remember, GWB had great resume bullets as well.
He did?